Windows Weekly 915: Magic Tricks for Cats

Summary

Podcast Summary: Windows Weekly 915: Magic Tricks for Cats

Release Date: January 15, 2025
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell
Platform: TWiT.tv

Introduction

In the 915th episode of Windows Weekly, host Leo Laporte, along with co-hosts Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell, dive into a myriad of topics centered around Microsoft's latest developments. Recorded amidst vibrant backdrops—Paul in Makunji, Pennsylvania, and Richard in Puerto Vallarta—the trio maintains their signature blend of insightful analysis and engaging banter.

Patch Tuesday 2025: A Historic Update

The episode kicks off with a discussion on the recent Patch Tuesday release, which marked the most substantial patch bundle since 2017. This update not only introduced a significant number of security fixes but also addressed some severe vulnerabilities that have kept the community on edge.

[06:00] Paul Thurat: "Microsoft released the largest patch bundle since 2017, focusing heavily on security updates without introducing new features."

Leo highlights the importance of this patch cycle, emphasizing that while the number of updates is staggering, the absence of new features indicates Microsoft's focus on fortifying existing systems.

Microsoft's AI Overhaul: Copilot and Beyond

A substantial portion of the discussion revolves around Microsoft's ambitious strides in artificial intelligence, particularly within Microsoft 365 and the Copilot initiative. The hosts examine Microsoft's reorganization efforts aimed at integrating AI more deeply into their product suite.

[28:03] Paul Thurat: "Microsoft's pivot to AI has been nothing short of chaotic, with constant churn and rebranding attempts that leave customers confused."

Richard and Paul express concerns over the scalability and strategic direction of Microsoft's AI endeavors, questioning whether the company's rapid pace is sustainable and customer-centric.

Windows 10 End of Support and Extended Security

Another critical topic is the impending end of support for Windows 10 in October 2025. Paul addresses the unprecedented move by Microsoft to offer extended security updates to consumers, a strategy previously reserved for enterprise clients.

[10:15] Paul Thurat: "Offering extended support for consumers is a first for Microsoft, and the pricing model—starting at $60 for the first year and doubling thereafter—raises eyebrows."

The hosts debate the implications of this decision, considering the vast user base still operating on Windows 10 and the potential shifts in Microsoft's support strategies.

Copilot Pricing Strategies and Market Competition

The conversation shifts to the financial aspects of integrating Copilot into Microsoft 365. Paul critiques Microsoft's pricing model, which imposes substantial additional costs for AI features, comparing it unfavorably to competitors like Google.

[30:42] Paul Thurat: "Charging $20 per user per month for Copilot Pro is exorbitant, especially when consumers have alternative AI tools available."

Leo and Richard discuss whether Microsoft's integrated billing offers enough value to justify the steep prices, and whether consumers will opt for more affordable AI solutions from other providers.

GitHub Copilot: A Developer's Revelation

Paul shares his firsthand experience with GitHub Copilot, highlighting its efficacy in writing and optimizing code. He praises the tool's ability to predict and generate accurate code snippets, likening his reactions to watching "cats being shown magic."

[121:02] Paul Thurat: "GitHub Copilot felt like magic—it wrote entire code blocks that I had no intention of typing, perfectly aligning with my project needs."

Richard concurs, noting that such AI tools are becoming indispensable in modern development workflows, streamlining processes, and enhancing productivity.

AI Assistants in Everyday Life

The hosts explore the integration of AI assistants into daily routines, discussing products like always-on AI glasses showcased at CES. Leo shares his personal experiments with AI-driven to-do lists and automated reminders, reflecting on the balance between convenience and privacy.

[55:32] Leo Laporte: "An AI assistant that's always on presents both incredible convenience and significant privacy concerns."

They debate the future of AI in personal and professional settings, contemplating its ubiquitous presence and the potential societal impacts.

ARM Architecture and Virtual Machines

A segment is dedicated to ARM architecture's evolving role in computing, particularly in virtual machine environments. Paul and Richard analyze Parallels' recent updates, allowing x86 Windows VMs on ARM-based Macs, albeit with performance compromises.

[24:19] Richard Campbell: "Running x86 instances on ARM is an inception problem—it's like holding a mirror up to a camera."

The discussion underscores the challenges and limitations inherent in bridging different processor architectures, questioning the practicality of such solutions for everyday users.

Organizational Changes and Layoffs at Microsoft

The episode delves into Microsoft's internal shifts, highlighting the creation of the Core AI Platform and Tools division. Paul outlines the subsequent layoffs, reflecting the company's intense focus on AI at the expense of other divisions.

[66:07] Richard Campbell: "Microsoft is restructuring around AI, leading to layoffs across various departments, indicating a singular focus on artificial intelligence."

The hosts express mixed feelings about these changes, acknowledging Microsoft's financial prowess while questioning the long-term sustainability and employee morale.

Pi Hole and Ad Blocking Techniques

Towards the latter part of the episode, Leo and Richard discuss ad-blocking solutions like Pi Hole and Next DNS. They share personal anecdotes on managing network-level ad blocking, balancing user experience with privacy preferences.

[106:44] Paul Thurat: "Pi Hole effectively blocks unwanted ads, enhancing our streaming experience without compromising on necessary functionality."

This segment provides practical insights for listeners looking to optimize their internet usage and reduce intrusive advertisements.

AI in DevOps and Documentation

Richard shares insights from a conversation about integrating AI into DevOps pipelines, particularly in automating documentation and resource management.

[142:25] Richard Campbell: "Incorporating AI into DevOps ensures that documentation stays up-to-date, streamlining operations and enhancing collaboration between development and operations teams."

The discussion highlights the transformative potential of AI in streamlining workflows and ensuring consistency in software development practices.

GitHub Copilot's Impact on Coding Practices

Paul emphasizes the revolutionary impact of GitHub Copilot on coding practices, likening it to having a silent partner that anticipates and generates code with remarkable accuracy.

[120:42] Paul Thurat: "Copilot reads my mind—I start coding, and it completes entire blocks with precision I didn't expect."

Richard adds that such tools are becoming essential in modern development environments, reducing repetitive tasks and allowing developers to focus on complex problem-solving.

Conclusion

Wrapping up, the hosts reflect on the rapid advancements in AI and their integration into everyday tools and professional environments. They anticipate further disruptions and shifts in the tech landscape as companies like Microsoft continue to prioritize artificial intelligence.

[155:57] Leo Laporte: "AI is unfolding like never before, reshaping how we interact with technology both personally and professionally."

Notable Quotes

• Paul Thurat [06:00]: "Microsoft released the largest patch bundle since 2017, focusing heavily on security updates without introducing new features."

• Paul Thurat [28:03]: "Microsoft's pivot to AI has been nothing short of chaotic, with constant churn and rebranding attempts that leave customers confused."

• Paul Thurat [10:15]: "Offering extended support for consumers is a first for Microsoft, and the pricing model—starting at $60 for the first year and doubling thereafter—raises eyebrows."

• Paul Thurat [30:42]: "Charging $20 per user per month for Copilot Pro is exorbitant, especially when consumers have alternative AI tools available."

• Paul Thurat [121:02]: "GitHub Copilot felt like magic—it wrote entire code blocks that I had no intention of typing, perfectly aligning with my project needs."

Closing Thoughts

Windows Weekly continues to be a pivotal source for tech enthusiasts, providing in-depth analyses of Microsoft's strategies and their broader implications in the tech ecosystem. This episode underscores the transformative impact of AI, the challenges of organizational restructuring, and the evolving landscape of software development tools.

For more detailed discussions and insights, listeners are encouraged to tune into future episodes of Windows Weekly.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat is in Makunji. Richard Campbell's in Puerto Vallarta. But we're gonna do a show. Yes, we are. The first patch Tuesday was yesterday. The biggest patch Tuesday. The most patches since 2017, including some pretty serious flaws. I don't know why I'm laughing. It's better than crying, I guess. We'll also do a lot of conversation about Microsoft's AI models in Microsoft 365 and Copilot. It's all kind of CR. In fact, it's so crazy. Microsoft's doing a reorg all around AI, plus new Surface hardware and more. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurott]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 915, recorded Wednesday, January 15, 2025. Magic tricks for cats. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Microsoft news with my good pals. To my right, Mr. Paul Thurat. Tharat.com leanpub.com he is in Makungie, Pennsylvania. To my further right, Richard Campbell. He is, of course, a run as radio fame and dotnet rocks. And he is in. You're in Puerto Vallarta.

[Richard Campbell]

Puerto Vallarta.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

I never quit Windows Weekly. What can you do?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, thank you. I'm sorry. The curtains are closed, though. Don't we want to see a beautiful.

[Richard Campbell]

Absolutely blinding out there?

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it is sunny.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm sure it's a contrast thing. I really was trying to make this work on the patio, but it's quite noisy out there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, the good news is Paul will be joining you next week.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right. We got another bedroom over here all set for the couple.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, fun. And then, Paul, are you going on to Mexico City or is it just a little tv?

[Paul Thurott]

We're actually going to fly to Mexico City on Saturday. And what do we come there? I think Monday, probably Sunday.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And you're using one of their local discount airlines. I can't wait to hear what that experience is like.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, which one?

[Paul Thurott]

I've been flapping my arms in anticipation of the.

[Richard Campbell]

Here, hold this rope.

[Leo Laporte]

What. What is the airline?

[Paul Thurott]

No, it's. It's a Solaris.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Polaris. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Now, when I see this, I'm like, who is that? I'm like, oh, wow. It's the EasyJet of Mexico. This would be awesome.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. So we've taken. What's the big one there is Aeromex Just Aeromexico, which is great actually, at least.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, I've been on air. I like Hero Mexico.

[Richard Campbell]

They're top tier airline.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, yeah. But you know, I listen, I've helped push a bus in the snow. I got this. It's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Ultra. It's their, their tagline is ul. Ultra. Low cost.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a little scary.

[Paul Thurott]

Spanish. Ultra means crap.

[Richard Campbell]

But you bring the duct tape, we'll have fun.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm so jealous of you guys.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, we'll have some fun up here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it should be good. Second largest airline in Mexico. Tantalizingly low prices.

[Paul Thurott]

Tantalizing.

[Leo Laporte]

But according to the San Diego Consumer Action Network, it's no way to run an airline.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, hell.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

This, this is going to be interesting. When is this? Oh, this article's from four years ago. You know what? In fact, it's not Even, not just four years ago, it's March 2020. In the height of the pandemic.

[Richard Campbell]

Really? The launch of the pandemic.

[Leo Laporte]

The launch.

[Paul Thurott]

The launch.

[Leo Laporte]

You may be subjecting yourself to hellaciously bad customer service and scheduling tricks that simply wouldn't be tolerated under US law.

[Richard Campbell]

March 2020, I was at Paul's place debating whether I was going to fly home or not.

[Leo Laporte]

May never go home again.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yikes.

[Richard Campbell]

All right.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, you had a, like an Uber not show up at like 3:00 in the morning or something?

[Richard Campbell]

Something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I managed to get home in time for the very first day of two week quarantine too.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember that because it was St. Patrick's Day that we shut down March 17, 2020.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And boy, you know, it's funny how this recedes. I remember when this was all happening. I looked back at the reminiscences and I talked to people who were around in 1918 and they didn't, they didn't really remember how many were there? Not many. You know, they don't remember it. And I thought that's really weird because.

[Richard Campbell]

That must have been a devastating anti mask outcry.

[Leo Laporte]

Same thing happened. Exactly. Yeah. And I mean my kids.

[Paul Thurott]

Now I understand the last planes to come back to the United States, they were in Jamaica or near Jamaica. And we didn't think they were going to get back.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, my son was in Asia and he was kind of hanging out in Bali for some time. They had a, they had a villa, a bunch of young people and I think they were having a ball. Eventually though, the Balinese, he said they're kind of Looking at. Yeah, Giving us a side.

[Paul Thurott]

You eat a lot, you know, compared to the other ones that are normally. Yeah, they really wanted us to get.

[Leo Laporte]

Out of here, so we.

[Paul Thurott]

Let's just get you out of here.

[Leo Laporte]

And we quarantined him. I put him in quarantine for two weeks to make sure he didn't bring anything back. Those were the days five years ago. It's amazing, isn't it?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And. And I could see now you really do blank it out. It's like, you know, it's. Let's not remember.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm firm. I'm firmly of the opinion that we will have grandchildren that will look at us the same way we looked at our Depression era grandparents.

[Paul Thurott]

Like.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah. Survived the depression.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, by the way, I hope it's like that because the alternative is this just keeps happening.

[Leo Laporte]

Mommy, why does Pop Pop still wear a mask everywhere he goes?

[Paul Thurott]

Why does he look like the Intel Bunny Man? And also, what's Intel?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Really?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, now I remember. All right, let's start talking about Windows. Yesterday, Microsoft released on Patch Tuesday the largest patch bundle. They never. They haven't since 2017.

[Paul Thurott]

I forgot to check. Let me see if the biggest bug of all has been fixed.

[Leo Laporte]

There were three, zero days.

[Paul Thurott]

That's amazing. All right, so File explorer in Windows 11 has a bug where if you click the whatever more, not whatever it's called the menu, it goes up off the top of the screen. Still happens. So yeah, I don't know what they were doing over the past 36 days, but not fixing that bug.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, 161 patches, is that right?

[Paul Thurott]

No, I don't. I mean it was a huge number. If it is. It's all security updates, you know, bug fixes, but not that bug fixes 11.

[Leo Laporte]

Critical flaws the largest CVEs addressed in any single month since at least 2017.

[Paul Thurott]

I'm fascinated that this is a thing because there's nothing new in these updates, which is like the first time in three years. Like the thing that's most interesting about this month to me is that they did not add any new features to Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it was December, right? They weren't working on anything. They were just holiday stuff.

[Paul Thurott]

No, I know, I know. It was a nice little. It was a nice break, but they.

[Leo Laporte]

Were saving them up, so that's good.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I got up early like you do on Christmas Day, waiting for that download to appear in Windows Update, even though I know it doesn't happen until about 1pm my time. And yeah, not much going on there. From a functional perspective.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Scroll down a little bit if this is the right page. Yeah. See this video? You can tell there's nothing in it because the video is productivity tips for the new year.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute, wait a minute. This is KB5005009, the Patch Tuesday release. And with a video of productivity tips for the new year.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, because usually that video talks about something that's new, you know, there's nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I see. These are all security patches. So this would be the video that would say all the new features, but there weren't.

[Paul Thurott]

There weren't any. That's right. Listen, I consider this to be a resounding Success.

[Leo Laporte]

What's tip one?

[Richard Campbell]

With Windows 11, you can customize everything.

[Paul Thurott]

You can buy a [e-mail].

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my, my, my.

[Paul Thurott]

I don't know. So nothing to say about this except it came and it went and we're.

[Richard Campbell]

All, nobody's been hurt. That's a good sign.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, it is 24H2, so plenty of people have been hurt, I think since the last time we did the show last week, I've heard about three new 24H2 problems, one of which is literally being resolved as we speak. Kind of a Dolby Audio issue that Microsoft actually did issue a fix for. But yeah, so there's that terribleness and we get some really good AI terribleness to talk about later in the show. But I'll save that little surprise for then. And yeah, I mean, this is like Windows Update Patch Tuesday used to be, right? Boring.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Just uneventful. Nothing to talk about.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep. So no reason.

[Richard Campbell]

That's why it feels so weird actually.

[Paul Thurott]

If anything, the big news we have this week, Windows wise, is actually Windows 10 related. But real quick Windows Insider program. I believe there's only been one build since last week. It was a Canary build. We don't know why they do this anymore. There's nothing new in it. I'm struggling to understand what they're working on with Canary, but yeah, there's that. But. So every Friday I do a column called Ask Paul and I let readers, you know, write in with their questions and I answer them. It usually ends up being this three to six thousand word Iliad and the Odyssey type thing. But one of the questions last week was this is an interesting little poser, I guess for everyone in the community is do you think that is Microsoft serious about this October end of support date for Windows 10?

[Richard Campbell]

I get that question on the run ass side.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. I mean this is going to be the. This is going to be one of the biggest topics of the year unless we have another crowdstrike. The issue here is twofold. They've done this before. We've had Windows XP, Windows 7, where they've had to extend the lifecycle and they've offered extended security, paid security. But it's also unprecedented in the sense that they're offering it to consumers for the first time, just for one year. You know, it's a. Per PC cost. I think it's $60 for the first year, and then it doubles. 35, 35. Okay. Whatever the price. I actually don't.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it goes up.

[Paul Thurott]

It goes up. It doubles every year. I know that. And the other unprecedented bit, and we talked about this last week, is that at this time in its life cycle, as it was about to expire, and support Windows 7 had dramatically lower usage share out in the world than Windows 10 does today. And my response to that question was that there were a lot of factors that would go into this. I really don't have a read on, or I should say now I do. I didn't have a read on it on Friday per se, but I felt that that number was important. You know, 60, 65% of the user base still on Windows 10. Actually kind of a big deal. But also I think which customers are still on Windows 10 and where they are in the migration makes a difference too, if that makes sense. So in other words, some customers are more important than others. Some customers might have enough weight that they could go to Microsoft and say, yeah, you're not doing this, you know, and they might have to make a change, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and one of the options would be that Microsoft cuts them a deal on extended support just to stick to their gun.

[Paul Thurott]

That's right, yes. I mean, and there are a lot of backroom deals like that that occur that we don't hear a lot about. The one I heard that was sort of similar to this was that time when the UK hospital system was packed. They were also running. I think it was xp.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

And it was long out of support. And I think it was. It was Terry Myerson at the time. So, you know, what am I going to do? Not. Not patch the bug for the UK hospital system? It's like, obviously we're going to fix that, so we'll see. But I. I've had a. I've had a tough read on this. But then yesterday Microsoft published a couple of. Well, one's a blog post. One was just a support document where they reiterated the October date and then announced that they Will not support Office on Windows 10 after that date. Which is kind of interesting. Very unclear about whether Office would be supported if you were paying for the security updates. I logically, my brain says feels like a random threat.

[Richard Campbell]

They're going to back away from.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes. I mean, I mean, yes. This is just so. I appreciate the effort. I appreciate what they're trying to do. I get it.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice one.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. I mean, you know, well, like in a vague sense like Windows 11, you know, for all the criticism when it came out of the gate, you know one of my, my things was like, you know, I. Simplifying something as complex as Windows is hard. I appreciate they took on the effort. I wish they had let some adults, you know, tackle the problem. But you know, whatever they, they gave it a shot. So I don't know. I feel like they are going to stick to this date.

[Richard Campbell]

I think it's January and then we're talking about October and anything could happen. A whole fiscal year rolls over. You know, I think when Amy Hood's folks start focusing on the next fiscal and look at the situation, the pressure may be on.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. But you know I, I feel like for every pressure in that sense there's kind of the opposing pressure which is that the PC market hasn't rebounded like they thought it would for maybe the second or third year in a row now.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh wait, didn't you hear it at ces? This is the year of the PC.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. But like that has to actually come true for it to be true, you know, and people actually have to upgrade. There's a. Microsoft is fighting what is now a decades long problem with a lack of enthusiasm on the part of anybody who uses a PC to upgrade. You know, for all kinds of good reasons.

[Richard Campbell]

Because it ain't broke.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. And it's just a new era. So you know, when they announced. I don't remember when this was. It must have been actually it's probably tied to trustworthy computing. But whenever it was roughly 20 years ago when they announced the. Maybe it was older than that, whatever it was, the 10 year support lifecycle, you know, that felt really aggressive at the time. But in the 20 year sense or whatever it's been, you know, PCs have obviously gotten a lot more reliable which is. Feels. Still feels like a weird thing to say.

[Richard Campbell]

But they have the rate of hardware change tapered off after 2000.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Really?

[Paul Thurott]

Yep, yep. Yeah, that too. I mean, yeah, lots of factors. Right. There's the reality that most people use other devices for things. They used to use a PC for. So the PC is a very laser focused kind of a thing for most people and most of the time it's, you know, traditional PC based productivity work, which is.

[Richard Campbell]

And if it doesn't work, you go back to your iPad.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, there's a lot of things kind of arrayed against it, but. But they're not just trying to help themselves. I mean, presumably the majority. Well, I don't know this for a fact, but yeah, I mean certainly over 50% of their revenues come from these enterprise agreements that it doesn't actually matter what version of Windows they're on. There's no bump. So in many ways the bump here is for the rest of the industry. Like a healthy PC industry helps Microsoft obviously, because you don't want to see any problems there. But I just don't see a lot of confusion.

[Richard Campbell]

The motivation here, right, like are you wanting to get everyone to Windows 11 so you don't have to support two versions of an OS because logically there should be a Windows 12 on the horizon and you don't want to support three. Okay, so maybe drag out a proposal for a 12 to make 10 seem really.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

Or you really trying to move the PC market? Because I just don't think you care that much if you're Microsoft. I mean the hardware vendors certainly care, but is Microsoft.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, yeah. So from a unit perspective, I feel like we've kind of plateaued or bottomed out or however you want to say that. Like I feel like we're in the same kind of area for the most part other than cyclical upgrade business type things. But I mean from the PC maker's perspective, you could say, well, we're really hoping that if someone does upgrade, but the idea that this thing's going to last for X number of years and maybe they get a more premium computer, maybe higher margins, et cetera like that.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it went for a while there, like La June we were talking about, well, you're going to need an mpu. It's just that I've yet to see a justification for needing an mpu and I see Microsoft distinctly not motivated to do this because you consume the better off for them.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep, it's. Yeah, yep. I, yeah, we, we're going to be, we have been and will continue to be so laser focused on the AI stuff that it's hard to almost see the rest of the world now.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, but it's irrational. Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

One of the many big stories with Microsoft and AI is this, I mean, almost insane, maybe literally insane focus on AI. And just how off it is, you know, from their customers expectations, you know, they're just in a completely different space and it's bizarre. And we'll get into this because there's.

[Richard Campbell]

A lot again there to be clear again.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, every so often they're aligned with their micro, with their customer needs and things are pretty good. And then somebody comes along who wants a promotion and has a vision and is going to manifest it against the will of the customer until the customer finally pulls back.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep. I had this in the sort of insurtification space, which is not in the notes or anything, but you've reminded me of this. I had this idea sometime in the past week or ten days where you bring up a computer maybe after installing an update or it's a new computer, whatever it is, and there's a screen. Well there, I should say there may be a screen that has something to do with OneDrive folder backup and they really aggressively want you to use this feature. If you do see the screen, the language has changed and I don't actually remember what it used to say, but they want you to say yes. But then it said opt out. It actually said opt out, which is a curious turn of phrase. And I thought, what if this means something? What if this indicates that they're backing off from this policy of auto enabling folder backup for people like they do to me all the time. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. So I'm going to pay attention to that.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm going to reach an mvp. Let's see how many people click on this.

[Paul Thurott]

Whether it does it, it turns out you're closer to the truth than I am because I've upgraded my Surface Laptop 7 to Pro from Windows 11 Home. You're supposed to see that screen on Pro during setup. Honestly, it doesn't appear every single time, but unlike Home, you could see it. And I did choose Opt out on it and I did decline the offer three different times after I got into the operating system. And it still auto installed. Yeah, still auto enabled this feature.

[Richard Campbell]

We now have that little data point that you did select Opt Out.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep. So Opt out is as meaningless as any language when it comes to Microsoft. So I was kind of hoping that was that meant something. But it doesn't mean anything now.

[Richard Campbell]

You're just talking crazy to our Mr. Thrott.

[Paul Thurott]

I know. Yeah. Okay, so Office not supported officially after October, but that really means. I know nobody does. That's. And by the way, I say that having read and reread that announcement post, I don't know what it means because one of the things you're looking for in that language is, okay, I'm going to pay for additional updates, security Updates for Windows 10. That means my system is supported. That tells me that a valid Office license should be.

[Richard Campbell]

How you don't support Office. Like, what does that even mean? Only when I do a PSS request and they say, oh, you're running win 10, you have to do 11 before we'll talk to you.

[Paul Thurott]

If you don't read this thing carefully, it looks like Windows 10 right now is in the same space as Windows 7, 8 and 8.1. They literally commingle these things together. Like these are all things that are or soon will be unsupported. It's not great. So this blog post or whatever was. Community post. Yeah. I always look for clarity and I so rarely get it. And this is a great example of that. But they are going to give you the new outlook in Windows 10. So for those people, whether you want it or not, I mean, they did just get rid of Mail and Calendar, right. So those things went out of support at the end of December. And I guess it makes sense on that level. It's the replacement for those apps in Windows. Right. It's not just this thing that will come in Office eventually, by the time we're all retired, but is also a constituent part of Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

I think I said this last show, I am getting comfortable with the new Outlook on one mission.

[Paul Thurott]

I have a comparison later in the show to this because as I think I said last week you said something like, oh, I wanted to talk to you about this Outlook thing that you told me I had to install on my computer. And I was like, here we go. And anyway, I may have done that. Yeah, it worked out better than those things usually do for me.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's disturbing to me that I hadn't turned it off as I usually did.

[Paul Thurott]

Right, there you go.

[Richard Campbell]

And now knew where to click on things. Like, it was actually a smooth workflow. That was. It wasn't interrupting. Right that moment where I turned to it, I got what I wanted from it and moved on. And then the back of my head went, wait, you just had a good experience with new Outlook. That's not right.

[Paul Thurott]

This is how I rate touchpads on laptops because when they're unreliable, I disable three and four finger gestures so that I'm not by mistake using this feature that, you know, task View or whatever. And sometimes I'll review a laptop, I'll use it for six weeks you know, and then I go to write the review and I'm looking at my notes and I don't have anything about the touchpad. I'm like, wait a minute. And I go look at settings and I never changed it. Which means this thing's been working great because I noticed that immediately, you know, so it happens sometimes I think it's.

[Richard Campbell]

The challenge of being critical is the things that work just don't pop up. Like you do need that checklist to say here are the things that normally annoy you. The fact that it didn't is extraordinary.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. This is the truism, I think, of life in general, that you could have this thing that is annoying you and you're really not you. I mean anyone. But you're vocal about it, you can't stand it, it's making you crazy. And then it goes away and you're like, eh, you know, it doesn't. It's not met with like the opposite, you know, kind of enthusiasm you should have for something that doesn't stink anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah, yeah, but I, I also deeply appreciate the guy that old, the old outlook, like they. It's an orphan in a lot of ways. Right. Like it's so odd. It's its own, always has been.

[Paul Thurott]

Really.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I know, I know we're getting in, we're going to get into this later, but clearly if you're not working on a. If you're a developer, you're not working on a. At Microsoft, your days are numb.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh my God. I know. I want to talk to you about this. We're going to get to this because this.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's what it seems to be. So every, you know, you're allowed one of each product that isn't an AI product. You're not allowed to.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, Yep, there you go. I don't know what the call is for this, but one of the things that occurred as Apple switched over to Apple Silicon on the Mac is that Parallels came out with a new version of their virtual machine software, Parallels Desktop. But it didn't support x86 VMs, right. So you had to have an arm VM, which makes sense if you understand the architecture for these things. Of course there aren't a lot of ARM OSes that run on Apple Silicon. So Windows 11 now is actually fully supported. So that's nice. And then there's some Linux distributions that work, but they're not as well supported. But they are there. But this past week they enabled running x86 Windows VMs only. So Windows Client or Server.

[Richard Campbell]

So this is an emulation then?

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, it's very slow. There's literally, I think they ship you a gerbil, it runs in a wheel and it kind of powers. It's not really ready for primetime. But I guess a lot of people have asked for this and maybe this is something that will.

[Richard Campbell]

This is kind of virtual machine and virtual machine. So the inception problem exists.

[Paul Thurott]

That's right. Like you're holding a mirror up to a camera. Yeah, so that's there. I mean, I, you know, it's. They're working on it. That's kind of cool. They kind of implied they were heading.

[Richard Campbell]

Toward this just in time for it not to be relevant.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Like if Windows for ARM starts running. Well, why would you run an X86 instance?

[Paul Thurott]

Yes. Well, there may. Maybe I'm just devil's advocate. Advocate advocating this. You may have a legacy app from maybe in a business that only runs on x86 and this is the one thing that keeps you from doing this. Or maybe, maybe. But this feels like a small use case to me.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah, now we can think about the fun of the Windows in ARM instance doing interpolation of an x86 app across to ARM into an ARM virtual machine.

[Paul Thurott]

I mean, I'm not sure if the Prism emulator is that good, but it's a.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, but you, you know, it speaks to what Parallels really needs to do when you have one of those good hardware based interpreters is can you do a pass through through a VM for.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

But that's. We've had that kind of interop between virtual machines before, but it takes special work to do.

[Paul Thurott]

This reminds me of back in the very early days of Virtual PC, which at the time was what we think of as sort of a software based virtualization engine, like not a hypervisor based one. And it was miraculous that you could run Windows on a Mac. You know, back in the early PowerPC days. It was terrible too. Right. I mean it was just awful. Like the performance was really bad.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

But at least it worked.

[Richard Campbell]

Now we were using that virtual PC for testing, right. It was about we. We had some machines running a 311 implementation, some machines running in 95 implementation. We just had to test everything. And you didn't want to have one of each hardware.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And so the fact that we could get one torquey box and run Virtual PC and test each of them, it worked.

[Paul Thurott]

Microsoft bought that company, didn't they? And they brought out eventually something called Server that later was replaced by Hyper V which was a software based jig, but also with I guess seven, there was an XP Mode thing briefly, that technology running Windows XP for those customers that needed that, this kind of thing forever. For some reason, we can't let go of the old stuff. I don't know what a world that something.

[Richard Campbell]

All right, well, apparently we're taking a break.

[Paul Thurott]

All right.

[Richard Campbell]

Or not. All right.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. So I, I've written so much about this. I'm going to try not to babble through this because it's just so big. The more you get into it, the more it kind of expands out. But the AI era, such as it is, that we live in now, if we just kind of boil it down to the Microsoft thing and try not to pay too much attention to everything else that's going on around us, has been sheer chaos. Right. This past week I wrote it's Exploration. The way I think of this is that we often throw out these numbers like they mean anything. But 2/3 of Microsoft's revenues from Windows in this case come from businesses, not from consumers. It's probably closer to 90%, by the way. But whatever that number is, you're not.

[Richard Campbell]

Talking about 2/3 of Microsoft's overall income. You're being their Windows income comes from enterprise.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Because it's, you know, no one's buying Windows. I mean, well, there are a couple hundred million a year in Windows licenses, but compared to all the enterprise agreements that are ongoing, the amount of money that they make from business is just, I think astronomically higher. Sure. And yet that is the audience, the majority of their customers, who do not want this constant churn of change. That is what AI brings to everything that it touches. Right. And Microsoft has not just embraced this thing, they've lit the fire. And they're running from building to building, fanning the flames. And it's since the beginning of 2023, it's been this kind of, like I said, constant churn. You see it in things small like here's this new product, oh wait, we're going to rebrand it to Copilot within the span of months. Something that the old Microsoft would have taken several years to make that right. To the sheer number of products they release. And now this year we're seeing this major change in business model, which in Microsoft's case is actually a set of changes, because of course it is. Nothing can be simple. So it's complicated. So the other day I wrote a story about the 15 months it's been since we got Copilot in Windows and just the sheer chaos of that. The number of times they just moved the icon on the taskbar, the number of times they change the app to be something completely different. Right. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. It's kind of crazy. But the one thing we sort of saw coming, because they started talking about this, I guess, in September and then a lot more in November at Ignite, is this people try to define these things in different ways. I think I've called this like copilot 2.0 or 3.0, whatever the number is. But moving to this kind of agentic model. Right. Which does have that feel of eventually something's going to stick. Let's just keep throwing things out and seeing how it goes.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

But from a business model perspective, the way that Microsoft has done this is we're going to give away some stuff for free on the web, and then we're going to do the same stuff in Windows and then some other stuff in Windows, and then we're going to have some other stuff in Windows that will be free, but only if you have a Copilot plus PC, which really confuses people. And then we're going to have these paid services that are really expensive, you know, and without again, getting into the nitty gritty details, it doesn't matter what sku you run consumer or commercial, but you pay some amount of money per user, per month or per year for, for Microsoft 365. And then you pay 300 to 500x or 5x, sorry, 3 to 5x for Copilot for Microsoft 365 or Copilot Pro if you're a consumer. And it just doesn't feel commensurate with clear as bad.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's so obvious now how to do this.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, well, well, okay. So I, I, it's it.

[Richard Campbell]

So I'm sorry, three to five times as much. I want 20 bucks for copilot. Depends on what sku.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, so, well, copilot running 85, you're.

[Richard Campbell]

Paying 150amonth for that.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. No, Copilot Pro is consumer. So Copilot, or we'll say Microsoft 365 families, 120 bucks a year, six users, one terabyte, all the apps, multiple devices, 20 bucks per user per month if you want to do copilot Pro. So one user.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurott]

If you just had one of the six pay for that, your price for Microsoft 365 would go up 3x that year. It's insane.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Again, that's, you're, you're looking at it from a consumer point of view.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, no, no, that's just one example. But if you look at it from the business point of view. Yes, it depends on what skewer you're using, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, because. Because a half a dozen E5s is nearly ten grand a year.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, but that's not the only SKU that can use this. I mean, it's not based on the price of the base sku. It's the same price. No matter. That's part of the problem.

[Richard Campbell]

No matter what. I think this is mostly a Conway's Law problem, that the structure of the organization reflects the way they make products.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, God, yes. By the way, that is one of Microsoft's core problems. Forever the hierarchy of the business showing through in the product that comes out. That kind of thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. They will not allocate developers to a project that isn't making money. And so they have to attach this new product with a price tag to justify the existence of the developers.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Camera's not focusing. I'm sorry. So if I feel a little blurry to you, it's because, you know, if you've been trying to understand this is just. Is, isn't AI a competitive marketplace though? Or is there something that Copilot does?

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, it's only competitive marketplace if somebody's making money.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but I understand what I mean from the point of view of the purchaser, there are many different AIs you could choose from. Does Copilot have an advantage because of its integration?

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, because it's. You get one bill. Right. It's. If you. One of the main advantage reasons a company would stick with Microsoft 365 is you get it all. You know, it's. It's easy, it's. And it's. It's not like it's. It's. It's like. It's not like it's uncompetitive. It's probably one of the best of this type of thing that there is. Right. There's only a couple, but I mean, it's probably one of the better ones. That's not really the concern. It's just that there are different models. Like, if you look at the way subscription services are, like in the consumer space, you have like ad supported and then paid is one typical one. It's not standard across everything, but that's one of the ways you could do it. And Microsoft sort of. Right. But the one thing that they indicated and are now starting to roll out is that if you pay for a Microsoft 365 subscription. They're actually going to give you AI credits every month and you can use those previously exclusive to Microsoft 365 features up until you, you know, you, those credits are used up like everything you do uses some credits. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So certain number of token kind of thing.

[Paul Thurott]

And you know, to me that's fair. Right. Because regardless of the actual price of the paid subscription, at least this gives anyone the opportunity to try it. And those people that use it the most heavily and are actually running out of credits could say, okay, you know what, actually it makes sense for me to pay 20 bucks a month. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

If you ran out of credits, clearly, because you were using it and so you, you and you're going to run out of the moment where you really want an answer to something and you're going to be much more likely to say, okay, I'll pay.

[Paul Thurott]

This to me is the. Is an acceptable compromise. You kind of have to accept it, look to say stuff is happening whether you want it or not. I had written that thing back in August where I was like, look, I'm not paying for AI and I, and I mean that like I will pay for a word processor, but I'm not paying for spell checking separately. Like I will pay for a photo editor, but I'm not going to pay for this thing that removes the background like that. That needs to be part of the thing.

[Richard Campbell]

These are features.

[Paul Thurott]

Features or like enhance.

[Richard Campbell]

Aren't we seeing that now with GitHub Copilot?

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't you dare. We're going to talk about don't you dare.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry. Does Microsoft Copilot have Anything comparable to ChatGPT4?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, it does and it is.

[Paul Thurott]

It's the same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

How is it labeled?

[Paul Thurott]

Well, Leo, I'm glad you asked. They've changed it five times, the most. I'm not kidding. They just today announced the latest name change. So under the terms of this new model, that thing that started as Bing Enterprise Chat and eventually became Microsoft 365 chat is now available for free with this token. No, it's not this. It's a different system but if you want to use agents, you actually they have a pay as you go thing which is completely separate from everything I just talked about. But you get some amount of functionality and if you pay for Microsoft 365 copilot, it's wide open. You get pretty much everything by the way, except for some agenic capabilities which are still pay as you Go. But still, I would argue, I am arguing, I guess literally it's better than it was because before it was like the haves and have nots. You pay a lot and you get stuff. You pay nothing, you get basically nothing, at least in the Microsoft 365 copilot sense. But now you do, or now it's starting to happen. So to me this makes a lot of sense. But then Google today announced, and I saw this announcement and I thought, I know exactly what they're doing. They're going to copy Microsoft again. When Microsoft did the copilot stuff, they came out with the same thing with Gemini. Same price, same price for consumers, same price for businesses, just different name Google thing instead. But that's not what they did. Interestingly, they came out with a different approach. They are raising the prices of workstation across all of the tiers by less than 20% and they're not going to sell what they call Gemini Advanced or Gemini Add ons anymore, which were $20 to $30 a month each per user. So now everyone just gets everything. You pay a little bit more and you get more. Now I actually think that's even better. And part of the calculus there is that Microsoft is also raising the price of Microsoft 365. They haven't done it in the Americas and they haven't done it in Western Europe yet, but they have started doing it in parts of Asia and I think Australia, New Zealand. And those prices are going up like 45%. Like they're not. Yeah, so we'll see what they do here. But we'll just asterisk that for now.

[Richard Campbell]

Data center thing too, right? Like, I know they tend to test on smaller markets, but at the same time it's like the data center resources in South Pacific are far more constrained.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, there are less. Well, there aren't less users in Asia obviously, but there may be less users of the fewer users of this stuff. I don't know. I don't actually know that. But yes, so it's happening. I mean, I think it's fair to say by the end of this year we will all be paying more for Microsoft 365. We'll see how that happens, how that goes. But for now, Microsoft has made a step forward as far as meeting the needs of its customers. I think in a way that is meaningful. Google's made an even bigger.

[Richard Campbell]

I just don't see why they don't roll this into the price of the product and stop breaking.

[Paul Thurott]

As long as it doesn't, you know, double the price of the product or whatever it is. You know, I mean, that's, that's the.

[Richard Campbell]

Again for the consumer edition.

[Paul Thurott]

That's, you know, that's the worry. So we'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

It seems unwise when you're spending 130amonth on an E5 that you really want 20 more dollars, like, just better to make it 155. And it comes with, you know, here's me being the, the enterprise guy and you being the consumer guy and the pricing, and they're using the same pricing strategy. It's insane. Like, what do you think?

[Leo Laporte]

I can see why enterprise isn't gonna. This is a, this is more enterprise. But as a consumer, I feel like my, my, my AI dollars are better spent somewhere else.

[Paul Thurott]

Right. I know.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why I say, isn't it a competitive market? Can't consumers.

[Paul Thurott]

It is a competitive. So I am, I mean, this is anecdotal, obviously. I'm just, you know, I know some people who do what they do. Like, who cares? But it surprises me how many people I know who are not technical people who pay for ChatGPT. For example, this, this came up twice over last weekend. And it's like, I'm sorry, what are you doing? And one of these guys who's like the. Just part of the family, he's not related to me by blood or anything, but a couple of bloodlines removed or whatever. He said, I use this thing all day, every day. I use it all the time. I use it way more than I ever thought I would use it. And that kind of blows my mind, but there you go. So.

[Richard Campbell]

But also, at 20 bucks a month, it's coffee money. What do you care?

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, well, but that's what I'm saying.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that Microsoft has to be sensitive to the fact that there is also anthropic and open AI and mystery, and.

[Paul Thurott]

Also that I am, as an individual paying them 120 bucks a year for this already. I, that's the thing. I. Right. To me, a lot of this stuff feels like things that you would have added to this product for free 3, 5, 10 years ago because these are just features of the product.

[Richard Campbell]

So one hand, we have this pitch of, well, you're already paying me, so paying me more is easy. On the other hand, it's like, really, you're going to ding me 20? If I got to spend 20, I'll go spend it on something new.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes. And this is literally like the difference between an enterprise commercial customer and an individual. Like, as an individual, you could almost act in a way that you're seeking revenge on Microsoft and to punish them for their ills. I'm going to use ChatGPT, which is hilarious because by the way they make 21% of that. But whatever. You don't know that and you're trying to hurt them for some reason, whatever it is. But yeah, I. But to Leo's point though.

[Richard Campbell]

And if they just discounted the consumer version.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, but that this. Okay, but this is part of the age old clash within Microsoft where the people representing the EA side of the host don't ever want to see that happen because they don't want Enterprise to come to them and say excuse me, this thing's free over there. We give you a lot more money than those people do. What's up? So there's a weird balance there. You know, they can't be.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But I would argue that the feature set, the functionality of Copilot for them365 in the enterprise is dramatically different from Copilot.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. And a lot of it's related not just to manageability, well that's important. But also to security and data governance and the ability to determine what data that your users can access while they're using the Copilot services, et cetera. So there's a lot of kind of over management overhead or just safety Rails, however you want to say it. I mean there are some obviously in the consumer product too but. But enterprises will demand that, you know, they. This is a non starter unless you offer all of that stuff. And is that worth part of that chunk of change per user? Yeah, that's up to individual.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I guess that was my question. I can see why Enterprise might, you know, be. It might be sticky for the Enterprise but less so for consumers. That's all.

[Paul Thurott]

Here's so one of the little data points in this chart that Microsoft put out today, which is about the new chat for Microsoft 365 which is now available for free for the first time. And what the differences are between that and the paid version is that you cannot limit the data set to your company's data unless you pay for it. Right. You can't do that for free.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting, huh?

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, that's one of them. You know, there's only a couple. But that's. And they're big ones. Right? Most of the stuff. There's only a couple. Really. When I say most, I mean like the other two are related to. In fact this might. That. I think that's one of them actually. That is one of them. So there's only a couple and one of them is. Or the others or all of them are related to these agentic capabilities. So if you want something, an agent that's going to work on your behalf without you interacting with it, you actually have to pay for that. And it's a consumption based thing. So it's a pay as you go deal. And that's true whether you're paying for copilot365 or not. So I don't know what the justification is there because they're never going to say this. Is this somehow more expensive for Microsoft or is it because this thing always runs in the background and is there doing stuff on your behalf? I don't really know. Maybe they perceive it as such a valuable service. It's something they can charge for. It's a. They're just calculating that people will pay for this capability. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but they decided on charging that long before it was valuable at anything.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes, exactly. Yeah. What are you telling me? If I. It tells me there's an iPad for $0.17 off that's not valuable. Come on, Rich. Jeez. I know it's. It's.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but I'm pretty sure I can do that without a large line.

[Leo Laporte]

I can do rag, which is. Right.

[Paul Thurott]

That's rag.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. I could do RAG for free in a lot of these things.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes. But with that. And this is going to be the push and pull. So I.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe they don't guarantee privacy or people trust Microsoft and trust the brand.

[Paul Thurott]

I like that you said that without laughing a lot. I mean some people do. I do too. I mean to us to.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, you know, because they have more. Look at. OpenAI is not worried about its reputation or Perplexity or Claude or any of this stuff as much as Microsoft is. They have a lot more to lose. Same with Apple. I think people go with those big brands for that reason. But I have to. I mean I'm. I get a lot more out of. For instance, perplexity AI. That's worth 20 bucks.

[Paul Thurott]

Interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

And it does a lot more. And I'm in chat GPT using 4.0, the new reasoning model. So you say I could do that in Copilot, but how do what, sorry? Use ChatGPT, the reasoning version, whatever it is.

[Richard Campbell]

401.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. So they literally. That's what came out today. So.

[Leo Laporte]

So it does it. What does it call it? How do I know that I'm doing that?

[Paul Thurott]

Don't make me look this up. It's called. No, I should Sorry, just came out today.

[Leo Laporte]

Ask the AI because I, I like to use 01. Right?

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. And that's.

[Leo Laporte]

But when I'm on ChatGPT.

[Paul Thurott]

Right. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I can use 4.040 with scheduled tasks, which is new. I can, oh, 101 mini. I have a lot of models I can use. This is ChatGPT's interface.

[Paul Thurott]

This thing is called Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. That's the new name. This is the one that for the first time is available in a free tier as well as a paid tier. So before it was only paid.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like they're missing the boat by calling it chat, because that sounds like it's about chat.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, it isn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's just how you interact with the AI is you type a question and it gives you an answer. That's not, to me, a chatbot, something you converse with.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay. But think about, think, just keep to Microsoft Word just to make it simple. Right. So you've got this application that you write things with. Copilot is something that you could summon to do something specific, summarize this document, rewrite this paragraph, whatever it is. It's also something that could happen automatically. You're doing like. This is something we'll talk about with the Copilot stuff for. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple Intelligence does that. You have some features that are built into the editor.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

So the Chat interface, which is the thing, you know, we have one, we have it in Windows, it's on the web. It's just the thing you bring up when you want to ask questions and talk about. Yeah. So it's, it's, for some, it's bizarre, but it's a fact of, you know, it's a, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

And you're saying when I use that, that's not four. That's not four. Oh, that's 401.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, for. It is 4. 0. Let me look it up. It's complicated.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there's more granularity in the chat GBT world, even though I know we're using the same tools.

[Paul Thurott]

I think the reason it's the free One is chat GBT 4.0.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's not the same.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

401 is the reasoning one. So you must have access to that.

[Paul Thurott]

I don't know. So I'm looking at it right now. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I, I, it seems to me that the reason people do this is it's from Microsoft, it's trusted, it's integrated in, so I don't have to have a separate window.

[Richard Campbell]

Low friction.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, the big use case though to me is going to be enterprises that want to limit the data set to the. What do you call it? Ground the data in their corporate data because that's where it can be helpful. There's a lot of Microsoft products that have kind of come and gone in the past where the net result is you're in a big organization and you have to find someone who's an expert on whatever the topic is so you can ask them a question or whatever. So you want to find someone who was involved in a previous initiative and find out what happened because now someone's asking about again or whatever it is you're looking for. Kind of corporate story. Yeah. So I think one of the big benefits, the thing I've been looking for the most honestly with Copilot, when they first announced Copilot, the first thing that went into my brain was I want to point this thing at my onedrive where have my document archive and I want to be able to search and then find things because right now I can tell you when I search for things I don't find half of it. And that was really interesting to me. Kind of ground the AI and I could ask you questions like when did Microsoft release? Or whatever the thing is, because that stuff's in there, like the information's there, you just have to pull it out. And I think AI would be good at that. So I think that's part of the appeal. Grounding the data in the corporate knowledge base, whatever that means across their many data silos and the Microsoft graph and all that. I don't know. So yeah, that's why you would go with Microsoft+OpenAI. My God. From the outside, doesn't it look like, I mean you think Microsoft's chaos. OpenAI.

[Leo Laporte]

You can literally do that in every other AI that's out there.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, well, right, so.

[Leo Laporte]

And you can do it privately because all of them have the checkbox or something.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. So let's say you stop paying for Microsoft 365, but you still have Word in your computer. Or you might have Word because you bought office 2019 one time. You're like, I'm never buying this thing again or whatever it is. So there's all these add ons you can get for AI if you want, Grammarly or whatever for just helping you rewrite things and all that. There's a million of these things. So is that big enough competition for Microsoft or Copilot or whatever right now? Probably not. I mean Microsoft has Withstood far bigger threats to Office than any of that stuff. But I think apathy is a big problem for them. And also just people just sticking with the old version and never paying them again. So it's like, great, we have this huge user base of Office, but what are they using? They're using a million different versions and a lot of it's not even supported anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And are the enough work?

[Paul Thurott]

It still works. I know. Which is the, which is the rub. Right. This is the tough thing for Microsoft.

[Richard Campbell]

You've got this. Somebody said in the chat that, you know, what you know works fine. Office 2003.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. And Office 2003 was the first version where, like I say, Outlook was worth a damn. And, you know, it started to get really interesting. And before they did the ribbon. Right. Which honestly, I think worked out tremendously in the long run. But AI is just going to be.

[Richard Campbell]

Everywhere with a way to manage a ridiculous amount of complexity in an application.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, yeah. And let alone a suite of applications. I think that the big problem for Microsoft here is going to be the same as it is for Office, which is just that AI will be. Is already basically everywhere. And it's not much of a value add because you just get it everywhere. You know, you might have it on your Apple iPhone and you'll look at Office and be like, why are you charging me for this? I get this for free right here. Why, why would I? What am I doing? I don't care about that stuff. So it's a problem.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and they. And they are getting more efficient.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Like the, the cost of Microsoft per user is also going down.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes. I mean, it should. Right. Well, but then their investment.

[Leo Laporte]

Go ahead.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Just real quick. I mean, we know they're spending 20. No, sorry, $80 billion on the fiscal year. But I would argue that's the little tip of the iceberg, because when you look at all the Aqua cars, Aqua hires and partnerships and all the other stuff, and the reorgs and bringing in, you know, we're going to talk about the organizational changes that are coming. I think the real cost of this is dramatically higher. And I'm just curious if Microsoft can afford it. They're one of the richest companies on earth.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I was going to make exactly that point. It's not like they're borrowing the money.

[Paul Thurott]

No.

[Richard Campbell]

They would have otherwise used that cash for more stock buybacks. Instead, they're investing in infrastructure.

[Paul Thurott]

So is there a point where shareholders kind of say, we'd like to get some of that back directly if we could or you know, there might be. Right. Or is there some point where the board of directors finally wake up?

[Richard Campbell]

This is where the energy of the hype comes from is how do you keep the shareholders calm by making this a worldwide hype.

[Paul Thurott]

I mean they could have created another Zune, Windows Phone and kill them again and they still would have cost less than what they've spending on AI, less money. It's kind of weird.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean admittedly a lot of this money is in infrastructure. Like it has a long term asset value. It is buildings and servers, 19 or.

[Paul Thurott]

$20 billion a quarter. It cost them 7.5 billion to get rid of Windows Phone and Nokia. Yeah, I mean that's like six, what is that? Eight or nine Nokias in a year. We thought that was a big deal when they did it the one time. You know, now they're just gorging up this much money all the time. It's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an interesting space because on the one hand it feels like the wild west and you would want to be in a more experimental mode maybe feeling like the incumbents, Google, Apple, Microsoft are probably too conservative with this stuff and all the interesting stuff is going to be happening outside of them. On the other hand, it's so expensive that only Google, Apple and Microsoft can afford to do it.

[Paul Thurott]

This was kind of my point at the very top of this, which is just that from the perspective of Microsoft's biggest and most important customers, they expect a conservative, slow moving change of our organization. This, this has turned into a clown car of stupidity. Just like change. I mean it's crazy. We're only two. Doesn't it feel like it's been 20 years? It's been going on for two years.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's happening really fast.

[Paul Thurott]

It's.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's why I just don't feel like the incumbents are going to be as, as nimble and as interesting as these little.

[Richard Campbell]

And yet they've outrun everybody.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I mean Microsoft is trying their damnedest to break out of that trap.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they were smart because they did partner with Anubi, they partnered with OpenAI and I think arguably still the forerunner in all of this.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And I think they got lucky, they got real life. Kevin Scott saw an easy opportunity to get more Azure consumption, which was his mission. There was no expectation it was going to work until they presented him GPT2 and then he wrote that email. Gray's like, okay, this looks like a thing.

[Paul Thurott]

It is a thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we'll agree, I think we can all agree.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's a thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what it is but it's.

[Paul Thurott]

That's maybe the best way that's ever been put. Because literally, I mean something. It's like the, you know, the screaming teacher in Back to School, he's like, I, he's. Because guy's really passionate.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you remember in the early days of the Internet, I, it seems to me I had the same notion kind of sense though something here. Yeah, there's something huge here. I remember the first time I encountered it, I was on the well which was a text based message system running on servers that were on top of Unix which had access to the Internet. And there. And I found out there's a command you can drop out of the well software into a command line and you can use Archie and Gopher. There was, I mean it was really early days but I was blown away because I got this sense of there's a lot of people here, there's a lot of stuff here. There's a global thing here that's kind of hidden. And this is what, probably 92, something like that. 91.

[Paul Thurott]

So I was.

[Leo Laporte]

But, but, but, but at the same time you, you didn't. I don't know what it's going to be right.

[Paul Thurott]

When it grows that. So all of us, because we're in the industry have experienced this moment where this thing that's kind of constrained to our stupid little lives, it gets out, breaks out somehow and normal people come to you and say things and you're like wait a minute, what. So I remember with the Internet one of the big things was just that everybody wanted it, you know. Yeah. And it was, it wasn't.

[Leo Laporte]

This is 94 and 95.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes. In the mid-90s. It's just everybody got online and then you kind of forget. It doesn't take long, a couple years. You're like, I used to spend a lot of time on computers before they were online. I don't remember what the hell I was doing.

[Leo Laporte]

It was just a big calculator.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. And the, the, I like that. I had a friend, non technical. He said, he goes, I want to get in like an ipod. Like, you know, does that make sense? And I was like, how do you even know this exists? You know, like, like it was a big, it was a big.

[Leo Laporte]

But I, but I have to say there isn't the same sense. Like when the iPhone came out, we knew it was not only a thing, but we knew it was a big thing. We had a pretty good idea of what it meant and what it was going to be. I mean, it ended up being even more huge. But yeah, there wasn't a surprise. The Internet. Yeah, kind of. I think AI is going to be the biggest surprise of all.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I think. I think. But for the same reason as the Internet. It's just going to be everywhere. It's going to become a fact of life. We're going to forget what it was like before we had it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

And I. Look, we all grew up in Star Trek movies or TV shows and movies and those scenarios. We always talk about that. You know, he's sitting in the chair with this tablet and doing whatever he's doing. And, you know, when are we going to have flying cars? Like we're. This is kind of a lot of it.

[Leo Laporte]

I am now experimenting with always on AI. I'm wearing this thing that came at CES the Bee and I showed you the brilliant glasses that are. Make you look like you're a dork. I'm going to talk more about these next show on Twig, but I'm really interested in the idea of an AI assistant that is always on, always listening. And then this. This BE comes up with to do list for you.

[Paul Thurott]

I mean, you know, Bill Gates was talking about this like 25 years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We've always thought there would be something like.

[Paul Thurott]

It's just this has been promised for so long.

[Leo Laporte]

I've got. I've got a to do list that was created because this thing is always listening to all my conversations. And now some of it I'm gonna.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's where the AR equation kind of comes in, is you kind of need that dash cam on your face.

[Leo Laporte]

So there is another one I ordered that is a little glowing light you glue to your temple.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, jeez. Like a Borg.

[Richard Campbell]

That's a look.

[Paul Thurott]

But look sleeker.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is all. This is all generated. I'll read it to you from conversations. Practice playing Jingle Bells on the piano, incorporating both hands and chords. That is like a checklist on my to do. I didn't put it in. It heard me.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is early, early days.

[Paul Thurott]

I like the transition here, by the way. We've spent the past five years being freaked out that everything we say in front of our phones is recorded and used to service ads and blah, blah, blah. And now you're like, oh, it made it for me. It's listening to me. Awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I have no idea where this is going. It's probably going to China.

[Paul Thurott]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Who cares? It's working and it's doing something. For instance, yesterday Lisa said, she told me, like, verbally, I'm at breakfast, oh, don't forget to upload your tax documents. And she told me where to upload them.

[Paul Thurott]

And then you were like, no, it.

[Leo Laporte]

Put it in here as a to do.

[Paul Thurott]

There you go. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I would have forgotten. So it's very early days. This is, you know, there's a lot.

[Paul Thurott]

I will say is make sure you put the password for that account into this list.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the problem.

[Paul Thurott]

So you'll never lose it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the problem. I just, I, I'm, I, I think that there's something here. And what I'm saying, I guess, is probably this is using open AI. I don't even know. They don't even tell you. But that's not the point. Yeah, it's, it's the feature set, as you said. It's the feature set. It's how you use it that becomes interesting.

[Paul Thurott]

But this is why AI is an enhanced version, like I've called it MSG or whatever, of what we had before. Someone in the chat is saying, who cares where the info goes? Because it's so helpful. Which, by the way, is a really naive way to look at that. But that is the relationship or agreement we've implicitly made with Google already. Everyone who uses Google Maps or whatever it is uses it in part because, God, this thing is so helpful. I could never. I can't believe I ever drove between states or whatever without it. And you kind of know it's tracking you.

[Leo Laporte]

It's tracking you.

[Paul Thurott]

Google has come to. So these are the two things that happened to me recently with Google Maps. I got in the car on a Friday, put the car. I put the phone up on the dashboard, not to do anything with it, just to put it up there. And this thing pops up and it says it will take you eight minutes to get to Notch, which is the restaurant we go to.

[Leo Laporte]

He knows that it's time to go to Notch.

[Paul Thurott]

Did not tell you I was going to Notch. I know how to get to Notch. That was a little weird. But the other one is done. I think I mentioned this on a previous show is. It's, it's like, boop, boop. Hey, Paul, we, we have a 17 minute gap on the 11th. Could you just fill it in and let us know what you were doing? Wait a minute. What?

[Leo Laporte]

I want nobody to schedule me.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, that, that's the one where you're like.

[Leo Laporte]

But there are some people who. That would Be useful. I mean, if you're a CEO, a really busy person.

[Paul Thurott]

No, no, what I mean is it's an assistant tracking it. It has a, it has a gap. It knows in understanding of what I did that day and it would like me to still let it go.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I said, well, can we connect to Gmail and Google Calendar and Google Contacts? I said, yeah, yeah, sure, just take it all. But now remember, I'm a, I'm a perfect guinea pig for this because I live in, I mean, I'm on YouTube telling you everything about it, my life, all the time anyway. So I mean, obviously I don't have anything to hide, but my life is.

[Paul Thurott]

Nothing but many reaction video. Reaction videos of people watching the Van Halen Unchained video, which is just amazing. That's all different people watching the same video over and over again. It's fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

They know what you like, Paul. They know what you want.

[Paul Thurott]

Every Friday.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me take a little break because it's time. But we've got more to talk about with AI and there are some things going on at Microsoft. I see some layoffs happening and so forth. So let's talk more about that in just a little bit. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell, and for many years now, Windows Weekly, in fact, you've heard me say it probably for many years, has been brought to you literally by Cash Fly. Remember bandwidth for Windows Weekly provided by Cash Fly@ cache flashly.com I just did an interview. He interviewed me. Matt Levine, the founder of Cash Fly, just interviewed me. We did a great hour and a half conversation. I think that podcast is coming out in a month, but I have this, this relationship with Cash fly is almost 20 years old. And it's funny because it was practically from the beginning of Cash fly. For over 20 years, Cashfly has held a track record for high performing, ultra reliable content delivery. They, they serve over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. And since we practically, since the beginning of twit almost 20 years ago, we've been using Cash Fly to get our content, audio and video to you. And I don't know if you've noticed, but it works pretty well. In fact, the fact that you don't notice is the key for me. It always works. It's smooth, it's easy, there are no problems, no hiccups. But if you really think what's happening, we do petabytes of data through Cash Fly every month, every month to hundreds of thousands of people, audio and video, just kind of thoughtlessly streaming Downloading. It's amazing. Cashflow is the only CDN content delivery network built for throughput. They offer ultra low latency video streaming. They can deliver video to over a million concurrent users with latency under a second. They offer lightning fast gaming. If you're a gaming company, they deliver downloads faster for you with zero lag and glitches and outages during the online play. They can do for anybody serving images on the Internet. Mobile content optimization. It automatically transparently to you optimizes your images for every size screen so your site loads faster on any device. The thing that made a difference to us almost 20 years ago when Matt Levine called and said let me help you out is they were very flexible with the billing, with the month to month billing because we didn't know we, you know our traffic is very spiky on Wednesday and then it trickles off through the week and then it's a again next Wednesday and like that. And all our shows are like that. We had no idea. I don't want to pay for non stop bandwidth at the peak, you know. So they were very flexible. They worked with us and they will work with you month to month billing as long as you need. Once you know what you need and that will help you work that out, you can get a discount for a longer term. We were very long term. I think we're, we're a 15 year term. Design your contract. That's the key. That was what was the key for us when you switched to Cash Fly? Some new stuff they wanted to announce. They've got something called managed Object Storage. This is a new object storage solution designed to increase speed and reliability to industry leading levels.

[Richard Campbell]

Why?

[Leo Laporte]

Because the hardware is entirely based on NVMe. You know what? It's really good for people with a large number of small objects. Still completely S3 compatible. Did you even know they had this? Yeah. They'll easily migrate into your cash fly MOS or S3 or any other tool set you've designed. By the way, Cashfly does not charge either for egress or ingress which you can't save for some of the. Have you ever seen your US bill? Just a flat volume fee and I really like that because it's predictable.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

They've just opened a new pop in Austria's capital city Vienna. Which means if you listen to our shows in central Europe, you're going to see significant improvements in latency and average transfer speed and all of that. And everybody benefits from that. Cash Fly resellers will like this. There are quite a Few of you I know they've added some reseller features to the portal. You can now be classified as a reseller, which means you can have numerous full accounts under your reseller account, but each of them operate independently. Billing, centralized. I mean, there's just a lot of nice features because they very. They very much think about what their customers need. They talk to you all the time and they're very responsive. That's been our experience. Cash Fly. They deliver rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs. You could do what we've been doing for years, which is shield your site content in their cloud. When we upload shows, we don't upload it to our site and then cash it over to Cashfly. We store it all on Cash Fly, which means we've got a 100% cash hit ratio. There's never a cash miss because they always have it. Oh, and I love this. The support is fantastic. With Cash Fly's elite managed packages, you get the VIP treatment. You'll get a dedicated account manager who'll be with you to support onboarding and a smooth implementation. And they'll be there 247 reliably helpful support when you need it. So learn how you can get your first month free at cash fly. C-A C-H-E F O Y.com TWIT it sounds more familiar if I say bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by cash fly@ cache flashly.com TWIT thank you, Cash Fly, for making the entire Twit network possible. Frankly, without you, I don't. We couldn't. We just couldn't do it. All right, let's go on with Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell, you're watching Windows Weekly. Looks like there's been some shuffling in Microsoft's AI group.

[Paul Thurott]

So sometime in the first half of last year, remember, Microsoft announced something called Microsoft AI, which was a new. Not a division. Right. I think they called it a organization. It's a home for Suleiman under Mustafa Suleiman, who was coming from Inflection, and then they basically hired almost everyone from Inflection, including their chief scientists. Right. And it was confusing because at the time, we had just come out of that period where Sam Altman had been kind of ousted at OpenAI AI. A month went by, then he came back. They got rid of half the report. There was a whole churn.

[Richard Campbell]

Not a month. It was a week.

[Paul Thurott]

It felt like a million years. And it was.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it was a week of dark satya, angry gotcha you know, so in.

[Paul Thurott]

The wake of that, they did this Microsoft AI organization, I think the conventional wisdom was that this was a response to that, that they needed to, you know, not have all their eggs in one basket or whatever. You're like, okay, well, it was weird that they hired people from outside the company. I think there were a lot of people inside Microsoft who were like, what's going on here? I know at least some people left. Remember, there was that engineer who said, yeah, I don't want anything to do with this. I've been working on Copilot, whatever. In fact, one of the, I think, was the lead guy. The lead on Copilot left when this happened. You know, just, you know, it just felt out of step. So it's almost a year later and they're doing it again. So there's two things that have happened this past week or so that may or may not be related. Right. So the first is that Microsoft announced the creation of something called Core AI Platform and Tools division, which has similarities to that old Platform and Tools division I remember from the old server Visual studio days, early 2000s, which is led by someone who is not from Microsoft. Again, what's going on here? And what is this thing then? There are separate reports. In fact, there are multiple reports. My phone was buzzing off the hook last night. I was getting texts from three different people about layoffs at Microsoft, including from one who's a former employee who had some kind of interesting details about that. And I don't know that these are completely related. And I've read through this announcement about this core AI Platform and Tools division several times. This is going to come up a lot on the show this year. Me trying to figure out what Microsoft is saying and failing completely. I'm not 100% sure. Richard, I'm curious if you know anything about this or have any thoughts on this, because I just don't. I don't quite get what's.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I think they were due for a refocus on AI. I do certainly heard from various sources that if you're working on something, if you're a dev inside of Microsoft and you don't have AI related in your pipeline somewhere, you are in trouble. So make sure you're associated with all of that. The subtext of this particular announcement that was interesting to me was Scott Guy.

[Paul Thurott]

Right, Right. I. Thank you. I literally, my heart skipped a beat for a second when I saw his name and I thought, oh, no, oh no. But he's an interesting. He's a survivor, obviously, and he's been around for a long time and I was nervous that this would be the beginning of some kind of a wind down for him. Even though he is not an old man, you know. No, I know, but he's not.

[Richard Campbell]

Although he's been an EVP for a long time. But his, you know, he was cloud and then he was cloud and AI and then you said Mustafa showed up and then there was another AI entity. So at that point you're like, what's going on? And there was a schism. Maybe it's enterprise versus consumer but they never really made that clear. Now the meta guy shows up and they're like, okay, we're going to consolidate the AI group around that. I don't. They didn't really say, you know, his cloud AI group was going to be a cloud group. But clearly when you see him writing about anything right now he's writing about cloud. Like he is responsible for growing Azure at the highest levels. Right. Like he's at the top. He's at EVPs top of the stack. So I think the growth pain in Azure and there's pain, right. There's been some weird outages. There's been. It's not. What they're doing is crazy hard. They're rented Three Mile island, which is.

[Paul Thurott]

Just a headline from the Onion that never should have happened.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it when you say renting. That's a good. Instead of, you know, recommissioning like it's.

[Paul Thurott]

A weekend birthday party or something.

[Leo Laporte]

You're like vrbo. You know, it's like I got a.

[Paul Thurott]

Bouncy house but you're getting Three Mile Island. It's the same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Nuclear power by owner. Yeah, I understand you.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And I'd like to buy 8 gigawatts of electricity, please, every 10 years. Can you hook me up? I know a guy.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, but when you think about like the com. The constituent parts of this new actually division. Right. I think they call it a division. Yes. So it's not. It's not a nebulous organization. It's a division. And they're going to combine what used to be dev div.AI platform and then some parts of office. I'm sorry, not office. Office of the cto. Which. Which is Kevin Turner. Right. He was doing Kevin. Kevin Turner. Speaking of the early 2000 AI Supercomputer Agency runtimes and engineering thrive did care God work on the brands and then the mission is to build end to end copilot and AI stack for both. This is the fascinating part for both first and third party customers to build and run on with AI apps and agents. I read that and I think to myself, okay, what about Net, what about Visual Studio? Which by the way has not gotten a major upgrade since the 18th century or whatever. It was a long time ago.

[Richard Campbell]

No. Yeah, well. And you notice Julia loosens in that loop but that ultimately she's the head of Dev Div. So. And I think there's a quote from Amanda Silver who's really her, her right hand and really in charge of Studio. But you're right, like Studio still sells annual licenses. Right. Like they haven't really switched over to the new model. They've certainly got a Copilot product. Like they're, they're in there. But I don't know that Julia Lucent's had a new person to report to than Scott Guthrie in a decade.

[Paul Thurott]

That's incredible.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

When you talk about that conservative, slow moving, whatever Microsoft, that part of the company was that, you know, predictable, reliable. I don't mean, I don't mean that in a negative way.

[Richard Campbell]

The vast majority of Visual Studio customers are last year's Visual Studio customers. Right. Like they, they. It's a subscription model for a reason. Big enterprises use it. I don't know that they have much of a plan to acquire new customers.

[Paul Thurott]

I mean somebody just Teddy asked me when's the. When there going to be a next major rev of Visual Studio? And it's like I don't know that. I'm not sure there will be.

[Richard Campbell]

They are due.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, they're over.

[Richard Campbell]

Like it was 2019. There was a 2022. So logically there should be a 2025. Not. And I'm saying that because I know.

[Paul Thurott]

No, and I want to be.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you. I would say what I mean.

[Paul Thurott]

I guess what I mean, what I mean by a major rev is not just calling it something different, which is yes, is due.

[Richard Campbell]

But Studio gets a quarterly update. There's lots of features being added. It's not like it's a dead product.

[Paul Thurott]

No, no, no, not at all. I don't know if we're moving to this kind of AI agentic future. Are there better tools, different tools for that kind of stuff? And does this stuff just go forward as almost a legacy? Something. Something like I.

[Richard Campbell]

One would argue that's already true with Visual Studio code.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. I mean so one of the many things this past year go back to build. Microsoft announced something called the Windows Copilot runtime, which is hilarious because it's no runtime. The core part of that, which I think of as that is the Windows Copilot library, which is a set of APIs or will be because none of them have been released. Not one of them. And that is amazing to me. If you look at Net or just at Azure, There are many APIs related to cloud and I'm sorry, to AI capabilities. Most of those run against the cloud. Right. The Windows Copilot runtime stuff is supposed to run against the mpu, which hasn't turned into a big market, frankly, and those things haven't appeared. So Net plays a role in AI and hopefully it's a role. Actually you would know this. So I assume. Let me just ask you, what is the biggest audience base, for lack of a better term, the biggest use case or whatever for. Net in the world? What's Net used for? Mostly corporate.

[Richard Campbell]

Internal corporate apps.

[Paul Thurott]

Like apps. Like actual apps. Interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

And usually back end parts. Although with Blazer being ascendant, you're seeing more and more like old web forms apps being replaced as blazor apps. But the vast majority of. Net apps are behind corporate firewall to the millions.

[Paul Thurott]

So I guess there is an audience out there of customers who may want to either modernize existing apps or create new apps in. Net.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a constant pressure. And it's also the folks I know inside Dev Div. These are the conversations they're having every week. How do I move you off these older tech? How do I get you into mobile in a useful way? How do I open LLMs as a door? Net rocks. How many of these shows have we already done? A ton of them. But you know, and by the way, like Windows Copilot Runtime is funny. It's just a grab.

[Paul Thurott]

I was gonna say, I hope you mean funny in the right sense because. And you do. It is funny. It's. Yeah, yeah, it's ludicrous.

[Richard Campbell]

They had to put a wrapper over top. Where does Phi Silica live? Right. And where does recall live? Like.

[Leo Laporte]

Like.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's what it really is. It's just a. It's just a wrapper over a bunch of stuff. So there's some sense of overall product.

[Paul Thurott]

Management on it, which they should have called it the AI Grab bag. That would have been a. A more appropriate name.

[Richard Campbell]

It's because it's fair. By the way, not everything ML Net is not in this list. It's not like they've got everything.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I'd have to go look at it, but I assume nothing from Net is in this list. Maybe that's not true. I don't know. I Feel like it would just be separate. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

In the end. Imaging APIs are part of App SDK, which has always been associated with. Net. There's plenty of stuff that's in there, but it's an extension really of the Win app SDKs, adding more of these newer technologies. But it's. You definitely see this again. Conway's applies what teams played ball, what teams did.

[Paul Thurott]

Interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

When they sort of package this thing up and that's still going on. Like I said, I'm very interested to see how someone like Julia has a new boss and how that rolls down to the rest of the organization because. And I'm not. And I'm not saying that in a good or bad way. In any respect. Some respect. I. I have worried about Studio for a long time. I'd feel like it's not.

[Paul Thurott]

Doesn't get enough attention.

[Richard Campbell]

I think Focus on the future.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, to just not maybe the right.

[Paul Thurott]

Attention is the way to say it. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you know what I like about a month. When you look at these products that have switched over to these monthly models and on Office 3 and M65 is a great op example of this. It's that they can keep adding new features and watch people use them routinely and, and. And then they can associate revenue with those things. Like you're Starting to see GitHub Enterprise have more subscription options for things that people want and that there's no better bet than people buy it.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Richard Campbell]

But there's no, you know, as long as you're selling Studio on an annual subscription license, how do you ever know if the customer is affected in any way?

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, that's a good point. Well, this is.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, anyway, these, these are, you know, is the Donna Ross guy. I care about this stuff a lot.

[Paul Thurott]

You should. And that's why I wanted to ask you about it because I, I mean, I care about it too. I don't have as much of a presence in this game or whatever, but I, But I. Yeah, I mean I use Visual Studio every single day.

[Richard Campbell]

Two summers ago I shot a video series with the Microsoft Studio team. Talking about all of the things in Studio. Right. Like talking about the best debugger in the world. Like people we forget. Like, I felt like all I was doing was reminding people of things they owe you.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, that's truly. That was the problem for Microsoft office for 20 years. You know, the top 90% of feature requests were things that were already in the product.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, I know. It's a. And it's a class. You know. Kathleen Dollard does this talk where she's showing features in Studio and people are like, oh my God, when did that come in? It's like 10 years ago. You just didn't know it was there.

[Paul Thurott]

That's funny. We're going to talk a little bit more about Visual Studio. Yeah, Visual Studio later. But yeah, this has been top of mind for me.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's a big reorg. It's important. I'm excited to see what comes next. Yeah. There's going to be some layoffs, but I think that's. I also believe that Microsoft's now in a pattern like most tech companies, where it's like keeping your employees vaguely afraid of their jobs. Stops them from organizing.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. I mean, the text messages that I was exchanging last night were very alarmist. And there was this indication that a lot of it was at sort of the PM level of each organization, that it wasn't like, like the layoffs. That is like it wasn't about specific parts of the company. It was kind of like everywhere but little. Like, like relatively small. From a total headcount perspective.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a 2 or 3 percenter. Right. Like they're just sort of taking a little raft through and you know, it's typical of Microsoft. I haven't checked this. I'd have to go see. They're probably being 90 day.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Which basically says you have figure it out. Wages can't figure out like, yeah, you've got 90 days to go find a new role inside the company.

[Paul Thurott]

So.

[Richard Campbell]

And if you don't, then you're right.

[Paul Thurott]

GeekWire has written about this. Business Insider has written about it. I think it was Business Insider got a quote from a company spokesperson who said, we focus on high performance talent. We're always trying to help people learn and grow. When they're not performing, we take appropriate action. Yay.

[Richard Campbell]

And there's a very specific, you know, sort of course of action when you have someone who's underperforming significantly when they keep scoring fives. But it's a long path to getting fired for cause.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh my God. Yeah, I would hope so. I mean.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but I, but these layoffs are not that. Right. That's. This is a workaround. Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

I mean, again, I, I would never downplay any layoffs. I don't want to. I'm not making light of anyone losing their job.

[Richard Campbell]

Big deal to the people that are being affected. But you know, there's another side of this which I've been abundantly where, where, where I've since this new behavior in the past Five years. Which is. Is the labor lawyers are circle.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, but.

[Richard Campbell]

And they're looking for.

[Paul Thurott]

You made the point earlier, which I think is. I think it is related to this very, very precisely, which is we're doing AI. Okay. Everyone on board? No. Oh, then you can leave.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Anyone else? Oh, everyone's good. Good. And then every once in a while they come back and say, hey, we're serious about doing A.I. we're so serious. We're actually reorgang around it now. So I want to make sure everyone on board. Oh, you're not. Bob. Okay, Bob, you can leave. Anyone else? You know, like, we kind of go through this.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I would also argue. We forget how often Gates reorganized when he was leading the company.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, it was almost a joke.

[Paul Thurott]

It was.

[Richard Campbell]

You could rarely get through a year. But it was his approach to not allowing empires to be built. Like, it just, it was impossible. And, and one of the reasons this reorg is such a big deal is because it's been a long time.

[Paul Thurott]

I mean, I think they've been a little hyper focused on other things. I don't think it's any strategy or whatever, but. Yeah, yeah, but, yeah, but do you.

[Richard Campbell]

Feel like in the past two, three years as, as the a. As Satcha jumped on the AI train, he's been gathering assets. This is the first time he's trying to put them into a box.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay. It makes me a little nerv. I. I, I'm changing verse myself. So I like, I kind of get that, but it makes me a little nervous.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, believe me, I. You like you. I got a few calls and I'm like, look, look, I. You're working on the right thing. You're going to be okay.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Right. You hear this is happening. You look at your job title or whatever and you're like, no, I got AI in there. I'm good. And then just to.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, Copilot is the word you're looking for. If it says co pilot in your.

[Paul Thurott]

You're the something something of copilot. Something something. Yeah, no, you're good. Just two really quick things. OpenAI last night announced a new tasks feature for ChatGPT that is sort of bringing it to this, I don't know, Siri style personal assistant kind of functionality. It's beta. The features a little different depending on what client you're using. You're limited to 10 tasks active at one time. But this is that kind of agentic capability where you kind of wind the thing up and say, go forth into the world. And act on my behalf. And their examples are silly. My daughter would like to hear a story when she goes to bed about whatever. Please remind me to come up with a stupid story every night. Something like that. Like, okay, that's cute. But you know, they're trying to turn this thing into more of a general purpose tool for the normies, I guess, and then the other one. And there's only one appropriate response to this headline, which is Microsoft Excel in Windows now supports dark mode. I, I, I.

[Richard Campbell]

What?

[Paul Thurott]

This didn't already. What, like, what are you talking about? I should say in beta. They're testing it. It's in the Insider program, but it was coming to the app soon. I, I don't use Excel. You know, I use, well, I don't use most of Office these days, but Word would be the big one for me. And obviously Word has supported dark mode for, I don't know, several years to some degree.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know. I, I'm looking at my Excel right now.

[Paul Thurott]

It's a dark mode. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know what's happening there. I don't know. But yeah, that, that's. It reads like another Onion headline, you know, like seizing the day. Excel has finally decided to. I guess we're calling it proper Dark mode support.

[Richard Campbell]

Ah, so there's an improper dark mode. Excellent. There's been Office themes for 15 years. Right.

[Paul Thurott]

So, okay, like I said, I did someone script the date on this thing? It was this actually from 2005. I don't know. But yeah, April 1st. A little bizarre.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I don't want to be dark or anything, but maybe we should just stop for a moment, take a breath because I want to plug something. It won't be long. And just a brief mention that we are doing our yearly survey. We'd like to know more about you. It's an easy few minutes. We just basically are asking questions about you, but we aren't going to ever use them as individuals. We want to know our audience in aggregate. Twitt TV survey. We've done this every year. We usually get around 10,000 responses and that's very helpful for us because we know then it's at least somewhat statistically valuable if you can. Twitter TV survey. We do it for two reasons. One, to get to know you better. Helps us tailor our programming towards your interests. But two, and I'll be absolutely forthright about this, we also use it with advertisers. They often want to know, well, do it. Decision makers. Listen to the show and it's really helpful when we could say, yeah. According to our survey, 10,000 people, 75% of them said, yes. We're IT decision makers. That's the kind of thing that really helps us. So if you want to help us, of course, join the club. But the second free way to do it is take the survey once a year. TWiT TV survey. Thank you in advance. We're done with AI and Dark Mode Excel, right?

[Paul Thurott]

Attention, taxpayers. The IRS is intensifying collections in 2025.

[Richard Campbell]

If you owe $10,000 or more or.

[Paul Thurott]

Have unfiled tax return returns, it's time to take action. Tax Network USA's experienced lawyers have saved clients over a billion dollars. They're ready to negotiate with the IRS on your behalf. Don't risk wage garnishment, property seizure, or losing your home. Call 1-800-958-1000 today. Get the help you need at 1-800-958-10000 or visit tnusa.com beautiful anonymous changes each week. It defies genres and expectations.

[Leo Laporte]

For example, our most recent episode, I talked to a woman who survived a.

[Paul Thurott]

Murder attempt by her own son. But just the week before that, we.

[Leo Laporte]

Just talked the whole time about Star Trek.

[Paul Thurott]

We've had other recent episodes about sexting in languages that are not your first language.

[Richard Campbell]

Or what it's like to get weight loss surgery.

[Paul Thurott]

It's unpredictable. It's real, it's honest, it's raw. Get Beautiful Anonymous wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, let's move on then, to hardware. There's going to be an announcement at the end of the month. You're muted, Paul.

[Paul Thurott]

All right. I did that out of respect for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you for all the respect. I really appreciate it.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. And then I have short term memory loss. So those two things combined bring you what you see in here today.

[Leo Laporte]

Nothing like that. Alzheimer's respect.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So hard with you, young man.

[Paul Thurott]

You look interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you my son?

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Exactly. Wilson. So Surface teased an announcement for businesses on January 30th. I mean, last year was kind of weird for Surface because in March, they announced the new. It was the new Surface Pro and laptop for business, running Meteor Lake chips. Right? And then they did the Qualcomm Snapdragon X versions they announced in May, released in June. Lunar Lake has come out since. So, yeah, I guess that could be part of it, even though it's been, you know, nine, ten months, whatever. But actually, there is one machine that I can think of that is a current concern for Surface that maybe needs to be Updated. And that's Richard's computer. The Surface Laptop Studio. Right. Yeah, Maybe that's. Maybe it's time to turn that into a property Copilot plus PC, a kind of portable, almost workstation class machine with dedicated graphics and so forth.

[Richard Campbell]

And by turning to you mean anyone?

[Paul Thurott]

But no, I mean, I assume you'll probably use it for a while, but it's. But yeah, I mean the timing on that was kind of interesting because if I remember correctly, it must have been October, November 2023ish. And then Microsoft and Intel did the AI. Oh no, I guess it would have, yeah, technically AI PC. It was an AI PC. Obviously it is an MPU. It's unique because it's technically, I think a desktop chip. But if it isn't, whatever, it doesn't matter. But it has an external npu. Then they did Meteor Lake, which integrates it into the chip, but it's not Copilot plus PC Class. And now they have Lunar Lake, which is. And a bunch of other chips that are not. So Intel's fun. Maybe it will be AMD based. That might even be better. Yeah, that would be kind of interesting. They have done AMD Surface models here and there. The Surface Laptop was available in AMD for a while, for example. And I don't think it's going to be a Snapdragon or anything just based on where they are in the product cycle. It's not like they have some exciting new design. If they came up with like a base model Snapdragon, something. Something like whatever. Okay, I mean that's not particularly exciting. So. So we'll see. But I don't know anything about what they're going to announce. And then speaking of amd. So AMD and Intel both announced hundreds, it seems, of chip models at ces. One of the companies got a lot of really good press and the other one we just kind of feel sad about, we were kind of tired of talking about and there was some really interesting language like PC World referred to the Arrow Lake chips that intel put out as, and I'm quoting, crappy, you know, whereas AMD cannot. It has to do with the speed of the mpu. But it's. AMD can't make enough of the chips that they just announced. Like they're literally going to have to ramp up production by some order of magnitude that they did not anticipate, which they should have because in December I got to see HP and some other things. But HP was using the same chip, technically a mobile chip in a laptop, which is essentially a thin and light kind of workstation, portable workstation, but also in a modular, gorgeous desktop workstation. That's how powerful these things are. Obviously the desktop version you can pair with discrete graphics, but the integrated graphics in these X3D class chips as they call them, the kind of higher end version of the Zen 5 chips, are astonishingly good. And there's some Nexus or kind of wonderful coincidence of things happening at once where intel is kind of hobbled right now. AMD is hitting on all cylinders and PC makers are finally looking at and implementing AMD versions of devices where they hadn't before. Like Dell is doing commercial PCs with AMD for the first time.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And as their flagship machines.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh yeah, no, these are the good ones.

[Richard Campbell]

This is the fastest workstation and you.

[Paul Thurott]

Know, like one of the kind of non scientific tests I've been doing because you know, but for science is testing Call of Duty on all these different laptops with integrated graphics. Right. And yeah, I mean someone else and by far the best one that I have is that, that AMD 9 series, it's not 3D, X or X 3D, obviously those just came up. But whatever the highest end version was they had before is so much better than everything else with integrated graphics that it's almost. No, I would say it literally isn't a class by itself. So for example, with a Lunar Lake laptop running at 2.8k, like 2,800 by whatever, the resolution is so much higher than full HD, you know, 40 frames a second, pretty much all the graphics set to low, very low. But with this amd chip at 2800, you know, 28k roughly or whatever, the resolution is full res and all the graphics settings set to high or very high 120 frames a second. I mean it's not even close. It's astonishing.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurott]

So it's nice to see a company like this be rewarded for doing something right. And of course they, you know, MD is trying to be nice, you know, they don't cause a lot of waves, frankly. AMD's in fact, if anything, I wish AMD would be more aggressive. But they've, you know, come out and said, yeah, you know, we have this competitor and they coughed up a hairball and you know, we're here, so nice.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, have you considered.

[Paul Thurott]

Actually what he said was we did know that what we made was awesome. What we didn't know was that this competitor built a horrible chip. So the delta between those two things was greater than they anticipated. They sort of expected that intel would show up to some degree. So kind of interesting. So I'd like to see that happen on the opposite side of the spectrum. I don't understand this one, but the former designer from Surface Ralph, I'm going to probably going to pronounce this name wrong, but Lal Growin. I guess I always think of Matt Croning from the Simpsons when I see his name. But super nice guy. My understanding is he did a lot of the product design, like the actual form factor stuff. Like Stevie Batich would have worked on more technique, you know, hinge designs and more technical things related to screens and AI eventually. Actually.

[Richard Campbell]

Pano seems to be getting old.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, well, so, yeah, so he's joined Panos Panay at Amazon Devices and Services. Right. So I have some questions here because this is not a business that has a lot of resources and doesn't make anything that doesn't look like cheap plastic crap. So I'm kind of curious. Maybe they wanted that, but someone on some social network said what you just said, which is that, oh, Panace is getting the band back together. I said, yeah, except they're playing bat mitzvahs and elementary school recitals. Like I, you know, it's not, you're not going to have the same budget and you're not going to have the same premium device kind of vibe.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, Amazon's got the money if they want to experiment with a new product, you know.

[Paul Thurott]

But that's the thing. I mean, this is the part of the company that a year ago last, you know, fall, like a fall a year ago said, yeah, we've been losing billions on this business, so it doesn't make any money. So I, I, I just don't know. I don't know. I mean, I'm curious why he went, I'm curious what they're doing, obviously, but.

[Richard Campbell]

I went, I think he went for the right amount of money. But the most likely thing is that Panos is making something cool.

[Paul Thurott]

I hope that's true. I, but I don't know. We'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

Look, they need to revamp that line big time.

[Paul Thurott]

I just bought a Fire HD 8 tablet just to kind of reacquaint myself with this little piece of crap, which I instantly returned. It's terrible. And it's, and you know, people will say things like, well, you know, cheap though. It's not as, yeah, it's, it sucks, but it's cheap. You know, I get that it's.

[Richard Campbell]

Now I use them on the wall with Home Assistant because I run kiosk on them. So you don't use any of their software. You block them from updating themselves so they don't get screwed up.

[Paul Thurott]

I find it to just host ha, borderline insulting this device. It's just, I don't know, I don't mind it. I mean, look, I want to embrace the whole low cost thing. I'm not like an elitist or anything.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but ecosystems are not for the weak.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just hard for most people to understand how to make an ecosystem.

[Paul Thurott]

So we've talked a lot about ARM and Qualcomm and that whole legal battle. There's more and more information coming out this past week. There was a report from Reuters that shed a bit more light on Aram's plans, which were divulged during the trial but redacted in the documentation that came out afterwards. To do things like create their own chip manufacturer. I don't mean manufacture directly, like obviously TSMC or whatever would do this, but design chips that would actually be sold to end user companies like Samsung or whomever instead of selling them to other companies that will then design chips off of that design. Like Apple. Well, Apple doesn't sell them, but Apple does that. Qualcomm does that. Samsung probably does that. Okay, and that's interesting. And there's some internal stuff where, you know, it's just like during the Microsoft trial In the late 90s, early 2000s, they came off poorly. But I don't really view that kind of stuff as whatever. You know, companies compete, people talk plainly when they're speaking privately. In this case not email, but over teams because it's 20 years later, but whatever. So when the CEO of Arm holding says of Qualcomm, they are hosed. I just smile and think that's cute. But here's. I feel like ARM was in the wrong for what they did with Qualcomm. I know that Qualcomm came out ahead in the legal battle, but I feel literally that in that relationship ARM is miscalculated, it was a mistake. But I'm going to defend ARM a little bit here because one of their plans, which we already kind of knew, right, is that they're raising the prices on the chip design licenses that they sell to licensees. Companies like Apple and Qualcomm, which are off doing their own thing, have stopped licensing new things. So they're not paying higher license fees, which is one of the problems. Right. That was one of the reasons they were trying to get Qualcomm to pay more. They just don't pay a lot. So According to Reuters, there is a plan to grow their revenues from chip Design licenses by 300% over 10 years. And this has unleashed an incredible tirade of criticism in my, my side anyway, against this company. And I gotta say, the one thing that's come up a bunch, especially since ARM has gone public, is that ARM runs every computing device on the planet. It is the architecture behind everything from the smallest IoT devices to all the mobile devices, smartphones, tablets, whatever, now in PCs, but also data center, AI, whatever. Somehow the company that designs the underlying chip is the smallest part of this entire thing by far. Sure, great profit margin, but it's understandable that their parent company, essentially SoftBank, owns, I don't, 90 or 95% of them, whatever it is, wants them to grow revenues. Right. And so there are different ways to do that, but one of them is like, just charge more for these things. You should get more for this work you're doing. I gotta say, I think there's a compelling evidence that that's true. You just like, they, I don't remember the exact number, but I know that Qualcomm earns ten times as many revenues as ARM does. I think Apple, if I, if I'm getting this, this is a Reuters number, but I, I think they said 90. 90 times. I mean, look, I'm not saying they should make as much, but, but you.

[Richard Campbell]

Know, there's difference between a design and implementation. But if you don't like it, use a different.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, people are like, well, I guess we're just switching, all switching. It's like, settle down, just settle down.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Paul Thurott]

Like, hold on, we're fine. It's okay.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, there is a point where it's too expensive and it's worth pricing an alternative.

[Paul Thurott]

No, I mean, I, I don't know. Look, there's some crappy stuff that this company did. They lied to Samsung about Qualcomm's license for their chip designs, which caused Samsung to actually cut back their contract with Qualcomm because they thought it was going to disappear. And then the CEO of Qualcomm get up on the stand during the trial and said, no, we, we have a license through 2033. This isn't expiring in a year or two. It's, we got, we have a license for a while. So there's stuff like that. And certainly I would be critical of ARM for that. But as far as, like this being the architecture of the President's last future and it being, like I said, one of the smaller players in the market that it supposedly created and or controls. Yeah, I mean, I think maybe they should get more money. I'm not saying that. I mean, I feel like the right thing happened in the Qualcomm trial, but maybe they deserve to or whatever or can charge more for their own designs and maybe they do start selling chips directly. That could happen. That's okay. And not a big deal. But There is a 16 gigabyte Raspberry PI 5 now. So this was the device that got delayed because of the pandemic and then was finally released. I'm not going to get this exactly right, but I want to say probably 4 and 8 gigabyte versions at first. And then this past fall summer they released a 2 gigabyte for the low end and now they have a 16 gigabyte which, you know, stepping on low end PC territory here. Not even low end really. With 16 gigabytes, it's pretty good actually. Pretty good, right? Yeah. But here's the thing. If you want to get like what they now call an N100 or N1 2000 based NUC, which is this is what used to be Pentium or Celeron or whatever, or a 12th gen Intel Core, I, I'm going to probably five. It's only like two to $300. And once you add the storage, the case and whatever else you would need for a Raspberry PI, these things are kind of the same price.

[Richard Campbell]

They're comparable price.

[Paul Thurott]

I know they serve slightly different markets, but I think a lot of people look at this thing and think this would be a really cool entry level computer. You know, if Microsoft would just bring full Windows 11 to this, that would be kind of interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

They used to ship with Windows 11.

[Paul Thurott]

But it wasn't full. It wasn't full.

[Leo Laporte]

It was like a special.

[Paul Thurott]

It was almost like an IoT version. Yeah. So what you could do, you had a dashboard and you could run one app. And the idea was the thing, it was going to be like a kiosk type thing. So you have this little Raspberry PI and it runs a. I had it.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it ran, first of all, I ran my Minecraft server on it. But also it ran a version, a modified version of Minecraft that you could code with Python. Yeah, that was really cool.

[Paul Thurott]

I love that this exists. The Raspberry PI to me is what computing was like back when personal computers used to be called home computers. And it was eight bit, it was Atari, Apple, Ti, Commodore, whatever. And there was a whole enthusiast movement and people were every one of them Came with BASIC and people were writing their own programs. A lot of kids didn't have a way to save those. So they put them on paper then type them in again the next day, that kind of thing. And I. I feel like this is the closest we can get to that era now, you know?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's just 16.

[Paul Thurott]

You could write in Swift Playgrounds and an iPad, publish it to the store and be out in the world with a product. No. 1 people are building little enthusiast pieces. Except they are. Because the Raspberry PI, it's kind of awesome. Like I think it's.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what it is. Yeah. And it does have that. I think that's it. And they go in all kinds of directions. All the hardware shields.

[Paul Thurott]

Like cheap AI accelerators, you know, again, not quite co pilot PC class, but up to like meteor lay class for sure. Like probably 50 bucks or something. Like hilarious.

[Leo Laporte]

This nuc that you mentioned here, that's. Yeah, it's pretty amazing for 229.

[Paul Thurott]

That's not that old. Like I just. This past week alone because I've been kind of winding down here with whatever computers I have. I brought up a bunch of 12th gen laptops. Very similar specs by the way. 16 gigs RAM, very standard for that whatever size drive SSD. Like that's. That is not a horrible computer.

[Leo Laporte]

Not horrible. I mean, no.

[Paul Thurott]

For 220 90s.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazing.

[Paul Thurott]

I know, it's crazy. It's pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

I might even just go out and buy one. Yeah, just. I mean at least compare it now.

[Paul Thurott]

Sorry. That. Sorry. I should say the one caveat to that. This is N200. So this is not core I something. Right. It's. This is sub. This is celeron.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like an atom kind of thing.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, it's in that class. But still for 229. As far like little enthusiastic kind of. If you think of it as a kind of a Raspberry PI like computer. Not. Not bad. Not bad.

[Leo Laporte]

You can get it for 189.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Well that's N100. Right. So that's.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the previous gen that one you're looking at was. That chipset was released in 2023.

[Paul Thurott]

But it's the old. It's old.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a crap altar.

[Paul Thurott]

It's the.

[Leo Laporte]

Is what you're saying.

[Paul Thurott]

It's the low end. It's not. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

How about the N5105? Is that 11th gen?

[Paul Thurott]

I bet that's closer.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a core processor.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. So it's 11 yeah, 11th gen. Which is, you know, it's fine. I. But I. Arguably because of the shift to the Core Ultra platform. I mean the 11th, 12th. I think there was a 13th if I remember. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, there would have been. That's kind of the. The apex, if you will, for the. The old stuff. I know, pre NPU stuff, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

That's wild.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't realize there was such an expensive NUX out there.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I think people buy Raspberry PIs for other reasons, honestly.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurott]

You can make. Put a fun little case on it, give it as a gift. You know, there' little things you can do with it. I bet a lot of them are single use.

[Richard Campbell]

Daughter just asked for a pie hole.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually that's a perfect use for it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, she was. You're going to configure it for how things were working.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like get it all set up and. And like that. Yeah, just give me a pie hole, daddy.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, just plug it into the network.

[Paul Thurott]

Change. The router would never come out of.

[Leo Laporte]

My daughter's mouth for many reasons.

[Richard Campbell]

She.

[Paul Thurott]

Does it have iMessage on it?

[Leo Laporte]

But you don't. But so, and so you connect. So your route. You connect this inside or outside the router?

[Richard Campbell]

It's an outside device, but it's just your.

[Leo Laporte]

It's basically so you connect.

[Paul Thurott]

It sits between the router and the. The rest of the world basically.

[Leo Laporte]

So you connect the, you know, Comcast to this and the router comes out.

[Paul Thurott]

Or I guess it would sit. Does it sit?

[Richard Campbell]

No, the PI hole would be on.

[Leo Laporte]

Must be before the router Inside. Okay.

[Paul Thurott]

From the inside.

[Leo Laporte]

So the router goes into this. Okay, interesting. And that. But there's only one Ethernet.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just a network device on the network. Oh, that is.

[Paul Thurott]

It's not a physical chain, although I guess it could be.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it is. It effectively is. Because when you now tell your router to whatever it says. Hey, if. When I say DNS use the internal.

[Leo Laporte]

DNS, the internal DNS, this becomes your DNS server.

[Paul Thurott]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Got it. And it's pretty fast.

[Richard Campbell]

Fast enough.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's all local networks. Not that that much traffic on it. But the thing that's great about the pie hole solution is when your television goes to go grab ad.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

You can't run AD block.

[Paul Thurott]

That's the one thing I do. I don't do that here. I put next DNS on my portable.

[Leo Laporte]

Device which is roughly the same. I think you're using them as.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, I mean it's a external DNS, whatever. But it's. Yeah, it's fine. I, I don't put it on my computers. Part of it is just I kind of need to see what terrible things Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

But you can run Next DNS as your router's DNS provider and then it's the whole network, same as it would.

[Paul Thurott]

I could. But I don't, but I don't. I'm purpose. There's enough on the mobile devices that doesn't work where it's like, I don't think I want to introduce this to the house. Exactly. Although I do like the idea of it.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't do it because Lisa says what are you blocking ads for? You know we're an ad supported network, right?

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. But our ads aren't the ones going out through the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Knock it off. Well it says I want to see the ads, I want to hear the ads, don't block the ads. I said fine.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's the upside of the pie hole is I can configure for these domains for these, these things.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. You can do that with Next DNS as well. You can even do it granularly by machine.

[Paul Thurott]

I have to put my comment system on the white list, for example.

[Richard Campbell]

But then I come out, I come out into, into Mexico and I get inundated with conventional ad on websites and it's like how do you use these web pages? Like they're on, they're not functional.

[Leo Laporte]

It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, that's same thing with YouTube. Once you're used to an ad free version.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh my God. You could never stop paying for YouTube once you've used it. Yeah, YouTube gives the, maybe the best example of that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So actually that segues very nicely into a discussion of our plan to eliminate all advertising on the Twitt podcast network. It's not going that well yet. But, but, but maybe with your help it could. We've created as many podcasts have of a membership club. Club. Right. We call it Club Twit and the idea is we can replace ads with subscription fees. Now I don't ever want to do a paywall. I really think it's important that all our content is available for free to anybody who wants it. So we're going to keep doing ad supported shows. But I also think it would be really nice for the support to come from our audience. Right now it's about one and a half, half, almost 2% of our audience that has joined Club Twit. I'd like to get that to 5%. And honestly, that could replace all the ad revenue. Even if one in 20 subscribed. It's not expensive. We keep the price low so that because we want everybody to be in the club $7 a month, you get ad free versions of all the shows, obviously, because you know you don't have to because you're paying. But you also get additional content that we don't put out public. For instance, Paul's Hands on Windows is available to the public as an audio show. It's a great show. If you want video, join the club. You'll get video as well. Same with Hands on Macintosh, Hands on tech. It's going that way. We're going to do iOS today, I think that way. So that's one thing. We also do stuff like the book club. Stacy's book club's coming up. There are two days left to vote. It is really close. It's neck and neck between Orbital, which a number of people have said, please don't let it be. Please don't let it be Orbital. Apparently it's a little slow moving right now. Orbital's winning, but it's only winning by two votes. So if you're a club member, get into Stacy's book club section and cast your vote. There's also Micah's Crafting Corner coming up tonight at 6. It's just a chill hang with Micah as he does his craft, which I think lately is building these little tiny rooms. But you can do any, anything you want alongside of it. Maybe I'll practice. Oh, you know, maybe I'll join, practice my piano. I can play a little piano music. For the crafting corner. Home Theater geeks is coming up. Photo time with Chris Marquardt. The new adjective is luminous. There's just a lot of stuff going on in the club. Then of course there's a club Twit Discord, which is a place for all the club members to hang out and talk about the things that interest geeks during the shows, but also not during the shows. You know, there. So there's always. Yes, that's you, Patrick. So there's always, there's always fun stuff going on. Actually that's, that's, that's, that's us. Join the club, everybody. Steve Ballmer says, club members, club members, club members. Twit. TV club Twit. We will be very happy to have you and welcome you into the club. Twitter, TV club, Twit. I just want to find the Stacy's Book Club thing. See all these other discussions that are going on. I can never find though the one I want. Anyway, somewhere in here there is the Stacy's Book Club. Look in the announcements channel to see how the book club is going says Wojo. Thank you Wojo. But I don't see it here. That's why I'm confused. Maybe I'm in the wrong spot. Oh, announcements. Thank you. There we go. It's really close. 31 votes for those beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson and 35 votes for Orbital by Samantha Harvey. And the other two are lagging behind. But if you like hum or the Practice, the Rising and the chain, vote for those and then in three more days, three more days we're gonna know and we'll do that in the Stacy's Book Club. So just, you know, as an example, there's some fun stuff going on. Twit TV Club. Twit. Don't you want to be in the club? I know you want to be in the club. Join the club. We would love to have you on we go with the show. What is next?

[Paul Thurott]

I have lost track.net 9.01 yeah, of.

[Leo Laporte]

Course it's.net is next big just fade away into the.

[Paul Thurott]

It's better to fade out than no. So I spent a big chunk of last year working on this update to my net pad app for net 9. Wasted a good better part of a month thinking I was making a mistake and then found out actually there is a bug in Net9 that causes apps to crash if you use an expander control and try to change the theme.

[Leo Laporte]

You mentioned that last week. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

This was infuriating to me because like I said, I spent time on this and it was my code was fine, it was Microsoft's code that was broken. So in the end I decided just to knowing they would fix it because they said they did internally but not sure when they would fix it. I kind of just. I put my app up on GitHub and said look, just don't do this thing that crashes it, you know, and then it will be fixed. And so last night I saw they announced announced net 9.0.1 and I thought oh, this must be the fix. And I scoured all of their documentation. It's not a single message mention of this. But I said screw it, I'll just install it. And sure enough it does fix it. So I updated the app, got rid of the workaround I had in there and yeah, it only took two months. Bastards. But yeah, that's fine. Unrelated to that but sort of related.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way this is why you have to code, Paul, so you can live in the world that developers live in where you've got a tear your hair out bug and it's not your fault. That's a good thing.

[Paul Thurott]

I was looking for something that was even more aggravating than being an IT pro and I think I found it. You found it and less fulfilling? No, it's actually pretty fulfilling. So ever since, well, not ever since they announced it, but for the past year or two, whatever, I've wanted to try GitHub Copilot, the original copilot, right. And I always figured at some point with this project that I would use it, if only to do some sort of a code review, code quality review, like point, like a method at it and say, could this thing be more efficient or written in a cleaner fashion or whatever, not ever having used it. So I have not written this up yet. I just experienced this. I think it was yesterday, maybe the day before, but I think it was yesterday. Back in December, they made a free tier of GitHub Copilot. So you can actually use this for free. It works a lot like that thing we were talking earlier where you get a certain amount of credits every month and then, you know, you can do a certain number of code completions, a certain number of chat interactions, etc. And if you keep using it and you find you're running into the limits, you can just pay for GitHub copilot. So I was like, okay, this is, this is not going to hurt me to try this, so I should try this. I, I want to be super clear about this because it's going to sound like an exaggeration. This might be literally black magic. I have never, especially in the scope of AI, which we all know about hallucinations and all the problems and in.

[Richard Campbell]

The world in which the most mature product. It is the most mature product.

[Paul Thurott]

Yes. And part of it is that thing I sort of always suspected and I do still think is true, which is when you ground the thing in just a subset of, you know, it's not going out to MSN for the latest news. It's like, look, we need to know how C sharp works, we need to know how these programming frameworks work, et cetera, etc, it's building on a very finite database, if you will.

[Richard Campbell]

So, yeah, it's got a scope to it that makes sense.

[Paul Thurott]

Now, look, I'm not a professional programmer, but that was the point. I thought the first thing I did with it was I selected a method that did a thing and had whatever code I thought. I can't remember how I worded it, but I just said, make this more efficient or faster or better or whatever it was. I forgot to check a box that. That would have deselected or had it ignore the rest of the document. So it actually ran against the entire thing, which is the main C file in this project. It came up with a bunch of stuff. Some of them were curious and subtle and some of them were stuff I knew, like getting rid of redundancies. I went through a big effort to make the code more modular, but it had more suggestions along those lines. All very good. And I was like, okay, just for this. Like, this is amazing. There was a really. I can't even explain this. It was like a. There's a list, a construct I'm using in C to collect all of the state management stuff that I'm working on for the app. And it suggested this other thing, which is really subtly different, but in fact will work better with WPF controls, which I will be doing in the future when I add tabs. And I was like, yep, genius. Okay. So I was like, this is nice. This is like. I was like already. I was like, okay, I 100% get this. But then I started just working on new stuff I wasn't thinking about Copilot. And here's the thing. Like, I'm trying to imagine what this would be like in Word if you were writing like a document. But in I'm writing code and I am writing what's going to be a block of code that's going to do a thing. It's going to iterate through this object and reach into parts of it and pull whatever bit out. I know what I'm going to write roughly. And what I mean by that is I don't know the exact code as I write it, but I know as I do it, I will, I'll do it.

[Richard Campbell]

The shape of things, right?

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. Like, I have the idea. So I start, right? I swear to God, I. I don't want to exaggerate. Like I said, I typed I want to say two characters. And it didn't just auto complete the line, it autocompleted the code block that it could not have known I was going for. Like, it literally read my mind. And I was like, you've telegraphed. Yep, that's exactly. I was like, that's it. It wrote it. And I was like, holy. I mean, are you kidding me? And then over the course of the next hour or two, I was so excited about this. I Told my wife, who, I got to be honest, could not care less. She puts up with it. I'm trying. I'm so excited. I'm like a little kid. And the only thing I can equate this to is I watch a lot. I think I said this earlier in the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Show.

[Paul Thurott]

I watch a lot of these kind of animal videos on like YouTube and Instagram, whatever. One video I saw recently, this is exactly the reaction, the, the, the interaction. It was a video of cats being shown magic. And the cats react exactly as they should. Their reality has been destroyed and it scares the living daylights out of them. So when in many cases it's just a trick, like the, the cord is gone or the, whatever it is, like a normal magic trick, and the cats like jump and run out of the room and they freak out and they lose their minds. And that was literally the reaction I had to this. Because, look, I'm a skeptic, I'm a cynic. And I was like, look, all I could hope from this is that it will improve the quality of the code, which it absolutely needs. And it is like it was reading my mind. I couldn't believe it.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you think it did that, by the way?

[Paul Thurott]

Way I think it literally read my mind. Leo. I'm glad you asked. No, no, I don't, I mean, I, so, okay, so I, I, I'm leaving out a few details, but the, it.

[Leo Laporte]

Must have known from previous code what you were on your way to.

[Paul Thurott]

That could be part of it. In one case, I did write a comment before I wrote the block, so it's possible it looked at that and said, okay, but there were, but there.

[Richard Campbell]

Were multiple comment to describe what you intend to do. And it spits the code out.

[Paul Thurott]

And it wasn't. I want to be clear, I wasn't even thinking of copilot. I was just.

[Leo Laporte]

The comment prompt says out of sync. And I think that that's accurate. When you write a comment, you're actually writing a prompt.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay, I accept that. I'm just, what I'm saying is I didn't know that at the time. And then it wrote the code block and I'm like, what is happening?

[Leo Laporte]

And then neither did the siamese cat in this. Yes, it works.

[Paul Thurott]

Where did the quarter go? Where's the quarter? Yeah, no, but, yeah, I listen, not a professional developer. Ikea. I want to highlight that again. But, but if you are a developer and you've kind of poo pooed this. I'm just saying it's free, it's Amazing. Look at it, look at it. It's unbelievable.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm talking to teams now where if the. The developer's not using Copilot, it's not like they won't hire them. It's that they immediately, like, we need to teach how to use this.

[Paul Thurott]

Are you writing code on a parchment? How are you doing work? You know, like, I.

[Richard Campbell]

You brought your chisel.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. It's fascinating to me because it's slowly spreading throughout all our shows. Steve Gibson had the same experience with assembly yesterday. Jason Snell said, I can't believe it, but I can't. I can't remember what model he was using. I think Chat GPT knows.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. So Apple's Cloud is good at this too. Anthropic Cloud, one of the first.

[Leo Laporte]

Claude does very well.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. The very first thing I ever did was I had written the C Sharp class for this coming thing I'm doing, and I published or wrote about it. And then that day they announced an update to Cloud and they said specifically, like, it's better for programming. Like, oh, let me give it a prompt and say, I want to. I want to make this class. What does it look like it made. Exactly. It was almost letter. It was almost identical. And that was good for me because it kind of verified that I had written the right thing. Unless we both hallucinated somehow, validation from software.

[Leo Laporte]

But, you know, but to be the skeptic, one of the reasons this works so well is because it has a massive database of code and code is extraordinarily repetitive.

[Paul Thurott]

Oh, my God. Of course.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody else has written that many, many times. And so it's not, you know, and.

[Richard Campbell]

All the reason you shouldn't write it again. Let the tool do its job.

[Leo Laporte]

Precisely.

[Paul Thurott]

You're reading through a database on a loop, but you want every third one. Right. Is there an efficient way to do that?

[Leo Laporte]

You're not the first person to do that.

[Paul Thurott]

I know that. But I do what everyone else does. I Google it. I usually end [e-mail].

[Leo Laporte]

Steal their code.

[Paul Thurott]

Nope, not that one. But it's takes me time. This one. I just said four.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you want a loop.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay. I didn't say anything about every third one. It said ampersand three, blah, blah. I'm like, kidding me. It was. It was unbelievable. Yeah. Really good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Just, you know, this is. This is. On the one hand, it is magic. On the other hand, we are cats. I know. And. And we don't. We are there. There are some things that might make us feel a little bit Less magical about it. Like the fact that this is really based on code that's been written many, many, many times. And so.

[Paul Thurott]

No, but even that. But that's the convenience. Right. In other words, like I said, we could, all of us have done this, we've googled it.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been saying this for 2 years. I've been using chat tbt for my comments.

[Paul Thurott]

Now that I've seen it, it's real. I mean, I don't even call you. I.

[Leo Laporte]

It's everybody better. The older the language, the better. Right. And that also is consonant with the idea that it's actually the more data.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Not necessarily older, but size of data set.

[Leo Laporte]

Size of data set.

[Paul Thurott]

This came up with one of your shows, Richard. I think it probably. Net rocks. And it was probably the guy, the guy who used to run Flutter, getting the former Microsoft.

[Richard Campbell]

Chris Sells.

[Paul Thurott]

Chris Sells. He was saying, you know, one of the problems with Flutter is that, you know, in the. Net space, which is what I'm working in, if you Google something, there's a million. Because this stuff goes back 20 years. There's a million. But if you need some help with like Flutter or one of these newer frameworks, probably.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Paul Thurott]

It's a. There's less, you know, data set is very limited. Yeah. So I mean, yes, that, that might have helped too, but I. Look, if you're working in Visual Studio.

[Richard Campbell]

TCL has been around a long, long time, but there's not a lot of open source tcl.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. It's really. Was the data set available?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's another thing. Use an open source language like Common Lisp. It's really interesting to me that AppleScript, which is a terrible language and weirdly arcane. It turns out these AIs are very good at writing and he used the code unmodified.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, that's great though, because you need the help with something like you need. We need it everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Intellisense or Intell. What do you call it in Visual Studio or even intellisense when it does Auto complete or whatever. It's one of the nice things about Visual Studio. Object name, dot list. You're like, yep, that one dot. But you know, you kind of go from there. Right. It's a nicety. It's more than a nicety, honestly. Once you start using something like that, you kind of wonder, God, how did I do this before? You were breaking open a book, looking up the list of properties and stuff. Yeah, slowly. So this to me is not an order of magnitude but it's the same level of oh my God.

[Richard Campbell]

And then you see this reaction when someone uses telesense for the first time, especially an experienced coder, and they're like, what the what?

[Paul Thurott]

Okay, yeah, no, this will benefit anybody who uses these products. Like, it's incredible. And I've not had this reaction to any AI anything about writing or. Although the poem thing in Notepad is amazing. But other than that, that's on Hands on Windows, by the way. It's. It is amazing. It's stupid, it's useless, but it's. It's amazing. But this is just incredibly, immediately and obviously a huge productivity booster that absolutely justifies the cost if you're gonna pay for it.

[Richard Campbell]

Dude, I wrestle around with like razor pages for the run ass site and that and have copilot. It's like, where is X? And it's like it's in this stupid header file. Oh, thank God.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay, that's excellent. And. And look, anyone who's watched this show for any amount of time knows I don't talk about, like this about almost anything. It is amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

Balthaerot making happy noises. What is that?

[Paul Thurott]

I know. I don't even know how to handle it. I'm like, what is that feeling? It's like you're happy. Is that what this feels like? Why did I like this all the time?

[Richard Campbell]

No, I mean, it's awful.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, well, that's right. Thank you for reminding me. But yeah, no, it's. But it's. I'm just going to repeat myself.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a revelation.

[Paul Thurott]

It's amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

Truly.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, it really is.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel refreshed. Let's talk about Xbox.

[Paul Thurott]

I want to do a screenshot.

[Richard Campbell]

Frustrating at all.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. This isn't as good. So I think we touched on this last week a little bit, but during ces, Microsoft kind of hinted at this. Well said. Literally, we want to do more around gaming handhelds. But of course, the question that comes out of this is, well, yeah, but like PC gaming handhelds or Xbox gaming handles right. And so. So, yeah, right. And I think this is the holding pattern we're in as a platform. I think when people are nervous about Xbox in the future and hardware, what's going on? And I think we're waiting for this to kind of coalesce into something that's more of a strategy and less of like, vague talking every couple of months, you know, so we'll see what that looks like. But I'm interested in. Because I've returned to PC gaming to some degree, the notion of a Switch sized PC game machine is actually kind of interesting other than the tiny screen I can't see with my really old eyes. But I like the idea of it. I like the idea of something you stick in the bag and that because.

[Richard Campbell]

The essence of a Steam deck anyway.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, right, right. So Lenovo is selling a portable gaming device or PC that you can choose between SteamOS and Windows. And this is the first and I think right now the only. But there will be more of those devices and this is another pain point for Xbox people because SteamOS is going to kill us. This is what's going to happen. It's like, guys, relax. I mean there were pros and cons. I think we talked about this. But Linux is great because it uses fewer system resources. Good. But Windows is better for compatibility and you have a choice of stores. It's not just Steam. I mean Steam is I guess the big one, but it's not the only one. Right, right. And if you, I, you know, I don't have numbers for this but I bet most PC gamers just go wherever get the games wherever. I mean they get them all over the place and I bet some percentage uses some form of game pass and they can play from that library as well. So I think choice is good here. I like to see. I guess I'm just vaguely happy that this is working out. I feel like a lot of these other PC form factors kind of come and go, but I feel like this one's going to stick around. So. So that's kind of cool. And speaking of angst, Microsoft is going to, I can say, you know, it's sort of couch like they might be bringing other games to other platforms. No, I mean they are like we know this, right? There's a coming second remake of Halo coming down the pike. Absolutely. Going to be on Sony PlayStation. You know it is, right. So that's going to happen. There's been a bunch of people who have have cited various sources. Flight Simulator is coming to PlayStation and even the Switch 2, which is kind of interesting. Tied to that is a lot of Switch 2 rumors over the past week. As soon as tomorrow, I guess Nintendo could announce this. I'm a little surprised by how much it is just the Switch again. I mean obviously it's a much faster processor and there are other improvements.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just a hardware refresh really.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. For all the waiting and wondering and what's going on and what is this? What's the next thing going to be? I'm like ah, it's more of the same. Which maybe is the right thing to do.

[Richard Campbell]

What do you do with perfection?

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like what you.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, there you go. You find a younger model, Richard. That's what you do. So. Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Faster chip inside.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. It might actually be like twice as fast. It's a significantly better chip.

[Richard Campbell]

Several years. Right. Like Switch was out.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. And they were rumored to do something like this a few years ago. They had. They did like the OLED version, the light version. And I think. Think there was supposed to be. There was Talk of a 4K version or something, but I think obviously not. I think they didn't do it. So now we're going to get the Switch too. So that's fine. And they can probably keep the old one.

[Richard Campbell]

There's a lot of memory. And for what?

[Paul Thurott]

For Call of Duty, for flight simulators.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, 2024 realism, graphics in Nintendo Land.

[Paul Thurott]

Right. I know. Well, it's going to be interesting to see how those ported games look. But that's like a. Nintendo already won that generation, this current generation, by a wide margin. They're looking good. And then they could come up with a thing that could kind of fill in the gaps, frankly. So there's these Sony games that I don't know if those are going anywhere. I know they go to PC, but Xbox games that could come to this platform that I think would solve or answer some questions. Right. Like, I like the idea of the Switch, but I don't play a lot of those types of games. So if it had some shooters and some things like that, it's like, oh, yeah. Maybe be.

[Richard Campbell]

Maybe just playing the wrong games, Paul. That's all.

[Paul Thurott]

That's absolutely true.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, Animal Crossing may not have any violence.

[Paul Thurott]

Can I snipe the animals?

[Leo Laporte]

Enjoyable.

[Paul Thurott]

I just. I just want to set up a sniper's nest. Is it wrong? I don't. Yeah, probably.

[Richard Campbell]

There are no Zelda frowned upon.

[Leo Laporte]

Zelda has fighting, doesn't it? There's some combination combatants of a sort.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurott]

That sounds. Yeah. What do they argue? What do you mean, fighting? Like they swing a sword, one of.

[Richard Campbell]

Them pops into a jewel.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

You clearly played the game, Richard.

[Paul Thurott]

There are no jewels or coins or whatever in the games I play. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

It's all about the mushrooms.

[Paul Thurott]

I did get attacked by a dog in Cool at Call of Duty Mobile the other day, though. So that's still a thing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's amazing.

[Paul Thurott]

That's kind of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

And then Microsoft announced. Announced an expansion, I think, of their iFixit partnership where they're selling official Xbox repair parts and Ubreak Fix is coming on board to do the same. But they're gonna. This is a company that has locations you can bring an Xbox to and they'll repair it for you instead of shipping it to Microsoft and hoping for the best, I guess. So they're making these things more easily replaced. Comparable, essentially. So it's good. Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

It's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Although how you would break an Xbox, I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean.

[Paul Thurott]

Well, I kicked mine through the wall one time.

[Leo Laporte]

That's one way.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. I don't know what's going on. It's a lot slower than it used to be.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Mine's tucked deep inside the television console.

[Paul Thurott]

I don't. I blew a metric ton of dust out of the back of one. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was doing something for sure.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. That's a black mark on the carpet behind it. On the.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, like, fan blows.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah, it's just not doing good. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Good show. Do you want. Do you.

[Paul Thurott]

I.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you want to do any other Xbox stuff? Are you going backwards?

[Paul Thurott]

I think. Oh, I forgot. Yeah, I skipped that. I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Moving backwards.

[Paul Thurott]

The other thing is I feel like this happens now throughout the year. This used to be 1, 2, 3, whatever events a year, but now it's just kind of all the time because it's online. So next week, I think on the 28th. 8th. Do I have this? No. 23rd. Sorry. Microsoft is hosting a developer direct livestream. So this is where we're going to finally get to see this new Doom game, which I'd say definitely I'm going to try, you know, because it's so different from Call of Duty, but I am looking forward to that. So a lot of sandworms in Call of Duty. Yes. So we'll see how that goes. Yeah. You don't go to hell in Call of Duty a lot, except metaphorically. Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I decided to. That's why I'm playing so much piano. I decided instead of compulsively playing Valheim, I'm going to compulsively play the piano. And maybe at the end of a year, I'll have some accomplish something besides.

[Richard Campbell]

A lot more fre j.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep. I'm going to type freak into GitHub co pilot and see what it comes up with.

[Leo Laporte]

Would it be cool if you could use an A? Well, I guess that wouldn't be cool.

[Richard Campbell]

Major C Corp.

[Leo Laporte]

I did. I did actually use an AI to make some music for you last week. The Whiskey music. I will not play that again. Sorry about that.

[Richard Campbell]

Everybody's still traumatized.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, you're watching Windows Weekly. That's Paul Thurat there. He is of course from thorat.com and to make sure you get a premium subscription for a lot of more goodness. It's a great site to visit. I visit every day.

[Paul Thurott]

Literally.

[Leo Laporte]

Quite literally. And of course his books [e-mail] Richard Camel is the host of of two fabulous podcasts run as Radio. We'll talk about the latest episode in just a bit and also with carlfranklin.net rocks if you're a net person. Do you guys talk about the Paul's net woes or no, I think this is below that. There's so many woes, so little time. Thank you for joining us. We're so glad you're here at T Mobile.

[Richard Campbell]

We'll give you four free 5G phones.

[Paul Thurott]

And four lines for only $25 dollars per line per month with eligible trade ins. And no, it's not a contest.

[Leo Laporte]

It's every day for a limited time.

[Richard Campbell]

Everyone's a winner on America's largest 5G network.

[Paul Thurott]

Minimum of 4 lines for 25 per line per month with auto pay discount using debit or bank account. $5 more per line without autopay. Up to 830 off each phone via 24 monthly bill credits plus taxes, fees and 10 device connection charge for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue build credits or credit stop and balance on required finance agreement too bill credits and if you pay off devices early ctmobile.com beautiful anonymous changes each week. It defies genres and expectations.

[Leo Laporte]

For example, our most recent episode, I talked to a woman who survived a.

[Paul Thurott]

Murder attempt by her own son. But just the week before that we.

[Leo Laporte]

Just talked the whole time about Star Trek.

[Paul Thurott]

We've had other recent episodes about sexting in languages that are not your first language or what it's like to get weight loss surgery. It's unpredictable, it's real, it's honest, it's raw. Get Beautiful Anonymous wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Leo Laporte]

Time for the Back of the Book. And let's start with a tip of the week from Paul Thurat.

[Paul Thurott]

Paul yeah, we ran into some friends last weekend at a like a party or whatever and I it became really clear immediately like they were not drinking. Which is fascinating because these guys are definitely alcoholics that drink way more than I do. What are you doing?

[Leo Laporte]

And why no dry January?

[Paul Thurott]

So I was like, that's curious. I said, you I do this every year. She said, no, it's the first time we've done it anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how you know you're drinking too much if you, if you participate.

[Paul Thurott]

This is the first day I've not had a drink. Literally. Yeah, no, I was like, I don't. That doesn't work for me. So I was kind of thinking about this because a lot of people just like, if you go to the gym, the gym now is packed, right? It's full of people, can't get on machines, you know, you know they're going to be gone by the February 1st, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Y hurry up and give up on your resolution.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. So how many times does that have to happen before you're like, you know, maybe there's something like a different approach to this. So without it getting into the weeds. I'll just keep this to kind of work related stuff. I try to make what I think of as micro changes, like smaller changes, but I do it more frequently. So I have, it's not a hard schedule, but I have this kind of monthly, quarterly and then annual thing that I try to do, just maintaining files and archiving things and all that kind of stuff. So because it was January, this was a perfect storm of these things. But a lot of it just has to. And Inbox zero for email kind of factors into this or where things are replicated or backed up or whatever kind of factors into this. But the big change for me was if you go back, I guess a year ago, I had just finished my big digital decluttering photo consolidation work, which was just this epic multi month awful process. But I did this knowing that every year going January would come every year and I'd have to go get all the photos from the previous year and then organize them in the same way. So I just started working on that and it's not awesome. I mean, I have to use these tools that I've forgotten how to use because I used them a year ago and it's been a while and I'm going to do this now for the rest of my life or whatever. But I think it gets easier too because digital photos taken with phones are just full of metadata. They're easy. But it's just rather than like, I'm just not going to drink, you know, it's like, yeah, Arya though, you know, I mean, I think it just, you know, everyone's different. I guess maybe that works for some people, but it's never worked for me. So I try to just do smaller things and. But more of them I guess. And it's like Valentine's Day, you know, it's like, I guess you could wait until this random day to tell your wife or girlfriend or spouse or whoever it is that you love them. Or you just do this throughout the year. Right. Why do you need a stupid day for that? I don't know. Okay. And then the app pick. There was no announcement and I didn't write about it yet, but STARTUK put out START 11, version 2.5. This is the one that they were beta testing earlier. That lets you put the taskbar on the sides of the screen, like God wants you to.

[Richard Campbell]

Thank goodness.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah. So if you kind of held off on this or whatever or weren't sure you needed it or wanted it, you know, that might be enough to put it over the top. There's actually a bunch of stuff in there related to businesses and, and managing this across, like deployment and all that kind of stuff. But for individuals, the big thing to me is you can move the taskbar. You know, Microsoft still doesn't let you do.

[Richard Campbell]

In Windows 11, I got giant screens. I don't need a bar all the way across the bottom of it. My vertical resolution is everything.

[Paul Thurott]

I know.

[Richard Campbell]

I know lines of code, man. I think it matters.

[Paul Thurott]

I agree. So you can do it with that? That's one way.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go. All right.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Now I can migrate the Dev machine to win 11. Because start 11.

[Paul Thurott]

Because of start 11. Oh, geez. Well, by the way, there you go. Clearing up deployment blockers since Windows 8.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

But they've been doing this start menu for a long time, right?

[Paul Thurott]

I mean, yes, it's Windows 8. Windows 8 was the, like, bride ward.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

He was at some event with me and Mary Jo and he's like, oh, I have an idea. You know, I'm going to fix this problem. Yeah, it's a good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Okie dokie. Hey, you know what that means? It's time for Richard Campbell. Let's start with a run as radio pick of the week.

[Richard Campbell]

My friend Matthias Carlson. Back on the show, been a little while and we were talking about DevOps docs, or just a shorthand for part of your CI CD pipeline. Should include some level of documentation generation. Most software that you're building are responsible for. You need some level of documentation around it. APIs are the classic one, but also resource allocations, like what are you using in the cloud, that sort of thing. Because often you need to refer to it and different folks need different things. Right. Certainly from the Operations side. Rarely can we count on developers when they make an update to a software saying hey, we've now incorporated this new platform in it. So the fact that we can now have a tool that analyzes the deploy and then builds up that list is usually the moment where we find out oh, we're now using XYZ resource. Is that being built in the right location? Is it properly allocated with the right resource tags? Like all of the things that operations folks care about for resourcing more than devs do. So just catching those. But it also was useful from the perspective of if you're building API documentation, inevitably when you make those docs they are already wrong. So having it. Having the build process bound to generating those files just means you're more likely to have accurate API documentation. It was a good conversation about this should just be part of the pipeline even if it has an edit pass afterwards. That routine set of updating was really, really important. So it was good. Proper devopsy type Talk about how do we do include this in the process. It's not out of date.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a friend who specializes in writing tests for CICD deployment. So that you automatically test before you push. Yeah, seems like a good idea.

[Paul Thurott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And then you run it through, you know, testing can be very expensive. I. I've got in projects where they have big, you know, service level agreements and so we actually have to benchmark the new versions. They will actually support the sla. They need a transaction rate like this.

[Leo Laporte]

This perfect.

[Richard Campbell]

Before you deploy.

[Leo Laporte]

Test it before you deploy. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Seems simple.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you have to run it in the cloud. Makes this dramatically easier. I used to build racks of hardware for this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Actually build a simulated product.

[Leo Laporte]

CI CD is kind of amazing really.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And it just got so much easier as we were able to build it.

[Paul Thurott]

Out in the cloud.

[Richard Campbell]

So I've got some Azure DevOps shows coming as well as GitHub Actions and Things like that. Just because, you know, our lives are better. This used to be a lot harder.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. Hey, you know, don't let Paul know, but I think it's time to talk about a. A liquor pick of the week.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh my goodness gracious. I would never. You know, it's dry January.

[Leo Laporte]

Dry January.

[Richard Campbell]

I could always do my job if I was driving little. I'm in Mexico. Like you want to be sober here.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, it's gonna be an arctic freeze next week in Makunji. Paul run run time becomes polar Vorte way. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

All right, so join to the commissary here at Vedanta and looked around at a few things because I've done tequila here before. We might do that next week with Paul, but this week I, I noticed in the section they had, they had Buchanans, which I hadn't talked about before. I usually don't find this in Canada, so it's always fun to grab one. You don't usually see it's a blend. And one of the famous original blends going way back, James Buchanan. It'd be clear this is not the James Buchanan who became the president United States, a different guy known as one of the great whiskey barons. Although we'll talk about that a little later on, actually. Born 1854 in Canada from Scottish immigrant parents who decided it was a bad idea and shortly after his birth moved back to the United Kingdom. And he was again, it's almost like he was of a time that in the late 1800s, his, his initial jobs were working in the whiskey trade, mostly buy, sell, that kind of thing. And he saw working in London for a Scottish company that the marketplace was looking for milder whiskies. And so he set about to make his own blend. Right. And this is one of the reasons that blends were so popular back in the day is that we weren't into making 12 year old plus whiskies. We were aging in barrels, but only for a few years and so they were pretty harsh and introducing grain spirits and things were about actually smoothing stuff out. And so at 30 years old in 1884, he sets up James Buchanan & Co. Uses all the contacts from his earlier jobs buying and selling the resources around whiskey to be able to buy and blend his own whiskey called Buchanan's Blend is also responsible for a whiskey sold to this day called Black and White because it had a black bottle with a white lip. And he's a hustler like good salesperson gets out there. But by 1895, just a few years later, he has a royal warrant from Queen Victoria. So it's a product that the queen will buy and it's, you know, there's still a little, little seal on the bottle to remind us all that. No, no, he's, he's got a royal warrant there. He finally built his own Distillery in 1898. It's called Glenn Tochers. It still exists today. You've never heard of it because they've never sold a single bottle malt. It was built as a blending whiskey from the outset, initially making Buchanan, although in the 1980s when the market was on hard times, the production was low. Allied Distillers bought it for in 18 in 1989 they were then acquired by Chivas, which is now Pernod Ricard. But so Glenn Toucher still makes whiskey, but they make it and goes in Ballantines now just a different blender land. And then he forms the alliance in 1915 with John Dewar, with John Dewar and sons to create the brand they call Scotch whiskey brands which assume named Buchanan Dewar because they didn't own the only Scotch whiskey brands. And they set upon their acquisition spree coming out of World War I. So they bought Port Allen and Islay in 1922. They got Ben Rinnis and then this then merges together to become the Distillers Company in 1925. Which is I also now appreciating as I'm reading more about all the people involved like the Tommy and and John Dewar. They were all getting on by the late 20s and so they wanted to retire. They became directors with a larger company underneath them by forming Distillers Co. Buchanan passes in 1935 and then by the 80s the Sillage Co. Gets acquired by Guinness. Guinness and Grand Metropolitan merge together and that's Diageo by 1930, 1897. So that's sort of the chain of events for a blender who then eventually made other whiskies. And like I said, he was one of the whiskey barons. And we've talked about the whiskey barons before, just kind of indirectly. One would argue that the original whiskey baron is John Alexander Dewar, one of John Dewar's sons. When I talked about Dewar's aid, I mentioned this, that John Dewar had his sons get involved. John Alexander was the one who stayed home and ran the facilities for doing the blending and eventually built some distilleries and things. And his brother Tommy went to London and sort of lived the higher life of promoting whiskey. Eventually goes over to New York. They make the first promotional film about whiskey ever. Like these folks that they eventually call the barons. They were about branding before branding was a thing. In some ways they invented branding and put Scottish whiskey into the world purview, not just inside of Scotland, Scotland. And they literally became barons. So John Alexander Dewar was also a politician when he was a stay at home guy. So he was the Lord Provost of Perth and he became a Liberal MP and so forth. And he was granted a barony. He became the Baron Fort Avoy in 1917. His brother Tom became the Baron Doer in 1919. Now he didn't do it because he was a good politician. He did it because he was buddies with Edward vii, who helps at the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Apparently there were three of them hanging out. There's another Tommy, a guy named Tommy Lipton. As in Lipton Tea Lipton.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wow.

[Richard Campbell]

So. And Edward VII was the son of Queen Victoria and he actually did become king briefly for about nine years, 1901 to 19 to 1910. And then he passed and then it was George V and then George V passed in the 50s and that became Queen Elizabeth II.

[Paul Thurott]

You left that.

[Leo Laporte]

Edward VIII, but no one wants to remember him. Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And Edward VII also had the very first car in Britain.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, neat.

[Richard Campbell]

A Daimler male Phaeton that he got in 1900. The second car, Tommy Lipton. The third car, Tommy Dewar.

[Leo Laporte]

These guys are great. This is that video we showed last week or the week before of them dancing and kilts and stuff. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That was the first.

[Leo Laporte]

First ad.

[Richard Campbell]

That was that first AD that they made in New York. Right. So just. And, and so I think the problem here is you've got a prince who's hanging around with some movers and shakers type. Like, they were very popular in Scotland. Right. They were very wealthy. They were the nouveau riche. And they were hanging with the. The old schoolers. And so making him a baron was a way for Edward to not look like he was, you know, hanging with the lessers. Although again, they were educated and articulate, intelligent and good contributors to society. Like, these are not bad people. And James Buchanan falls in the same category. He never was ever a politician. He was famously known to be extremely well dressed as he started making money and he made a lot of money. He was the driver behind the Distillers company and all those mergers. And one could argue, and you read some of his writings on this stuff, he was saving these distilleries that were going defunct. Right. That he liked the industry and he wanted things to go well. And so bringing them in and protecting their brands was part of the equation. During World War I, when everything shut down, he actually volunteered as his services for no pay. He worked in the government in munitions. And along with some other. James Stevenson, who actually was part of Johnny Walker, did very much the same thing. Ultimately ended up working for. For Churchill. And so coming out of World War I, Buchanan is granted a baron. He becomes the Baron Wolver Lington in 1922. And same thing happened to Stevenson. He became the Baron Stevenson. There's more of them. I won't keep going on about it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hysterical.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah, these guys all begin.

[Leo Laporte]

These are the oligarchs of the turn of the last.

[Richard Campbell]

At one point, Buchanan is the third wealthiest person in all of Britain for making whiskey. Whiskey around. It's distributed around the world. So, yeah, they. They call them the whiskey barons because they literally were granted baronies.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

So meantime, we've got ourselves some Buchanan 12. Its recipe is. It's a blend, obviously, so it's a bit of a secret as to what it is. It's tasty. There's a little hint of peat in there. It's not real potent. Now, the rumor mill says this is a blend of. Of Glendolin, which you've never heard of. Again, another distillery primarily making blends, although they do have a special edition they call the Singleton. Dalwini is a popular spay. Great stuff. Probably part of the blend. Also Talisker and Kaua, which are both Islay whiskies, so they're a bit, you know, smokier and so forth. There's a big chunk of single grain in here and some grain alcohol to dilute it down to keep the price down. Because if you can find this bottle and it's not that tough to come by in the US I found it on Bedmore. 30 bucks. So not a wildly pricey whiskey. You got a lot of choices when it comes to blended whiskies. I've always recommended like the Dewar's 12, but Buchanan falls cleanly into that category. This is original popular Scottish whiskey going back more than a hundred years, made by a group of people who put Scottish whiskey on the map and became barons in the process.

[Paul Thurott]

Process, as opposed to.

[Leo Laporte]

And there you have it.

[Paul Thurott]

Which is slightly.

[Richard Campbell]

This is that a wacky story, like just a.

[Leo Laporte]

It's how you. How you become a baron. You.

[Richard Campbell]

You.

[Leo Laporte]

That's just make some whiskey day and age. Yeah. Now they. This is the deluxe you're drinking, but they have these other blends like the. The Master, which is what, A little older, I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, this is kind of the. The lead. This is the base base product.

[Leo Laporte]

And then the special reserve. 18 years in the Red Seal 20. Are they better?

[Richard Campbell]

They are more expensive.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That means they're better. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Remember, if they've got the year on it, it means that's the youngest thing in the bottle.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Right, right.

[Paul Thurott]

All right.

[Richard Campbell]

It gets pricier from there.

[Leo Laporte]

Just checking. I choose my whiskey about price.

[Richard Campbell]

And by the way, the 30 bottle. Like don't feel bad to put a little soda in this or.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I noticed. I always know when it's that kind of whiskey because they have at the bottom of the website, they have. Here's some recipes for what to do. Put it in the pina fizz or a buccalada. Don't order a buccalada or pina shot.

[Paul Thurott]

Buccal. What?

[Leo Laporte]

Ladies and gentlemen, with that we have come to the end of this fine episode of Windows Weekly. I hope you have enjoyed it. Next week, Paul and Richard will be sitting next to each other actually probably hammered, by the way, in Puerto Vallarta.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you should.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it's dry January. Best time to drink. You should. Paul, you should rent Elizabeth Taylor's house. Richard, you should rent Richard Burton's house. And you should do the podcast on the bridge between.

[Richard Campbell]

The bridge.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, very famous.

[Paul Thurott]

Romeo where ferrato.

[Leo Laporte]

And you know, Burton pretty much always brought a bottle of whiskey with him when he went over that bridge. So I think you're in good company.

[Paul Thurott]

There's no other way that Exorcist 2 happens. I mean, it all makes sense.

[Leo Laporte]

Thurat is at therot.com t h u r r o doublegood.com Become a Premium Member for all the goodness. Although there's lots of great free stuff, it's a great way to keep up on what's going on in between Windows Weekly episodes. He also writes many good books, including the Field Guide to Windows 11 and Windows Everywhere. His latest about the kind of a history of windows through its coding frameworks. That's [e-mail] set your own [e-mail] Richard Campbell's website is runasradio.com he also hosts.net rocks with Carl Franklin. You'll find them [e-mail] and you'll find them both here along with with most of the time. Most of the time me on Wednesdays 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern Time, 1900 UTC.

[Paul Thurott]

I would go so far as to say you might be a staple of the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe, maybe, maybe not. I don't, I don't want to claim ownership. I'm just along for the ride. Make me a Baron.

[Paul Thurott]

Okay, Baron.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm Baron of Twit. That's good. You can watch us do the show live off a Wednesday by tuning in if you're a club member to our club Twit Discord. But you can also go to Twitch, YouTube, TikTok now that may change next week. We'll see. That's all up in the air. We're going to talk about that next on this week in Google we're also on X.com, linkedIn, Facebook and Kick. So lots of places you could watch live. If you're watching live. We do watch the chat as well, and I often chat in with the people. So please feel free to join those and join us live. That's, you know, the advantage of chatting is you know you're watching live. Nobody's really there later after the fact. But you can listen on your own schedule. Just download a copy of the show. There's several places you can get it. Paul's got a link at his website, thorat.com. you can also, of course, go to our website, twit TV WW for Windows Weekly. There's a link there. Not only can you get the show there audio or video, there's a link there to the YouTube videos. That's a really useful thing for sharing. Little clips, little pieces of the show and there's other things there. For instance, the playlist of Richard's Whiskey Talks. We've made a great playlist there and you have a direct link to it. Right, Richard, what is that URL again?

[Richard Campbell]

Did it populate?

[Leo Laporte]

I found.

[Richard Campbell]

Forgot something weird from my closet.

[Leo Laporte]

Something weird from my closet dot com. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's all working now too.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it working good? All right.

[Richard Campbell]

Something weird from my closet dot com. You will land on.

[Leo Laporte]

You'll get the Whiskey playlist after the fact. The probably the best way to get the show is to subscribe in a podcast player. You'll find Windows Weekly there. We've been doing this show forever and ever, 15, 16 years. So most podcast players have finally cottoned onto the idea that it exists. We're going to be. Our thousandth episode is in a couple of years, believe it or not. We're at 9:15.

[Paul Thurott]

It's amazing. I can't do two years. Yeah, two years.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess a little less.

[Paul Thurott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm at 967 on run ass. So, like, this fall for a th.

[Paul Thurott]

I mean, when do we. When do we lap you? How does that. Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Never.

[Paul Thurott]

Never.

[Leo Laporte]

He's running faster than we are.

[Paul Thurott]

My son asked me when he was a little kid, like, when. When do I. When will I be as old as you? After I die.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. That's a good point. That's. I never thought of it that way. Yeah.

[Paul Thurott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, on that bright note, sorry. Thank you for joining us and we will see you all next week on Windows Weekly. Bye, guys.

[Paul Thurott]

If you have a locked AT&T phone, we're here with bolt cutters. T mobile will help pay off your locked phone and give you a new.

[Richard Campbell]

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[Paul Thurott]

Visit t mobile.com carrierfreedom via virtual prepaid masterclass in 15 days. Free phone up to $830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax and a $10 device connection charge. Qualifying port in trade in service on Go5G next and credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on required finance agreements, due bill credits and if you pay off devices early.