Windows Weekly 928: The Rice is Done

Summary

Podcast Summary: Windows Weekly 928: The Rice is Done

Podcast Information:

• Title: All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)
• Host/Authors: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell
• Episode: Windows Weekly 928: The Rice is Done
• Release Date: April 16, 2025

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1. Introduction and Episode Overview

The episode kicks off with Leo Laporte welcoming regular hosts Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. They outline the main topics for the week, including the latest features of Windows 11, Paul's feature tracker, the discontinuation of the Surface Hub, and the return of the Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard.

Leo Laporte [00:38]: "We're here to talk about Windows 11, the feature tracker, and the end of the Surface Hub."

2. Windows 11 Feature Tracker and New Features

Paul Thurrott discusses the progress of his Windows 11 feature tracker, which he maintains using Notion. He explains the challenges of embedding it into his website due to its wide layout and mentions upcoming updates scheduled around Preview Update Week D.

Paul Thurrott [02:51]: "We're aiming to list features based on when they will be available to everyone, not just the build or channel they're in."

He highlights significant upcoming features, such as the integration of Windows Copilot, semantic search, and various accessibility enhancements like natural language descriptions in Narrator.

Paul Thurrott [04:56]: "Preview versions of Recalls and Click-to-Do are coming to stable on Copilot PCs. Patch Tuesday in May will introduce these features to the preview update."

3. AI Integration in Windows: Copilot and Semantic Search

The discussion delves into AI-driven enhancements in Windows 11. Paul explains how semantic search uses local AI to improve search capabilities, allowing users to find documents, images, and settings using natural language queries.

Paul Thurrott [06:15]: "Semantic search in Windows 11 allows you to type in natural language and get tailored settings recommendations directly from the search results."

He envisions a future where Copilot not only assists in finding features but also takes more direct control over PC operations, akin to voice-activated assistants like Siri.

Richard Campbell [10:01]: "This could pave the way for augmented reality interfaces where AI assists without the need for traditional input devices."

4. National Recording Registry Additions

The hosts highlight two Microsoft-related entries in the National Recording Registry:

• Windows Reboot Chime: The iconic startup sound from Windows 95, created by Brian Eno, recognized for its cultural significance.
• Minecraft Soundtrack: The ambient music from the game "Minecraft," composed by C418, noted for its relaxing and atmospheric qualities.

Paul Thurrott [20:38]: "It's amazing that the Minecraft soundtrack made it into the National Recording Registry. It’s a testament to its impact on gaming culture."

5. Microsoft Edge Performance Improvements

Paul shares updates on Microsoft Edge, noting a 9% improvement in web rendering performance thanks to optimizations in the Chromium engine. He emphasizes Microsoft's contributions to Chromium, particularly in text rendering enhancements.

Paul Thurrott [17:47]: "The latest Edge update boasts a 9% faster web rendering speed, a significant improvement in 2025 terms."

6. Intel's Stake in Altera and Market Movements

Intel has sold its majority stake (51%) in Altera, its Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) business, which it acquired in 2015 for approximately $4.46 billion. The stake is now valued at around $8.75 billion, reflecting Intel's strategic divestment to streamline its focus.

Paul Thurrott [41:03]: "Intel's sale of its Altera stake marks a significant shift in their hardware strategy, focusing more on cloud data center integrations."

7. Apple’s AI Developments and iPadOS Enhancements

The conversation shifts to Apple's advancements in AI, particularly within iPadOS. Paul anticipates improvements that will transform the iPad into a more versatile computing device, rivaling traditional laptops.

Paul Thurrott [45:57]: "Apple's rumored updates to iPadOS aim to bridge the gap between tablets and laptops, potentially making the iPad a full-fledged computer."

He critiques Apple's conservative approach to AI integration, suggesting that the company is lagging behind in offering comprehensive AI capabilities akin to Microsoft's Copilot.

Richard Campbell [13:41]: "Apple needs to evolve its AI features to match the seamless integration we've seen with Windows Copilot."

8. Adobe's Embrace of AI Tools

Adobe has aggressively integrated AI into its suite of products, ensuring that their models are trained on licensed content to protect against intellectual property issues. Upcoming features include AI-driven enhancements in Acrobat Express, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro, aimed at making complex tools more accessible.

Paul Thurrott [81:08]: "Adobe's AI integration promises to democratize their powerful tools, making them more user-friendly without compromising on capability."

9. Xbox’s New Streaming Features and Game Pass Updates

Paul announces significant updates to Xbox, including a new mobile app that allows users to stream games directly to their smartphones. This move is part of Microsoft's strategy to make Xbox games more accessible across various devices without incurring the traditional app store fees.

Paul Thurrott [97:05]: "The new Xbox app on mobile simplifies game streaming, eliminating the 30% fee previously imposed by app stores."

Additionally, Microsoft has expanded Xbox Game Pass with over 100 titles available for streaming, including popular franchises like Modern Warfare 2, enhancing the value proposition for subscribers.

Paul Thurrott [100:08]: "With the addition of Modern Warfare 2 and other major titles to Game Pass, Microsoft continues to solidify its position in the gaming industry."

10. Notion Mail and Self-Hosted Alternatives

The hosts explore Notion's expansion into email with Notion Mail, a front-end for Gmail that leverages AI for enhanced functionality. They discuss the limitations, such as its exclusive integration with Gmail and the requirement of Notion AI for full features. Leo expresses frustration with the lack of support for non-Gmail accounts, highlighting challenges in integrating alternative email services.

Leo Laporte [121:07]: "I signed up for Notion Mail with a non-Gmail account, and it won't let me use that. Frustrating!"

Paul emphasizes the broader trend of centralized platforms and the difficulty of migrating data and functionalities between services, comparing it to historical transitions in personal computing.

Paul Thurrott [123:27]: "Just like switching music services was a hassle, moving email and productivity tools between platforms remains complex."

11. Club Twit Subscriptions and Member Benefits

Leo Laporte promotes Club Twit, a subscription-based community offering ad-free access to all show episodes, exclusive events, and participation in live keynotes. Membership includes access to a dedicated Discord server, special events like crafting sessions, and other member-only perks.

Leo Laporte [141:18]: "Joining Club Twit not only removes ads but also grants you access to exclusive content and community events."

Paul and Richard encourage listeners to support the show by subscribing, emphasizing the value and community benefits that come with membership.

12. Miscellaneous Discussions and Light-hearted Moments

Throughout the episode, the hosts engage in lighter conversations about household gadgets like rice cookers with built-in melodies, personal anecdotes about travel and technology frustrations, and the cultural significance of mead in Hawaiian distillation.

Leo Laporte [61:17]: "The rice cooker plays songs like 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,' making the end of cooking a delightful experience."

Richard Campbell [134:34]: "The 12th Hawaii Distillers Reserve produces a unique honey-based spirit, blending traditional mead with local Kona coffee and violet potatoes."

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurrott [02:51]: "The important thing is not really what exact build something was in or what channel it was in, but rather when do we think this is going to come to everybody."

• Richard Campbell [10:01]: "This could pave the way for augmented reality interfaces where AI assists without the need for traditional input devices."

• Paul Thurrott [17:47]: "A 9% improvement in web rendering is significant in 2025 terms."

• Leo Laporte [121:07]: "I signed up for Notion Mail with a non-Gmail account, and it won't let me use that. Frustrating!"

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Conclusion: In this episode of Windows Weekly, the hosts provide an in-depth analysis of the latest developments in Windows 11, Microsoft's strategic hardware and software moves, AI integration across platforms, and the evolving landscape of productivity and gaming. They balance technical discussions with personal anecdotes, creating an engaging and informative session for listeners interested in technology trends and updates.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thoradin's here, Richard Campbell's here, and we've got a big shoe coming up for you. We'll talk about Windows 11. A lot of new features. Thank goodness for Paul's feature tracker. Also, the end of the Surface hub.

[Richard Campbell]

Aw.

[Leo Laporte]

But the return of the Microsoft Sculpt keyboard. That and a whole lot more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is tw.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 928, recorded Wednesday, April 16, 2025. The rice is done. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest Windows news, Microsoft news. Come on, you winners and dozers, gather round, because here comes Paul Thurrott from therot.com. hello, Paul.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hello, everybody. Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

He's apologizing. Apologizing.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I usually do when I meet people like, oh, you're Paul Thrott. I'm like, yeah, sorry up front.

[Richard Campbell]

Get dizzy. And by.

[Paul Thurrott]

Disappointing, isn't it? If it isn't now, it will be soon.

[Leo Laporte]

I apologize for everything. Also here, Richard campbell from run isradio.com. hello, Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

Hello.

[Leo Laporte]

Last day in Madeira Park. Next week you'll be in. You'll be down under.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Next week. Yeah. So we're leaving tomorrow. Gonna go see the granddaughter for a couple hours before I head to the airport, and then. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's good to get children used to you leaving.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah. They're not around, and that's normal.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

A child. We also, just the other day, we.

[Richard Campbell]

Needed a puppy as well. I. I mean, I didn't want a puppy, but sometimes you're outnumbered one to one.

[Leo Laporte]

Got a puppy. I saw.

[Richard Campbell]

So now we have a puppy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Congratulations.

[Richard Campbell]

I had to take.

[Leo Laporte]

I had.

[Richard Campbell]

Had to take a tick off the puppy already, so. Yay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a little scary.

[Richard Campbell]

It's been a while since I have to think about ticks. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have ticks in Mexico City, Paul?

[Paul Thurrott]

I have some ticks, Leo. Oh, I see what you're saying. No. Well, maybe. I mean, there's a lot of dogs. This is a big dog city.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think. I think the.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm a friend to all the dogs on my street. I stopped by. They. They see me coming. They're laying on the sidewalk, and you can see the little telegram. Here he comes. You know, And I'm always like, don't get up. And they always get up, but you don't get up.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't get up.

[Paul Thurrott]

Don't get up. Okay, you're up.

[Leo Laporte]

You're so polite now you're humping my leg.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, that's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

We're not here though to talk about your travels, my friends. We're here to talk about Windows 11, the finish tracker. How's that coming along, by the way?

[Paul Thurrott]

Slowly. Leo, Glad you asked.

[Leo Laporte]

Still in?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I think I'm going to keep it in notion. The only issue is it's. It's wide. What I want to do is embed it in my site, which I can do, but it's going to be one of it. Right now it kind of scrolls left to right, which I don't like. So kind of working through that, but I figured, I think the next time I do an update that you guys will see will probably be the week D. Let me just look when that is. Next Tuesday, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Not to be confused with week T. That's right.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was week B. Week D are the big update weeks. Preview updates are week D. So the Tuesday, the 22nd, I'll probably update it. But that's kind of the point. That's the beginning of the show, right. So if you're looking at the notes, you might notice that a. I spelled colors like a British person, which I will now fix. But also in the past, when we've talked about what's happened in the past week, especially in Insider program, I kind of just laid out like build by build and I thought maybe I'll do this like the feature tracker, just list the features instead. Because the important thing here is not really what exact build something was in or what channel it was in necessarily. Although that is important. But rather when do we think this is going to come to everybody? So I tried to do a little bit of that in here today. We'll see how it goes. I don't know. To me, the biggest thing is, and we learned last week that actually the biggest thing is of course the fourth item in my list. So I'm already doing great with this new format. Preview versions of Recall and Click to do are coming to stable on copilot PCs. Right. Patch Tuesday in May. So we should see that in the preview update next Tuesday. And we know this because they put it in the release preview channel, which has 23, 24 H2 builds and also Windows 10, which we're not going to discuss because, you know, who cares? Tied to this.

[Richard Campbell]

Still got Windows 10 on this machine. You know, don't burst into flames or anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, don't get too touched. I really like that phone Style squared off ui. I think it's got legs. So tied to this is semantic search, which I struggled to find a good name for. Sometimes they refer to it as semantic search, sometimes they refer to it as AI powered search or just Windows search with AI improvements or whatever. But the idea is that search that doesn't suck. Oh, so going back to Longhorn. Yeah, we call it Tiger search from OS X, Tiger from 2003, four whatever year that was. But yeah, this has been the dream for a long time, obviously. So semantic search is local AI powered, which is interesting. So it's Copilot plus PC specific, which will limit its rollout nicely and it will look for. It's hard to keep track of this. That's why I have a tracker. But it's because there are so many different features. But they started well, it doesn't matter how they started. So what should ship in stable very soon is image and file document search across local files if indexed and OneDrive. And then soon, in the future, maybe not soon, but in the future, third party cloud storage as well. And this past week in 24H2 dev and beta channels, they started testing Windows, setting search through semantic search. So in other words, you bring up search like window. I got to keep checking. It's Windows key plus Q&S also. So it's one of those is going away, it doesn't matter. But when you bring up Windows search and then you can just type in using natural language, something, whatever the thing is you want to change and it will recommend the right thing in settings and then you can go there from search results. So fairly basic. Richard last week I think mentioned the possibility, which I will now accept as a fact, that a lot of this stuff, and I mean that because it's very obviously once he said it, I was like, yeah, this is clearly what's happening. Setting the stage for a future where Copilot can control your PC in better ways, that today we use it to find a feature. Remember they added a search box to the top of Word and Excel and all those apps and you could type something in and it would say, here's where you go find that. You're like, okay, but how about you just do it? And so I think these are the natural progressions that these things go through.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's the equivalent of Siri saying, here's what I found on the web about that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, passing the buck. Yeah. When AI evolves so quickly like it is now, you can go to one AI and say, how do I do this thing? Or Whatever. And it will say, here's how you do it or here's where you can go find that information. Sometimes it will say, I will just do that for you. And it's like that's the one you want, the one that just does it. So I think we're going to get there. Also Copilot plus PC only, but also Snapdragon X only for now is natural language in Narrator's image descriptions. Right. And so it can see people, objects, colors, text and numbers and images and then describe them to you using natural language. That will happen across all copilot plus PCs eventually. That one is the one I'm really not too sure on timing wise because it rolls out Snapdragon X only. That's the progression there. So we'll see what happens. Snipping tool was updated in Canary, but I see this on my dev computer. So there's a text extraction feature. This is the OCR functionality in this app, which is cool, but they're putting it right in the capture bar, which is that little UI that appears when you first run it and just to make it less clicks to get to it. So I think the idea here is that you took a shot or you open an image and then you can use just immediately go and get the text out of it very easily. So that is good. So that should be soon. That's an app. That one will happen quick. And then the last set is a bunch of stuff. So there's Narrator has a speech recap feature. Again, natural language, that weird phone link start menu integration where the phone link is like a little bar there on the side like a cancerous growth. Some more File Explorer updates. I feel like we get those every month now. The Windows Share feature we talked about earlier, where you can edit the image before you share it. Those are all in Release Preview. So that means we can expect those features next Tuesday and I should say in Preview. That's release preview 23H2. So we had previously talked about those features in 24H2. Sorry. Pretty identical looking set of features. So I think you could expect that again next month, right? In Patch Tuesday. Okay. That's most of it. I think that was pretty quick.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't expect that.

[Richard Campbell]

You know what I mean about this list of features is that this is a good set of tools to mature when you're not sure if you're going to have a screen and a keyboard. Like I immediately start thinking about how do you make augmented reality come true. It's these interfaces.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Text. It talks to you, you talk to it. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You don't need to find things you wanted to snip and extract from for you. Like what I've noticed in all those descriptions there is. I don't need a mouse, I don't even need to see something, but I don't really need a screen. Now think of this from the perspective of I'm looking through a pair of glasses with a camera on it at something else and saying, snip that text for me.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? That's right. Yeah. This is, you know, it's funny, we've. I don't know, it feels like it's been 10 years, but in the couple of years now that we've been talking about this in the post Copilot announcement or whatever, I keep bringing up this notion of orchestration. This is my, I don't know, totem or something.

[Leo Laporte]

But orchestration, you need a swelling orchestra every time you say that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I feel like there's platform level stuff, for lack of a better term, super technical term for it, that needs to happen for Windows and then the apps that run in Windows to, in a sophisticated manner be controlled by AI because you can do screen scrape type stuff and you see some of that obviously. But yeah, real time, actual control. This is going to come up in the AI section as well because we're starting to see AI integrating with different AIs integrating with different, I don't know, productivity stacks, if that makes sense. Copilot plus Microsoft 365 is pretty obvious, but what about Anthropic plus Microsoft 365? It's not a thing yet, but it will be. Right? I mean this stuff is all coming. So there's a programmability or an extensibility or an automation ability or whatever that has to occur in these platforms. Well, Windows in this case, but across it's not just Windows because agents are going to have to integrate with online services as well. Same thing for this stuff to make sense, for what Richard just described to really make sense, everything that we interact with in a kind of a secondhand way, right. Through an agent or an AI or whatever has to support that capability. Right. For it to work.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, yeah, now you have to get the feature set done. But here, now you found a way to start maturing this feature set in the existing set of interfaces. And once it gets to a certain point you can now talk about other interfaces.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean we've said this a bunch but like Copilot is a good name because in this current era you have these tools which are traditional, which we're all very used to. Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, whatever. And copilot is this thing that kind of sits over there and works with you. You might ask it questions. You might say, hey, could you do something with this document? But those tools either have to evolve or be replaced with something that's more.

[Richard Campbell]

Goodness knows, you can't actually sort out the control panel. So better to do this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, that's right. Yep. We can't. Look, we can't even get dark mode on a. On a window that File Explorer displays. But we're going to nail it with AI.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, it'll be fine. Everything will be fine. I know it'll be fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. I have so much.

[Richard Campbell]

Just add another layer on top to fix everything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. We get Sinofsky team to come back, do one of those architectural diagrams where it's like Windows is this little line at the bottom, and this is AI. And it's like, that's the stack.

[Richard Campbell]

I was thinking more along. You just lay in shag carpet over the asbestos tiles, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And some future generation we'll pull up and be like, oh, my God, there were beautiful wood floors down here. What did they do? You know, why did they do that? Or someone painted.

[Richard Campbell]

I've Never heard the win32 API referred to as a beautiful wood floor before, but. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I was. Yeah, it's. No, the WIN API is a disaster. No, there's stuff below that, though. It's gross and it's slimy, but it's there.

[Richard Campbell]

Thunking is. Your friend Dave Cutler told me so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Dave Cutler was right about everything. Just ask him. So. Yeah, because you mentioned it. Someone asked me about this. You know that Dave Plummer we were talking about that does these videos. He. I love him. I subscribe. I watch every video he makes. But he did one in Longhorn, and I don't know if we talked about this at all, but I very much wanted to watch this. I was super excited when I saw it. I was like, I'm going to learn something new here. And I didn't learn anything new. It turns out he left Microsoft in 2003, which is when this heated up. And his stories are as secondhand as mine. I. And this is not a criticism. I. Just because of who he is and what he does. I was like, oh, my God, there's going to be some information. But as a Cutler acolyte, he was, of course, kind of crapping on the other parts of Microsoft, because that's what Cutler did. These other people were children, they couldn't program correctly. Everything they did was.

[Richard Campbell]

He was very much of the we don't have to deal with bugs because we don't write bugs mentality.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. It's the prince from the Princess Bride who says, if I'm wrong, and I'm never wrong, you know, like, he kind of goes from there. Right. So. But. But he is Cutler. Right? Cutler's a genius. And, you know, he is.

[Richard Campbell]

He and his immediate acolytes could actually qualify for that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Mark Lacosity falls into this category. These guys were just absolute geniuses. So Dave Humbler is a really smart guy, but he wasn't in the upper echelon of that part of the company. Right. So I can. I can handle Dave Cutler crapping on Jim Alchin or Longhorn, which he called shorter and hilarious. I like. It's okay. But for someone else like Dave Plummer to just sort of ride along and do the same thing, it's like, yeah, you might want to.

[Richard Campbell]

You're not that guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're not.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're just not. You're not there and it's. And you're not right about everything. It's just, you know, it was a little tough. But anyhow, still goes to the office.

[Richard Campbell]

And he's in his 80s.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's amazing. He is a force of nature.

[Richard Campbell]

He's a force of nature.

[Paul Thurrott]

If he ever does pass away, he will disappear into a cloud of sparkles and there will be just like a. Like a black mark on the ground.

[Richard Campbell]

No one will arguably, like Arthur C. Clarke. He will just go back to his original timeline.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Yes. Where VMs actually made sense and we live in a different world. Okay. I actually forgot why I went off on that little Longhorn story. But there was a reason. I don't know. There are reasons.

[Richard Campbell]

We're bringing all the window stories together.

[Paul Thurrott]

But as I get old, they all kind of just blend together. So I transform from time to time and space to space. Just two more Windows Related stories. So Microsoft Edge, remember when they were still using their own rendering engine, they used to do these performance comparisons. They put the computers next to each other, run time things, and we used to get that a lot. We don't get that anymore because now they're using chromium. Right, Right.

[Richard Campbell]

What's the point?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, one of the points is that when Microsoft makes changes to their. To the rendering engine, they can just do it for Edge. So they could do their own thing, but they also kind of feed back into chromium. They did that thing with the text display only on Windows because it relies on Windows technology. But text rendering across all Chromium browsers now is better because Microsoft contributed to that. But they're all. I guess they're still doing literal web rendering performance work outside of Chromium, although they suggest some of the stuff will go back because they've done that in the past as well. And I guess in the latest version of Edge, if you haven't updated your browser or didn't update for you, you should do that.

[Richard Campbell]

Depending on when it updates a browser, it just sort of happens.

[Paul Thurrott]

This sort of happens. Yeah, it annoys you when it happens. But apparently it's noticeably faster web rendering. So 9%, I'm not saying is a huge number, but then again it is 2025.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's interesting that you can get that kind of a performance scan. And of course they've been doing the.

[Richard Campbell]

Performance at some point in indictment. Really? Now you find 10%, that's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, okay, so. And this is my problem with. Well, one of my problems with these Apple events every year where they're like iOS 19 is 47%, blah, blah, blah. And you're like, how awful was the thing you shipped last year that you could possibly. You don't get big double digit gains every year. What's going on? But I guess they do.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it only Edge or is this a Chromium speed up?

[Paul Thurrott]

Right now it's only Edge, but they.

[Richard Campbell]

Did say it might be in a branch.

[Leo Laporte]

They should contribute it back though, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

They do, they do. I mean, so the quote that they provided about this was our unique approach and focus to optimizing speed and the code changes we continuously make to Edge and to the Chromium rendering engine within it.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Have led to real world performance improvements when using the browser and a variety of hardware.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, don't say they're putting contributors.

[Paul Thurrott]

They don't say this particular feature. But they do. They have. So my guess is this will in fact feedback because it will. You know, they've been pretty good about that.

[Leo Laporte]

There's some incentive for them not to. Right. If they don't contribute it back, then you might not use Chrome, you might use Edge.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but then you left on the fork. Now. Now you're raising everybody.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. You want to be careful.

[Richard Campbell]

Do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I agree. I agree. It's bad form.

[Richard Campbell]

If you're suggesting the new version of. NET always has big performance improvements that are.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's another one. That's right. Yep. Every time.

[Leo Laporte]

But I should point out that Chromium engines based on the Blink engine is based on khtml. And I don't think Google contributes.

[Paul Thurrott]

You don't think there's a lot going on with.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, that's what.

[Paul Thurrott]

The KDE desktop environment in Linux has benefited greatly from Google's work.

[Leo Laporte]

Somehow I doubt it.

[Paul Thurrott]

But you never know. I could be wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

You never know.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know. I've never heard that. But it could be. And then this one's just kind of fun. So there is something called the National Recording Registry that's part of the US Library of Congress. That'll be the next part of our government that gets axed once they find out it still exists. But they have, as they do every year, they induct songs, albums, artists, all kinds of things into this. So it goes into the Library of Congress. It's there. So this particular one is Happy Trails by Roy Rogers, the Chicago album, the Chicago Transit Authority, Helen Reddy, Steve Miller Band, Tracy Chapman, Celine Dion, all kinds of stuff. Hello, dummy. The comedy album by don Rickles from 1968. Is that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's in the Library of Congress. Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

There are two Microsoft related things in here. One of which I found immediately confusing but then cleared it up. The first one is the window, what they call the Windows reboot chime from Windows 95, which was this one. No, that's a donkey brain. I don't know what that was. You know that Bloom, Bloom, Bloom. Yeah. Pleasant sound. Right? So Brian Eno is. He makes a lot of atmosphere.

[Leo Laporte]

I love the little piano. Ding, ding, ding.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's a nice. It's nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Pretty.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And then they, they redid it again in Vista and I'm sure they've redone it several times since then, but nobody cares anymore. But at that time this was a big deal. So that was kind of a nice. That was, that was.

[Richard Campbell]

These were all distraction tools for the.

[Leo Laporte]

Fact that you were waiting to boot that one. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, they're all of a. You know, there's a family of sounds.

[Leo Laporte]

I found a. This is a YouTube channel evolution of all Windows startup and shutdown sounds.

[Richard Campbell]

Love it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. What's the guy. Robert Fripp was the guy who did the Windows Vista sounds from Crimson.

[Leo Laporte]

What's King Crimson?

[Paul Thurrott]

King Crimson. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

He and Eno are buddies.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that makes sense.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. But the other Microsoft related item that made it into the National Registry or the National Recording Registry is the soundtrack album for the game Minecraft. Wow. When I saw Minecraft soundtrack, I thought you don't mean the movie that just Came out. No, no, no, no. I guess there was a 2001.

[Leo Laporte]

In Minecraft, you have records that you could put on a. There are. So there's. Yeah, there's music.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah. But if you go to Spotify or whatever service and search for Minecraft soundtrack, you will find this. And lot of it is made by. I think it's C4, C418 or something. But it's called Mine. The theme song is Minecraft Volume Alpha.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man, this brings me back. I hear this. I feel like I'm in the. I'm in the mines.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is a little bit like a Brian Eno kind of thing, isn't it?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's like, totally.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

But there's a whole. Well, you know, there's an album of these songs, and so.

[Leo Laporte]

And now I can play it because it's in the Library of Congress.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. Honestly, to me, it does. It almost sounds of the same error as the Windows 95 music or theme, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

It does, doesn't it?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it's certainly.

[Leo Laporte]

This one's called Wet Hands. It's very relaxing. It's one of the reasons I actually like Minecraft, because it's very relaxing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. This. I told the story a million times, but I was. I walked into my son's room one day, and he wasn't playing, like, an action game. He was playing something that looked weird to me. And I was like, what the hell is this? And he says, this is Minecraft. I'm like, what do you. You know, what do you do? And he's like, you build things. I was like, okay. And then this. This thing floated by in this space or whatever. And he goes, that's my cousin Harrison. He just now works in security.

[Leo Laporte]

And Harrison's in there, too, huh? So he had.

[Paul Thurrott]

They were. They were playing. They were doing something together, and I was like, cool. I was just like, carry on. This looks cool.

[Richard Campbell]

This thing's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's the best. I've spent many hundreds of hours in Minecraft.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Building crap.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I hope you enjoy the movie. It looks ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we have a Twip Minecraft server.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah, right. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Club members have access.

[Paul Thurrott]

They never did this. But to this day, I mean, the best HoloLens demo I ever got was that first one where they did Minecraft in the room we were in. So, like, this Minecraft castle on it. But the wall was a Minecraft wall, you know, looked like Minecraft, and it was the real room, but it was all on the Stuff, you know, and the wall broke open, the bricks came out, and these Minecraft bats came flying out towards. And everyone was like, you know, like. Like it kind of went right at you. And it was. I was like, yeah, this is amazing. And we never did anything with that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So never shipped it. Do you know how many Minecraft players owned a HoloLens headset?

[Paul Thurrott]

Zero. Not counting employees at Microsoft. Zero.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Wow. Oh, man. I always wanted that. I would almost go out and buy a Vision Pro or whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

The list of things that almost happened with Minecraft is really interesting because, remember, they were going to do a really realistic graphics thing, but there was something, I think it might have been called Minecraft Live. They demonstrated it on stage.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a game. You could go around.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like it was around briefly. Like you could go in the real world and Minecraft would be there. I used to play it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. So I remember the demo on stage, because they were on stage, it looked like a chasm opened in front of them or something. Then it went down into the ground. I was like, oh, yeah. Like you could tell, like, this is.

[Leo Laporte]

It was so cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean, this type of stuff and.

[Leo Laporte]

It would be persistent. It was using that Azure location technology.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, yeah, Azure probably, or whatever they call it. I'm sure this was inspired. Inspired by what? Was that mobile game? You used to play this all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

It was Pokemon Go. That's why I picked it up, because I thought, oh, this will be great. This will be the next Pokemon Go for Minecraft.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And they killed it like almost like months later. They didn't.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, these days if you don't get 100 million users in two months, which is not important.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really true.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, there might have been. I don't remember what if there was an excuse or reason. I don't know. Maybe there were people walking off of Piers. It was bad enough like Apple Maps debuted and people drive it in the middle of the desert because there were no roads there. Imagine you now you're walking around in the real world. I mean, you could walk into walls, get hit by cars.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm kind of sad. Pokemon, which was a kind of a Google spin off. Niantic. The guys at Niantic were the Google Maps guys and they just sold out for billions of dollars to the Saudi Arabian sovereign fund. So the Saudis now own Pokemon. Pokemon Go.

[Richard Campbell]

I was an Ingress player for a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Ingress was their predecessor.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, that was the predecessor.

[Leo Laporte]

I loved Ingress. It was a. Was too complicated for normal people.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, for us it became a game.

[Richard Campbell]

Where, you know, it was very much an insiders game, but you had to walk.

[Leo Laporte]

The thing is, you had to get. And this was, I loved about Pokemon too, was you had to get out and do it. You had to walk around.

[Paul Thurrott]

The best steak I've ever had in my life. I mean, you'd hate it. You're more of a French guy, but you're not. This was this. This is if you just had my.

[Leo Laporte]

Love for you, you know, no AI in it.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm sorry for one eye cousins. Goodness knows.

[Paul Thurrott]

HP Sauce, as we call it.

[Leo Laporte]

HP Sauce. Ladies and gentlemen, let's pause for a moment to remember Steve and the Minecraft movie, which as it currently stands is the number one movie in all of the world.

[Paul Thurrott]

It will always be number one in my heart and I wish it would die in a fire. I don't understand why this movie's popular.

[Leo Laporte]

Jack Black pays Steve. That's all you need to know.

[Paul Thurrott]

That is all I need to know. I agree. That was my primary reason for ignoring it. He's a good looking guy.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm waiting for it. I'm waiting for it to stream it. I'm not going to a movie theater ever again. But.

[Richard Campbell]

It'Ll be fine on an airplane.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Richard has those airplane movies.

[Paul Thurrott]

I have my Minecraft movie soundtrack. Take a nap. You'd be better off.

[Leo Laporte]

So relaxing. So relaxing. I'm going to download Minecraft and show you the twit build. It's really amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my gosh.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is there anything in it? Like, one of the promises of doom for a little while was that people would make maps of real places and you could play the Brick House.

[Leo Laporte]

Studios are in it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, okay. See, that's cool. I like that kind of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

It started with Chad Johnson. Omg. Kraft.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They built that for years. The three or four, maybe five people were really devoted. And then I saved it, we had a copy of it and we put it back up on the server and then I don't. I don't want to run the server out of my house anymore, so. Well, only because I. I need all the upstream bandwidth I can get. This was back in the studio where we had so much upstream bandwidth. So. Very kind fella in our club whose name escapes him. Trying to remember his name. But Anyway, Lion Admiral, 1981. Lion Admiral 1981 took it over and he's running it. So if you want to get into our Minecraft server, we have a survival server that's set to like super tough too. Just join the club. Seven bucks a month ad free versions of all the shows and access to the Minecraft server.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

See, I should mention that more.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. I'm surprised this isn't more of a perk mention.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you know, yeah, go into the let's Play channel in our discord and say add me because you do have to get whitelisted. All right, let's pause and come back Much, much more of Windows Weekly on the horizon. But as soon as it gets here, we'll let you know. But Omen, what's that on the horizon? It's at the of the tunnel.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that's not going to be good.

[Richard Campbell]

Might be a train first, First a.

[Leo Laporte]

Word from our sponsor, the wonderful folks at 1Password. Here's a question for you from 1Password. Do your end users always work on company owned devices and IT approved apps? I didn't think so. So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices? 1Password has an answer to this question. They call it ext 1Password Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign in for every app on every device because it solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM can't touch. Imagine your company's security like the quad of a college campus. There are nice brick paths between the buildings. Those are the company owned devices, the IT approved apps, the managed employee identities. And then there are the paths people actually use, the shortcuts worn through the grass that are, well, the actual straightest line from point A to point B. Those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non employee identities. Like contractors, most security tools only work on those happy brick paths. But many security problems occur on the shortcuts. 1Password Extended Access Management is the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices, apps and identities under your control and ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy, and every App is visible. 1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third party audits. It exceeds the standards set by various authorities and is a leader in security. It's security for the way we work today and it's now generally available to companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra and in beta for Google Workspace customers. Secure every app, every device, every identity, even the unmanaged ones at 1Password.com WindowsWeekly by the way, all lowercase 1P-A-S-S-W-O-R-Com Windows Weekly. Thank them so much for the support of Windows Weekly. You support us when you go to that address. 1Password.com WindowsWeekly all lowercase. On we go with the show.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've lost. Huh? Oh God, I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

No, please. I'm just going to say to you what's up in the hardware sphere.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, some stuff. What I was going to say was I've kind of lost track of the history of this. You know, before the pandemic, Microsoft was working on these Surface Hub devices. Right. Which are kind of a.

[Richard Campbell]

Which were a hit.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. At the time when we were all going into businesses or meeting rooms together.

[Richard Campbell]

And they were doing great projectors in replacing a whiteboard and doing it all in one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Before this they had, remember it was like a PixelSense display. And now they use the term Pixelsense to describe Surface PC displays.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean the original Surface was that crazy table that Alex. Yeah, the big table that didn't work on stage.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, right, right. And was the type of thing a hotel or a casino would buy, but not the type of thing a person would buy.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And so they.

[Richard Campbell]

It was broken the moment you installed it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, you know, it was by design, it was fine.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember seeing like on cruise ships, I saw them in hotels in Vegas.

[Paul Thurrott]

There were some cool demos for it. You know, I like the return to the sit down Pac man style machine where you could be across from someone in both. You know, when you switch players the screen was swapped so they could play whatever. Kind of resembled that to me. But Surface Hub, the first version, 50th 50ish and. And 80ish inch screens, I forget. But then they. Right before the pandemic. Yeah, they announced Surface Hub, I guess two and this is the one where it was like on an easel and you could string three of them together and have one big screen. It was going to be amazing. And then it was the pandemic.

[Richard Campbell]

Then the world ended.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. So tied to this. I sort of forget the oss, but the original Service Hub had like a teams edition of Windows 10, I would imagine. And then of course in time they had a Windows based os. I think it was like Surface OS or whatever that they were going to use as they kind of evolved these things. But the original Surface Hub is now, well, 10 years old. So in October it's going end of life and there's no upgrade for it. You can't put Linux on it. There's no real plans for this thing.

[Richard Campbell]

It doesn't matter if it just bursts into Flames either. It's just going to get no up updates.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, right. I mean, but you know, as software evolves and you know, we'll see. I mean it's. We'll see what happens. But I suppose given the nature of this device, maybe it's not as big of a problem as say with a PC, but. But you know, it's interesting it's been that long. I mean, to me it's just like, wow, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, the probable thing for a 2015 Surface Hub is it hasn't been turned on in three years.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, now that people are returning, returning to the Office is now a thing. It's the hot new trend in offices actually using the office.

[Richard Campbell]

The other thing the Pandemic did is it get everybody a camera rig and experience with sharing software. Now the question is, do you need to go into the meeting room?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, I think being in person is the point of this Return Office thing actually. So maybe, I mean, which also begs.

[Richard Campbell]

The question, what do you need that thing for? Because that was always about somebody's not in the office and others are.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean, depending on the business, there will probably still be people around the office. But if that's not the case, it's still a big display. Right? I mean, I suppose you could just use it as a screen, as a display or whatever. Yeah, remote your display to it.

[Richard Campbell]

The other thing about thinking about 2015 is like, think about how much better camera gear is or 3D sensors. Like if you could afford all those things in the first place and they were not cheap. Cheap you can afford. You're either out of business and you don't care or you want anyone.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, I'm going to forget the details of this too because again, pre Pandemic and it just kind of dropped off the face of the earth. But the original, like Surface Hub 2, 2s, whatever they were called, we got a really good. It was one of the last. Yeah, it was one of the last things I did before the Pandemic, I think. But they did these in person demos where these things actually had the USB C ports all around the edges and you could plug in like a webcam. If it was oriented this way, you could pop it up on the top and they had lots of sensors and all that kind of stuff. And they would do palm rejection when you were writing on the screen and they get multiple people writing on the screen at the same time, et cetera, et cetera. It's cool stuff. But like I said, the OSS have evolved. Surface Hub 2S is from 3, 4 years later. I think it originally ran on the same Windows 10 team version that the OG Surface Hub ran on, but you could migrate that to what's now called teams rooms for Windows, whatever. I don't know. So there's still, you know, this, this may be a business that kind of springs back to life for them just because of.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the other thing is there's a ton of competitors now, right. There's all kinds of smart boards near Hub, like. Yep, Microsoft, Google killed their.

[Leo Laporte]

Google killed theirs.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, they had a silly name. What was that thing called? It begin with the J, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't remember.

[Paul Thurrott]

I can't remember either. Jam something.

[Leo Laporte]

Jamboard. Yeah, it was jamboard.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you're right.

[Paul Thurrott]

But yeah, so it was kind of like the Chrome OS version of this, you know, like a, like. And you know, that might meet a certain need too if they still made it. But this will always have a place, I think in big enterprises and you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but I think they also want to get it from a conventional vendor. Right. Like Microsoft should get out.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean like an actual display vendor. Yeah, yeah. What a thought. Yeah, I mean that's probably going to be a lot. And is today a lot more common? Obviously.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go. Surface Hub, 385 inch with pens and smart camera. $32,000.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeez, forget it.

[Paul Thurrott]

The original one I think was just north of 20 when they announced. Maybe it was 18 at first, then it went above 20. But even the.

[Leo Laporte]

So they figured, oh, it's Enterprises, you know, they pay 10,000 for their Cisco Zoom Room, so they'll pay.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think it was like this. I don't think it was like a cynical, like, how much could we charge?

[Leo Laporte]

It really did cost that much.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think they were expensive, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, yeah, 85 inch screens are big expensive.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean like even surface PCs like the surface Studio, everyone sees that and says, yeah, okay, but I just want the screen. And it's like, okay, well the PC is $3,500. Just. The screen is going to be $3,300, you know, like it's the most expensive component by far. It's more expensive than all of the other components. Like it's really expensive. But yeah, yeah, just have I.

[Leo Laporte]

You spend that much money though, you hate to hear it's at its end of life, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, at least you didn't have like a four or five year period where you couldn't even use it. So it, it's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

What are you gonna get Back to like, why would you buy one of these when everybody has a camera and a screen and sharing software and like.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S turned out to be no.

[Richard Campbell]

Kind of an absolute concept.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's. It beautifully solved a problem that was becoming irrelevant.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. That's the Microsoft story in a nutshell. So I guess. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it was a boardroom piece. It was cooler than a projector.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It was that. You wanted that, that. That Tony Stark sort of interactive effect.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, one would argue now you should go the meta way and everybody puts on a. On a. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

We should all sit in the same room with Boba Fet helmets on our heads and world.

[Richard Campbell]

Because that's not dystopic at all.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, what a world.

[Richard Campbell]

What a world. I know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Someday I can't wait to. We'll be sitting on the couch watching a movie. My, you know, my wife and I. You and your wife or whatever. And you won't even. You'll be talking through a microphone. You know, you'll actually get up to go to the bathroom and be like, oh, I forgot what you looked like. What happened? I'm over here, honey.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm on the call.

[Paul Thurrott]

I am your father.

[Richard Campbell]

Where startups get too much money, right? Where they're getting an a round of $25 million. And so consistently I have a CEO coming at me going, how do I build the ultimate boardroom? Like, we're going to go get this exotic wood table and so forth, but the hardware, like, I need it to be special.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What does Putin use?

[Paul Thurrott]

Because that looks cool. I would imagine that in those scenarios, whatever he's using gets updated every two weeks. You know, the problem is they spend all this money on something and you want to use it for years, as you would, and it's out of date. It's pretty quick. But that's technology. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

There you have it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Intel has made their first major move under their new CEO. This one's kind of interesting. They sold 51% stake, so a majority stake in Altera, which is their Fieldgate programmable array business that they bought for a lot more money than it's worth now. Several years ago, Altera was actually founded in 1983, which is. Is pretty amazing, by the way. Went public in 1988. Intel acquired it in 2015 for 16.7 million, based on a 51% stake worth 4.46 billion. We're saying that this thing is now worth about 8.75 billion. Nice so intel once again has the touch of Midas to them. But these components are super important and today they're used in cloud data centers. Intel still owns the other 49%. They're going to remove those earnings from their earnings report. But they still have an ownership stake and they'll still be able to take advantage of. I think they did some sort of. What are those? I already forgot the name of the chips. Not the mainstream chips for PCs, but the high end chips which were for workstations and now are for data center. They integrate with these type of chips. So you have a standard powerful Intel CPU that is kind of monolithic, but it could be attached to these. It's a weird thing to say, like f. What do you call these things? Functions? Field array or field programmable.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, fpga.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, fpga. We need a better term for this.

[Leo Laporte]

But programmable gate array.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Not Gatorade. No, Gatorade. By the way, here's Putin's setup. I just thought you might want to. Richard, when they ask you next time, just, you know, yikes, tell him this is what you need.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's unimpressive. Also, is he in a Hilton? What is this?

[Leo Laporte]

It looks like he's in. You're right, A Hilton ballroom. That's pretty funny. There's a couple of computers under the tv.

[Paul Thurrott]

He calls down and he's like, I plugged my ethernet cable into the port and it's not doing anything. You know, like, yeah, it's a Hilton. That's how it works. It doesn't.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a Hilton.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, you have the worst WI fi on earth. You should attest.

[Leo Laporte]

That's pretty funny. You're right. It looks like a hotel ballroom.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is so weird looking.

[Leo Laporte]

Now who knows?

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, I don't know why this bothers me so much, but when Steve Jobs announced the iPad in 2010, he positioned it as this thing that was going to sit between a phone and a PC. And the way he said it was something like the question has arisen, as if it came up out of a swamp. Like Steam emerged. It's like the question has arisen, is there another device we could sell to everybody?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

But Steve Jobs was very upset with the reaction to the first iPad. Because, people, this is when we started talking about consumption devices, right? This is a term we never really used before. And he had this list of things that it was better than PCs or phones at, at the time. You know, email, web browsing, reading, blah, blah, blah, whatever, most of which are consumption activities. And so for the second iPad, he said, this is the post PC era. We make most of our money on post PC devices. This is the future of the computer. And they updated their iWork apps at the time and they made sure there were a bunch of third party kind of creation. But, you know, iPads today are still kind of consumption devices for the most part. I know they have iPad pro, but the iPad OS is limited dramatically and on purpose not to harm Mac sales. But now that they have iPad pros that cost over a thousand dollars, oh.

[Leo Laporte]

My setup costs more than an apple laptop.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So you could throw together an iPad air or pro of either size screen with, with their keyboard and their pen, and that thing costs more than a MacBook air. So the question has arisen, leo, is there room for ipados to improve so that it actually could work as well as a computer? And my answer to that for a couple years now has been yes, but they haven't done it. So every year WWDC rolls around. Every year I'm like, maybe this is the year, maybe they're gonna do it. The iPad pro, any iPad is so limited that if using final cut pro, whatever app it is to render some video and you get an email and you switch to mail, it stops rendering. It has the most powerful processor imaginable. It's the same thing they use in their computers. I mean, I know there are more powerful versions of the chip, but this little thin, wonderful, portable device could be so much more than it is. And now Mark gurman has a report that they might actually be doing it this year. He's very vague, but he says they're going to. Part of this stuff they're going to announce in two months is improvements to ipados to make it more like the Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Multitasking, things like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

God forbid. I last year said, look, you forked iOS into iPadOS, fork it again into ipados pro and put that stuff, make it for iPad pro only, or maybe iPad air and pro, whatever, that's fine. Most people who buy a normal iPad or a mini or using it to watch movies and read books and play games, like, you don't have to do that stuff over there. But if you're going to spend as much or more on an iPad as you would on a MacBook air, you know, this is overdue. So supposedly it's happening. I guess we'll see. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll be the test bed for this.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's funny, I want to use this so bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Why?

[Paul Thurrott]

Just for. Because, well, this is the dream. Right. So this is the one thing that can do everything. Thing. It's never been done effectively. Maybe there are exceptions, but a folding iPhone or phone that could turn into a small tablet gets there. But one device that you travel with where you attach a keyboard and you work normally like you would on a laptop, but then you take that thing off and you can watch, play games, or you can do whatever you want without that stuff on it. Cool. And then the battery life is amazing. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's all day, for sure.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Apple's the one company I think could get this right. You can take something complicated by Windows, like Windows, and chop off parts and try to get something simpler, which they technically did for iOS. I get that. But now you have iOS, it gets more and more sophisticated every year. It just needs a couple of things. And then you get the. The stuff that's important, but you don't get any of the legacy deadwood. And so there's a. I don't know. This is kind of a dream. We'll see. I mean, they've never done it so far, and I think it's artificially limited at this point.

[Leo Laporte]

But there's an interesting change in the user base at this point where people use their iPhones to the exclusion of everything else.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, that's their main primary YouTube device.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And so they're very used to that. The interface, the applications, the way it works. Maybe it makes sense for Apple to say, okay, we're going to embrace this change and help people.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know why they're hesitating the customer you've already got on a Mac and move them to an iPad. Like, why are you sad?

[Leo Laporte]

Same price.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. That was kind of my point. Once the prices of the iPads rose to the point where. Where they were the same or more, the excuse for not doing it goes away.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll be very interested. I mean, I have. They put the M4 in the iPad Pro before.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I mean. Like, you gotta be. I know. Incredible. So I feel like if Steve Jobs had not passed away because, remember, so the iPad2 was 2011. He was actually out on hiatus because of health reasons.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Came back to do the presentation. It was so important to him. They did that special cover that they still use, which is amazing. I mean, I don't know the dates off the top of my head, but it took them a very long time. So he passed away that year. He passed away that October. So I feel like if he had stuck around, they would have pushed the iPad as A piece of computing. I really think he was very hot on this post PC thing, right. Tim Cook is not a visionary, he is a bean counter. I think he looked at this and said, you know, what would be better than replacing the Mac? Mac is selling people both. So that's my. I'm just, I mean I'm projecting here. I don't know that this ever conversation ever occurred.

[Leo Laporte]

We talk about this all the time on MacBreak Weekly. We don't know. It's inconceivable.

[Paul Thurrott]

It doesn't matter. Yeah, I don't think that word means what you think it means, but I don't remember the dates. I'm not the big Apple guy. But over time they introduced a keyboard cover that didn't a touchpad on it. It was like, well you'll touch the screen but we also have this stupid Apple pencil. The thing Steve Jobs made fun of and said no one will ever want. And then they eventually added the trackpad with the support and they, you know, but it didn't have keyboard shortcuts or it didn't have, you know, it was always a little bit limited and then just the OS now is limited with background tasks and specific multitasking features. Whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

I do think though that a generation that's grown up on the iPhone, I couldn't completely embrace it and say plus.

[Paul Thurrott]

Once they do their folding devices, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Mean then you can carry it and it's nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean look, I've tried every version. We all have, right? I know you guys have both done this like back when I think this might have been a Sony or a Palm TX or something. I remember what the thing was, but a little Palm device, right? One of the later ones as they got kind of nice little fold out keyboard, little thing, you kind of stick it on there. I'm on a flight typing my thousand word editorial. But whatever, I'm living the dream. I'm flying through space like Thor and then there's a little boop boop in the plane and the little Palm thing went and lost the connection, lost everything I wrote. It's gone. So I mean I've tried like we talk about. Jerry Purnell used to love those little Windows CE handheld PC things that was the size and shape of a mobile keyboard. So the screen was like this, you know, like a Hummer view outside. And you know, you hunch over it, you do whatever. Because I think there's a class of people, we used to call them knowledge workers or information workers, people who would travel for work, who they want the Lightest thing possible. But they also wanted to do as much as possible. And you try to.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like a MacBook Air is pretty cool.

[Richard Campbell]

The Air is what I was thinking. It's the definitive machine in that class and for a long time, literally the best computer in the world. Julianne fries with it.

[Leo Laporte]

It was so sharp.

[Paul Thurrott]

My daughter just got the M4 version of the.

[Leo Laporte]

That's pretty spectacular MacBook Air.

[Paul Thurrott]

And the reason she wanted to do. She had a Surface Pro. I don't remember. Nine maybe. And she loved it. She liked the pen. She's a student, so she would. She drew and took notes and all that stuff like a kid would do, I guess. But this thing got like two and a half hours of battery life. She was freaking her out. And I was like, well, you can get a new one of these. I guess you could get the Snapdragon thing. I mean, that would be pretty good. But I'm like, I got to tell you, you get this. If you get it back, repair, it's going to last forever.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And you're not going to think about carrying your charger with you because you don't work long enough to use up the battery.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's incredible.

[Richard Campbell]

So you'll be home before.

[Leo Laporte]

She's probably exaggerating as a Windows guy to say that.

[Paul Thurrott]

No. Last year I bought the M3 version and I would say one of the big achievements of the Copilot PC is they got into the ballpark of this. But if the MacBook Air I had 15 inch. The bigger one, it's about 15 hours. But real world battery life, which is nuts. The best Snapdragon 11 ish. 12 maybe. Maybe 8 to 12 depending on the machine, depending on conditions, whatever. Fans. There's no fan in the MacBook Air, but the one she got, she has a smaller one. So she says she gets 18 hours of battery life. I'm not sure how she rated that, but she's overjoyed by this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's what she does. It really is dependent. I don't get nearly what you were saying because of what I do on my MacBook. So it's really.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So just the normal way that I use computers, that's what I got on that computer. It's impressive. Most of the PCs I review get like six or seven hours if you're lucky. But it also comes. And Richard was talking about these cameras and sensors and stuff earlier. It has an. I think it's 8 megapixel. Yeah, just goit crisp. Like just super nice camera. So the iPad air I have is like an okay camera. I don't even know. It might, it might even be 720p. I don't know what it is. It's like, okay, it's nothing special, you know, the screen's like tiny, it's really thin. But the one, she has a score. It's really nice. Like you could really see the difference. Alex.

[Leo Laporte]

Lindsay. It's funny, he's been saying that the microphones now on the laptop are so good that he often doesn't send a standalone microphone out in his zoom.

[Paul Thurrott]

So that's fascinating to me because I would say in the PC space that's the one thing that's still lacking. They've totally caught up on webcam. That stuff's awesome. Five megapixels, very common. You're starting to see eight as well. But the microphones are garbage. And I do the same recording test every time to try to figure out some setting. There's all this AI nonsense you can do and whatever and it just doesn't. I've never found one that's any good. You need a microphone. Like it's to me. I would never do a podcast on the screen, the built in one, unless it was an emergency or whatever. An emergency podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

We wouldn't let you. To be honest.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're very. Yeah, you would very clearly be like, I don't know what you think you're using. It sounds like you're under the ocean or something. But this is not working. So. Yeah, no, it's very clear that it is not clear. Okay. Anyway, wwc, we'll see if they actually do it. I hope so. I'm curious on the flip side of this equation, Google has laid off hundreds of employees in their newly consolidated platforms and devices division. This is where they brought together Android and Pixel into one group, along with, I don't know, Chrome and the Nest devices and Fitbit and all that stuff. Right. So I don't think this is as bad as maybe it sounds at first glance. Only because we all knew this was coming. They actually asked people to agree to leave because they were consolidating and some number did. But I think these are the ones. The ones that did not. You fools. You could have taken the money and runs.

[Leo Laporte]

Told you to leave.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're like, they'll never let me off.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm so important. What happened?

[Leo Laporte]

I told you to leave. But you didn't. You wouldn't. We tried. That's pretty funny.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Google's feels like a stumbling drunk. They just. Yeah, you just really wonder what's, what the heck's going on up there?

[Paul Thurrott]

I, yeah, I don't know. I, I, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

I really, I just, I started using the latest Pixel again, which I have to say, I love. The camera's wonderful. It's the most welcome thing in the world. Going back to that, like, when you take a photo, it could be of anything. It could be like a drink in a bar or sunset or whatever. And it's like you're like, every time, you're like, oh, my God, look at this. I know I'm going to get used to it and stop doing this. But every time I, like, look at this picture.

[D]

Look at this, look at that.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, it's amazing. But then you look at the battery life and you're like, oh, yeah, they're right. This is down.

[Richard Campbell]

Nothing's free.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, nothing's free. And then the watch thing is, I want to physically harm it. I hate it so much. Part of it is just the normal notification thing where it's not set up properly yet. So it's notifying me too much about stuff. I know I'm going to get on top of that. And the way I'm going to do that is by turning off notifications entirely because it's driving me insane. But, But I swear to God, five, six times yesterday, this thing was. And I don't mean it didn't go bing, it went like, or whatever. And I look and there's nothing there. I'm like, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Just making noises.

[Paul Thurrott]

No notification. There's nothing. I don't know why I did it. There were at least five times. I cannot explain.

[Leo Laporte]

It sounds like my rice cooker.

[Paul Thurrott]

I can't.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, Lord.

[Paul Thurrott]

We have a. If anyone has any Samsung appliances, they might. Oh, God. Are they like. It's so. Yeah, it's, it's unbelievable. Like, so we have one at home and we have one here and they sing different songs that, you know. This one's a little more of a, you know, a Mexican traditional. It's a trumpet sound. I don't know. It's just, you know, it's Mexican.

[Leo Laporte]

But do they really. They have. Oh, see, that's interesting. So it's not actually specific.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's definitely a different song, I can tell you that. I don't know why.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting. What do they do in Canada? Do you have any Canadian.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, Canada.

[Richard Campbell]

And the chicken dance. That's what we did.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually. There's nothing here that couldn't be turned into something that makes a lot of noise. So they. That's just the.

[Richard Campbell]

It's. It's the. It's the washer and the dryer and the rice cooker. And we've got a Japanese water boiler, too that plays us on when the hot water is hot.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I used to have a Japanese water purifier that would have a rigamarole.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. This is like, okay, so maybe this is an Asian thing, but it's like, we want your electronics to make you happy. Right. They were probably among the first to try to make them into people like things. Right. Even though it's a white square that doesn't look like a person. Although I guess I am a white square, depending on how you look at it. But. But yeah. So I think, like, these, like, play little happy songs. So, like, maybe it makes you happy. Whereas I'm always like, is there a button where I can turn this thing?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Can I gouge it with, like, a.

[Leo Laporte]

We have a German dishwasher, and all it does is make a very annoying beep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah, of course.

[Leo Laporte]

We're done. We are done. Tom opens the dishwasher.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was driving slowly through a town in small. Some small town in Germany, and there was an old man with a canyon. He's walking, like, two seconds, like, two miles per hour or whatever. And I'm like, obviously, I'm going to let this guy go. Even though I could have just driven through the intersection, there's no one else there. And he looks at me and he, like, shook my cane at me. And I was like. I was like, go. And then he hit the car. He's like, no, you have the right of way. He didn't say it.

[Leo Laporte]

Follow the rules.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're following the rules. And the rules are.

[Leo Laporte]

I appreciate that, because I hate it when you come to a stop sign and it's obviously this person's right away.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well.

[Leo Laporte]

And he says, it's okay, Go ahead. And it's like, this is how accidents happen.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Follow the rules.

[Paul Thurrott]

Listen, I live in Pennsylvania, so I have more rules. I have. No, there are rules that nobody follows. What I don't like is uncertainty. In Pennsylvania is all about uncertainty. Are you gonna go? Oh, you want to go? Why don't you go? I'll go. Oh, no. Oh, you're gonna go. And it's like, guys, it's a freaking intersection. Let's go. One of you.

[Leo Laporte]

First person here goes first.

[Paul Thurrott]

In Mexico. It's dystopian. It's a fight every time. It could be a person. It could be in a bike you could be a car, bus, it doesn't matter. As long as you act aggressive and you always have the right away.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's very different. Anyway, Sam's like right away. I don't know who's most talking about anymore. But yeah, I don't know. There it is.

[Richard Campbell]

The rice Cooker song.

[Paul Thurrott]

Little watchers used to do this, right? You would have like, I don't know what time climax or some old fashioned watch. And they would always play little songs. Why is there a song built into this thing? I can't even tell the time. What do you like?

[Leo Laporte]

But now it's Pavlovian. My mouth just started watering because the rice is done.

[Richard Campbell]

The rice is done, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

That's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

It plays Twinkle Twinkle Little Star when it starts. And according to Wikipedia, it plays a tune called Amaryllis when it's done.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Did Brian Eno do this music? Because that would bring this whole thing home.

[Leo Laporte]

That would bring us full circle.

[Paul Thurrott]

That would be amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Full circle. All right, let's take a break because the rice is done and I gotta.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sounds like a Nintendo game.

[Leo Laporte]

A Zozi Rushi rice cooker is the best thing. It's amazing that ever happened to me.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'll let Lisa know you said that.

[Leo Laporte]

But she agrees, by the way.

[Paul Thurrott]

She's like, I'm a dissing number.

[Leo Laporte]

We both look at it, we go, it makes perfect rice. Every time. It's like, you don't have to think about it.

[Richard Campbell]

You're moving to New Zealand. You're leaving the rice cooker.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can have the house. I just want the rice.

[Leo Laporte]

I want the rice cooker.

[Richard Campbell]

That's.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can have everything in it. I just want the rice cooker.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a little break. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell, wonderful to see you both in your native habitats for the time being. Our show today, brought to you by US Cloud. Let me tell you, the name does not tell you exactly what they do. Sounds like a cloud service, right? No, it's the number one. And I mean it. The best. Microsoft Unified support replacement. Now, we've been talking about this for some time now. I hope you know about US Cloud, the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. They support 50 of the Fortune 500. And there's three reasons. In my mind, there's three reasons. First of all, of course, it's a big money saver switching to US Cloud. Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier Support. But it wouldn't be better if it was just cheaper, right? You want better support. Well, it is better. Faster, twice as fast. Average time to resolution versus Microsoft. And it's better. They've got the best engineers. They actively recruit the smartest, best, most experienced engineers. So you're getting the best team working for you. Faster time to resolution for less. But now they're going to live up to their name because there's another thing they do that I don't think Microsoft would ever do this. They save you money on Azure, right? That is something. Microsoft would be very happy that you continue to spend more on Azure every month. But US Cloud has a new offering. It's called their Azure Cost Optimization Services. I mean, honestly, when's the last time you evaluate your Azure usage? It just grows on you, right? If it's been a while, you have some Azure sprawl, I'm sure a little, you know, a little spread, little, little spend creep going on. But there's good news. Saving on Azure is easier than you think. With US Cloud, they offer an eight week Azure engagement. It's powered by VBox. In those eight weeks, it will identify key opportunities to reduce costs. Reduce costs across your entire Azure environment without reducing capability. You'll get expert guidance and access to those engineers. I talked about US cloud senior engineers. An average of over 16 years with Microsoft products. And at the end of the eight weeks, you get this beautiful interactive dashboard that will identify rebuild opportunities, downscale opportunities, unused resources. You can take that money and put it in the bank or, or continue to save. My suggestion, invest the savings in Azure into US Cloud's Microsoft support. That's what a few US Cloud customers do and completely eliminate your unified spend. So you save again. Sam gave us a great testimonial. He's the Technical Operations manager at Bede Gaming. B E D E Bead Gaming. Of course, they use a lot of azure. He gave us Cloud 5 stars. He said, quote, we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure. But once we got to 40 or 50,000amonth, it really started to add up. Yeah, that would, wouldn't it? It's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure. Stop buying more Azure than you need. Identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Visit uscloud.com right now. You can book a call today. Find out how much your team can save. I'm telling you, these guys are the best. Uscloud.com book a call today. Get faster, better Microsoft support for less. I mean, you can't lose. Uscloud.com and if they ask you, please do me a favor, say, oh, yeah, I heard about you on Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard and Leo said it was great. US Cloud. Thank you, USCloud, for supporting this fine effort. We call Windows Weekly. I'm gonna go get a little rice. And now I wish I had some rice.

[Paul Thurrott]

What is this?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. I read an article by a woman who grew up in a Chinese family, and she said she bought these. These dried Chinese sausages. Put two in the rice cooker when you cook the rice, and it flavors the whole thing. And then Doc Rock, who's from Hawaii, said, in Hawaii, what we do, get the. He says, get the zojirushi. And when you have leftover piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

You put it in with the rice in the rice cooker and it flavors the whole thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, God.

[Leo Laporte]

Doesn't that sound good?

[Paul Thurrott]

That sounds fantastic.

[Richard Campbell]

When's the last time I had Kentucky Fried Chicken? Well, that's the problem.

[Paul Thurrott]

I have it all the time here, really. But not here. It's terrible in Mexico, but I really like Kentucky Fried Chicken.

[Leo Laporte]

So I see here something that says this just in. And then that's all it says. Is there a breaking news?

[Paul Thurrott]

There is. So Microsoft stopped making their own keyboards and mice and peripherals right under their Microsoft brand. They sold some Surface stuff, but in doing that, they got rid of the keyboard I'm using right here. I love this thing. The sculpt ergonomic keyboard.

[Leo Laporte]

The Ergo keyboard.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. But in case. And Microsoft announced Incase was going to bring these things back from the grave or whatever, and then it never happened, but it just happened. So the sculp ergonomic keyboard or desktop set, I should say, is available from Incase. Designed by Microsoft. Right. It looks identical. In fact, let me see how identical it looks. Yeah, it's so identical, it doesn't even have a copilot it key on it. It has the same, like, layout as.

[Richard Campbell]

The thing I'm looking at right now. The Sculpt keyboard is a cult. Like, there are believers in this keyboard. They buy them whenever they find them. Buy as many as they can.

[Paul Thurrott]

I used to have three of them in a closet.

[Leo Laporte]

You're in the cult.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

80 bucks. That sounds like the same price, right? That's about what it was.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is. That's not the. That's. Sorry, that's not the right one. It's not.

[Leo Laporte]

This is designed by Microsoft.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's a different one. I mean there are other ones.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh I see the whole line of.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, the whole line of these things. So it's the sculpt ergonomic desktop set. So it's keyboard, mouse and ah. 150 bucks which was about the same price. I think my only issue with it is that it was a proprietary usb a dongle and it still is.

[Leo Laporte]

Here it is. Here it is.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I wish it was a slash Bluetooth something. I thought it was going to be slash Brutus but whatever. I will buy one of these immediately.

[Leo Laporte]

It's wired only. Is that it?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's wireless. It's just. But it uses a dongle.

[Leo Laporte]

Well that's silly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. But it works great.

[Leo Laporte]

This is it, right? 150 bucks.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, that's it. I'm using it right now while I'm using the Microsoft one.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah, one of the vintage ones.

[Paul Thurrott]

I can't show this to you effectively but I have a USB A to well C to A like on it with a cable. So I put the dongle in the end of it and it's stuck into the front of the Thunderbolt dock I use. Plus it brings it closer to the keyboard so there's less interference. Whatever. Yeah, yeah. I love this thing. I love it so much.

[Leo Laporte]

In case. In case makes. I've had other in case stuff. They make a lot of accessories.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah they're pretty well known and actually yeah. If you go to their design by Microsoft menu thing which I think you did.

[Leo Laporte]

I did. They got a bunch.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's a bunch of stuff and this was not the case fairly recently so. So they had a couple of things I think for a while but now it looks like they got a whole thing going. So you can get just the keyboard for 120.

[Leo Laporte]

They do have a Bluetooth keyboard but it's a square regular everyday.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I don't. I wish this thing. I thought they were going to update it. In fact I thought part of the update was it was going to have the copilot key. That was going to be one. Right. And that would be also Bluetooth but I guess no, it's still the same. Whatever. It took long enough. I'm glad they're making it. It's better than you know it's better.

[Richard Campbell]

Than get a bank a couple like just.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well not at 150 bucks but I'll definitely. If. If I ever thought These things were going away, which happened. Yes, I. I did that before and then I went through them.

[Richard Campbell]

So. Yeah, no, that's the thing is I brought. While they're still in stock, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

To bring it, you know. Yeah. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Breaking news.

[Paul Thurrott]

Samsung, you get a little song.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, sure.

[Richard Campbell]

And my clothes are dry.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I guess this doesn't. Yes, right. And your rice is done. So Notion does this thing where there's like a weird scroll Barry thing over on the right and I keep clicking it by mistake and it scrolls all the way down to the bottom of the document.

[Richard Campbell]

Don't do that.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's the first little bit of. Yeah, okay. So, AI, we can go through some of this pretty quickly, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wait a minute. I gotta run. My clothes are dry.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'll be right back.

[Richard Campbell]

This goes on for hours until quite a song.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, the Samsung. Right. Is this, is this a Samsung thing? Because they go on for a lot. They go on for a long time. Yeah, no, it's like we've got to get it all out. It's like we got it. We've already taken the clothes out of the dryer. Yeah, you know, I know. I gotta get through this. Sorry, it's. There's no way.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an Austrian song called by Franz Schubert. That's why it's so long.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's an art. It's a complete aria.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's the whole damn thing. Oh, I bet you we triggered a lot of people. Now Anthony Nielsen says we're going to get a copyright takedown from Samsung. I don't think so. Really. If we listen for that, I'm going to be very.

[Paul Thurrott]

Whatever anyone thinks of the song, their stuff is pretty great, actually. The reason we buy it.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, that's why. That's why. I mean, that's why I know the music. I got the thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it works well.

[Richard Campbell]

Keeps drying my clothes.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's talk AI, because this is dumb.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. We need smart over in the Apple part of the fence there. On the other side of that fence. A lot of hand wringing over Apple intelligence. And they'll get it right eventually. Something. I don't know. There's been a.

[Leo Laporte]

There was an article in the New York Times saying Apple is failing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, this is that trip, idiot. So I saw that. I'm like, yeah, I know who wrote this. And I was like, yep. So look, this is the richest company on earth. They're doing great.

[Leo Laporte]

They're back at the 3 trillion.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're fine. You know, they're going to be only only 3 trillion. They've reorged, they've moved people around, whatever, they'll get it right. But I guess the new thing is. So if you're in the developer beta stuff, you might have seen this and I think there's a whole beta now, but iOS, iPadOs,macOS, 18, 15 point, whatever, five. They're looking at actually improving Apple intelligence by using on device data about you. But it's Apple, so they'll do this in an Apple safe, we respect your privacy kind of a way. But I think this is the little conceptual hurdle I think people need to get over with AI, other than the obvious is it real or not kind of thing. But I, I've told this story before too, but this guy complained to me that he enabled Cortana and then it asked him to give him permission to look at his calendar and his contacts or whatever. And I was like, yeah, that's how it works. It can't do anything unless you tell it about yourself. And obviously that's going to even more true of AI because there's so much more data. But yeah. So I think Apple wanted this to be the most closed system thing imaginable, but they're coming around to this notion that, look, you're going to have to. If you're going to use this thing, you're going to have to.

[Richard Campbell]

They're trying to solve this a year after they said they had it solved.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, I'm not sure. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what they.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean the normal Apple pattern here is when they announced it at wwdc. It's going to ship in three months. It's already working. We're just putting the finishing touches on it. They announced something they just didn't have. They even showed a demo or something.

[Paul Thurrott]

Apparently they didn't have have having sat through the Longhorn demo of 2003. I hear what you're saying.

[Richard Campbell]

Listen, I'm used to Microsoft presenting fiction. I am not used to this version of Apple. Tim's Cook Apple presenting fiction.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, well you're putting me in the awkward position of defending Tim Cook and Apple, which I have to say I.

[Richard Campbell]

Don'T know everything about that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think maybe I just won't even do it. I feel like they were. We knew from the beginning it wasn't going to be immediate. And then we learned.

[Richard Campbell]

I felt like I had to make an announcement and then we get it figured out it would be a. Here we are staring the next WWDC in the face and they still haven't.

[Paul Thurrott]

Figured, yeah, I would imagine whatever the specific announcements for this year's show are, that the central premise is going to be we announce something and then we ship it in September and that's the end of it. I, I, I think they're going to go for that.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not going to preview anything they can.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think so. Because that did not, it was not received well. Yeah, it was not received well. Although, you know, to be fair to Apple, with the exception of this conversational Siri nonsense, which again, if you ever use Siri, I don't know what you thought was going to happen. I don't know what miracle you thought this was, but I think they've delivered by now everything they talked about except for that one thing. I mean, it's fine. I don't think it's changed anyone's life.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the question. The question we keep asking on MacBreak weekly is does it matter? Does Apple, Apple need, they made a mistake promoting something they couldn't deliver. Fine, yeah, yeah, but is anybody going to not buy an iPhone? Because Apple intelligence is not that intelligent.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but it may drag people away to other services. Right. So Apple, like there are two things Apple could do. They could just open up their OS entirely and allow third parties to integrate at various parts of the stack, which, you know, they don't want to do.

[Richard Campbell]

And aren't doing in the Apple way. Not at all.

[Paul Thurrott]

Not their Apple thing. I mean they don't like that. Or they could do what they did. But look, every Time Someone uses ChatGPT on an iPhone or Gemini or something and maybe then you oh, I can pay for that. Oh, and you have this other thing I might want to use. I mean, you're moving over to a place where maybe the iPhone isn't the important thing anymore. And so I think from that perspective they felt like they had to do it. The problem, I hate to use these kind of terms but I think it's just like lazy. But it's like table stakes at this point. They can't not have this because everyone else does. And I have to say to their credit, doing it in this kind of Apple privacy respecting way I think resonates with people regardless of its efficacy or whatever. I mean efficacy of AI, not efficacy of privacy protection.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there's even some question that it's deferential. Actual privacy thing they're using is not it really? Until you can be used safely and it could be used unsafely, it could be, it can leak information and it cannot leak Information. And with Apple not really being forthright about how exactly they're doing it, it's unknown, I guess.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But it sure sounds like there's an internal battle going on here too.

[Leo Laporte]

It does, doesn't it?

[Richard Campbell]

Different teams are working on different things and it's gone awry. It's very. Feels like a very bomber. Ask Microsoft.

[Paul Thurrott]

The thing what this reminds me of.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think it was the year after Steve Jobs passed away, or if it wasn't, it was within a couple years they shipped the first version of Apple Maps and it was a disaster. I just referenced this. The people would drive through a desert and there'd be no road or whatever. It wasn't very good. Now they've improved it since then, but Tim Cook went down to Scar Forestall, who was responsible for that and said, you need to apologize. And he's like, yeah, I'm not doing that. Says, well then you're fired. And this time around, no one's getting fired, you know, And I think maybe it's because the decision to do what they did at WWDC last year came from on high. Like, I think this time Tim Cook's not going to fire himself. I mean, he may not have come up with this idea, but he okayed it. You know, he was part of that.

[Leo Laporte]

Question about where John Giandre ended up.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, the guy. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But he might be in a roof having lunch, if you know what I mean sometimes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. So I think what will my guess, because this is what happens in all companies. This has happened at Apple too. You won't hear anything about him and then one day you'll find out he has quietly left Apple and maybe he wanted to spend more time with his family. Maybe he wanted to become an invest like a VC guy or something. Whatever it was, was moving on to.

[Richard Campbell]

Brass band, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yep. Is that a Jim Alin reference? Is that what that was?

[Richard Campbell]

That's what that was.

[Paul Thurrott]

Very nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Very nice. Yeah, yeah, so whatever. Anyway, he still has a title.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy. But he doesn't have the role. He doesn't have the operational role anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. Well, they wanted to put it on someone who can actually ship, like the guy from Vision Pro. Yikes. I'm sure I'll be fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Well now you're right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sure, it'll be fine.

[Richard Campbell]

We're all fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

So Adobe and Do I have the right link for this one? I do not. Oh yeah, I know I do. Good, good, good. So Adobe I have to say they've jumped in with two feet on this AI stuff. They've done it in an almost Apple like way in the sense that because they have this huge library of content that you can license legally and know that it's not taken from anybody or whatever, they've trained their models on that not. And they indemnify their customers against any complaints about anything that's created with their AI. So that's. That's amazing. Right. And they did not announce too many thing any. Well, they didn't announce anything specific, but they just made an announcement ahead of the Max show. And I think they. I don't think Max is a show they have once a year. I think Max might be a show they have up to two to three times a year. But the next Max is being held in London and end of April. April, a couple of weeks ago, I guess. And they're going to discuss this in more detail, but they talked about how they were going to bring agentic capabilities across their products. So Acrobat Express and then all the creative cloud stuff, especially Photoshop and Premiere Pro. And I gotta say, this feels really smart to me. These tools are complex.

[Richard Campbell]

You have to be, you know, sell yet another version.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And it's also how you can expand your audience because this will make these tools more accessible to less proficient professionals.

[Richard Campbell]

Have you played with the podcast tools that Adobe has?

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Richard Campbell]

They're astonishing.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I mean the number one over and above audition. What else do they have?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah, the new podcast AI tools. This does a transcript of the text of the podcast and then you edit the text and it edits the audio for.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was thinking, I mean, yeah. So I mean, Adobe, in my brain, I always go right to Photoshop and then Premiere. But obviously Acrobat PDF, that stuff is humongous. And they'll do all that summarize, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Generative AI. But the idea, like I'll do things like just something. It's like the Excel example I use where I use Excel once a year. Right. So every once in a while I have big letters and what I want is like a photo that's behind all of those letters, but not in the background. Right. So it's only in the letters, you know, and there's a name for that. There's a technique to do it and it's complicated and every time I have to do it, I have to look it up and I never remember what it is. But the notion of speaking or typing or however you do it and having it tell you, you know, it's like the thing we were talking about in Windows or an Office where in the beginning it will say this is how you do it. And then with these agents you'll say I want this to happen and it will just do it for, for you. That will make that kind of thing much more accessible and it might make people who might not otherwise have paid for these products say okay, actually now I can use this thing. Whereas I think for a lot of people they're overwhelming or they're expensive or both or whatever it might be. Maybe this opens this up to more people. It's kind of interesting. So I'm curious, I'm kind of looking forward to.

[Richard Campbell]

And this is one of the dreams all along, right? Is making these tools easier to. To use?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yep. I think they'll do pretty good. Adobe, this has been like the one non dramatic AI thing happening. Generative AI is controversial.

[Richard Campbell]

For a long time I just felt like Adobe was a place where software went to die.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

But they've hung onto a few pieces and they've the ones that make them enough money and then they switched over to cloud. Not with some. Without some resentment.

[Paul Thurrott]

How anything related to PDF is still a business is. Is unbelievable to me. But let me see if I can find this number. Six Adobe Acrobat. Three trillion PDF files in circulation. 650 million active users, what a dozen.

[Richard Campbell]

Other editors for PDF and so forth. Like the format's not going anywhere. I don't know much Adobe makes on it, but at least it's a gateway drug into their creative crowd.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it looks like it's pretty good somehow, but yeah, it's amazing to me. It's been a week, so Obviously there were 18 OpenAI announcements. I'm not going to even try to go through all these, but they've announced by my account at least 5 models since we last talked. They're going to retire GPT4. Sorry. Soon they have 4.1 models. They have 03 and 04 mini models now if you are a user, even a free user, you have an image library. So if you used ChatGPT, which used to be be just that standalone tool, Dall E. Right. But you can do it just in chatgpt now. I guess it will actually store your image library so you can go reference the things you've done in the past, which to me sounds like duh. Microsoft Designer already does that. There are rumors that OpenAI is going to create a social network now because I don't know why? Okay. And then I referenced this earlier in the show and Brad had a really good saying for this that I reference again later in the show called. It's something like AI is removing the moat. And what he meant was that AI is what's going to bring together all these disparate ecosystems where you can kind of mix and match and do whatever you want. So in this case, cloud or anthropic announced that their cloud models now integrate with Google Workspace. And what that means is you can ground this thing on your data, your work data as a company and of course it's all the permissions and all the stuff you would expect there. But you can now ask it questions about the document library that you have associated with Google Docs, the emails that you've sent, the schedule. This expanded out in every direction imaginable, meaning every AI, every email, every calendar, every set of documents that's in the cloud, storage, wherever. You know what I mean?

[Leo Laporte]

Does recall look like nothing at all?

[Paul Thurrott]

It takes screenshots. It's fun. I don't know. Would you. Problem man. It's cool. I don't know. Yeah, it's. It's kind of amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm also thinking about this GPD4 thing and thinking they're. They want to retire that to save themselves money. Like really? GPT4 looks like it was the peak.

[Paul Thurrott]

Of the, like, inefficient, inefficient giant, just.

[Richard Campbell]

Grab as much land as you can kind of mindset and now it's tuning and processing efficiency and organization.

[Leo Laporte]

But which is, here's the question. Is it getting better or is it just differentiating and changing? Changing. Is it actually getting.

[Richard Campbell]

How do you measure better?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I know, I know.

[Paul Thurrott]

What is better on the Flowers for Algernon scale. Are they still on the upward side of the slope or have they.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not getting dumber?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're getting more ubiquitous. They're doing more things.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think I said this before, but to me, one of the big successes of OpenAI and ChatGPT specifically is how ubiquitous it is. Yeah, I, going back in time, I would rate. We're in the industry so we have kind of a skewed view of where things are because we see things early and we use things that maybe aren't quite mainstream. But I remember a friend of mine asked me if he should get an ipod and this was three, four years in and it was like, wow, okay, I guess this has hit. This is normal. He loves music at tapes and CDs and cars and stuff. I was like, I think I want to get one of these. He's like, do you recommend this? I was like, yeah, these things are great. The number of normal people I know, meaning non technical, not in the industry, who use ChatGPT and actually pay for it is kind of astonishing to me.

[Leo Laporte]

It just comes up, asked me, can it do text now and images? And I said, yeah, it could do text now and images. I said, let me make an action figure for you, Lisa. Lisa.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Oh, nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, it can do text now, so it's better in that respect. But being able to make an action figure.

[Paul Thurrott]

She's really ripped. What happened?

[Leo Laporte]

I asked her to ask it to really beef her up.

[Paul Thurrott]

Toned.

[Leo Laporte]

Toned. The toned.

[Richard Campbell]

This action figure meme is killing me.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, we're burning forests to do this. You understand?

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, but look at. That's a cute image. And then it will be in two seconds, we'll be on to the next thing. It's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So that's my question. Is it getting better? I guess it's better at text.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think it is getting better because it's getting more diverse and it does more types of things. It rips off more forms of art. I mean, that's just clearly an evolution.

[Leo Laporte]

It's better at ripping off our ability.

[Richard Campbell]

To feel is getting better all the time. A couple of weeks ago on Net Rocks, we talked to Dr. Jodo Burchell specifically about. About how to measure the quality of different LLMs. Like, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the question. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You've got a working app running under GPT 3 + right now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

If I switch to 4, how do I know it's better?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

What does that even look like? And she went, she's, you know, one of the experts in the space. I'm very much of the machine learning person.

[Paul Thurrott]

The AI version, the Windows Experience Index or whatever they called it. The.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's a bunch of test suites. Like, these are the things you can test.

[Paul Thurrott]

Benchmarks. Yeah, that's what we need, more artificial benchmarks.

[Leo Laporte]

They have benchmarks.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I know, but like, so now we're going to do what we do with CPUs and GPUs. We're just going to like write these things to the benchmark.

[Richard Campbell]

Totally. 100%, you know, and oddly enough, it is a machine learning model, so it's particularly designed to get good at benchmarks.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. That's one of the questions is it's probably good enough. It could just lie and output the, you know. Exactly. Just artificially. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like when they use a Samsung to take a picture of the moon and it's somehow perfect every single time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that was amazing, wasn't it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, interesting. I mean, I think, you know, for the people using, it's like, who cares? I just want a picture of the moon. You could have just downloaded it from.

[Richard Campbell]

Basketball.Com had to work there. It had to realize that you were taking a picture of the moon and then had to decide what phase the moon was in.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have no idea. The image recognition technology.

[Leo Laporte]

Burning more forests as we speak.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hey, they're not going to burn themselves.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. That's true. I'm thinking of doing a section, a segment on our intelligent machine.

[Paul Thurrott]

How many forests have to die?

[Leo Laporte]

What? You know what, What I did this week to burn three forests.

[Paul Thurrott]

So maybe that's the measure we're looking for. It's like number of trees that had to die for this operation to occur successfully.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you really want to think about that? Because it really is kind of. It's.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, we've been looking for a way to destroy civilization with a meme, and apparently this is it.

[Leo Laporte]

Faster and faster, better and better.

[Paul Thurrott]

I want it to be efficient, but I also want it to be funny.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you get a good. So now we're trying this with the action figure meme. There you go. Get five more memes like this. Maybe we can get there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. How many megawatts does it use to do that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, Right. I don't know. And then Meta, which I think we can all agree is the most trustworthy computing technology firm on Earth, says that they will start training their AI models using EU data for the first time. Just kidding. They've been doing it all along, but now they're actually going to. They're going to.

[Richard Campbell]

Now they're willing to admit it.

[Leo Laporte]

Now we admit it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, because they're the best. Love those guys. In fact, if you Leo, ever want to start a meta podcast, definitely.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, just.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, just throw it out there.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny you say that because at our editorial meeting yesterday, one of our staff said, are we going to cover Meta's keynote? And I said, nope.

[Paul Thurrott]

My only request of such a podcast would be that everyone had to get a perm that was on the show. That would be the importance.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know why, Because, I mean, they're doing interesting stuff, but I just have no interest in covering, like, who I o. We're going to do Build. We should do. Right, we'll do the Build keynote.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, the Satya keynote's at 9am on Monday.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're going to do that. We're going to do Apple's keynote in June because that's going to be of great interest. What Apple, of course, what Apple says about what excuses Apple gives.

[Paul Thurrott]

I can't wait to see how they massage the Apple intelligence story.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, and by the way, I should mention it for people who are saying, oh, good, Apple has now really tried to take us down a bunch of times for doing the Apple keynotes.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like it's become a kind of a cute tradition you guys have. It's. Yeah, it's fun.

[Leo Laporte]

So we stopped doing it on YouTube because we had a lawyer, an actual person say, you know, we're gonna ding you. So we stopped doing on YouTube and then they did it to us on Twitch and we thought, you know what, we can't do this anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So all the keynotes now are going to be in the club, only we're doing in the club. Twit discord. The advantage of that is people will be able to, to participate. The disadvantage is if you're not a member of the club, you won't see it. So this, all of these keynotes we will stream. Mike and I are going to do the Apple one. If you guys want to do the Build one, I think you're probably going to be at build, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. But if you want to do it with us, we can, but we'll do that in the club as opposed to in public. If you're not a member of the club. This is another reason to join. Now.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is like when the guys from MST went off and did their own, you know, went kind of went off.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And they would, you, you'd have to have like a DVD of the movie and then you would play their soundtrack somehow simultaneously.

[Leo Laporte]

And it was like, copyright's a pain.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's hard. That stuff's hard.

[Leo Laporte]

And honestly, this is fair. It really should, because we're doing journalism, we're covering it and we're reporting on it.

[Paul Thurrott]

You feel, you feel like there's some kind of a fair use argument to be made there. I mean, obviously, like, I don't even understand the argument otherwise.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. And we even say, hey, if you.

[Leo Laporte]

Want an uncommon commentated version of this keynote, Apple's streaming it live. You can watch it there.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's plenty of places to see that. You know, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

To date, nobody else has complained, but Apple has so vociferously that we decided, well, why take the chance? Because Honestly, if we got kicked off YouTube that would be problematic.

[Richard Campbell]

Is an issue.

[Leo Laporte]

We stream on all those platforms, including Meta by the way. Facebook and LinkedIn. And meta. Meta and everywhere and Meta. Meta. We don't stream on Instagram because we can't figure it out. TikTok stream on TikTok streaming.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hello, TikTok. We missed something.

[Leo Laporte]

What? Did you get all the AI in?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. No, I just was looking at the notes. I screwed something up and then I missed the story and I gotta clean it up before you come back.

[Richard Campbell]

Gonna be all right.

[Leo Laporte]

Aren't you happy? Ladies and gentlemen, you winners and dozers, you are watching the fabulous Windows Weekly. We do this every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. And yes, you can watch it live on in our discord but on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok X dot com, Facebook, LinkedIn and something else that I can't remember did.

[Paul Thurrott]

I left. Oh, you finally missed one.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, damn it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I thought this was yours. This was like this. Your superpower. What happened?

[Leo Laporte]

Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick X.com and TikTok. There we go.

[Richard Campbell]

8 Twitch.

[Leo Laporte]

I mentioned Twitch. So if you want to watch live you can, but obviously it's a podcast, so really there's no. The only reason you would watch live is so that you could be in the chats on these respective platforms. And I have this wonderful unified chat interface so I can see all the nasty things everybody's saying on all the different platforms.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's no better form of feedback then live feedback.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go. The best.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember we've mentioned this before when I taught Regis Philbin how to tweet, he was so excited about it for about a week and then he realized that people were saying, not everybody was saying nice things. I'm not doing this anymore. You got to have a little bit of a thick skin to be in the public.

[Richard Campbell]

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[Leo Laporte]

All right, back to the program at hand. I think this would be a good time for Paul Thurat to break out his Xbox chops.

[Paul Thurrott]

Paul this is a big week for Xboxing games. Yeah, big week. So there is an Xbox app on mobile which on the face of things sounds kind of ludicrous because you could do almost nothing with it. And part of the problem is that of course Microsoft doesn't want to put or can't put on iOS I guess paid stuff through there or couldn't because of the app Store rules and blah blah blah whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

30% Apple took chunk.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. But that is going away and they're not saying what happened if anything. So they are going on iOS and Android allow users to purchase games meaning Xbox ecosystem games for PC or console.

[Leo Laporte]

That's fantastic.

[Paul Thurrott]

Subscribe to Game Pass which these are paid things like normally Apple or who or Google would get a 30% whatever you know and I don't they didn't address if there's been some kind of an agreement or a change on the back end or I don't know. But these things are changing so that's actually really cool. That's a question.

[Richard Campbell]

What did he mean when he said this is an Xbox?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well as you know everything's an Xbox now. It's not confusing at all. In fact they've made it simple.

[Richard Campbell]

No I don't know Xbox games on my phone speaks to everything might just be an Xbox.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well but it also speaks to something happened I don't know. And that thing is not Microsoft agreed to pay the fee so I guess we'll find out. That's kind of interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

They didn't need the 30%. They're not.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's no way they're reading the 30%. That's too much money. Or even if it was 15, whatever this is. No way. So we'll see. We'll definitely hear more about that one. The thing I forgot to put in the notes, or didn't see when I did the notes, is there's a stream your own game feature that Xbox has been testing for consoles. It's now available publicly. It's not every single game you own, unfortunately. There's a licensing thing there, I guess. But there are over 100 Xbox games that. That aren't available on Game Pass, but are available to stream if you own.

[Leo Laporte]

So if I own it on my Xbox, I can then not install it on my iPad or what?

[Paul Thurrott]

So you stream it on your Xbox but you don't install it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you don't install it.

[Paul Thurrott]

So in other words. Yeah, you go to that same interface that you would use for cloud streaming, like Microsoft calls cloud gaming, because cloud streaming is too obvious. And whatever games you have in your library, you've paid for it digitally. Right. Are there. So that's cool. And then they're adding, I guess 19. I don't know if they added them already. They're coming soon. But there's a big list. There's over 100 now. So that's interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

I got an idea.

[Leo Laporte]

That's cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

And actually I should say, sorry, it's not just your console. These work on Samsung Smart TVs, Amazon Fire TVs, Metacost headsets, Xbox app. Yeah, wherever Xbox can stream, I guess. So. That's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's neat.

[Paul Thurrott]

I hadn't seen. I just saw that when you were doing the ad. So I'm not completely up on it, but I know they were testing this and apparently now it's available in stable, so there must be a new system update or whatever. Yeah, there is. So. Yep. And there's a couple other small things, but that's big. I mean, that's a big one. That's good. It is the second half of April. So now we have. Am I doing things out of order? I think I am. Let me look at this again. Yep. So now we have a new set of Game Pass titles coming across console, PC and cloud. And there's an Activision game in there, guys. The original version of Modern Warfare 2 is available and that means you can stream it if you have cloud gaming through Xbox. God, there's so many Games names Xbox Game Pass ultimate, which I think is a first for that game. You can. It's PC.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to play Crime Scene Clean.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, I saw it. That's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

What the.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like the Dexter kind of game or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not a game, that's a job.

[Paul Thurrott]

Neither is mowing a lawn. But that's a game too, right?

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lawn mowing game.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, there's a lawn mowing simulator.

[Richard Campbell]

Some people find that stuff fun.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, it's crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

You know what. Far Cry 4, but, you know, before Shark.

[Paul Thurrott]

Grand Theft Auto 5, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the greatest game of all time at this point, right? How many. How many mil? How many? Millions and millions, I believe.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's what, number two best selling game of all time, I think after Minecraft. Or it's right up there. Either way.

[Leo Laporte]

Cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So, yeah, the 20, this is.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, and Dredge, I played.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's right. Wait. Oh, sorry. My laurent wrote this as the more recent game. I'm sorry, maybe I'm wrong about the game. This is Modern Warfare 2 2. I know, but the more. I guess it's the more recent version. I'm not. I'm not actually sure looking at that. Somebody out there will.

[Leo Laporte]

Can you tell from the album art, I mean, does that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't see, that's what I. That's the reason I thought it was the. Let me look it up.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, where is it? Oh, there it is. It's the M with a skull on it, man.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, but I thought that was the old one. No, I guess it's the new one. I'm sorry. So Modern Warfare 3, the new one, and Black Ops 6, the latest are on, you know, Game Pass, etc. So now Modern Warfare 2 is coming there. That's actually pretty. Okay, so that's good too. That suggests that it must be the full game, so they must still have multiplayer that works, et cetera. So that's interesting. That suggests. So I have, you know, Call of Duty installed on a couple of PCs. I would imagine that will become available. That means I'm going to get another 130 gig update. That's great. Thanks, Microsoft.

[Richard Campbell]

Excellent.

[Paul Thurrott]

Congratulations.

[Richard Campbell]

Good. We're all fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

You figured out a way to make me dread Activision games coming to Game Pass. That's fine. Anyway, that's a good one. This is a good, good set of games.

[Richard Campbell]

What if some of these titles end up making an iOS version and now it's coming through your iOS device? Maybe there is a way for them to make Money. When the iOS version is available, you can buy it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I actually wonder if the future of Call of Duty isn't the mobile version. And in the same way that you can play against PC and PlayStation, maybe.

[Richard Campbell]

This first story here about Xbox on mobile is a setup. It's a setup you're preparing the landscape for, being able to facilitate those games.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's definitely something going on. That's the thing.

[Richard Campbell]

It's bizarre to me that everybody's on board for.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So we'll see. We'll see what comes out of this. I think there's. Yeah, something's going on that's kind of interesting. The latest Doom game is coming up out in mid May, so actually about a month from now.

[Richard Campbell]

Sorry, why is there a new Doom game?

[Paul Thurrott]

Why? Because they have to complete the trilogy. I don't know. The new games are okay.

[Richard Campbell]

New Half Life two game and then the world really has gone insane.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I. I mean the new Doom games are modern and different and whatever, but this one looks like it's more of a back to basics type thing from a playability perspective, which honestly I think is pretty smart. Yeah. But Microsoft is coming out with some Doom or like themed console and then some controllers. So if you're really into Doom and want everything to look like that, I.

[Richard Campbell]

Know someone who will buy this.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think we all know someone who will buy it. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Interesting. So that's kind of cool. And then is there more? There's more, right? Yep. See, if you're not comfortable with Xbox exclusive games going to the consoles, you might want to block yours. Sea of Thieves is going to Battle.net, which is Blizzard, which is part of Activision, which is part of Microsoft, So it's not that bad, I guess. But Battle.net is that console or just PC? I think it's probably just PC. Right. Battle.net, i'm not really sure. I think so. And then I've looked at my own. I'm like. And then Meta will start training. It's like, no, that doesn't seem right. And then Sony is raising the price of their consoles in a lot of places. Places all over Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Probably because of the tariffs. Right. I think we can just blame everything on that now, obviously.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So if you hadn't bought one by now, good luck. It's going to get more expensive.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't understand why it's only in certain locales though.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I don't know why either, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

It might have to do with Tariffs, maybe.

[Paul Thurrott]

It might actually have to do with tariffs because they're the. The processors and the chipsets, the graphics are all from amd, right? Yes. Which is US Based.

[Richard Campbell]

You're not. Okay, so they're buying the parts from the US I don't know that. Be the terrorists.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's Europe, uk, Australia and New Zealand.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. This makes no sense. You're talking about a Japanese company.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't have tariffs with Japan, presumably.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love. It's like a Japanese company selling a product that. Yes. Is made with some American company components, but also a lot of other components.

[Richard Campbell]

And the American.

[Paul Thurrott]

In countries that are not the United States.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. When the United States puts on tariffs, it's for their imports, not their exports. So why are we raising prices again?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, like the Trump administration, you obviously don't understand how trade taxes work. Let me explain it. No, just like a friend of mine, ex Microsoft guy, I think on Facebook said something like. Yeah. He said. Yeah. So I went and I bought a bagel. So now I have a $5 trade deficit with the bagel shop. So I'm going to have reciprocal tariffs. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Make them pay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. They owe me 1845. That's how trade tariffs work. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Smart.

[Richard Campbell]

It's going to be fine. Everything's fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Everything's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything's fine, Richard. That's good. I like it.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's why you don't get it.

[Richard Campbell]

Playoffs. Everything's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

The Oilers, are they going? Are they on their way?

[Richard Campbell]

The Oilers are going. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Bloody McDavid. But look. And the Canucks are not in. So I pretty much enforce the trail for the Oilers because I am not cheering for the Leafs.

[Leo Laporte]

Never.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm pretty sure you've just described different kinds of sushi. I don't even know what you're talking about anymore. Canuck.

[Leo Laporte]

When I was a kid, I had one of those.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is that like a kind of oyster? What is that?

[Leo Laporte]

Those hockey games where you had sticks and they were attached to a player and you'd spin the stick and the player.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah, of course.

[Leo Laporte]

Then you hit the puck. I loved that game. And it was always the Maple Leafs versus the Canadiens.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. Of course.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've only saw like the soccer version was like the way you spin the players around.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Foosball. Yeah. This was great. It was a really fun hockey game.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Really enjoyed that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Air hockey. The air hockey game, though, was good, too. The way that would actually hover above the table a little bit. Like, you know, like, that's. That's pretty.

[Leo Laporte]

It took a little More energy though than this one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Plus you could hit right in the forehead with that thing if you did it right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was fun though. If you really spun the player fast, you could hit the puck out of the, out of the, into the wall.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, of course, that was always.

[Paul Thurrott]

That could have been my skull.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, it's time for me to say a little something, something about our great club, Club Twit. We want you to join Club Twit. Seven bucks a month and now we've added the $84 a year plan. Why should you join those legitimate? I mean, if I'm asking for your money, here's why. The primary reason is even though we have ads, they are not sufficient to pay for it, everything. So we have to make up the gap. And that's why we created the club two years ago and that's why we continue to do the club. And it's been great. We have had to cut back. You know, you notice we might have shut down the studio and laid off people and things like that, but we, but we're doing our part to, you know, tighten our belt. And thanks to our Club Twit members, we're able to keep, at least keep doing these shows. I hope you appreciate them, I hope you like them. If you join the club, you get ad free versions of all the shows. I hate it when somebody charges you for something and then still plays an ad. So you don't get the ads. You don't even get this, you know, solicitation. You just get the shows pure and simple. You get a custom URL just for you with the ad free versions of the shows. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord. A great hang. It's kind of my favorite social network now because there's smart people, you know, it's kind of a self selecting crowd of smart interest. People who right now are doing mostly just playing foosball it looks like in the club. But it is a great place to hang out. There's also special events that we do. I mentioned we're going to be doing keynotes from now on in the club like wwc, dc, Build, Google I O. We also have Micah's crafting corner that's coming up. We do that every month. Micah, I think he's building Lego succulents right now. But you don't have to be doing Lego. You can do any craft. Join Micah tonight, 6pm p.m. pacific, 9pm Eastern for just a chill hang. Friday, it's coffee time. YouTube coffee star Liz Happy Beans joins Coffee Geek Mark Prince and me to Talk Coffee at 1pm Pacific on Friday. Again, these are all club exclusives. The AI user group on the fourth Friday of every month we talk about how we use AI hands on tech. Stacy's book club is coming up next month. The WWDC keynote. We'll add the other keynotes into that. So that's all special stuff for club members only, which I love. I love. But the biggest reason to join the club is for the animated gifts. No, the biggest reason to join the club is because you will get the warm and fuzzy feeling that you're helping create these shows. Put them on the air and we really appreciate it. Now I should say we did bring back the annual and we are right now in the process probably. I think we're gonna ask for a little more in the club starting soon because costs are going up. But what we're gonna do is guarantee that if you subscribe now that this price stays so you won't get an increase if you're already a member. New members only. Okay. New and returning members. So. So don't give up your club membership. And if you're not a member, sign up now to get to lock in that $7 a month. I think it's a very, very reasonable amount. You get an awful lot, I believe. We hope you do too. Twit TV club. Twit. Now back to the program already in progress. We start the back of the book portion of the program with Paul Thorazde. Tip of the week, Paul.

[D]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Paul Thurrott]

I did it self censoring here. Last week I wrote these back to back articles about kind of like I didn't, it wasn't really meant to be a theme but it was kind of like this notion of alternatives to these big tech, monolithic, monolithic platforms, yada, yada, yada. And I wrote this thing that I wrote, whatever and I was like okay. And then it triggered this memory and ended up writing a second one. And in the early 2000s when I was working at Windows IT Pro, I think a lot of Microsoft guys who were involved in it kind of fell into this trap a little bit, especially back then where you started thinking like I'm going to manage my home, like it's the workplace. I'm going to have a managed environment, maybe active directory if it was that long ago or intune maybe if it's more recently or something. And I'm going to, my family is all going to sign in with these accounts and blah blah, blah. And they try to do that. You go through this, right? And so I went through various, what.

[Richard Campbell]

I did, my children came to me saying apparently I need to speak to my administrator.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So you know, like okay. And look, if you think about the history of this stuff, like in the early, very early 1980s, VisiCalc know drove Apple to sales into businesses, right. Where this thing was personal computing. And then the success of Windows and office in the 90s I think kind of turned it in the other direction where people wanted to get these computers at home and so they could run some of the same software they had at work. I remember my wife, my wife owned a, like a PS1, like IBM, those little crappy computers they sold at Sears. And so she could have WordPerfect, right. Which is what she was using at work, like dos version of WordPerfect. And you know, we've been doing this ever since then, like you know, and look as we call it insuredification now. But you know, one form of insuredification that we certainly get from Microsoft is they made a switch. I'd have to think about the exact. I think it was Office 2000 where they were targeting businesses, not individuals by this point. So it kind of went from enthusiasts to mainstream individuals and features, features, features and then businesses and then enterprises. And so when Microsoft does this stuff in Office or Windows where they're pointing you in certain directions. Yes, that's terrible in all kinds of levels. But a lot of it has to do with this kind of centralized control or whatever over users which as an individual it's like. I don't know, it's weird to me.

[Richard Campbell]

Apple didn't even mention Windows Home Server. Like that was a good couple.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, that was. Well, I could go through the whole lineage there. I had an active server domain with literal Windows Server whatever vert Standard edition probably. I did small business server with. Sometimes with multiple machines. I had Rack mounted stuff. I did Centro, which was the. The medium business server. I can't remember the. What they should. Under what name that was enhanced.

[Richard Campbell]

The ebc.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. And. And you know, and of course home. All the home server permutations, including the stuff that came afterwards, which was essentials, like Windows Server Essentials I think was the name of it. Maybe at some point or whatever those things were. I went through every version of this. Every version. But the thing is we've always had alternatives. You could have bought a Mac at any time in this thing. There's a whole ecosystem there, obviously. But I feel like right now we're in this golden age of these solutions and I don't think we talked about this last week, but when you look at stuff like Notion. So Notion just came out with Notion mail, which is actually my op. Pick in a minute. Proton has that whole suite of stuff Slack, you know, whatever. You know, you can kind of mix and match now.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Alternate web browsers is something that comes up all the time. Opera just update their browsers.

[Richard Campbell]

Temporary hardware for a home server now is a Synology or.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. And that's by the way, that was my end game. Well, it will be my end game. I went to a. A WD nas which is basically unmanaged really. But the next thing I do will be a synology. NAS for sure. Yeah, of course. And it's simpler and it does what you want and it's. I would call that more of a prosumer product than like a business product. Right. Like a, you know, Microsoft looks at things from a certain way, you know. And anyway the theme there is just like you're not an enterprise. So like why are you acting like one? Like, like why, you know, why are.

[Richard Campbell]

You doing this to yourself?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So I only did it when I was down to just managing she who Must be Obeyed. And listen, that's a failure path. Stop. It's not going to work out for you.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, same.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I never fully pulled the trigger on this. I think there was an understanding, like I Did. I had this thing and it was run and I had different things running for many, many years. And for a lot of it, it was really just for me, which was stupid, but it's just too much. You know how it is. Like your wife walks in your room and you're like. And she's like, I can't print or I can't. You know, like, you just. You don't want to have these conversations. You know, it's like, I just want to get life. I want to get. I have to get going.

[Richard Campbell]

Get rid of the network printer. What are you doing? Yeah, like you need a scanner. Here's a USB one. Plug it in, it's yours. I don't want to know about it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. Same. Yeah. No. All right, so at home in Pennsylvania. That's right, same. She has all this stuff upstairs. I don't even know what it is. I don't even care if I really.

[Richard Campbell]

Need to print something. And almost never do. I walk up with a usb, speak to her machine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I just email it. But, yep, life is too short. Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just too short.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just not worth it. So. And on that note, so Notion Mail just came out. So they've been working on this for a while. They bought a company. They Notion Calendar now. Love Notion. I think I just asked this last week or the week before, when is Notion going to start charging me? And this is the answer because Notion Mail requires Notion AI to do anything. It's a front end for Gmail only. I think it's. They don't say this, but I think it's. It might always only be a front end for Gmail. It's AI powered, so it does all kinds of cool views and stuff. But if you want to do your own customizations to it, you have to pay for Notion AI. I'm not going to, but it's interesting. I don't really use. I mean, this is the. Notion A is not something you pay for to use in mail. It's something you pay for to use across Notion. Right. So Notion is the app App, but it's also with Calendar and now Mail. So they're starting to build this little suite. You know, it's interesting to me that they don't have their own email service. Right. They're going to just use Gmail. Gmail's free. I mean, you know, it's hard to argue with, but you would have to pay for Notion AI for this to make any sense. And, you know, if you use Notion.

[Richard Campbell]

As much, still aren't doing and it confuses me.

[Paul Thurrott]

It confuses me too. I feel like at some point I'm going to try to add a page or a note or whatever they call it. They're going to be like, oh, you hit the limit, you have 1 million notes and you have to pay. You go over a million, you got to pay you. It boggles my mind that this hasn't happened.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know why they haven't pinged you and said, here's a free license. Tell us how to just remind everyone how awesome we are.

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go. Well, that would be another. I would be okay with that too. But I don't know. I guess at some point if I end up paying for Notion and this Notion AI is part of that thing, paying for it and thus it makes Notion mail makes sense. I guess I would look at it, but for now they have a web client and a Mac client. They will have an iOS client soon. They've never said anything about Windows or Mac. I can tell you the web app is installable. It's a pwa. So you can have a sort of app, but you're not going to get that offline. Whatever experience, obviously. Well, maybe not obviously. I shouldn't say that. I'm actually not even sure. Maybe you can. I don't know. It's certainly a possibility, but I don't know. I think just only working with Gmail is a little self limiting. But maybe that was smart on their part. I'm not really sure. Something to look at anyway. Especially if you use Gmail.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. My frustration is I sign up to notionmail with a non Gmail account and it won't let me use that. I have to. It says, well then you have to be signed in with your Gmail account and you can't combine them. No, no. Oh God, very frustrating.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, that's not good.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not. I'd like to try it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. You can't have two. You can't have two accounts signed into the Notion app, can you? I bet you can't.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I can't figure it out. Every time I try to do it, it says no, no, you have to be using your Gmail account.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. This is a hard computer science problem.

[Leo Laporte]

It's fine. I didn't really want Notion mail, so I'm okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

But how would do you know?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. Well, that's the thing. I want to see what the AI integrations do and all that stuff. And I pay for Notion.

[Paul Thurrott]

Notion has a good vibe to it. Kind of a minimalist kind of look, you know, I've been trying.

[Leo Laporte]

I set up a local wiki that I'm serving from the house and I'm trying to move everything over to that.

[Paul Thurrott]

But it's a local wiki. What do you.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I mean, it's also on the net.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I know, but you're hosting it yourself.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean I'm hosting self hosted wiki.

[Paul Thurrott]

So what's the software? What's.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't remember. It's a. I'll tell you in a sec. I mean it's like.

[Paul Thurrott]

What's this? What's the. Is this on Linux or like.

[Leo Laporte]

It's on Linux. I have a little server and it's running in the background and I have a. You are a domain. I guess you could go there. Laporte wiki. And then you would see my wiki but you wouldn't be able to use it because you have to have a log.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

But the theory is I should be able to replace pretty much everything I do with notion with my own self hosted stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, yep. And there's probably all kinds of. I know. Notion. That's the thing that they created something. It's very sticky.

[Leo Laporte]

It's sticky. But it bugs me because all the data is on their server. It's not.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Which is part of the quest. Right. So whether it's Obsidian or. There's a bunch of these. Any type I think is one. There's a bunch.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, no, I, you know, I started moving stuff over. It's just. I have a lot to move. I have a lot of notion. There's a lot in notion I've been using.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like trying to move between music services. If you made a couple of playlists, you're screwed, man.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, they're tools to do it, but it's ends up being a pain in the butt.

[Richard Campbell]

Nothing.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but the tools stink. Like they just. It's so many mistakes every time. It's really. It's bad.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's my laporte family wiki with us.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's how I know it's a mirror. Oh my God. Oh no. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how I know it's mine. But I for. I forgot my password. So I can't remember what I. I can't remember what software I use is. It's some. You know, it's. I think it's a Docker. It's a Docker container running it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I always have to leave notes for myself. Of how to fix a Docker thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I know.

[Richard Campbell]

I'll never remember.

[Leo Laporte]

It's easy to set up. I mean, that's the beauty of it. It's really easy to set up as.

[Richard Campbell]

Soon as anything goes wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

If anything goes wrong, you don't know what you did.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah. And I always figure it out and get it working again. And I just have to write a note to myself and read there. It's like, hey, dummy, read this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oops, I got the wrong two factor. I'm hoping, like, somewhere I'll see what. What it is. Yeah, I got it. Go back. That page does not exist.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

What? That page exists. All right. Anyway, anywho, I think it's time for Richard to run his radio. Sorry to bog down the show with my stupid wiki. Go ahead.

[Richard Campbell]

Tech support problems. I did a show with my friend Barbara Forbes. Been on before.

[Leo Laporte]

Wiki js Sorry, it just said it. Wiki js yes, Barbara Forbes. Tell me about. Tell me more.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it's from a talk she did called how not to hate a PowerShell, which I thought was hilarious. So don't use it. No.

[Paul Thurrott]

PowerShell is awesome. No, I'm PowerShell.

[Richard Campbell]

PowerShell is great.

[Leo Laporte]

Why would you hate it?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, here's how you do this. And one of the things it's pointed to is how sophisticated organizations are getting with PowerShell. What's happening is that senior people are building more and more sophisticated PowerShell scripts to the point where nobody can maintain them. They're just too complicated. There's too many moving parts. And so you get in a situation where the juniors try to do something, they get into trouble, the senior has to bail them out, and eventually it's like, don't touch it. Just leave it alone. Which is exactly the same track week get into in traditional software development all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And so we fight against that with good documentation, practices simplification, like keeping stuff organized so that other people can maintain it. And that's just not a thing that administrators necessarily think about. So it's just become this odd reality that PowerShell is now at a point where they're having the same problems that software developers have. And where.

[Leo Laporte]

Because this software, it is software. Software, Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And so just the. The other one we got into was, you know, they're getting good enough with the tool, they're starting to do really challenging things and often trying to get to that 100% perfect solution that is incredibly complex, where the 80% solution was simple to maintain, easy to understand, and the 20% you have to do by hand is not that much work. So why do you care? Right. So it was just trying to strike that balance, sort of what's a reasonable thing to do with these solutions scripts and how do you make it so that the team can take care of it? And so as much as it was sort of a gag going in, it turned into a really solid conversation about being responsible inside your organization.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it. I might have to listen to that one.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a keeper. I really enjoyed it. And it's like one of one of those things where we just run around and it's like, wait, this is actually important and profound.

[Leo Laporte]

How did that happen for all programmers? And I mean, this applies to all tools, really.

[Richard Campbell]

Without a doubt. We get into this problem every time, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Runasradio.com for the latest run as episode 980. I am excited about this whiskey of the week.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, yes, yes, yes. We'll call this the MVP series. Right? Because these are all the whiskeys that I got while I was at the MVP summit.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody brought you something. Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

This looks like this is from fellow MVP John White. From who? I. Hawaii. And it's called the 12th Hawaii Distillers Distiller Reserve. And so a little bit about Hawaii. We should probably do this. So this, if you didn't keep, weren't keeping track. There's 137 islands in the Hawaiian chain.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Richard Campbell]

Wow. It's more than you think. Most of them, of course, uninhabited. There are eight main islands. And really we're just going to talk about one, the big one, Hawaii itself.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is not where Honolulu is or any of the big city stuff. That's Oahu. This is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's Oahu. This is Hawaii proper, which is the third largest Polynesian island. Which begs the question, what are the first two? The first two are the north and south islands of New Zealand. Well, they're all considered Polynesian islands.

[Leo Laporte]

And is that where all of the Polynesian diaspora came from originally was New Zealand, do you think?

[Richard Campbell]

No, no. The Polynesians got to Hawaii before they got to New Zealand, became the mountain Maori. Oh. There's pretty clear evidence that the Polynesians arrived in the Hawaiian islands in the 1100s, and they didn't get to New Zealand until the 1300s.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They were a seafaring tribe, though.

[Richard Campbell]

They were. And traveled absolutely everywhere. There's an argument that they made it all the way to South America and the genetics seem to support that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Do they know where they originated?

[Richard Campbell]

The Polynesian island, the original Polynesian Islands are adjacent to the Philippine Sea and that is area in Indonesia. All of those smaller islands.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's very cool.

[Richard Campbell]

It's amazing and extraordinary. People navigating with. With simple products. They had the chicken, they brought the chicken with them, and they brought the chicken with them. They spread the chicken around. And one argued that they also were the reason the pineapple propagated as far as it has. But that's getting into really old history. The big Hawaiian island is not heavily populated because it has massive volcanoes on it, including. Including Kilauea, which has been erupting since 1983. And you. You go to watch that volcano do its thing. Mauna Loa, which is the largest volcano on Earth, is actually the largest mountain on Earth. If you measure from the sea floor to its top, it's bigger than Everest. And it's more than half of the total Hawaiian island of Hawaii itself. Supposedly the island is named for the the legendary Polynesian navigation Hawaii. Aloa, who supposedly discovered the island in the 1100s. And it was run as a kingdom more or less for centuries. The first Europeans to arrive was likely James cook in the 1700s, who also died there in an altercation with the natives. Although ultimately the crew was able to settle things up and leave successfully. And then of course, in 1898 it was annexed by the United States as a territory Hawaii. And in 1959 became the fifth 50th state. So while it's the biggest island by a long way, it's more than 60% of the total mass of all of the islands combined. Only about 13%, about 200,000 people live on that island, really in two main population centers. Hilo in the east, which is the state, the island capital, and sort of the rainy part of the island. And then on the west is Kalawa Kona on the slopes of one of the volcanoes. And that is where the distillery is. So the 12th Hawaiian distiller is called that because it is. Is the 12th distillery built on the Hawaiian Islands and the first one on Kona since the 1950s.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't think of whiskey in Hawaii.

[Richard Campbell]

No, nor should you. And we can debate whether this is whiskey at all. Oh, so Dave Puckett created it. He was actually comes from a family of distillers, but didn't want to be a distillery. Actually worked in construction his whole life, living a big chunk of it in Hawaii. And as he was getting close to retirement age, started experimenting with distillation in the early2010.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's brand new.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And only set up the shop licensed in 2017. Oh, now is this whiskey? It sure looks like whiskey, doesn't it? Except that it is honey.

[Leo Laporte]

What it's really mead.

[Richard Campbell]

This is mead. Exactly. This is distilled mead. So really what they would call honey shine. So arguably we are talking about the very original, original alcohol. Alcohol. Because if you take honey and you heat it up to a certain amount, not particularly hot, maybe 120 degrees or so with a lot of water. Typically you want to mix five to one water. That helps break down the honey and be and suspend the sugars properly so that it can be digested by yeast. But you have to cool it down a bit and give it 120. It would kill the yeast off. You need to be about 9590 and the yeast will propagate and ferment is in the yeast end. All of these alcohols are made by a yeast consuming sugar. The question is what is the sugar source? In this case honey is one of the original sugar sources. So there's evidence now that going in the of evidence of a naturally occurring alcohol by water and honey being combined with yeast going back 20,000 years.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Before agriculture, before even pottery.

[Leo Laporte]

Pottery, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

There we've, we had some forms of alcohol in this way. There are documents from China from 7,000 BC showing making a form of meat out of honey and water and rice. And of course Pliny the Elder wrote about his preferred drink being a form of mead in ancient Greece and played a big role in early England as well, particularly around in Wales. In fact, when you research mead for a little while you find out there's over a hundred names, names for a honey beer, a mead type thing. Because so many cultures developed it themselves in so many ways.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm kind of surprised. I mean Hawaii is known for sugar cane.

[Richard Campbell]

It is now. But you know, it also had its own set of these and and so had a lot of honey available to it. Which begs the question, why isn't mead and honey related liquors more popular than they are today? And there's a pretty simple reason for it. Because the sugar cane and grains are cheaper and easier to grow. Honey is an inconsistent product. In the end, it's bee vomit. And bees are fairly difficult to manage. They don't produce when you want them to produce. They only make so much, they can abruptly die and their product is inconsistent. So making a, I can say consistent product from honey is very challenging. And so it. As soon as we had simpler ways to do it, we did. And so that's why you just don't See a whole lot of it around. That being said, this is what 12th Hawaii does and actually they make a set of products. So they're our sort of root product is true Honey Shine, which is a honey ferment made with yeast that's passed four times through there still, which is a kind of column still. And that's it. It's not that particular sweet, but it is a 50 alcohol. It's a moonshine essentially, but it's called Honey Shine. You take that same product made that same way and you combine it with a bit of Kona coffee, so domestically grown coffee, and you get their Kona coffee spirit.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, now I'm. Now I'm interested. That sounds good.

[Richard Campbell]

And then they make a vodka. So their vodka is again the same approach, but a seven time distilled. So a much higher alcohol combined with a local purple potato, which is some of the original Peruvian type potatoes, to make a distinctive vodka. And then the fourth product is this distiller's reserve. So back to the Honey Shine. But when they were making it, they switched to a whiskey yeast, which has a bit of a stronger flavor. And then what really made it whiskey ish is they age it in Kawaii wood, which is a domestic. Domestic wood of Hawaii, actually. No, it's an invasive wood. It's originally from South America.

[Leo Laporte]

Most of the stuff on Hawaii I found out is invasive. It's not native.

[Richard Campbell]

It's pretty invasive. And it was brought from South America in the 19th century. It's pretty much adapted to Hawaii. They're not trying to eliminate anymore. But it's not an oak. It's actually a cousin of mesquite.

[Leo Laporte]

Huh.

[Richard Campbell]

And so Kauaia wood is very popular as a smoking wood.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

But if you get the bigger trees, you can can cut barrels from it. And that's what they're doing at the 12th Hawaii Distillers Reserve is they're making domestic barrels which they toast very much the same style as a bourbon barrel and then do aging with it.

[Leo Laporte]

So they make a Honey Shine, which is clear is the only difference between the Honey Shine and the whiskey. The barrels.

[Richard Campbell]

And they use a different yeast otherwise.

[Leo Laporte]

A whiskey yeast. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So different yeast. Yeast.

[Leo Laporte]

And does that give it a different character?

[Richard Campbell]

The yeast plays a role.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Remember. But remember, generally if the sugars are all digested, which typically they are by the bacteria, you don't have a lot of sweetness there. In fact, often in traditional meads, they'll add additional honey after the fast.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't taste like honey.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, there's no sweetness left there. Now this. Having a taste of this. So it smells like bourbon. It's sweet, right? You would swear it's corn. It's got that same kind of sweet sweetness. And it is 45% alcohol, but really no burn on the mouth at all. It still smells sweet and tasty. There's a little spice to it. That's gotta be wood. And it's a different. It's not the oak wood. Yeah. It's got that kind of interesting wood flavor to it. It heats up as it goes down. So you've definitely drank something again. At 45% is not incredibly high.

[Paul Thurrott]

But.

[Richard Campbell]

But this is really cool. This is a neat drink. There's two problems with it. The first is it's 85 bucks. Oh. The second is it is available nowhere outside of the Hawaiian island.

[Leo Laporte]

Awesome. You got to go or go to the MVP summit. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

To get a bottle of this. So this the bottle I've got that John brought back for me. And thank you so much, John. I'm really delighted with. This is batch 34 before. And it's handwritten on the bottle, so I don't think that's a fake print. I think they just don't make that much of this. Apparently, they have an awesome tour. It's well worth going.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to go to the Big Island. We haven't go to the Big Island.

[Richard Campbell]

Go to Kona, which is where you want to go anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Take in the nice weather. And I think you should take a little spin by. If you're lucky, you're gonna bump into the distiller there and.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

See Dave. And then go home with a bottle of Distillers Reserve. You'll not be disappointed. And the fun I would have with this. My intent with this is to feed it to my whiskey knowledgeable friends because I defy you to think this is honey.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. How cool is that?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's just so. So bourbony, like you can't even imagine.

[Leo Laporte]

Love it. That looks like a real treat.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm delighted. I'm delighted to try something new. To have spent time read Mead production and just sort of dig into this oldest of the alcohols, which only makes sense because you need the sugar to produce the alcohol, and it's the original sugar.

[Leo Laporte]

I might want to try the coffee spirits. And I've got to try Honey Shine, because I just wonder what that tastes.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You might want to just come home with one of each.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

You sold me. Richard Campbell. Thank you for another great treat. Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look at this.

[Richard Campbell]

I Like the direction this whole thing's going, where people are now bringing me things I've never heard of and I get to go the story be blown away.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the joys. Now, if they ever make an avocado whiskey, I hope you'll let me know.

[Richard Campbell]

A lot of sugar in there.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a little bland. It's also curiously green.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard Campbell [e-mail] that's where he hangs his hat and his podcasts, including Run His Radio and dot net Rocks with Carl Franklin. And if you're at a summit and you happen to have a bottle of something interesting, bring it to him.

[Richard Campbell]

I will tell its story, I promise.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, Mikey.

[Paul Thurrott]

He likes it. He likes it.

[Leo Laporte]

Mikey likes it.

[Richard Campbell]

You don't always like it's going to be not. Oh, you've heard me say terrible things about some bad whiskeys.

[Leo Laporte]

But sometimes it's good, even if it's bad to know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I didn't mean it like that. No, I just. I mean it would be fun for someone if you gave them something and then you actually liked it, you know?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah. No, and this one wowed me. I have already tasted the one for next week, which is actually Tasmania. Oh. And well, you're going to be down under, so that's when I will be down there. So the timing is impeccable. I did this deliberately, but I might bump it out too if I find something while I'm in Sydney. But we'll see what happens. But it was a. It was a punch in the face.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I'll tell you, Mr. Campbell. Have a safe trip. Enjoy that long flight to New Zealand.

[Richard Campbell]

I got upgraded already.

[Leo Laporte]

So are you in Qantas or.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, United.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, have a safe trip. We'll talk to you next week in Sydney. In Sydney, Paul Thurat. He [e-mail] that's where he hangs his hat. His books [e-mail] and that includes the Field Guide to Windows 11 and of course Windows Everywhere. Together they make the dynamic duo that hosts Windows Weekly. We do it every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch it on those eight different streams or better yet, just get a copy of it after the fact@TWIT TV WW. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player get automatically. There's even a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. It's a great way to share stuff. Little clips of the show and help us stuff were time to figure out.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sounds like an illicit drug thing.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's Share your stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

Whatever you want to share.

[Leo Laporte]

Share your kit. Paul and Richard, have a wonderful week.

[Paul Thurrott]

You too.

[Richard Campbell]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

And we'll be back here next Wednesday, all you winners and dozers for Windows Weekly. Bye Bye.

[D]

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