Windows Weekly 936: Liquid Aero

Summary

Windows Weekly 936: Liquid Aero – Detailed Summary

Release Date: June 11, 2025
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell
Podcast: All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)

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1. Welcome and Introductions

The episode kicks off with Leo Laporte introducing the show and the guests. Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell join from different locations, with Richard broadcasting from Stockholm, Sweden.

Leo Laporte:
"This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell."
[00:45]

2. Richard Campbell's Safari Experience

Richard shares his recent experience on a game drive at Aquila Safari, highlighting the unique blend between a traditional safari and a controlled environment.

Richard Campbell:
"It's the middle ground between a safari and a zoo... The animals are well-fed and comfortable."
[03:04]

He elaborates on the activities, including game drives and the scenic beauty of the reserve, emphasizing the ethical treatment of the animals.

3. Patch Tuesday Updates

Paul Thurrott delves into the latest Patch Tuesday releases, highlighting significant updates across Windows 11 versions 22H2, 23H2, and 24H2. The updates include:

• Drag Tray Area Enhancements:
  Improved file sharing and app management features in File Explorer.

• Copilot Integration:
  Paul Thurrott:
  "The Windows key +C keyboard shortcut is back for Copilot."
  [11:22]

• Taskbar Improvements:
  Graphical updates to the pill indicator and notification system.

• Microsoft Store Overhaul:
  A faster, more intuitive store interface with enhanced search capabilities.

• AI Features in Photos App:
  Introduction of "Relight" and semantic natural language search to enhance photo editing and organization.

Paul Thurrott:
"The biggest thing about it was how unfinished it was... Now they have [features]..."
[18:08]

4. Microsoft's Internal Challenges and Leadership Reflections

The conversation shifts to Microsoft's internal dynamics, including employee sentiments and leadership decisions. Paul references an interview with former CEO Steve Ballmer, discussing Ballmer's regrets and contributions.

Paul Thurrott:
"Steve Ballmer said, everything Microsoft is doing now, I started."
[52:XX]

They reflect on Ballmer's vision and the subsequent leadership under Satya Nadella, questioning the direction and future of Microsoft's innovation strategies.

5. Apple's Liquid Glass Introduction

Apple unveils its new "Liquid Glass" UI, aiming for a unified interface across all its platforms. Paul and Leo analyze the implementation and aesthetic changes.

Paul Thurrott:
"...they have new UI widgets and things that contract and get out of the way."
[74:45]

While acknowledging some improvements, Paul expresses skepticism about the necessity and execution of the feature.

Paul Thurrott:
"To me, it's not an improvement over what they had two seconds ago."
[85:00]

6. Xbox Segment: Introduction of a New Handheld Device

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to discussing Microsoft's new Xbox-branded handheld gaming device. Paul explores its potential impact on the gaming market, comparing it to existing portable gaming solutions and PC gaming.

Paul Thurrott:
"This Xbox branded third-party gaming handheld runs on the AMD Z2 platform."
[93:52]

The hosts debate the viability of Microsoft entering the handheld market, considering hardware challenges and the competitive landscape.

7. ARC Browser and Its Successor DIA

Richard highlights the transition from the ARC browser to its successor, DIA, discussing the unique features and user reception.

Richard Campbell:
"They announced DIA as the next browser, aiming to integrate AI functionalities."
[124:01]

Paul Thurrott:
"DIA introduces a unified search experience with AI integration, enhancing browsing capabilities."
[125:35]

8. Distillery Discussion with Richard Campbell

In a lighter segment, Richard shares insights about Glen Lossie, a unique distillery with a rich history. He details its operations, ownership by Diageo, and the exclusivity of its whiskey bottlings.

Richard Campbell:
"Glen Lossie was established in 1876 and has never produced retail whiskey, focusing instead on blends for larger brands."
[136:10]

This anecdote adds a personal touch to the episode, showcasing Richard's diverse interests outside of technology.

9. Advertisements

The episode includes promotional segments for:

• US Cloud:
  Offering enterprise Microsoft support solutions with significant cost savings and enhanced services.

• Club Twit:
  A membership program providing ad-free content, exclusive events, and access to premium show features.

Leo Laporte:
"Club Twit is how we stay around... $10 a month, $120 a year."
[118:XX]

10. Tip of the Week: Enhanced Sharing in Windows

Paul Thurrott shares a useful tip about the enhanced sharing features in Windows 11, introducing quality reduction options when sharing images.

Paul Thurrott:
"You can now share images in different quality levels directly from the share pane."
[123:12]

This tip highlights Microsoft's continual refinement of user experience features.

11. Closing Remarks

The hosts wrap up the episode, thanking Richard for joining from Stockholm and encouraging listeners to subscribe to Club Twit for premium content. They tease upcoming segments, including a detailed discussion on the new Xbox handheld device.

Leo Laporte:
"Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. We will see you next Wednesday, Windows Weekly."
[146:33]

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Notable Quotes:

1. "The Windows key +C keyboard shortcut is back for Copilot."
   – Paul Thurrott
   [11:22]

2. "Steve Ballmer said, everything Microsoft is doing now, I started."
   – Paul Thurrott
   [52:XX]

3. "To me, it's not an improvement over what they had two seconds ago."
   – Paul Thurrott
   [85:00]

4. "This Xbox branded third-party gaming handheld runs on the AMD Z2 platform."
   – Paul Thurrott
   [93:52]

5. "You can now share images in different quality levels directly from the share pane."
   – Paul Thurrott
   [123:12]

---

Conclusion

Episode 936 of Windows Weekly offers a comprehensive discussion on the latest Windows updates, Microsoft's internal strategies, Apple's new UI innovations, and significant developments in the gaming industry with Microsoft's new Xbox handheld device. Alongside technical insights, personal anecdotes and community interactions enrich the conversation, providing listeners with both informative and engaging content.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thoratz here. Richard Campbell is visiting from Sweden. We'll get the latest on his safari last week. We'll also find out about Patch Tuesday. It was yesterday with lots of patches. And Paul summarizes his thoughts about the developer conference season. It's coming to a close. We had Build, Google, I O and of course WWDC from Apple yesterday. Paul's thoughts on Liquid Glass, among other things. Coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell. Episode 936, recorded Wednesday, June 11, 2025. Liquid Arrow. It's time for Windows Weekly. The show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft, which may make you wonder, why do you call it Windows, since Microsoft is so much more than Windows these days? Well, it's for historic reasons. And speaking of historic, here's Paul Thurrott.

[Paul Thurrott]

Also, who cares about the rest of Microsoft?

[Leo Laporte]

Thurrott.com? well, Lisa was asking me for both Mac Break Weekly and Windows Weekly, which both have had the same name for like almost 20 years.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Can we change the name to reflect.

[Paul Thurrott]

This isn't kfc, Leo. We're not changing the name.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what the problem is? Ad agencies, they see the name and.

[Richard Campbell]

They go, well, nobody cares about that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Those guys.

[Leo Laporte]

You have an enterprise show.

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that's our enterprise. Yeah. But no, it's Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. So we did an interview on Net Rocks with the Imagine cup finalists. So These are all 20 something cool kids.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So great. And they're like, you make a podcast called.netrocks, like, do you care that much about the. It's just like they're baffled.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, how old are you?

[Leo Laporte]

Framework?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Who. Who cares? And I realized, like, the fundamental thing here is, like, it is so much easier to learn a language in a platform today than it ever has been.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. They're not attached to it.

[Richard Campbell]

Why would you attach to any framework?

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just not a thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. Yes and no.

[Richard Campbell]

In some ways, Paul's not comfortable. Everybody be supportive.

[Paul Thurrott]

By the way, I like Net. Shut up.

[Leo Laporte]

From Net Rocks. A show about a framework. Richard is in Sweden. Where in Sweden?

[Richard Campbell]

I'm in Stockholm.

[Leo Laporte]

Proper.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Sunny Stockholm, actually. You're having a heat wave today, aren't you?

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's raining. It's not nice, though.

[Paul Thurrott]

They are.

[Richard Campbell]

I got wet rushing back to get the show, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you for rushing back.

[Richard Campbell]

Did you have a. I missed you guys so much. I can't Even tell you.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, actually, yeah. How was the safari?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, dude, like, okay, first off, not actually a safari. So this is the middle ground between a safari, which is a couple of weeks and you may see things you may not, and a zoo where you see lots of animals but they're sad bad. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we don't want that.

[Richard Campbell]

In between is this thing called a game drive. And so a game drive is. I am in this big resort that's like a spa place with a pool and nice meals and all that sort of thing. And then they attach to that is like 10,000 hectares, like 20,000 acres of fenced off land. Wow. With all these animals on it. Now, these animals are not native to the area. They've been stocked.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's Jurassic Park.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And they do.

[Paul Thurrott]

They.

[Richard Campbell]

And they do game drives. But before they go out, the game drives, like the rangers go out and they just forbid food. So you kind of know where the animals are going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Like I got to show you these pictures. Like I got astonishingly good pictures of everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, how cool.

[Richard Campbell]

Lions and elephants and hippos and rhinos and zebra and wildebeest and giraffes and cape buffalo. And like, it on one hand was slightly offensive. It's like this is completely staged. On the other hand, these animals did not look sad like they were doing this. No.

[Leo Laporte]

Because they're in the wild. They don't know that it's a fenced off wild.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but they, and they, you know, but they were doing their thing and they're well fed. Like they're, they're comfortable.

[Leo Laporte]

You can come and do the same thing. In Petaluma we have a place called Safari west and that you can see the chickens. No, no, they actually have just like this. It's. It actually was named like one of the top glamping destinations in the us.

[Richard Campbell]

Glamping.

[Leo Laporte]

It's similar. It's not as big as this, but it's similar to this where you stay in comfort and then you'd get in a jeep and drive around and see the wildebeests. Not as good as what you did.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I just walk outside as a squirrel sometimes. Squirrel. Similar.

[Richard Campbell]

And you guys already know what my wildlife is around my place when I'm at home. But this, I really, I mean, I wouldn't.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the name of it? Give it a plug.

[Richard Campbell]

The one we went to was. The one that I went to was called Aquila A Q U I L.

[Leo Laporte]

A, which is an eagle. It's Latin for eagle.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Recommended by the locals, because the locals go to it. And yeah, if I go back there with my wife, I will take her there, but I won't go back on my own. Like, I've done the thing right, but I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

On the website it says Big five Safari and Spa.

[Richard Campbell]

That's it?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Part of it's for the man, part.

[Richard Campbell]

Of it's for the woman.

[Leo Laporte]

Ladies, why would I want to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, spa.

[Leo Laporte]

This looks great. So what fun. How long did you spend there?

[Richard Campbell]

I had two days there and the whole two days there was the, the male lion was gnawing on a chunk of horse the entire time. Like, every time we went by, he was still there gnawing on the, on the chunk of horse. But yeah, and, and also you can get a massage, like, legit.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that sounds perfect.

[Richard Campbell]

It was, I was enjoyable and, and I, but the bandwidth was shocking. So it's like, I can't do a show from here.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know what? I, I, and Paul will back me up. I said, no, he gets a vacation. Why should he have to do a show every single place he goes?

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, part of it is I get the sense that people think this is fun, that wherever I go, I try and make a show work. I do enjoy trying to make the rig.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like that you're trying to make that a reality. And I'm like, trying to live up.

[Richard Campbell]

To that ideal because it wasn't our original deal. Like, originally I said, hey, I travel a lot. I won't do the show then. And then we started experimenting with gear and we were able to make a show. And then people seem to like it, so I do it. And believe me, like, I have drank every single South African whiskey you can think of now at this point. So I've been collecting data.

[Leo Laporte]

You get some benefit to that.

[Richard Campbell]

I have a bottle in the bag that's going to make it all the way home. Like tonight's, Tonight's whiskey is a different story. But, you know, I'm, I'm at work. This is my job now, admittedly. Like, I, I was there for two weeks. I did two conferences. I did a conference in Johannesburg, in a conference in Cape Town, more or less back to back. And then with the extra week there, I had reached out to some local communities. So I spent a whole day with some univers students, which were fantastic. Like, just an amazing group of kids, nice and interested in everything. So I did a. They weren't able to get to the conference because it's sold out and they usually get comp tickets. So I did the keynote but instead of doing the 50 minute keynote that I did at the conference, I did a three hour version. Oh wow. I just dove into deep because they were younger so it was a lot of assumptions. So I went and told more history and sort of walked through the things but we spent the entire morning on thinking about how development is evolving right now. And then in the afternoon we talked about startup culture and how to build a company and how to find a partner and what it takes to raise money and they just, they were amazing, amazing students. I was so impressed by them.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd go back in a second to have you.

[Richard Campbell]

So it was a great day and I was delighted. So, so much fun to just like the chance to help folks that really want to do more.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Isn't it nice to meet somebody who's excited?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And it was, this was an entire classroom of.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like you attract people who are like you and I, you know, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, yeah, it was a great trip. We're glad you're back. I'm so glad you had a great time.

[Richard Campbell]

And so I flew back through. I flew Johannesburg to Istanbul which is like 10 hours and then up to Amsterdam. Stayed for a couple of days with my friends in Alkmaar, hung out with their little 18 month old little Julie and I'll tell more stories about them. And then I, I got up to Stockholm today and tomorrow is back to keynoting. So do the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the event you're going to speak at?

[Richard Campbell]

Dev Sum two day show. Yeah, I'm emceeing the opens on both days and I'm doing my futures talk.

[Leo Laporte]

That's so great.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I'm delighted.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a little jealous, I confess. It's been a good life.

[Richard Campbell]

I think I really have a lot of fun. And now and then I'm getting home and I'm six weeks at home, which is more than she can stand. Like I expect somewhere around, somewhere around the three week march she's gonna be like, don't you have somewhere to go? Like go, go, go.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was the only person who. You gotta do. Huh? It's like, do you want to come to Seattle? No, I'm good. Have a good time.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway, I've been a long. I went away long enough. She's actually missing me. So I sent flowers today.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's a good move. Very smart.

[Richard Campbell]

Flowers should arrive before I do. But I do have some gifts that I picked up in South Africa. So I found a nice collective that Was making some interesting jewelry and I picked some pieces.

[Leo Laporte]

Very thoughtful. That's good.

[Richard Campbell]

I do the best I can, man. I gotta. I. I get to have all this fun and the least I can do is like, share some around.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa picked something out she likes at Costco, so I'm gonna probably.

[Richard Campbell]

That's legit.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Patch. Tuesday. Yesterday. Let's go to work. What happened?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, nothing really. Honestly, I'm not even sure why we're talking about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Forget about moving on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah. Big. Not big mad there. No, actually, this was a big one. So I'm losing track of these things. Someone should make a tracker. Oh, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Wait, you do that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What is your tracker address, by the way?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I don't have it live yet. I'm still going back and forth on how I want to do it because I just want to do it once.

[Leo Laporte]

You're doing it in notion, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

I am probably doing it, but I've been trying some other things too. Yeah. So I think this is the second month in a row we had a really big major update. This time all the updates went out at the same time. So 22, 23, 24 H2.

[Richard Campbell]

Are they still pushing 22?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's supposed to be over October. I know, I thought so too.

[Leo Laporte]

But right up to the end. Right up to the bitter end.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Almost all the. Well, that's not true. Some of These features are 24H2 only. Some are across all three. Right. You know, I'm just looking at this list. This is like stuff we've all talked about a million times. So the drag tray area. So when you drag files around File Explorer, you can. You'll get that pull down thing at the top like you do with Windows and Snap. Except it will give you a list of app or I guess a grid of apps or a line of apps that you can drag to and then share via. That way. The Windows key +C keyboard shortcut is back for Copilot. Used to be Cortana, then it was Copilot, then it wasn't, and now it is again.

[Richard Campbell]

Everybody wants to put Cortana behind them.

[Paul Thurrott]

Bunch of things for the taskbars. Little things going on there with the little. It's called the pill. The little indicator underneath it is there when the app app is running. It's not just pinned. And then if there's a notification, it gets bigger and it turns red or pink or whatever. Just some graphical changes there. When you share images, the share pane that comes up now has resizing and editing options. I got to add this to the notes still, but that's tied to my tip, so we're going to get to that much later in the show. A bunch of stuff for copilot plus PCs. So click to do has come to the EU a month late, I guess, right? Yeah, a month late. Ask Copilot available in Click to Do. New text actions in Click To Do. If you are using a smart pen, there is a shortcut button that you can. Or shortcut you can use for the pen. So you can do like a double click action or whatever. You can set it to wherever you want so that it runs Copilot, because God knows Copilot has to run all the time.

[Richard Campbell]

All the time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Copilot's one of those. Sorry. I'm sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, I'm saying that Copilot all the time. Like you can't get away from it now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. The Xbox app used to be an example of an app where if you ran it once, even by mistake, it would always just start up with your computer every single time. And I hate that behavior. The Xbox app now has a toggle. You can turn that off. So it doesn't do that. Copilot needs that badly. Because when you run Copilot and then turn it off, it just sits there in the tray like lurking like a serum.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm here to help.

[Paul Thurrott]

I really want to help you. Oh, did you need me? Did you need me? Oh, I'm here.

[Richard Campbell]

Any chance.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, you know, you love irritating the Windows search improvement stuff. I'm going to call this semantic search because I think we need a name for this. You know, all this. All this stuff. Like, all this.

[Richard Campbell]

I can't even tell you how many products have claimed semantic search over time.

[Paul Thurrott]

But okay, yeah, yep. Look, we're still solving the problem that Steve Jobs solved in tiger back in 2005 segments.

[Richard Campbell]

Certainly Apple's trying to solve again, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, no, I know. Yes. And by the way, so I didn't write that in the notes, but later on when we talk about some of that stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

The other question. Giggling the whole time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, no, it's like, are we just going to solve the same problem over and over again? Is that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Because we didn't solve it that well last time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's our industry. We just never get it right. So I. Yeah, that's the thing.

[Richard Campbell]

And our whole industry based on another failed attempt.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, you know, you got to give them credit. They're like the little engine that couldn't. They're trying, but they just. I Don't know. We'll get there someday. Okay, so that's. I think that's most of it. So patch Tuesday. I would say this is a big one. So if you haven't.

[Richard Campbell]

Especially for 24H2. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Do you remember the keynote at Build several builds ago with the blind guy that used the cameras to describe what was in front of him. And now it's a feature in 24H2. Any image. It'll just explain it to you.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, I'm going to call that progress, Paul. Like, it's there.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is the narrator feature for narrator feature.

[Richard Campbell]

Full stop. It's like it's now a part of the operating system, although eventually. But it's still in insiders.

[Paul Thurrott]

But other problems are harder to solve, like sets, the ability to add tabs to every single application for some reason.

[Richard Campbell]

Don't get crazy now, Miss.

[Paul Thurrott]

But yeah, like, we can describe things to blind people.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's it. Yeah, we get that, Bill.

[Paul Thurrott]

So it's a weird world we live in. I was just, just before the show because Brian Wilson has passed away sadly. I was looking at cnn, right? And so there was a story in there.

[Richard Campbell]

So let's not be too sad. Like, guy lived an intense life, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, the tragedy there in a way is that a lot of his life was wasted to mental illness and he was being controlled by this manager type, whatever he was. But. But okay, Brian Wilson. Genius, right? Absolutely. And super talented. But anyway, that. That's neither here nor there. As I'm on CNN.com looking for something about Brian Wilson. I saw this story about something like insert name of company adds this feature. Insert name of feature using AI. And it's like, this is just the headline for everything, right? And so I think this one might have been something like Meta is making an AI. It's like a. It's like a mad lib. You could just fill in the blank. It doesn't matter whatever the company name is, whatever the AI feature is, whatever, who cares? But I think it was video editing or something like that, or video something or something generation something. I don't know. And I was like, you know, we have to be saturated on this stuff now. Like every app we have does this now. Like everything does. Like every. Like you could generate like a cartoon image of yourself using Notepad. I mean, it's like, not really. I'm kidding. But. But it's like it's got.

[Richard Campbell]

You're not far off.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's. It's getting close. Yeah, it's it's really weird, like, how common this is. So I don't know, at some point it's like we're just gonna fill in all the holes and everything will do everything. And then collectively we as a people are going to be like, is that it? Like, is that. That's the whole thing? Huh?

[Richard Campbell]

That's all we got.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, I guess we're done. All right. Anyhow. Okay, but we're not there yet. That will be July's Patch Tuesday. So looking forward to that. Several updates to the Windows Insider program, as you would expect. The biggest one, I think was yesterday. Microsoft added the new Start menu finally, which they've been talking about. And you could kind of manually enable if you knew the trick. If you're in the dev or beta channel in the Insider program, you could just get it and so the the phone companion sidebar actually debuted last month in Patch Tuesday. Although, you know, rolls out over time, so you may not see it everywhere or anywhere. I see it in some places, but not others. I just brought up this computer. It does not have it. So hilarious. But it's not tied to the new Start menu. But if you have the new Start menu, there's a little toggle up in the corner so you can turn that companion sidebar on and off, like on the fly, without going into Settings, which is not its biggest new feature, but it's kind of cool. But the big thing here to me is when I go back to my original assessment of Windows 11 when it first debuted in mid-2020. Well, the final release or the public release was in October. To me, the biggest thing about it was how unfinished it was. And the Start menu was so stupid that if you went up to the PIN section and deleted every icon there, it would just be a big blank piece of nothing. It would. It wouldn't reflow.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, at least that's honest.

[Paul Thurrott]

But yeah, okay, I don't think that was the reason, but I just to me is like just really lazy software. And over time they. They did little subtle things that didn't address what I just said. They. You could have more space for pinned and more for recommended or whatever the bottom thing was called. But they didn't really address the over the auto flow or whatever you want to call that. And now they have. Right. And so there are multi. Now there are. They could have three sections. You could have the PIN section recommended. And then I think it's just all which is just apps which could be organized different ways. You can turn these things off. You can. It Will auto flow automatically. If you do, it will just like it actually. And it's cheap. We always say this. It's like, this is what Microsoft should have shipped four years ago. And it's like, yeah, I mean, I guess so, but they weren't really there yet. Right. I mean, like, let's be. Let's be fair, but. But also let's be critical because what they did ship was terrible. But I think this is.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's the Internet.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I think this will address most people's complaints or whatever about the Start menu. Unless you just say Windows 11, in which case I can't really help you there. But you know what?

[Richard Campbell]

Linux is there for you.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is there for you. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Dhh did a whole rant where it's like, I've switched to Linux and I'm so much happier. And I'm like, who is it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

David Hanneman Hansen, like base camp. The guy who killed IE6? Like, yeah. I mean, I'm not his biggest fan or anything, but I respect what the man has done and he's been right a few times.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Well, I mean, well, if you don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Want to be in Roy, that's. That's a pretty good start.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He said some really stupid things too.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah, you know, for the course, like, what are you going to do? Who has not?

[Paul Thurrott]

Who hasn't as recently as in the past 15 minutes? I'm. It's just life. Right. So anyway, I, I do think the new Start menu is a big improvement. And they're working.

[Richard Campbell]

They're working on it. Like, they're genuinely. There's clearly more than one person. It's not just an intern. They're really trying to make a new.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not just someone who's used a Mac and has no idea what the Start menu is for. They're. They, you know. Yeah, I.

[Richard Campbell]

We're getting so. I mean, we. First we had the salvage out of win eight and then we had the we want to be Mac 11 and now we're going somewhere else.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Well, now that Apple's doing this Glass thing, they'll probably go back to Aero glass in Windows 12, so we can have that.

[Richard Campbell]

We're jumping ahead. I'm glad you're talking about it, but we're jumping ahead.

[Paul Thurrott]

People are going to be like, oh, God, please do that. Oh God, please don't.

[Leo Laporte]

But we will get there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

My first reaction, though, I have to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Say, my first reaction was, how did I write it? Arrows upon us. Well, no, they copied Windows phone in iOS 7 and now they're copying Windows Vista. Like you're going backwards.

[Leo Laporte]

This might be a good place to take a tiny little break before Paul goes crazy with Arrow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

He's fine. Everything's fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Everything's fine. It's okay. It's gonna be good.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway. There's, there's a lot. There's a lot to unpack.

[Paul Thurrott]

There is a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Richard Campbell]

It pays the bills.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it pays the bills. There's some other new features coming in the Windows Insider build. Yes, talk about it.

[Paul Thurrott]

There are, yes. So in addition to that new Start menu we talked about last time, two new AI features are coming to the Photos app. Probably two of 20. Really? I mean they're just kind of rolling these out over time. These two are both for copilot plus PCs. And the way they've been doing this is if you're in the Insider program, I think this is the beta channel. You'll get it first on Snapdragon based PCs and then probably a month from now you'll get it on x86 based copilot plus PCs. But the first one is Relight. This was actually announced back. I think it was ahead of Build as part of when they announced the Surface devices, the kind of refresh of stuff. So just an image editing feature and then wait for it, semantic natural language search. Where in this case they actually call it that. So I guess I think that mean.

[Richard Campbell]

The other one was unnatural language.

[Leo Laporte]

It was their best attempt at the time, best they could do.

[Richard Campbell]

How natural is it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, it's like a baby's butt. How natural do you want.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a little too natural. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. There's a major update to the Microsoft Store coming. If I could find my article about that. Where is this? I don't have it. I think I linked to the wrong thing, but that's okay. So. So this one's kind of interesting. I think this one is available across channels. If it's not all channels, then it's probably beta and dev, but I think it's everyone. And they keep kind of screwing with this. But the big part of this underneath the covers, because they rewrote it last year to be faster, which was necessary. They're adding that search experience, which in this case they're not calling semanticsearch, but same thing. The idea is you're going to see this. This kind of. I'm going to call it semantic search. This natural language search feature kind of appear everywhere. Right. Someone had asked me one of my Friday articles, you know, how do I find apps that are specific to copilot plus PCs? And I was like, surely the Microsoft Store, which has an AI hub, will have a section for that. And they do not.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm still trying to figure out what is a Copilot plus PC at this point. Because, yeah, it's, it's. I mean, I know it's Snapdragon, but it's. There is AMD machine that qualifies and.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And then intel. And then it's just Lunar Lake for Intel Qualifies.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. So I. One of the review laptops I have in now is intel core Ultra Series 2, whatever the number. And I was like, obviously, this is Lunar Lake, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And I was, you know, setting it up and everything. And then I moved over to, I don't know, it was paint or something. And I was like, wait, where the. There's no. None of those features are here. What's going on? And it turns out this is an Arrow Lake chip. So Arrow Lake doesn't qualify. Yeah, it's the generation that intel would have done after Meteor Lake had Microsoft not come to them and said, hey, by the way, we've given this special treatment to Qualcomm. If you want to jump on board, you got to do this, this and this. And they were like, you know, and a major contributor to Intel's problems last year, getting this thing out the door. So Lunar Lake is the one that has the good mpu, the integrated ramu, and actually better graphics, too. So the Arrow Lake is more powerful as a processor, so it could be good and better in certain Circumstances, for sure. But the graphics and Ampu are not as good. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

The adjacent stuff that matters.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. You could add. And it doesn't rely on integrated RAM either. And that's good or bad, depending how you look at it. But in the good news department, you could theoretically upgrade one of these computers, assuming the PC maker allows that. Right. So that's a possibility. Anyway. This stuff is so confusing now. I'm just. I can't even. Can't even think straight when it comes to this. But anyway, so there's just a lot of updates graphically to the store layout, blah, blah, blah, whatever. It's not really that big of a deal. But the big deal to me is just the search bit. And of course they're doing that. They're doing that everywhere as they would. And then notion keeps scrolling down to the bottom for me for some reason. It's very strange. And then there was a Canary build on Friday and we don't know why. We don't know why Canary exists. We're not really sure what the point of it is. Am I not bringing up the right thing?

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, the fact that they called it Canary build is like, this is the one that could die at any time. That's what that's supposed to be.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. A lot of the stuff that's in here is stuff that's just been elsewhere earlier. Right. So the energy saver improvements.

[Richard Campbell]

Not what it should be.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. There's phone mirroring capabilities in. In Phone Companion, but that's elsewhere. There's taskbar tweaks like I talked about for the pill thing at the bottom. Those are elsewhere. Like, I. I don't know that there's anything unique in this build. Maybe once or twice this year there have been a few unique features in Canary, but they're. Honestly, it's a pretty short list. It's kind of. It's kind of too bad. Okay, now what else? What else? And that's it. I think that's it for Windows 11, believe it or not.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

So when you do it.

[Richard Campbell]

When. Windows 12, Paul, when?

[Paul Thurrott]

So moving on to WWDC. Fine. No, yeah, it's a good question. Yeah. So if you look at the schedule. Right. Someone asked me this too, you know, as people would. Right. Like when. When's this going to happen? It seems like maybe this would be a time. We are roughly one within one week, four years ago of when they announced Windows 11.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then they shipped it in October. So if they were going to ship it this October along with windows 10 going out of support.

[Leo Laporte]

They could call it windows 26.

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

That's apparently stylish.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now it will be 2026 edition or, you know, it's back, baby. Look, say what you want to say about Apple, but the version number of that thing is 26. It's not 6.2 or whatever, you know, whatever. Windows.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they don't have those obscure. I mean, maybe internally they do and they kept the, they kept the, the geographic. You know, it's Tahoe. Anyway, we'll get to that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't want to get to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let's talk about Build.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, let's talk about developer shows because we, we're hitting the end of the season, so every year we run of shows. Yeah, Build, IO, WWDC and you have.

[Leo Laporte]

A chance closer together this time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thank you. They usually. Yeah, Google doing IO the week of Build and all the awfulness that happened to me at Build was a wonderful happenstance.

[Richard Campbell]

It's one of the, I mean, I keep looking back on that week going, that is one of the craziest weeks. And the layoffs on top of that. Just like, what a weird.

[Paul Thurrott]

The whole thing was nuts.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently Microsoft said, we're never doing it in Seattle again.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's part of it. So. And not because of, not because of.

[Leo Laporte]

Protesters, because of the homeless.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, so I, I mentioned this in passing. This was because if you were homeless.

[Richard Campbell]

In, in San Francisco, really, that's where we're going.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I've, I've yet to be assaulted by homeless person in Seattle. That did happen to me in San Francisco. But I, I mentioned this, but it was quick because the other stuff was way more important. But twice I saw a homeless person in some stage of disarray get out into the middle of an intersection in the crosswalk and just yell up, yeah. At the building. And you know, in one, one case, I actually, I was walking by him and I sort of looked up and I looked at him and I was like, I don't, I don't, I don't see it.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know what you, what are you yelling at?

[Paul Thurrott]

So, yeah, this is fentanyl.

[Leo Laporte]

It's mental illness.

[Paul Thurrott]

Seattle's always had kind of a tough, it's really tough. Seattle is like the Clippers to the Lakers. You know, it's like with San Francisco, it's like we've always aspired to be just like San Francisco, but they forgot maybe not do the bad stuff and that. Yeah, Seattle is such a beautiful city. I love it so much. And it's Like San Francisco. I go there and I'm like. Like there are things about it that are just, you know, whatever. So, yeah, Microsoft. There was a private exchange between Microsoft and the Visit Seattle organization that does the conference center stuff that was basically like, yeah, we're not coming back next year also. We're not coming back ever. So all of the holds we had on future years, you could forget about them. We're not doing it. And it was because they've been complaining about this homeless person thing and the open drug use and whatever else for years. And Seattle has done nothing about it. Like, nothing. And so showgoers and Microsoft executives, too, go there and they walk between the Arch Convention center and like the Hyatt grand, which is probably where, I think Richard was probably there, where a lot of those guys stay. And it's, you know, two, three blocks. It's not that far. But it is. It's like this fallout hellscape of, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, has that too. Weirdly, it's right next to City hall in San Francisco.

[Richard Campbell]

And to be clear, it is not that bad. Nobody's in danger.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's kind of disgusting. Is that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's not as tidy as it could be.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I, I saw a homeless person defecate on the sidewalk in San Francisco. I haven't seen that yet happen to me in, you know, this, you know, there, there are things I, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Not a fan of, but we call them unhoused. Paul, I hope you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, I'm sorry. I will continue to be insensitive to everyone who has a problem. I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

It's, you know, it's a very difficult problem.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But it's not just vacation.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I don't blame Seattle. I mean, they're not doing what Beijing would do, which is bring out bulldozers and just bulldoze them away.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And this is not a real reason to pull out of a.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, that's the thing. So that was kind of, in some ways is the point. I wonder. Well, and I guess we are wondering now openly if this wasn't a little bit of a cover. Because I read this thinking this will be how they communicate. Like, we wanted to keep doing this. Actually, we don't think it makes any sense. Here's why. So here's one of the problems though, with Seattle, like our not being in Seattle. For Microsoft, it gets dramatically more expensive for Microsoft to host this show because when you're in Seattle, their employees are all there. So they would have to ship and house thousand something plus Employees in some other city, which they are currently deeply against.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Like, they. They are super tight with their travel budget. So we know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

As if these shows weren't already struggling. And let me be clear, they are. Like, they're not the shows they should be now. They just made it harder for no real reason.

[Paul Thurrott]

Part of that internal email or whatever it was that got leaked, said that Microsoft had told Visit Seattle, that organization that I guess runs the convention center, that their expectation was that build 2026 would have 4,500 plus paying attendees. I know from my sources at Microsoft that they barely cracked 3,000 this year and only did that by lowering the price. So I don't know, I wonder if.

[Richard Campbell]

They decrease their attendance by lowering the price too much. Like that price 1125, like, that's crazy cheap. That just sort of says, wow, we don't think our show's that good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, also, I can tell you from experience, they cut corners pretty dramatically. I mean, you know, the old convention center is called old for a reason. And I mentioned the one day of meal that I got for free from my, you know, press pass or whatever. Usually you were taken care of all week, as you would be.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know what would be an interesting idea is take the money that Microsoft will have to spend to move it and put it towards the homelessness problem.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Now somebody in the chat room is saying it's really about a new tax. Is what is that Mr. Met saying? Do you know? Have you heard anything about that?

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

All right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know about that, but I don't know. I know. Look, we're not going to Seattle. I'm just saying this is what happened, that's all.

[Leo Laporte]

So you remember a few years ago, Seattle did propose charging a special tax for the big companies, Microsoft and Boeing, that no other company would.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Leo Laporte]

That failed.

[Richard Campbell]

So you've been successful in our state.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, congratulations. You win the lottery in reverse. Yeah. So, okay, so the Microsoft shows a.

[Leo Laporte]

New business tax in Washington state. Mr. Met says, right, doesn't like it.

[Richard Campbell]

So Microsoft should come out and say, hey, this new tax is driving us out. We're off to Vegas.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's just be honest. Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

San Francisco.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, they haven't been dishonest. They never said anything. This was private. They never announced this.

[Leo Laporte]

Good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Give him a chance to actually say so. Microsoft's complaints about the homeless to Seattle were not meant to go public. That was leaked to a radio station. And it was probably leaked because that radio station, like anyone who was probably A reporter, pundit or whatever in that area. This is a big issue in that area. And that was the point of it. It was like, look how bad this is. Now Microsoft's not coming here and they're right here. It was not. I don't think it's something Microsoft would. We'll see what they say.

[Leo Laporte]

Could it have been the protests or no?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, because that's going to happen anywhere. Although, yeah, actually, Mary Joe, Seattle's a.

[Leo Laporte]

Little more active than many.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I had this exchange.

[Richard Campbell]

San Francisco, come on, that's not going.

[Leo Laporte]

To be any better.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, then. So I had an exchange with Mary Jo yesterday and we were talking about this, this may, the assumption that they're going to San Francisco. And I said, yeah, it's not like they're not going to have protests in San Francisco. And she says, you're telling me that those employees are going to travel on their own dime to San Francisco to protest and lose their job? I don't think so. And I was like, you know what? That's actually pretty smart. Maybe that's true. It's super convenient to protest when you just have to get out of bed and drive into Seattle. But if you actually had to travel somewhere and potentially stay at a hotel or whatever it was, maybe Bill will be more. I don't know, maybe they wouldn't do it as much. But that said, absolutely there are going to be protests.

[Leo Laporte]

So Google was in public, but of course they're in Mountain View, which is not really suburban.

[Paul Thurrott]

But they also had a risk of protest. Right. And so this didn't get widely publicized, just like the thing with Microsoft didn't. They had a lot of security there and they were on the Outlook just like Microsoft was for employees, because their employees have also protested whatever deals they have with governments and militaries, whatever. And the one thing that I saw with Google that I didn't see with Microsoft, and I had made this point back in, I guess, April, whenever the 50th anniversary protests occurred, when I said, look, say what you want about Microsoft, but I feel like I could be wrong, but I feel like this is a company these people could work with and they would, would Microsoft would give them a venue to voice their concerns publicly if that's what they wanted. They don't want them to disrupt the keynote, obviously. But I used to feel like, well, you know, have some, like a space somewhere where they could be and let people go see it and take pictures and they could have a bullhorn and do their thing. Now this is in Seattle Not Microsoft campus. So that's what happened. But on the Google side, wherever that facility was in Mountain View or whatever, Google did give that to employees, by the way. So employees were able to go out and pick it and, you know, do their little protest thing. And so I'm not saying one was right and one was wrong, but that, and I don't know for a fact that Microsoft, they didn't approach Microsoft and say, hey, you know, we feel like we need to be able to voice this. And Microsoft said, no, I don't know. I just don't know. But I've not heard that. And my knee jerk reaction a couple months back was they seem like the type of company that would have been open to that, you know, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't know since. Since the show, I'm feeling like used.

[Richard Campbell]

To be like, yeah, I was just.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thinking the same thing. There was a story right after Builder, right at the last day of Build or something somewhere around there where Microsoft has, is now filtering email for certain terms so that if it's a blast email that goes out to everyone in the company or to large groups, they actually won't let those through automatically anymore. And so terms like Palestine or Israel or whatever are on that list. Right. Because one of the little subversive things these guys were doing was constantly spamming these internal mail lists with their, you know, complaint or whatever. So again, I'm not here to.

[Leo Laporte]

Times have been tough. This has been a bad month at Microsoft. From the employees I've talked to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

At the same time as a record quarter and the highest valuation of any company in history.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? Yeah, Right. So I don't know what to say to that. This is not a fair comparison in some ways, but I think you'll understand what I mean when I say it. I'll write a story or Laurent will write a story and I'll just make something up. Microsoft fixes the whatever problem in the new Outlook and the response you invariably get from a dozen or more people is great, but when are they going to fix whatever my thing is? Right? Or someone releases this thing for this thing and like, okay, but what about this other thing? And it's like, that's not what the story's about. The story's about this thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Don't worry. When they fix that thing, I will write that story.

[Paul Thurrott]

If that was part of it, it would have been part of the story, that kind of thing. So the thing I'm trying to separate because the numbers are so big is how or whether Microsoft being what you said they are, which they are the, the, you know, the most valuable company in the history of the earth. A stunning quarter nailing it by just spending 20 billion whatever on AI every month and not even feeling the impact of it financially. And yet not only do they have layoffs, but they have layoffs that came suddenly, without warning, without any sense of justification or, you know, it wasn't performance based like the old things like how do you rectify this? We've already, I know we've discussed this a lot but it's hard. Like I, I'd like to know or be at least have an idea. Oftentimes you can look at something and say, well, this is probably why I, I got nothing. And if the, if the, if the thought was we don't get enough buy in internally on this AI stuff, maybe we should threaten them. It's like that's the, that's where the wheel landed when you spun it. What are you doing? Yeah, that's crazy to me.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's a, I've literally been saying terrorism. Like you're just scaring people.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And oddly enough you've succeeded. They're scared.

[Paul Thurrott]

They are scared and it's unfair. They shouldn't. Those people should not be scared.

[Richard Campbell]

No, this is the.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's terrible.

[Richard Campbell]

What were you thinking? Right? Like it's as if the world wasn't scary enough.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, it's. I think thinking is the thing they're not doing, you know, or at least thinking clearly. Oh no, it isn't there. Never mind. So yeah, I mean Apple or Microsoft and Google, those shows happened concurrently. It was weird. It was an explosion of news. If you look at those two companies. And we'll look at Apple later too. But yeah, I have to say looking.

[Leo Laporte]

Back, it was a lot.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was a lot. But it was also mostly AI hyper specific to their audiences. Right. Which makes sense. I mean that feels obvious as I say it out loud, but the Microsoft advances are all around obviously. Cloud power and productivity, that kind of stuff. These are Microsoft's strengths. Google has a much stronger hold with consumers through all the services they have. They have like billion plus users and they can throw AI features at stuff that impacts people at scale. Microsoft does too. But I don't think anyone cares if Purview gets an AI feature or whatever or know we're going to use AI to determine some kind of a policy on identity or whatever. So. Yeah, that's really exciting. But you know, it's like photos is getting like you can turn a picture into A video. It's like, you know, it's fun. Like so I think the thing that Google has that Microsoft doesn't is just it's more interesting to people like individuals and thus it's more interesting to people that want to write news about those things and actually have readers. And you know, that's the kind of, you know, that's the world that we live in unfortunately our world or whatever. It's worked out for Microsoft. I mean it's financially like Richard said, they're going gangbusters but from a. Can you pull like an exciting news thing out of there for it? Like what would my wife be excited about other than me being gone for a week? Like about build. You know what I mean? Like I can't, I don't know that there is a, you know, maybe someone could come up something. I don't know. But the Google thing, I was like there might be parts of this keynote you might want to watch. And I said to her as a normal person, non technical because she uses Android and she reads on a tablet or whatever and does her thing but it's like this might actually benefit you in your day to day. Whereas I think the Microsoft stuff that would be true if you were like an IT admin or someone working in a Microsoft oriented shop or whatever. Absolutely. There's a lot of those people. But it's not interesting for, you know, it's not, you know, the fun photo stuff even though Microsoft does that too. It just doesn't, you know, it just doesn't kind of reach.

[Leo Laporte]

They need a place to see. Apple uses their WWDC conference as a keynote for real people, not for developers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well Google does too, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, somewhat Google does but Microsoft definitely doesn't. Do they have a venue where they could.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this should have been my tip. I'm going to throw this out right now. In fact you can just, you can Google this easily. The acquired podcast did a follow up three hour interview with Steve Ballmer. I watched it twice. It is fantastic. I can't, I can't really stand those two guys. But the Steve Ballmer is amazing and this was a, an incredible. It's on YouTube, it's an incredible and probably elsewhere. It's an incredible reminder of what this guy did and to the tune of, I think a lot of people don't even realize it was him and there was so much that came out of this. But in the past he and Bill Gates have both said when asked what is your biggest regret if you could have done anything differently? The Two of them at one point or the other, both said separately, I would have gotten phone. Right. And I was like, both times I was like, nope, nope, no, that cannot be your biggest regret. It cannot be. And he on this show said what I actually do think was his biggest regret because I see this, this was repeated again and again in that Steve Sinofsky book I keep talking about where Microsoft targeted enthusiasts and then individuals and that kind of went to retail and became the big thing from the 90s. But then businesses of different sizes and ultimately enterprises and all that stuff. And that was. Steve Ballmer did that. I mean, but what he said was when we got into this, my intention was not to drop consumer and completely lose that. Even though this enterprise thing was going gangbusters. It was to do both. He's like, I always felt like we could have done both. And everything we did on the consumer side once we embraced enterprise was just half assed. And I was like, yes, that 100%. Because Microsoft at that point in time was personal computing. They could. I'm not saying it wouldn't, you know, Apple and Google and Amazon, this stuff would have happened to some degree. But the world would probably be a different place if Microsoft had just tried, you know, and they really, for all kinds of reasons. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

We have and still aren't. Right. Like if we get.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well now you, I mean, how are you going to get it back now? You know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we talk about OpenAI's monthly users compared to copilot monthly users and it's it, you know, OpenAI has got not the consumer market.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And Microsoft is not. And the enterprise market is moving very carefully into using LLMs and so the adoption rate is slow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And you know, look, I, there are going to be businesses that see and those that do not see the balance, the benefit rather of these AI features. Right. Some will embrace it, be like, oh my God, this is amazing, here's why. And some will be like, you know, we keep trying. And I, I just don't, I don't understand the point.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean that's not what's holding enterprises back. It's the system mints going, I'm supposed to have my data state in stored or I don't even know how to do that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, but if it was amazing enough, this would be like getting Macs or iPads or not iPads, iPhones or whatever in the enterprise where C level execs would come down and say, look, we're doing this.

[Richard Campbell]

No, we're doing this. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't Care what you say. We're doing it, so figure it out. So no, we're definitely at the product.

[Richard Campbell]

Phase where we're there. We want this to be amazing, so go try stuff and find something amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And Microsoft's key advantage in this space, aside from the obvious scale they have just the sheer reach they have in the Fortune 500 and the biggest companies in the world, et cetera, is that thing that's getting them into trouble with teams in Europe, which is we can make this a feature of the thing you're already paying for and make it more valuable. You could view that cynically as kind of a form of lock in. But I think the reality is most people that use the Office Suite, which we're not supposed to call the Office Suite or Microsoft 365, whatever, and when I said people, but most, you know, businesses, I don't think any one of them are like, man, I'd love to drop this boat anchor and move on from this. I, I actually think most businesses are like, yes, obviously we're using this. It's the standard. It works great. Everyone loves it.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't and more saliently. And all the alternatives scare the snot out of me. So I'll stick with what I know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So when Microsoft approaches this, it's not like we're going to come up with this like Zune AI thing. It's like, okay, well Microsoft 365 has gone gangbusters. We'll add it to there and this is how we'll improve these products going forward. You'll get more value out of this. This will help us raise prices as we're going to have to do as time marches on. But it will make this thing that is already invaluable and kind of a no brainer for so many companies. Even more invaluable and more of a no brainer, if that makes sense. Anyway, the Steve Ballmer stuff was amazing. I'll just real quick on that. I, I should have put this in the notes. The other thing that there's a lot in this. It's three hours long. It's an amazing. Him talking is amazing. Those two idiots being like, oh, I didn't even know that product existed. I wanted to strangle them through my screen. But he is amazing. And one of those things that comes up is, well, you were CEO for X number of years. Bill Gates was CEO for X number of years. Why did you have to move? What was the point? Did you want to move on? And he's like, no, I did not want to move on. But he's like, here's the thing. I was good for Microsoft's bottom line financially, but not good for the stock price. And one of the reasons I wasn't good for the stock price is because I was always the guy saying, we need to spend money on this to win it and we need to invest and invest and invest. And I was the one who built up these big businesses that might be the next big thing for Microsoft. He was part of the reason that Microsoft became more of a multi product and definitely an enterprise company. And he said, look, I could not have gone. He goes, everything Microsoft is doing now, I started. He finally said it explicitly. He's like, I did all of this. And he said, but no one's ever going to give me credit for that. And if I went to Wall street and said, look, I know I've been spending money. I know I'm the spend, spend, spend guy. I got the religion. I got it. It. I fixed my ways. Not going to spend money anymore. Just believe me, you know, it wouldn't. He's like, it would never. No one would ever. I had to leave. He's like, there was no way the perception of this company was going to change unless we made a change. Even though I was the one pushing the change we made, you know, and I. You got to watch this thing. It's. It. He is. I miss him so much.

[Richard Campbell]

He's so great.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, he really is. I miss him so much. Yep, He's.

[Richard Campbell]

He was way. He was a lot of, of fun. Just like a much more interesting thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Here's one for you.

[Leo Laporte]

I had no idea that he was considered a great.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, that's the thing. It depends on who you talk to. Right. But, you know, he was, you know, he wasn't perfect. I don't mean it like that, but as far as, like a leader of a company who was actually like, literally a cheerleader of that company.

[Richard Campbell]

And he's also the. He's also the guy who kept the company together. Like he brought in as a CEO to get through the consent decree and he, he did it.

[Paul Thurrott]

His comparison of running a company like Microsoft to running a sports team like the Clippers is astonishing and awesome and instantly believable and real. And again, I keep saying this, but you got to just listen or watch or whatever you do, but it's. He's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

But same thing on Satya Nadella.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that's what. So, no, I'm not sure I was ever a huge fan. So honestly, this Guy to me comes off as really robotic. I have a hard time, you know, like I have weird hearing as it is, but there are certain sounds like we'll be in a restaurant, maybe there'll be a lodge area with lots of people and there'll be someone 28 people over cackling like an idiot. And there's something about his or her voice where it's on some timber or whatever where it hits me and it's like painful. And his voice. Yeah, his voice is like that. It's like a. It hits me sharp. Like it's. There's something about when he talks, I'm like, oh, God. It kind of bothers me. I think that's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Problem though, Paul.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I know, I know, I know. What was the rationale for him? This is the guy who ran Bing. Why do we think he would be an. Okay. There's a theory out there right now, internally and externally, that the person really running this company is Amy Hood. I'm just going to throw that out there, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I would agree with that post pandemic. She definitely got control of things during the pandemic.

[Paul Thurrott]

But here's the thing. This guy, the one thing Ballmer says and he wasn't, he likes Satya Nadella. He said Satya was one of two or five people that early on Microsoft felt internally like maybe like you always have to have these contingency plans for a CEO for leadership. Right. Succession plan. Yeah. Some of it is long term. Like, look, I think I'm going to be here for X number of years. We're going to try to do this in the meantime and then we'll move on to something else. Else. Some of it's, I walk out in the street, get hit by a bus. And so you have these lists of people who could kind of fill in. And I guess Satya was on the short list for longer than I would have thought. But the one thing he said though, and I was like, okay, this actually makes sense to me. He's not an engineer. This guy does not have an engineering degree. The big selling point for him. No, right. But the big selling point for him was we need to bring back someone like Gates who was an engineer, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're visionary, technical person. Yeah, I don't think he's. I don't think he's a visionary in the slightest. In fact, I'm developing a theory that Satya Nadella. I said, oh. I said this to someone from Microsoft last weekend. I think Satya Nadella is a high Stakes poker player who constantly is betting his family's home on a last ditch chance to win some, you know, bet. And sometimes he's right and sometimes he's wrong. Who spends $68 billion on Activision and then proceeds to fly Xbox into the ground. Like what, like how do you, how do you take that amazing regulatory victory and just screw it up, you know, So I don't know. He also talks, you know, when does someone mention Windows Phone? Windows Phone was never going to succeed, but he was pushing for Microsoft to make their own phone for several years and the board kept saying no, kept saying no, kept saying no. And then they said, well, they bought Nokia after you left. He goes, I know. He goes, I have to live with that. And I wanted to, like, like by the time we bought that company, we had to do it to save our platform. It was going to die otherwise. We should have done it earlier. Like, we should have done the right thing earlier with it. He was trying to do that, I guess, for several years. Anyway, anyway, look, like I said, no one's perfect. I don't mean it like that, but this is a very revealing interview. And if you're mixed on this guy or if you love him and miss him, or you hate him, whatever, I don't care. Watch it. I think you'll be, you'll come away with something excellent. It's pretty impressive.

[Leo Laporte]

Before we get to Google and Apple and I know I'm dying to hear what you think of Liquid Glass.

[Paul Thurrott]

You mean Aeroglass. Oh, Liquid Glass.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to take a break if I may. And we will continue in just a moment with Paul Thurot and Richard Campbell. I'm so glad you're all here, you winners and you dozers. This is Windows Weekly for June 11th. See that? It's there. We got a special clock now, you know, to the millisecond. To the millisecond where we are in the show, our show today brought to you by 1Password. Over half of IT pros say that securing SaaS apps is their biggest challenge. With the growing problems of SaaS sprawl and shadow it, it's not hard to see why. Thankfully, Trelica by1Password can discover and secure access to all your apps, managed or not. Trelica by 1Password inventories every app in use at your company, every app then pre populated app Profiles assess the SaaS risks, letting you manage, access, optimize, spend and enforce best security practices across every app your employees use, even the shadow IT apps. You can manage shadow it. You can. Oh, this is good too. Securely onboard and offboard employees and of course meet compliance goals. Trelica by 1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance and it's just one of the ways that extended access management helps teams strengthen compliance and security. 1Password's award winning password manager is trusted by millions of users in over 150,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. And now they're securing securing more than just passwords with 1Password Extended Access Management, of course. 1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. 1Password exceeds the standard set by various authorities and is a leader in security. Take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged. ShadowEye2 learn [e-mail] Windows Weekly that's 1Password.com Windows Weekly all lowercase. Thank you 1Password for your support for Windows Weekly. On we go with the developer conferences.

[Richard Campbell]

The great recap.

[Leo Laporte]

The great recap. We kind of did this last.

[Paul Thurrott]

Great. It's going to be. It will be.

[Leo Laporte]

It takes a while for the dust to settle in us.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's the thing. Right. So. Well, we'll get to this. The Apple thing was especially interesting. People are so divided over this with Google. There's been a two year long kind of vibe with them where like they're behind. Like they're not somehow they're behind, you know, and I feel like IO was kind of a show of force for them. It was really hard to understand to keep on track of it. That said, Android is usually kind of a big deal at the show. Android was not a big deal at the show. They sort of announced Android 16 before the show, but it wasn't ready yet. And actually today it just finally came up. But not really all of it because they're going to ship more. They do this quarterly updates and there's three really big features. The desktop mode that's based on Dex, the material. What's it called? The new material. Expressive design. And then those live notifications which are like the live notifications you get on an iPhone with dynamic island and so forth. We're all coming to the platform this year, but not today. So you know, there's that kind of weirdness. Okay. And you know, Google is one of those things. Like Google is the ultimate ADHD company because when they're on it, when they, when they want something, they can focus and it's unbelievable and they lose the script on other things all the time. So like they haven't released a speaker in 17 years. They don't really do the home stuff that much anymore. There's like, like they kind of just drift away, you know, they're, they're weird like that. But, you know, I, I wondered like a lot of people did, like, why would you do this? The week of build, you could do this show anytime. You. It's your place, like you could go, you know, it could be anytime. And I can't explain that, but, man, it was a, it was a tough one, you know, because the people who material you was the previous one. I think this is material expressive or.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, M3 expressive.

[Paul Thurrott]

M3 expressive. Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, it was. I'm never going to catch up on the Google stuff. Like, I'm never. Every single day there are multiple stories where it's like we added the thing I was talking about earlier, you know, AI feature to AI or app service, whatever it is, and you like, like, you know, businesses, consumers, and it's just like a matrix of all the stuff they do, which is vast and is. Looks like the Milky Way probably, and there's so much of it and it's just like, Yep, they're just filling it all in and it's astonishing. Like, I like the stuff that they're doing is really kind of incredible. And if anyone like actually seriously believes, like they're behind on AI, you know, I feel like you're not really paying attention, but fair. I think they're, I think they're doing. I think that, you know, I think they're going, yeah, full stop. It's kind of amazing, the Apple one. I would just like to have a moment of silence here while I collect my thoughts. It's like, I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

Like they had to make a call on Apple Intelligence and they did. They moved away.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they did it well, actually, because I do too.

[Paul Thurrott]

They came away.

[Richard Campbell]

I agree.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What they've done now is they've gone on a tour, interview tour where they elaborated on the point that Siri version two was what was not working. And so they postponed it. But I thought what they did that was smart and of course we'll see how it works. But presuming it works is just kind of sprinkle AI throughout.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

In a useful way.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think this goes back to a year when everyone's like, oh, they're behind. They're never going to catch up, you know, and then they, they announced what they did and they're like, yeah, but this stuff's not going to Be available for the iPhones and you know, then they kind of slow boil or release it over time. If you go back and rewatch that keynote from a year ago.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And compare it to where they demoed something that wasn't fiction, never came.

[Paul Thurrott]

See, this is. But they.

[Richard Campbell]

Because it never existed in the first.

[Paul Thurrott]

They claim that's not true. They claim. They. That that software did exist.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

They said it was.

[Leo Laporte]

V1 was working, but not well enough to release it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it was.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what? This is a problem with AI. If the AI is right 50% of the time.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. Then it's wrong. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to trust it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. But by the way, again, there's a cynical view which is very easy to adopt and then there's a view where you're like, well, they're being mature here. They're being. Look, they have a couple of billion, 2.5, whatever the number is, billion users. We have this incredible ecosystem with cross device capabilities. We are promoting privacy. This has to work. And it has to work in a way that the Google stuff doesn't have to work or OpenAI doesn't have to work. These are companies that just stole. I mean, Google has search results and all their stuff. So they have data. But like OpenAI, all these other companies, they had to steal the data.

[Leo Laporte]

What's interesting is they're using OpenAI models in many cases. Like for instance, they have this really crappy image playground where everything comes out looking terrifying. And they finally said, yeah, we're not doing it, so we're going to have that be OpenAI doing that, which is the right thing to do. Yes, but most of what they're doing, and this is why I want to withhold judgment till we see it, is on device using Apple models.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, okay, here's the thing. So they just announced an on device SDK or API, whatever it is, so any developer can access.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that too.

[Paul Thurrott]

The neuralink.

[Leo Laporte]

That's awesome.

[Paul Thurrott]

Microsoft's been doing this for two years. I mean, this is not new. Like Google has been doing this for two years on copilot plus PCs. That's what that is. Oh, okay. And it started before that when they had Windows Studio Effects and other NPO features. Good.

[Leo Laporte]

So do a lot of app developers use that?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no one does. Because the problem is on Windows, that market is relatively small. So like Snapchat or Qualcomm will be like, oh yeah, we're where like 15% of premium laptops that were sold in 2024. Great. But what percentage are you of the billion whatever user base, like, yeah, less than 1%. So who's going to do that? I will say a year ago at Build, when Microsoft announced what was then the Windows Copilot runtime, I was like, all right, well I need to try this. We'll see what it looks like. I didn't get a chance to look at it. No one did until January or February, I guess it was 2025. So that took them seven months to ship a preview that's still not public, by the way. And then they announced the update to that. It's called the Windows AI Foundry. And that one's actually more interesting because in that case, what you have is a combination of on device and cloud based AIs. The on device AIs are a combination of AIs that run against the CPU, the GPU and or the MPU. You. And so you as a developer can pick and choose and use the models you want for whatever your needs are. Right? And so obviously the big use cases, there are things like creator apps, like video editors, photo editors, that kind of stuff. But the problem with this stuff, this is going to be the problem for Apple as well. You just said like, Apple is sprinkling AI all over their ecosystem. And you're right, that's 100% right. But there isn't a single feature that would cause anyone to go buy an Apple device to get that feature. Right? So when you say stuff like, well, I can make whatever they're called genmojis. And now people in my contact list in the new version of iOS can take my Genmoji and have it make reactions where they're editing me and you're like, okay, so look, that may be fun. That might be something lots of people do in the future, I don't know. But I can tell you, no one's buying the new iPhone to get that. Like, that's not a thing. And this is the problem we see on Windows as well. And this is the killer app problem we talked about. We've been talking about this for two years. Like, what's the killer app? There is no killer app. There is a. We took a killer app and we shattered it on the floor into a thousand pieces. And there were a thousand little things. And depending on your needs, there may be one or five or 100 things that are nice, but not.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but that's not. And that's not what they came in on the door in I. We talked about this last year. Apple had to, at the point in the hype cycle For AI last year, Apple felt like they had to say something, they had to do something.

[Leo Laporte]

They were pressured, in effect.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I also feel like, look, in the same way that the iPhone appeared and it killed everything else. Right. The only thing that survived out of that, the cockroach, was Android, which they had to change completely.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because of the iPhone.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was going to be like a thing with a keyboard.

[Leo Laporte]

They went back to the drawing board. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

They were the only ones that were like, nope, stopping. Change everything. We're not doing that. Every other company on Earth, everyone's like, oh, Microsoft failed because the iPhone, you know, Microsoft. What about Nokia? What about RIM and BlackBerry? And what you. What about Motorola? What about the companies that only did that one thing? They all failed to. So sometimes these things come out of the blue and they blow you away. Apple was actually early to the game with what they call a neural processor, an mpu, and capabilities built into the devices that took advantage of it. They've been doing that for several years on the Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. It's been in the Apple.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just that.

[Richard Campbell]

And because they've needed to. Because they don't own enough cloud to do it any other way.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, this is before there was any cloud AI. This is. I mean, they've been doing this for many years. So all of a sudden this cloud thing happens with a chatbot and. And there's a breakthrough. And, you know, look inside of Apple, but outside for the rest of the world. We all saw it. Everyone looked at this and was like, oh, my God, actually, this is real.

[Richard Campbell]

100 billion users in two months.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is really good. So that put Apple in the spot, maybe that RIM and Palm and whatever companies you want to name back in 2007 were in, where at first you're like, well, we got this. We're us, We're. Look at us. We're great. We're not going to fail. We got everything right. We have a history of coming from behind and doing our little secret sauce thing and getting it right eventually. And by the way, that could still play out. I'm just saying.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, I think this is a confidence issue. Last year, if they'd had the confidence. So we said, hey, we're looking at this. We don't think it's good enough yet. We'll let you know, we got something better. They didn't do that. They said, hey, we've got it. Here's the thing, you'll get it soon. And now a year later and the momentum's off. Like, people aren't that impressed with AI. Like now it's easier to say, we're willing to wait.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, we could be like, we told you. So that's not.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they could have been there. But that's not what happened.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, but we're not used to.

[Richard Campbell]

Apple blinking on the confidence equation. And that's what we just saw, 100%.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I. But they still can say, look, here's the we. We announced whatever the number was. 28 things. We released 27 of them. Them. I'm not saying they're all awesome, but we also did give Siri this pink, purple glow thing, which is. It's pretty fun. It distracts you from how stupid it is, but it's fun.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, still doesn't understand what you're.

[Paul Thurrott]

Saying, but now it's ridiculous. But I mean, but this is the ultimate hand. Like, look at the purple and pink. It's still. It's still. It just did it to me, I think was today or today. Yes, it popped up and I'm like, what are you doing? Shut up. Like, I, you know, I never want. It always comes on when I don't want it. It never.

[Richard Campbell]

Not when you do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Do. I never do.

[Leo Laporte]

But anyway, I think they fell for the general consensus that the AI should manifest itself as a chat bot. And they didn't have the chat.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the one thing. See, they're not doing that. Right. They're not going to do a chat.

[Richard Campbell]

Now that they've learned how to.

[Leo Laporte]

They thought that was the way to do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually, I shouldn't say they're not going to. But what they've said publicly in those interviews you were referencing that kind of provide a little more color on the Siri thing was like, look, the Internet happened and we had Internet stuff in the Mac, but we didn't make a search engine. You know, the.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's all these examples because I think. And by the way, this is actually credible on their part. I'm extremely critical of Apple. But they do look at things and where they do feel like they can provide value, they pursue it. And when it comes out, it's usually pretty good. Those are examples of. That is not what happened at the time. Well, no, but they looked at those things and said, we're not going to do this. Like, we're not gonna. We're not gonna have an app. Well, again, they might actually be doing it, but, you know, they didn't. The plan for last year was not. And it all culminates in an Apple AI. Chatbot, you know, it's like, no, like they're doing what Microsoft is doing, but to phones and their devices, which is adding AI everywhere and hopefully it makes your life a little, you know, better for users.

[Leo Laporte]

That makes more sense. I mean, and you can always chat with Claude or ChatGPT or somebody else if you really want to.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the user doesn't care where any of that stuff runs, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

No, they don't care.

[Richard Campbell]

I would argue this. Apple, Apple has stayed loyal to their core business style, which is that they're a hardware vendor that makes exceptional hardware and the software is an ancillary point they provide.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's the value. Yeah. But you do get more value from Apple the more you spend. I know that sounds like. Like, why wouldn't you?

[Richard Campbell]

But their walled garden works well.

[Paul Thurrott]

But they're really good at that.

[Leo Laporte]

They really good lock in. They know.

[Richard Campbell]

But I would also argue this is not what Microsoft's done. You know, Microsoft used to be a software company.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

They're now an infrastructure company.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, just before the show started, my. Someone in my family, my extended family, texted my wife and I. And I texted my wife back and I said, please, God, give me the strength. And then I wrote, sorry, that was for chat GPT. Because people are just like. It's like a therapist now. You just talk to it and it's like, Paul, you seem like you're down.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you think of Liquid Glass?

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not. So honestly, I realized that was the big thing up front. Right. And if that's how they started.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In my opinion, the most important story. And I think you agree at the end, but Liquid Glass was the first.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thing we talked about. Well, look, I actually think there was a lot of good stuff in this keynote. Like I said, it's really easy, especially with these highly produced things they do.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple makes a hell of a show, by the way. There's no protesters if you record ahead of time. Although there was a protester in Cupertino, an Apple employee who did stand up, a pro Palestinian protester, and was escorted out. But the thing is, nobody saw it.

[Paul Thurrott]

But no one would ever.

[Leo Laporte]

Unless you were there, because you're watching.

[Paul Thurrott]

A video that they're watching there. You're not watching them watch the video. Yeah. Right. So look, I wrote a long, long piece about this. Liquid Glass, though. It was promoted as kind of the big thing. This unified UI across all of their platforms is actually, at least on iOS. Well, you know, iPhone, iPad especially, but even on the Mac, too. It's a very minor Change. There's stuff going on in liquid glass that doesn't require the glass effect. That is actually kind of cool. Like they have new UI widgets and things and you know, as you scroll down a page they kind of contract and get out of the way and like that stuff's wonderful. Doesn't require glass. Right. It's just not. They're kind of commingling these things. The way that it looks, I'm not 100% sold on. Like I. This is. Apple had this problem with Mac OS X. Microsoft later had this problem with Windows Vista where the first implementations are off. You know, like if you go into like Control Panel. No, what's it called? Control Center. You have like the glass clear style, whatever. You can't actually see some things. Like I've had things where like text jumbles up at the top, but it's all the same color and it's, you know, it's a beta. I mean I get that but. But I feel like iOS7 was like this at first. Like the first version was mostly there, but then over time they kind of refined it and it made sense, I think.

[Richard Campbell]

Not Wind Phone seven, like, I'm convinced.

[Paul Thurrott]

But he didn't. When Craig Federighi was talking about this, he kind of said, you know, think about how much time has gone by, how much more powerful our processes are. And I thought what he was going to say is now we have the graphics capability to render the see through glass effect.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the implication. I mean, Aero didn't work because it was sluggish on xp.

[Richard Campbell]

Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

That was the argument for Arrow. Yeah, for Arrow. Right, exactly. So it was like Microsoft, that was a tough time for them because people have been hammering them for not being as innovative in Windows as Apple was with the Mac. Apple has hardware accelerated graphics. They've got postscript or PDF based text rendering and whatever. It was all the stuff they had. And it was like you have bitmaps, it looks stupid. You make an icon go big and it's all blurry on the Apple. It looks like a photograph graph. So they're like, all right, we're going to do all that stuff. And then they did. And everyone's like, oh, it doesn't run on my computer. And you're like, you told us to do it. Like, you know, so look, that was a temporary problem. They solved it with Service Pack and then with Windows 7, obviously. But. And they also made. The important thing to me though is just the glass effect got better, if you will. I actually think flat is better. And opaque is better for this kind of interface. But you know, if you think about a big screen, multiple windows, the idea that you might want to see what's behind the thing you're working on is a decent one. This is not something you do on the phone, you know, not that much. I mean, sometimes maybe I'm trying to think of an example. They had examples, but like some little.

[Richard Campbell]

Uniform they're unifying across all the platforms too, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, that's why I said on iPhone especially it's more of a. On the Mac. And if you're using an iPad with Windows for some reason. And yes, this becomes maybe more of a thing. Although if you look at the shots of the windows on the iPad, they are not see through, they're just Windows. So I don't know. To me it's not. I don't know, it's not awful, but it's. I don't. Aesthetically, this is subjective. I don't think it's an improvement over what they had two seconds ago. And all of the stuff that is cool about it related to, you know, toolbars and widgets and whatever you call these things that kind of contract and go away and come back, whatever they do could have been done with any. It has nothing to do with liquid glass. Like, it's just like there are effects that occur. I don't have my iPhone here, but like you can press a button that is smaller than the tip of my finger and if you look at it from an angle, you can see there's a little glass effect. Great. I don't need that. There. That's. This is. This is pointless. I can't even see it. So I don't know. I. I don't know. I think people were worried that they were going to turn the iPad into a Mac and that they were going to dumb down all their UIs to make it look like Vision Pro. And I think that making things consistent to whatever degree makes sense, given the platform is fine. You know, I think it's fine. Like it's the consistency. Although, you know, Microsoft Learned in the 1990s, like their semi or less intelligent version of this was make all the toolbars in the Office apps as similar as possible because that will be familiarity. And then someone who uses Word can use Excel more easily. Not true. It's completely untrue. And people can handle different UIs as it turns out, but it's one of those things that sounds right. So when you say, like, we want to make all our platforms consistent, it's like, okay, but sometimes the UI I see on a phone makes sense on a tablet, makes sense on my Apple TV maybe. Maybe even on a Mac. But a lot of times no. Right. So I guess the trick is in the implementation. I guess we'll see. Plus you're basing your ui, your unified UI and the one thing no one bought. Maybe the UI on that thing is the problem. You know, like what? Did it occur to you that maybe that wasn't right? It's like everyone loves the Apple Watch, so everything's bubbles now we're going to bubbling UIs on all our devices. On a Mac you'll have giant bubbles. It'll be great.

[Richard Campbell]

Like they didn't high resolution retina bubbles.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. Retina bubbles, exactly. I don't know. I thought. I don't know. We'll see. I need more time with it. It's easy to knee jerk this kind of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean I also. Did you install a developer?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, I installed it on everything. I have it on my watch, my phone, my Mac and my Apple tv.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you like it?

[Paul Thurrott]

I do that with the Google stuff too. I mean, yeah, it's fine. Like I can't say that any of them. I don't think a UI change, like I have. It's like I have a new iPhone on my iPhone.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no. I don't think it's a big deal. It's a UI change. I do think what they did with the iPad is a big deal.

[Paul Thurrott]

I did. Yeah. Because this. And by the way, so I've been yapping about this one for years. Apple could have put a knife in Windows and especially in Surface forever. And I think under Steve Jobs would have. To me, the big actually bizarre thing about the iPad.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody debates Steve Jobs because I'm hearing a lot of people say Steve, well, would never have let this happen.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh really? Well then you should go back and listen to what he talked about because he was talking about the post PC era, not the PC plus era. Like we're still going to PCs and this thing. And he. And by the way, go to the iPad2 launch and his visceral reaction to all of the. All of the. Everyone suddenly had adopted this term consumption device.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And he was like, no. And he made sure that they, the IO Life apps, whatever they were called at the time. These are going to be first class on the iPad. We're going to prove that this thing can be used to get work done.

[Leo Laporte]

He did not do that though, I'm sorry to say.

[Paul Thurrott]

They did to some degree. And then he passed away. Because that year was the year he died. Okay, right, 2011.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look, I'm not saying we would have landed where we are. I agree that when you see things like a pointer in floating windows with the green and red and yellow buttons like you have on a Mac, it's like. Well, I didn't mean make it the Mac, you know, but what they did. This is quick again, this is too early, but they appear to have pulled this thing off where if you want to use the iPad like it is today as a full screen device with apps, you can. That doesn't change if you have an iPad pro or a big screen iPad Air or whatever it is, you can add a keyboard and a trackpad, like a cover or whatever and you could use this thing like a Mac, but in a device that gets way better. Well, better, hopefully better battery life, but has like that hybrid capability where it's a laptop and the thing it was before, I mean that's to me that's the dream. Right? That's what all these folding phones and folding laptops and whatever we have coming, whatever is about. It's like, is there a world, a version where I can replace two things with one thing that actually works really well for both?

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And so far the iPad has been really good for the consumption stuff and.

[Richard Campbell]

Not so good for anything else.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's okay. So now look, this is going to be like a lot of other things. People have been hammering at this for years. Some people are looking at it now and they're like, what are you doing? You're screwing up everything that's special about the iPad. But they're not, right? They're just adding something that you don't have to touch, pardon the pun. A year ago, well, they've been kind of slow boiling features that make the iPad better for that kind of thing. So a year ago I was like, look, this is the list of what you got to do background processes. So if you're rendering a video, it doesn't stop. If you know huge, you get the best processor in the world and you can't do background. What are you doing?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's because they, they were. Is basically the iPhone. They were protecting the battery and, and.

[Paul Thurrott]

That was silly because someone's doing video. Yeah, they're probably on power, by the way. Yeah, just do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, I agree that was default. Default apps for opening file types. And we. Leo you, you might remember this, we had this thing about files. You're like Files of the past, Don. Like, not for this audience.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you need files.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're working with assets in a video, or you're.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't need a full finder, a full explorer, but you do need access. That's the point.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, look, there's always going to be this power user who points to this thing and says, well, it doesn't do this. Yeah, of course.

[Leo Laporte]

I use files now all the time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, of course. Because now it's actually pretty good. Anyway, I listed out all the stuff that this thing needed. They didn't do one of them last year at wwdc. They did all of them. And listen, that's not how Apple does things. Usually what happens is, like, all right, this year you're getting a pointer. Next year you're getting this. Next year you're getting that. They usually do it like that. The fact that they just shut me the hell up, like, in one whack is.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm really excited.

[Paul Thurrott]

Astonishing.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a big iPad user, and this, to me, is exactly what they needed to do. But I will point out the major distinction still between the iPad and Windows, or the iPad and the Mac, is you have to install apps from the App Store on the iPad. There is no side loading.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. So that's a big deal. Without worrying about whether that's ever going to change.

[Leo Laporte]

It's never going to change. I can tell you right now, I.

[Paul Thurrott]

Don'T think it matters.

[Richard Campbell]

We should jailbreak the iPad, I guess.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, but that's us. For most people, that might even be a selling point. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I agree.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's part of the platform process. Promise that this thing, even though they don't really do that much, to make sure these apps aren't doing anything bad. But whatever. It keeps it from being a full.

[Leo Laporte]

Computer, though, because I can't.

[Paul Thurrott]

But maybe that's better.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. For its audience. I agree.

[Paul Thurrott]

Maybe it's better. But that's the audience that I think Steve Jobs saw, which was a much bigger mainstream audience than the technical people who maybe need, like, what I would call a workstation, because they're a developer or a scientist or an engineer or whatever you're doing, or a creator. Right. To some degree. Although honestly, a lot of people, I. Look, did you see all the podcasting stuff? They announced the audio.

[Leo Laporte]

That was really surprising to me. I know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Damn. Like, they're really going after that audience. I mean, it's interesting. So I. This is what I saw for the iPad so long ago, and I just almost. I basically gave. I Never. I'm like, they're never going to do this. Tim Cook is protecting the Mac. I don't know what incentive there was to make it all happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Now maybe I'm just thrilled because they've always great hardware and they never had the software to live up to it, and I believe they do now.

[Paul Thurrott]

The M4 shipped first on the iPad. You spend 1200 bucks on this thing and you couldn't render a video in the background? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Yeah. I mean, this is like a Ferrari, right? But with a limiter on the engine. It can only go 30 in a school zone or whatever. You know, it's like, what are you doing? So anyway, yeah, this was. They finally unshackled it and look, to me, the important point is if you don't like it, if you don't want it, if you love your. You have an iPad mini or normal iPad, whatever it is, and you don't want that, guess what? You don't have to use it. You actually get a choice in the beginning. You just turn it off.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I. Yeah, just. I mean, I think if you're using your iPad to read and watch movies. Yeah. You don't need this. But if you are thinking, like, actually I might want to travel with this thing because it gets incredible battery life. You know what it's like to, like when you're on an Apple device, you could watch a movie for like half an hour and then you check the battery and it's 100% somehow. And then you use like an Android device and all I did was check the time and it's on 83% the same amount of time. You're like, what's going on? Like, they do look at me.

[Richard Campbell]

And look at me again.

[Paul Thurrott]

Again.

[Richard Campbell]

Because it'll.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. How dare you look at me now it's going to be 81. You're going to look again, buddy. Huh? You know, like it's, it's. You know, this is a slightly different thing going on there.

[Leo Laporte]

So that is maybe the argument for sticking with the App Store is that you can kind of get.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's part of that. Well, we're assuming Apple does anything on the. By the way, but I'm sure I. There's a lot of stories about how all kinds of stuff don't really seem to do much.

[Leo Laporte]

We get through. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, look, that to me is. That to me was the most important thing personally. But. But if you look at all the products. Well, most of the products, there wasn't really much on app the work up buddy thing is like the cringiest thing I've ever seen. I don't care about Vision Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, good going. You just ran a half mile. Nice job.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. And then that's when I'm like, okay, how do we turn this off?

[Leo Laporte]

Shut up, shut up, shut up.

[Paul Thurrott]

Can I turn it off in a way that will cause this thing pain? Because seriously. Oh, stop. Apple devices. Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Not everything can be a win at Paul. All. Not everything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, so now that Apple's event has kind of come and gone, I will say, I mean, each of these events were so emblematic of these companies. They were all so it would like, Build was such a Microsoft event. Google. Google I O was such a Google event. And you know, the Apple event obviously was only Apple, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think the iPad now is a threat to Surface?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I do. In fact, yeah, I do. I think this might be. This is extreme. Maybe I shouldn't say it this way, but I think Surface has been able to coast for a while, in part because Apple never did this. Like Apple had the power to kill.

[Leo Laporte]

That thing and they never did.

[Paul Thurrott]

The joke is, what was the Tim Cook line about? Yeah, we could combine a refrigerator or a microwave, but no one ever wanted that. And it's like, well, you just did it, buddy. Also, so that's one way of combining things. You could also combine a microwave and an oven and those seem to work out pretty good. So these things are sort of closer than you're making them sound, Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I think my Apple still has distinctions between the two lines. I think they can still sell MacBook Airs and even though, I mean, they don't really care because they both are equally expensive. I mean, it's not like you save money by buying an iPhone.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I actually like that it's not about the money. Right. That because you could, you could get an iPad pretty cheap. I mean, you could buy a base iPad and a keyboard thing and honestly be pretty good, right? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

If you want a pro.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny. The best screen they make is on the iPad Pro.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now if you want bigger than a 13 inch screen, you got to buy a Mac MacBook Air, MacBook Pro. Both come in 1516 inch screens. Right? Great. And there are going to be capabilities around expansion, the number of screens you can add and the things you can have those screens.

[Leo Laporte]

I can use Emacs.

[Paul Thurrott]

Emacs, yes. There's got to be an Emacs in the store, but. Or there will be soon. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

That'd be interesting. Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know who said this, but someone had offered up this idea that a platform isn't real until you can create that platform on the platform. Like, in other words, you have tools that run on that thing. Right. So that's another thing that differentiates the Mac. I know there's like the Swift Playground thing, but to make, you know, apps like an X, like there's no Xcode on the.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right. You still needed.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now, by the way. There could be, right? I mean, of course there could be. Why wouldn't there be a version of Xcode that makes iPad and iPhone apps and I guess watch apps or whatever. Like. Or whatever. Like why?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there could be.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't. They could be very good reasons, by the way. I don't know. But yeah, I love that they did it. I, they. I did my take on the famous line at the end of Planet of the Apes. They finally really did it. Although I meant that in a positive sense in this case, because this is what I've been asking for since the iPad was the thing. This notion of this beautiful slab that is light and thin and gets great battery life and then I can click on and do actual stuff on it, but not deal with the bulk and, and crappiness and bad battery life or whatever of like a computer. There's a place for this. So we're going to find out. But a year from now we're going to be like, what were we concerned about exactly? Like it didn't change anything. Like it doesn't matter. I don't know. Anyway, so the three, anyway, the three shows happened. We got by it. The summer doldrums can occur now. This is the week that would normally be E3. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Too soon. Don't bring it in.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, all three of the companies that are the big console makers, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have or will have some set of announcements that would have been at E3 if E3 was still a thing. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Did I miss the story that Microsoft is shipping a handheld Xbox?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we're going to talk about this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, all right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because there's a lot going on there.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the longest Xbox segment ever coming up.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, not by word count, but maybe by the amount of time we spent on this. We'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching and you're glad you are, I bet. Windows Weekly, Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell, who's in Stockholm, Sweden. Is it past midnight yet in Stockholm?

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, It's. It's almost 10 o' clock. It's fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, it's early 10 o' clock in June, so it's like noon is what it looks like there. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Sun never sets, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Sun is literally overhead.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, man, it's dark now, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, is it dark really? Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I was in Helsinki, I pulled my curtain.

[Richard Campbell]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I was in Helsinki on the summer solstice and it really. It's weird how, how late the sun is still on.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you get this far north, it just keeps going. It's the same in Vancouver.

[Leo Laporte]

It's wild. You're watching Windows Weekly. Thank you for watching all you winners and you dozer. We continue on now with the much awaited the vaunted Xbox segment. I wouldn't mind an Xbox Steam deck. Is that what we're talking here?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So this has been one of those rumored things. There are still rumors that Microsoft was originally planning to have a first party, meaning their own device as soon as this year, but that has been delayed. There's a lot of speculation about what's going on with Xbox hardware in house. That, you know, we had gotten that leak a couple years ago about these refreshes that look really good to the Xbox series X and S and then what they shipped was basically the same consoles, like slightly different. You know, maybe you got the white one in black or the black one in white and then a little bit more storage, whatever. There is one of the things they were looking at was make going with ARM for the next generation. Right. And we know that makes a lot of sense. Yep. And especially for a portable device. Right. That's where that kind of thing makes sense. So for that to work though, that means that we have to get buy in from developers and whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Compiled arm.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So what I had, I developed a theory before any of this happened that that Microsoft was going to combine Windows and Xbox as a gaming platform, meaning that the same exact game would just run on both and that, you know, if you go and get like an Xbox logo for your app, which you have to get to sell that app in the Xbox store for the console that the next gen version of this, it will be a Windows game basically. Which makes it a lot easier on developers when you think about it because there's a lot of developers creating just Windows games and now, now maybe that opens up the console to this different kind of a thing. And I thought we've seen what they did in Windows 11 on ARM over the past year with things like AutoSR and the Microsoft Prism emulator to emulate apps especially, but also games to run better so you can run like an x64 game and not in all cases, but at a lower resolution. But it looks fantastic. So to your eyes, maybe it's 1080p even though it's running at 720p or even less. Improves the frame rates, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe this is the thing that will make this ARM dream come true. If they're still pursuing that. Phil Spencer has been talking about portable devices. They've been thinking about this for years. ARM would make a lot more sense on portable, but we're in this holding pattern, right. This is the problem with Xbox right now. It's just been a tough couple years. Right. And so there's a lot of uncertainty. But. But Microsoft had a Xbox game showcase on Sunday. They announced a bunch of stuff. You know, the next Call of Duty, there's a remake of the original Gears and then there's a future Gears of War game coming as well, et cetera, a bunch of stuff. But of course then they announced this Xbox branded, what they call a gaming handheld. Not a gaming handheld PC by the way. It's a gaming handheld and it's got the Xbox logo on it. It's the first time Microsoft has allowed a third party to ship a. I'm going to call it a computer or a device that's not a peripheral with their logo on it. Microsoft, if you've been following gaming on Windows or especially in Windows 7, you know that they've been improving the Xbox app and the game bar dramatically. Both of them support a compact mode which is explicitly for this new category of device. But I would have called it a gaming PC. But now we're going to call it a gaming handheld, I guess. And I think this might be a pret preview of how this platform is going to shift a little bit here. Because if you look at this business, Microsoft, you could make the argument that Microsoft Games, or whatever that part of the company is actually called is really like Activision Blizzard and some other stuff. And the stuff that loses money is the worst part of it is the hardware. Right. This has been the big problem for them.

[Richard Campbell]

It's always been just a break even proposition. At best. It's the money from the games.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So Microsoft just looked at if they've proven anything on the hardware front, it's that they can't make a profit doing it. It's true of Surface as well. Farm it out.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, neither can Sony. Like there's no money in the console.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hardware, but they make a lot of the razor blades. Right. And companies like Sony And Microsoft or Nintendo are actually much better at cost reducing over time so that they actually do make money on that hardware. Eventually somewhere in that lifecycle they've done that. Microsoft has never been, been able to do that. So yeah, I thought, well, you know, what if maybe the next consoles, they don't have to be made by Microsoft, right? Yeah. And when you see, what do you.

[Richard Campbell]

Care if you're making the games.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And what do you care if you're an Xbox fan? Right. Other than the very basic comment that you want the platform to succeed for whatever reasons that you love it. If the next console is kind of PC based, which by the way, the current version, the last version and the first version were all PC based.

[Richard Campbell]

But now maybe momentary lapse of reason in the middle.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was that weird PowerPC jumping the shark moment there. Although by the way, that was the most successful one. But okay, they've done a terrific job of bringing forward games from the past. So you have this library of backward compatible games. They have the play anywhere stuff. So your games work in as many places as they can do. Some of that is constrained by the publishers. But look, say what you will about this business, they've done everything they can to expand the concept of Xbox and the availability of the money you've spent, the games that you bought with that money, and they've done a great job with that. This will be a lot easier if this thing was a PC platform, to say a lot easier. So this is very interesting to me. So this Xbox branded third party gaming handheld, right, Made by Asus, runs on what's called the AMD Z2 platform. This is the version of their PC chips made for handhelds specifically for all the stuff. So they rely on a small screen with a lower resolution than you would have on a 16 inch laptop with the dedicated graphics or whatever. You guys will know. I write about this, I talk about this all the time. One of the biggest things that's happened over the past, I say almost two years now is the integrated graphics especially. But the chipsets that are in just mainstream laptops have improved to the point where I now just play games on a laptop. But not a gaming laptop. Not a gaming laptop with dedicated graphics, but. But anything based on Lunar Lake is fine. Anything based on the AMD Zen stuff, Zen 5, depending on which chip you have is either unbelievable or off the charts. Like just. It's excellent.

[Richard Campbell]

What about Snapdragon?

[Paul Thurrott]

So the Zen stuff is really good and no. So the Snapdragon. Well, so Snapdragon, we're waiting on Gen 2, better graphics and whatever platform improvements come up.

[Richard Campbell]

So this is part of that still a year away.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. And Nvidia and Mediatek are rumored to be working together on something. Something that would have Nvidia dedicated graphics with arm, which makes that obviously very interesting. Right. So. But again, if you're going to make Xbox be a PC, which no one has said, I'm just speculating here, then you want to go with the best chip. Now AMD does make the chip in the Xbox. They made the chip in the previous Xbox. They make the chip in the PS4 and the PS5, or at least the PS5, I don't remember on the PS4. They're good at this. This is a strength I can tell you on the PC side of just a mainstream laptop. That stuff is off the charts. It's fantastic. I play Call of duty at 2880 by 1800 on a laptop that does not have dedicated graphics and it's 110 frames a second with all the graphics on full blast. It's unbelievable. Like it's really good. So the Z2, I can't speak to that. The Z1 was in previous gen gaming handheld PCs. The Z2 is the latest version, you know, 16, I think 32 gigs of RAM, 512 or terabyte of storage. Doesn't have Thunderbolt 4 whatever. But it's a seven inch screen, 1080p. I think it's 120 hertz on both of them. There's two models Xbox controller on the sides. Right. Kind of a standard factor.

[Richard Campbell]

It looks good.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's good. Looks pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm, I'm excited for this. I don't think this saves Xbox. I don't mean it like that. I don't think this is the, you.

[Richard Campbell]

Know, this could be part of a new Xbox.

[Paul Thurrott]

Not about the hardware. It's the tip of an iceberg of other things that are coming that might include such things as third party Xbox consoles. Next gen that have a. Just like Copilot Plus PC has a, a spec that you have to make sealed in the box from the factory to meet the spec. They will do something like that for Xbox and they could call it whatever you want to call it. But on the software spec certified, right? Yeah. Or the Windows Xbox or whatever you want to call it. It doesn't matter. The handheld OS is Windows 11, but it's been heavily modified. It doesn't boot into the desktop, it boots into. It's sort of like. Remember back in the day, you you could boot into Program Manager, but you could boot into Notepad if you wanted to. Right. So you boot into this, into the Xbox app in compact mode. It has access to your other stores. So they showed off. Well, their store, what's it called? Not Blizzard, but Bethesda has a store or whatever. It's called battle.net but they confirmed later that Steam Epic Games will be in there as well. So you have a unified dashboard for all of your games, wherever they are. If you have those subscriptions through Microsoft, you get access to the game pass stuff, you get access to the game streaming stuff. Again, I don't have personal experience with the processor, but based on AMD in general, I probably thinking this is pretty good. Like on the device, 1080p7 inch screen, you're not pushing a lot of pixels. It's probably going to be pretty good. And it's PC, right? It's not Xbox, you're not playing Xbox games. But, but I'm thinking this might be where the platform goes. And then you get this thing, you get to this idea where Windows has gotten better for gaming. It's not perfect. Still Windows, it's desktop os, but you have this highly optimized thing. They didn't mention Dave Cutler by name, but they talked about the. They referred to the architects from Windows who had worked on Xbox OS before modified Windows 11. Like, you know, that's that team. It's the same people, right, that did the Hyper V stuff for the Xbox where this becomes the platform. Right. And so if you think about like what's good about an Xbox, what's good about Windows, you know, on the Windows side you kind of trade complexity for infinite graphics. If you can spend the money, you can keep upgrading and keep getting better graphics, better performance, et cetera. On the Xbox side you turn it on and it just works. And so this thing. And it's acceptable, like it's good, the graphics are good. So I think that this thing basically is like a middle ground. It's like something in the middle. It's still Windows. So it has the advantage of all the compatibility, which is fantastic for games. The thing you don't get by the way on SteamOS because it's Linux based, right. It's not exactly the same. Yes, it runs faster because Linux is smaller, but this thing runs faster too because it too is smaller. You basically get back two gigs of RAM, which on a 16 gig system is meaningful.

[Richard Campbell]

Huge.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yep. So I think this is the makings of something. And so based on what I've been thinking so far, I was like, well, what if, like you could imagine, like an Xbox Series S is basically like a nuc. And then an Xbox Series X, whatever the next version is called, is basically like a little mini tower, like a dedicated graphic thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I'm sorry, but this makes sense to me. I'm going to jump ahead just for one second because there is a four terabyte of storage card that you can buy for your Xbox today. Four terabytes, right. That costs 500 bucks. $500 is more than you would spend on an Xbox Series S. It used to be more than you would spend or as much as you would spend on an X. I think now it's a little more expensive or a PS5. 500 bucks?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. How much would it cost to add a 4 terabyte SSD to a PC right now? $0.29. Do you get it free in a box of cereal? Are you kidding me?

[Richard Campbell]

Like, comes with a whistle?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. I'm just. I mean, give it a break. So I'm. Look, like I said, I don't think this thing solves Xbox. I don't mean it like that, but one of the things you could do to help that thing as a business is back off of the hardware thing. Or at least even if Microsoft had to make it for some reason, you know, base it literally on standard PC parts. Like just make it a standard PC, you know, whether it's ARM or have.

[Richard Campbell]

All that power for free.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Just give it. Yep, just do it. So, you know, I'm getting ahead of myself in a way here. Like, we don't. I don't know what's going to happen in the future. We don't know how much these things are going to cost. We know they're coming this holiday season. We know there will be more next year and that these things will all run that os. I got a lot of questions from people who are like, well, I would like to run this on my PC and I get that. But the thing about the PC, the thing about the PC that is so beautiful is that infinite expandability. So if you're like a PC gamer and you're not running 32 gig system right now, at least you're not paying attention. I don't know what you're doing. But saving 2 gigabytes of RAM and losing a lot of the stuff you get normally in Windows is maybe not the right approach. But there is a feature in Windows that nobody ever thinks about, which if you go into settings, there's a thing Called Games Gaming. Sorry. And then there's a feature called game mode, and it's just a right. And it optimizes your PC when you're playing by turning off things in the background, which at a very high level is what this new version of Windows does. The difference is this new version of Windows is more aggressive because it's a dedicated device and it starts at boot time. Like, this is something Windows 11 does while you're gaming. And then when you come back, you're like, we're back. Everything's normal again. It doesn't work 100%. I get phone link notifications from my phone while I'm playing a game. What? That should never happen. That's ridiculous. So that's a problem. But it's also not configurable in any way. If you go into settings and look at the feature I was just talking about, this is an on off switch. It's on by default, I believe. There's nothing you can do to configure it, but you just turn it on and there's a webpage you can go. That tells you a little bit about what it does, but it only tells you a little bit about what it. It does. And it's mostly just around background processes and stuff. It's not a big deal. But there's no reason that game mode could not be expanded in normal Windows 11 to be more like this little thing. You could today emulate this, right? You could run game bar in compact mode. You could run Xbox app in compact mode, launch your games from there, play your games, access the game bar. Everything happens kind of full screen. You could do it, you know, I mean, you're still going to get Outlook notifications and, you know, whatever. It's Windows, those. But I do see a path for. I don't see Microsoft giving us this for anyone, but I do see them improving game Mode in Windows 11 to be more like this for those people.

[Richard Campbell]

That want that and it does get it. Make a case for eventually your PC is just a good gaming machine, regardless.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Well, now that the iPad's going to kill the PC, this will be the last thing we have left. So it's good. Really good timing. So I guess we'll see. Anyway, I'm excited about this Xbox iPad. Yes. The. The X Pad. I knew it. Gaming's pretty good in the iPad. But. But yeah, I, I definitely. I. I booted up right after this was announced. I think it was that same night I went in here, I turned on my Xbox for the first time and I. It could be two years. It can't be two years. It could be like. I don't know. It's been a long time. A really long time time. And I thought what I was going to do was spend a day updating it. Right. But the thing was this has been plugged in the whole time, so it's actually been doing that thing in the background. I probably been sucking down all the electricity in the Lehigh Valley. So my Xbox that I never use can stay up to date. Because, you know, that's also another problem with that console, by the way.

[Richard Campbell]

So constantly needing updates.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well. And not super energy efficient, even though they keep working on that. Right. So you know, Windows PCs and the chips that go in them and the software that runs on it, it have all been. I'm not saying they're great, but it's gotten better over time. For sure. The Xbox has also improved, but they were starting from a much worse place. I mean, these things are designed to be boxes that are plugged in all the time.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Heat rooms.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And the best experience you can have as a gamer, unless you don't, unless you care about the environment more, in which case you wouldn't be a gamer, would be to not let it do that. Not let it be constantly connected. There's a stem, whatever they call the mode, they can turn that off. An energy saver mode, whatever. And then every single time you run the thing, you'll have to update all your games in the system because nothing will ever work. And that will be a good gaming experience. So you don't do that. You let it update in the background. But it's super inefficient. It just is. So I think that's another thing that moving to literally PC platform, not just PC chips and stuff, but like literally to a Windows PC platform might be better efficiency on these devices. I use a NUC as an example. But there are AMD, Zen 5, whatever, the best chip you can imagine that cost no more than an Xbox Series X today with lots of ram, lots of storage that will run these games. Great. Like great. And that's before we even get into dedicated graphics. Like, it's going to be great.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is a, this is a good future. Assuming my fever dream is correct. Because no one has ever said this. I'm, you know, I'm tea. Leaving it in a way. But anyway, anyway, so I'm excited. I hope you can. Okay. I mentioned the 4 terabyte RAM thing or storage thing that no one should buy. There's that not that way anyway. Yeah, not that. Yeah, exactly. This is one thing actually Sony does do better rate because Sony, it has to meet a certain performance characteristic. But you can just plug an SSD in that thing, right? There you go, that's what you want. Bunch of new game pass games across all the platforms, actually recognize some of these. That's pretty cool. Bell. The Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 have both been enhanced are on there. Warhammer 4000, EA Sports FC 25, which I assume is the soccer game Crash Bandicoot 4, it's all about time. Etc. And then of course the Barbie Project Friendship, which I'm now going through with my daughter. I'm just kidding, I'm a man. Anyway, so nobody plays that.

[Richard Campbell]

Your daughter's not 9.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. My first solo movie watching experience with my daughter was the Shining. So she's not really like that anyway, I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's why we don't trust dad.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly. She's like, what does Redrum mean? I'm like, oh man, you're going to love the end of this movie. All right, so Apple has been trying to prevent Epic and other developers from communicating with their developers and they wanted to stay there. That ruling, they were denied that. So you can still play Fortnite in the App Store or the iPhone iPad 2 and developers are just kind of embracing this. And I think the Epic number was kind of interesting because everyone's, you know, people fall on either side of this debate. But for a lot of people it was like, well, you know, the App Store is safer and it's better and blah, blah, blah, it's like, okay, you're fine. I mean, so epic's own customers, 60% of them are still using the App Store. A lot of it is because that's when they got the subscription or bought the game or whatever it is. And you just use the thing you use, it's fine. But this is, I don't think this is going to be confusing to anyone. I think it's going to save people money. Certainly going to save developers money. And we just talked about the PC versus a console. Like one of the nice things that goes in the pro column for a PC is choice of game stores and where to get games. And you know, you can actually own them and no one's going to flip a switch and take them away from you, that kind of stuff. So not that that's what's happening on the iPhone, but I think any, anything that opens it up a little bit and gives Some choice is probably not a horrible.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nintendo launched the Switch. It was Thursday or Friday last week. Right. Somewhere in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Thursday. And it was huge.

[Paul Thurrott]

I guess it's huge. I will say from my cave here in the, in the dark, I have not noticed anything. None of you yet. Well, I walked into Costco for, for other reasons and in the front there's this big Nintendo Switch thing. I'm like, oh, that's kind of interesting. They actually have these things.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I just walked over to look at. No, they have the controller so you can buy.

[Leo Laporte]

I got excited too. I did the same.

[Paul Thurrott]

I didn't get excited. I just wanted to see.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a giant pallet there. Got tons of them.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's no version of the story where I walk out of there like, honey, I just spent 700 bucks, you know, she like, that's great, you're sleeping outside. But they sold 3.5 million units in four days. Wow, that's yikes. And the reason, that's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's better than any console in that period of time. And granted, granted, if they could sell zero now and it's over, it's hard to say, but it's definitely the biggest launch in that time period. Asterisk, asterisk. This thing is like half again as expensive as its predecessor. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean some of that's tariffs. I think they built the tariffs in.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. But real world, it doesn't matter. I mean the price of a hamburger is. The price is what you pay. Right. So as far as your like one might make the case, maybe this will be cheaper next year. I should just wait. But no, like their fan base is so strong, people. Yep, whatever. I'm going to stand in line. I'm going to do the, whatever the process.

[Leo Laporte]

One thing I've learned is prices don't go down, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I'm not saying, I'm not saying it makes sense but you know, sure. They'll release a light version. I don't know. Sure. Anyway, I guess that's a big deal. And then I don't, I'm not sure like what I mean, I, I, I do this on other devices, like mice. This is a big thing on mice now. So I don't know if this is part of the Bluetooth LE standard or whatever, but you can. PS5 controllers are actually going to support multiple Bluetooth connections at once, so you'll be able to switch between. I don't know if it's two or two or more, but some number of devices, which is something I Do frequently. Well, I don't do frequently but I do do with certain things. Like that Backbone Pro controller does that actually that's really effective and like I said, some mice and stuff. So that's kind of an interesting idea. It's something. I prefer the Xbox controller because I have, you know, man sized hands but. Well, actually PlayStation is pretty big now, isn't it? Yeah, it used to be kind of, you know, like thin, kind of weird but.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that was a very refreshing Xbox segment.

[Paul Thurrott]

I look there's. I'm pretty excited by this and look, maybe it's colored by the fact that this has been a tough year for Xbox, frankly. Yeah, like I was kind of. I kind of need some good news. I'm nervous about it and like I said, not going to save the platform. But good, it's good news.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, here's my good news. It's time to subscribe to Club Twit. Coming up. By the way, the back of the book, the tips, the picks, the brown liquor. But first I want your money. Honey, if you're not a member of Club Twit, you're actually missing out. Club Twit is how we stay around. 25% of our operating costs now around are paid by club members. Thank you. I sincerely mean that, but I think we give you pretty good value for money. You get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is fantastic. A great place to hang out and have fun. All the events are in there too. In fact we've been doing our keynotes in there only exclusive to Club Twit. You can go to the Twit plus feed and find our build and Google I O and WWDC keynote coverage. We also have special shows like our our Chris Markquart Monthly. Chris Markquart Photo Time. I submitted a geometric picture. We'll see them of those. That's coming up Friday at 1pm Pacific. Wednesday next Wednesday a week from today. Micah's Crafting Corner. I love that. 6pm Micah's chill and he's doing Lego. It's fun. Now we're going to move this. Our AI user group we just noticed is on. It's always the first Friday of the month but that's the 4th of July and some places that's a celebratory day. So I think we'll move it to the 11th. So just a little heads up, but that's just a sampling. We've got Stacy's Book Club, lots of events and by the way, ad free versions of all the shows. I probably buried the lead. That's a big reason that people subscribe, so they don't have to hear ads like this one. But really the main thing for me is it makes a big difference in what we can do and the capabilities we have have, you know, thanks to the club, we're able to do so much more than we used to. We did, you know, tighten the belt a little bit. We shut down the studio and canceled some shows, laid off some people. But I think we're stable now, thanks to the club members. Thank you. I really appreciate it and we'd love to have you. $10 a month, $120 a year. You can pay more if you wish, but that's, that's the starting price. And thank you very much to all our club members. We really appreciate you and there's some great, great, great folks in the club. It's always fun to hang out. Twit TV Club Twit if you're interested. Twit TV Club Twit. Time for the back of the book. We kick things off with Paul Ferrat and your tip of the week.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is, this is a. Oh no, I am there. Okay. Sorry, I was worried. I was muted. This is a small one and I was just trying to check different computers to see where I have it and where I don't. But Windows has had a share feature since Windows 8, right? And so in Windows 8 it was one of the charms. It worked with all of the modern apps that were in the store at the time. Windows 10, Windows 11, they've expanded it. Now it's more of a floating pane thing. You'll see it in right click menus and File Explorer, you'll see it in File Explorer itself in the toolbar. And I feel like sometimes I'm the only person that uses this feature, that one of the sub features of it is something called nearby sharing. And so if you have nearby sharing turned on on one laptop over here and one laptop over here, as I often work on multiple laptops, you can copy over the WI FI network seamlessly just between the two. It's like a direct connection which is really nice, but it also supports all kinds of stuff. This is expanded dramatically. So all the apps that make sense to share to, like if you have text in the keyboard and you want to share it to Notepad or something, it will do that. If you have phones connected through phone link, you can share to the phone. If it supports that, it can also share out from the phone to the computer, et cetera, et cetera. So Again, I believe that this might have been just added in the Patch Tuesday update that went out yesterday. But I actually see it on all three of the computers I have here and they run different builds, so I'm not 100% sure when it debuted, but. But if you right click and share an image, you get this new kind of a header in the share pane. And there's a couple things going on, but one of those things is the ability to edit it. And that actually opens like a window with editing capabilities, which I think is a little bit much, frankly. You can copy it to the clipboard and then you can just go paste it in another app. But there's a little link that this thing I wanted to tell people about. So it says the name of the file, it says how big it is, and then it says original and it's underlined like a hyperlink, the dropdown next to it. And you click that, you see original, low, medium and high choices. Right. And so instead of sharing the full resolution or full sized version of the original image, you could save it in different. Same resolution but different quality levels. Right. So if you use PowerToys, you might be familiar with the right click. Do I have it on here? It's probably over here. Let me just right click and see what it says. So if I right click an image on this computer that does have PowerToys and you have this PowerToy installed, one of the options you get is where is it? Oh, resize with Image resizer. So Image Resizer is not about quality, it's more about the resolution. Right. And so this is actually something beyond that because what I found, I'm going to write this up as a tip. So. So low and medium, you can tell the difference and it may not matter. Right. It might be a silly meme thing you're sharing with someone, but the high choice is actually up to 10x size file size reduction. Yeah, 10x. And I can't tell the difference in most of the images. I've done this too. So this is actually something I kind of wish I had a better way of doing just with it. I mean, I usually Photoshop or Affinity photo does this as well, but it's kind of a neat way. Like this image I'm looking at here on this computer is only 1.5 megabytes. But if I go the high version for this one is actually half. So it's 765 kilobytes, but you can't tell them apart. This is useful. So just something to know about it's. One of a million little features that Microsoft has added or is in the process of adding to Windows that no one knows about. So anyway, take a look. I think Share is the type of thing most power users especially be like, I don't need that. I know. You know, I use winget to show. I mean, I use like I copy over the network with the command line, like, okay. But for the rest of us, it's actually really useful. So something to look at. I'll do like a. I think I'll do a new episode of Hands on My Desk about.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that'd be. Thank you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because there's a bunch of stuff. Not just what. Not just the thing I just said.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then the app pick, of course, is not for Windows because I have no idea what I'm doing. But one of the big stories of the past year has been the ARC browser and how some people love it.

[Richard Campbell]

And some people some alternative browsing ideas.

[Leo Laporte]

I loved the ARC browser, but they deprecated it. They killed it.

[Paul Thurrott]

So they had this idea for an AI powered browser that they wanted to do in Ark and it was just too much going on there and they're like, actually we're going to have to rethink this and restart from scratch. And so a lot of the people who love ARC were disappointed by this decision.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

But they announced, I think in late last year something called dia, which is the next browser.

[Leo Laporte]

Dia de Muertes.

[Paul Thurrott]

De la Dia de Muerte for arc. Am I right? So it's also fair to say, like other browser makers are building these kinds of things into their browser. But the fundamental thing that's happening here is that. So first I should say the first beta version is available on Mac. So if you have a Mac, you can get it now. Hopefully it won't be six months long.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm running it now actually. But it doesn't have a lot of the features. Arcad.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nope. Right. So a lot of that's going to come. But the fundamental UI difference, and that's a big thing because honestly there were a lot of UI differences, but if you had to pick one, it was that ARC subverted, if you will, or changed the way that like new tab worked. Right. So Control T or Command T on a Mac would typically switch between browsers, but in that case it brought up basically a command bar.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're not doing that. So it goes to a new tab window or whatever it's called.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I see. This is a new tab window, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

It'S not a command bar. Right, right. So in dia, though, the address bar or the. That search bar, whatever it is that you just saw in the browser in the new tab window, functions as an address bar. It does all that stuff, but it also is where you can do this AI stuff, so you can interact with AI. So there's a side pane you can put next to it, like you would put in any browser and, you know, summarize this webpage, do that kind of thing. But what this thing is going to do if you let it. You have to sign in for the. Well, no, they had accounts, I guess, technically before, too, but you sign in. I don't know yet what they're doing with AI.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know who's the President of the United States. That's probably one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So it's probably anthropic. No, whatever it is, it says in.

[Leo Laporte]

Mid-2025, the government's officially led by Joe Biden.

[Paul Thurrott]

What a world that would be done.

[Richard Campbell]

Seems unlikely.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Well, maybe we're living in a different timeline than these guys.

[Richard Campbell]

We're definitely living in a different timeline.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so the first thing I asked it at Hallucination.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. But the point of this is as you browse around the web, it kind of takes note of what you're doing. So one of the things you could do is you could have, like, multiple browser windows open to, like, say, computers, and be like, which one of the computers I'm looking at now should I buy? And then it will go look at those tabs and kind of give you answers. Right. So it actually kind of prompts you in the beginning. You can tell it kind of the things you like, your interests are or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

We have the show notes open on the left, and AI is always there. Right. So on the right, I said, what would be a good name for this show? It suggests, among other things, the Patchwork Pod.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, not the Colonel for the episode.

[Leo Laporte]

Or Left of Center Tech or Cat on the command line.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

I think some of this is Put.

[Paul Thurrott]

A thousand monkeys on it, but they're not going to write a power shot. Rochelle Smith. That's all I'm saying.

[Leo Laporte]

It does ask you to personalize it, and I think maybe that's my mistake, because I said I have.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it's also day one. Right. So presumably a week from now, as you use this thing every day.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it'll get smarter.

[Paul Thurrott]

It will. Yes. So that's the kind of. The point of it. Now. The. The problem these guys face is that there's like 17 people in Brooklyn or whatever. It is. And Google's working on this. Microsoft's working on this. Microsoft has a sidebar too, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Is this an Agenda browser? Is that what they're trying to do?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. The documentation that they provided with this release is not even negligible. It's non existent. But if you go back and look at the stuff they've said before and they've given example, they've shown UI like, this is how we want this thing to work. It's actually a really interesting idea. And it's turned out to be not a hugely unique idea, actually, because like I said, other companies are kind of doing, doing this too. But I think the difference here is that, like when ARC came out, yeah, we saw a couple things that copied it, like Zen browsers, a Mozilla version of that thing. Right. But it wasn't like Microsoft, Mozilla or, yeah, Mozilla, Google, Opera, whatever, looked at that thing and said, all right, we're going to do this, you know, the workspace thing. We're going to, you know, no one actually copied that stuff. But when they started talking about this agency, well, they didn't call it this at the time, but agent organic browser. Everyone is like, yep, this is probably the future of the web. Treat the web like the data store that it is, and then personalize it heavily, which is what you want as a user, and then have it do the thing you want, whatever that thing might be. Like the simple get me the best price on a flight to Mexico City to whatever. Like, I want to buy a shirt. And they'd be like, well, you know, yellow is not your color, buddy. Maybe, maybe you want to go with green or brown or whatever, you know, something like that. So again, it's day one, but. And we can't get it on Windows yet, but I'm really, really curious about this and we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so it can't actually do anything agentic yet. It's just doing searches.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's just. But just, it's just again, it's V. It's not even V1, right. It's like first beta.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, it's a very early beta.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's pretty, it's clean.

[Leo Laporte]

I love dark. And it was very sad that ARC is gone. I'm not sure I really want a browser with AI built in, to be honest.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, what does that get me?

[Richard Campbell]

Just for the bytes and like, what is the difference does it make?

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think you're gonna have a choice in a way.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Unless you Want to go with like Sleepnir or something?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's gonna be in everything. I think it's the another links anniversary. You can switch the links.

[Paul Thurrott]

Speaking of text based browser.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, there you go. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's an awesome reaction to everything that's going on. You're like, you know what I'm going to boot into. You talked about booting into like some Windows thing. No, I'm going to boot into a command line. I'm going to type everything. That's enough.

[Richard Campbell]

Nothing's going to type back.

[Paul Thurrott]

All I need are words. I don't care about pitches.

[Leo Laporte]

W3M browser in Emacs. That's my strong.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, we talked about. Bill Atkinson passed away. One of his great innovations, and he had many was the Macintosh had a black and white screen. It was not a grayscale screen. So he came up with a dithering algorithm that would take a color photograph, dither it so that it looked like a black and white photo, meaning a grayscale photo. Right. That looked beautiful. And you could do that for email or not for what you call it, for links.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Just that dithering algorithm lives on. It's a very good algorithm.

[Paul Thurrott]

Everything he did lives on. He did the thing he did for overlapping Windows, the clipping, which he thought he saw at park but did not. They did not figure that out. He invented this. That became bitblit in Windows, everything. The iPad with its windows, floating windows. Guess What? That's the 21st century of the Bill Atkinson UI.

[Leo Laporte]

And I want to say anything, but he's in a round wreck right now. So there.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's one of the great stories, right? He was like, we don't need Ron wrecks. He's like, what are you talking about? Steve Jobs said, no, they're everywhere. He's like, where? He's like, there, there, there. They walked around the streets, like the parking sign, everything. He's like, all right, all right. He's like, I'll do it. And God, he's just doing rectangles was amazing. That's crazy. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He was pissed that they didn't really recognize him for being able to draw a circle fast.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now you want circles. He's like, this is amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

He's like, yeah, yeah. But, you know, it really would be amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're using a text computer. This is from the future.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, he was from the future. Brilliant.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. That guy was a genius. And unlike a lot of these tech guys, like, you know, you knew him like, he's a good guy. He's a great Guy, you know, that's what. That's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Genuine Guy. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Anyway, I will try. I'm going to try DM in it right now. I mean, I give. Actually, I give Ark a lot of credit because that's how I learned about Perplexity.

[Richard Campbell]

They.

[Leo Laporte]

They use perplexity in their iOS app. App. And that turned me on to it. They. They were very early on using AI and Search. So I'll give them some. I'll give them a. But I wish.

[Paul Thurrott]

A lot of people kind of burned. They're like, I'm not going to try another one of their browsers after arc. It's like, guys, geez. Like, I mean, it just, you know. Well, let's. Let's see. They're trying to move quicker. I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, at least they're experimenting. Like, it's literally a different mindset and that's cool. That's hard to think about browsing different levels.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. DIA from the browser company. It is. You have to sign up for the beta and there's a wait list. Although, because I was an ARC user.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was able to get. Oh, yeah, I was gonna say. I just. Right. I. They. They said you had to be an ARC member or whatever. I downloaded it without signing in. I just.

[Leo Laporte]

I know.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think they just.

[Leo Laporte]

Tried to use my ARC account and they wouldn't let me. I had to make a new account.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, just. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't understand.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think it looks good. I mean, it's early, but.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, Mr. Richard Campbell, you're on Time Run as Radio.

[Richard Campbell]

One of the shows I grabbed about a month ago at NDC in Melbourne. I got really lucky and got a chance to talk with Liz Fong Jones, who's one of the original site reliability engineers. Like, essentially part of inventing that space worked at Google, is now at. At Honeycomb. And so the conversation was all about telemetry. And she just came at it from a really broad view of not. It's not about the tooling, it's about the culture that you build, starting with the leadership, really about having a room. Room to fail. Room to measure stuff in detail and, and to learn and, and to get better. And without those things, you know, no amount of plum tree is going to save you.

[Paul Thurrott]

You.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. So it really. You need the. Right, you need the tools, but you also need the culture to make it work. So it was a philosophical discussion, but I thought a really powerful one for folks to just think more broadly about how they make things work.

[Leo Laporte]

Runasradio.com and go.

[Richard Campbell]

And again, she's a legend. Like, without a doubt, one of the best. Yeah. Canada's still in the playoffs. Exciting times.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yay. They.

[Richard Campbell]

They sure ate it on that last game. Six to one.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just want to point out that you're losing to Florida. Come on.

[Leo Laporte]

So weird.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, by the way, again, right? It's a replay of last year.

[Leo Laporte]

That's so weird. It's crazy. So I don't speak whatever language this is, but Benjar Voder.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, just hit. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's Dutch.

[Paul Thurrott]

So.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay, listen and use your translate feature. They will make an English version eventually. I was just in the Netherlands staying with my buddy Remy, and Remy owns a whiskey store now. So his favorite.

[Leo Laporte]

His last name, Martin.

[Richard Campbell]

It is not.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, just checking.

[Richard Campbell]

But he lives in Alkmaar, little town in the Netherlands. And he had a favorite, favorite whiskey shop. Been around for a long time, and the old guy wanted to retire, and he didn't want to lose the whiskey shop. So they made a deal, and now he owns the whiskey shop. And now, over the few years we've been doing this, I've been at his place a few times, and we've always had unusual whiskey because he loves his whiskey. And so we'd always try something fun, and I would usually put it on the show. And that happened again this time, only this time it's his store and the whiskey he brought me, which is an important part of this whole equation, is this. Glen Lossy, 26. You've never heard of Glen Lossie?

[Leo Laporte]

Never have.

[Richard Campbell]

Nobody has, because it's just like one of these invisible distilleries. It's been around a long, long time. It's a spay. It's on the A941 with a bunch of other distilleries as well. Literally. Glen Elgin is on the other side of the road from Glen Lossie. It's been around for a long time. It was created by John Duff in 1876. And John Duff went to where he first worked in Glendronach, which is further to the east. And then after he made the Glenlossy distillery, he helped build it with his partners. He then left for South Africa, very coincidental. And tried to make the whiskey industry work down there, and he failed.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh.

[Richard Campbell]

And then when he gave up on South Africa, he moved to the America, to the United States for a while and tried to make it work there. It didn't work there either.

[Paul Thurrott]

There.

[Richard Campbell]

And so he came back to Scotland, and just a few years later and almost Immediately built another very famous distillery, the Longmore Distillery in 1893, which is just further up the same highway and then next door built in 1898. Benriac are really the best known of all the distilleries he's built. So this guy made a lot of distilleries and Glen Lasse is one of them. But. But in 1876 when he was building it, when it went into production, they never made a retail whiskey, ever. That distillery was built to make blends and from day one it was providing whiskey to go into Haig and Dimple, although there are other blends since then. Now it's went through the normal rough patches at every distillery you went through. We've talked about it over and over again in Scotland. So shut down over World War I. And when they went to start back up in 1919, they didn't have enough money to finish repairs and so forth and so were sold to the distillers company, dcl. During the. During Prohibition there was a fire and it was burned down, but it was rebuilt and then going back into operation after World War II because again, they shut down for that and. And business was good in the 60s, so they flew right around. In fact, it did some expansion and then by the 1970s built an additional sillery right next door, Mattockmore. At that point it was owned by DCL to become the Scottish Distillers Corporation, but then that became United Distillers, which then of course in the 1990s got acquired by Diageo. So they are a Diageo. The only time you'll ever see Glenlossi on a label is either the Flora and Fauna bottlings that are done by Diageo and they only have done the them a few times. For Glen Lossie, which I've never had, there's a 91 edition in a 2004 and a 2019. The usual place you find Glen Lossy is custom bottlers. And there are a couple of websites out there that will literally keep track of every time a custom bottler does a bottling from a given distillery. And there are hundreds. For Glen Lossi, you name the bottler. Ad Radley, Black Adder, Caden Head, Douglas Haig, Duncan Taylor, Gordon McPhail, Murray MacDonald. All of them have done bottlings of Glen Lossie and this particular one is done by the Maltman.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you chose it because it's the Maltman 26.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, well, and it's a 26 year old and it's a single cask From a single. A single cask of Glen lossie. And it's 26 years old. Now, the distillery is a big distillery. Two million liters a year. Yikes. And it's a Speyside distillery. Again, never a public run. 8 wooden washbacks, 3 pairs of stills. 15, 16,000 thousand liters on the wash still, 13,000 on the spirit still. They use a conventional pear shape, no additional domes or anything like that. It looks like early on, they did an addition to their spirit stills called the purifier, which is literally a mechanism on top of the lye arm that causes additional reflex. And it's because they didn't put onion bulbs in the still. So sort of an inexpensive way to increase reflux to make the whiskey smooth. And they did that with their new still in the 70s as well. So they all three of the spirit stills have them. And I did make a note here because I know it would be important to you, too. They use creamed yeast.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, thank God.

[Richard Campbell]

They also have one of the largest rack house sets in the whole of Scotland. 250,000 casks. 60 million liters of whiskey being aged in the rack houses. Too many around Glen Lossie.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

And because they're owned by Diageo, there are barrels from all kinds of distilleries there. They do not do any tours of any kind. They have no. They've never had a visitor's house. They don't do any of that stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't even have a website. They just.

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Richard Campbell]

And they don't even have a website, which is why I had to point you to Remy's site, because that's all there is. There isn't any.

[Leo Laporte]

Anything else. This is a secret whiskey distillery.

[Richard Campbell]

They do. And they, starting in the 1970s and expanded with now being owned by Diageo in the 1990s. They do what's called residue processing there for more than 20 distilleries. So this is both draft and pot ale. Now, giraffe is the stuff you get. That's what left over from the mash after you extract the sugars from it, from your washbacks. Right. That's sort of. It's the remains of the mash. And they process 100,000 tons of draft a year. They also process 8 million liters of pot ale, which is what you're left over in the stills after you finish distilling. So it's the remains of the alcohol. It's all the excess. All of that stuff is processed. They call this dark grain processing into animal feed. High protein animal Feed so nothing's wasted. They also have a biogas processor, they do some energy generation, so forth. Like, it's a very contemporary site for having no visitor site, no public brands. Like, I just love that there's this great big dark distillery essentially for the rest of the world. But inside of Diageo, it's important still. And so, like I said, most of these bottlings are custom bottlings. This Maltman bottling is a unique one. It says 26 year old, so it was distilled in 1997, bottled in 23.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

And they have 387 bottles from a single cask, which should give you pause. What's weird about that number? 387? It's too many. Normally, if it was a thing from a single cast, it should be under 200. Why would it be 387? Like, how is it even possible? It's from a Sherry Hogshead, where the bourbon casks are 250liters and so you're lucky to get 200 bottles from it. Sherry hogshead are 500liters. And that's why there's 387 bottles of which there is virtually none left. Although if you. I think Remy has one. These are very popular. Look, I'm not a big fan of old, old Whiskey. Like a 26 year old.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is really old.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, they're.

[Richard Campbell]

They tend to be expensive. This one's like €350. Yikes. Which is not hugely expensive for a 26. Like you can even spend a thousand dollars on a 26 year old whiskey. But they also get really oaky. Like they're not great. This is not that whiskey. This was amazing. Just big fruit notes, no burn, no chalkiness. Just like, my God, what am I drinking? Very, very dangerous whiskey. Whiskey should not be this good. Like, you will get yourself into trouble. And if that sounds exciting to you, like I said, there's a couple of bottles left. There's only 387 bottles of this stuff. But meantime, my friend has decided he wants. He's going to take care of this whiskey shop. And one of the things he's doing very deliberately is only shelving these custom bottlings. His whole point is, like, if you want the Balvini 12, you can go to any store for that. But if you like Balvini, he's got a custom bottling of a Balvini for you. Or maybe you want something from Macallan, he's got a custom bottle of Macallan. Like he's just chosen unusual whiskeys so you can just have an experience. You'll go there and have a whiskey you wouldn't have anywhere else. And this Glen Lossie is one of them. Just an exceptional whiskey and a very odd distillery, like one unlike almost anything else you'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

Should I buy some right now? Will it change my life?

[Richard Campbell]

You know, I don't know if you can get it to America. They're not. They're not shipping in. They're only shipping in the eu.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's what they said. Yeah. Sad to say, it's just the rules.

[Richard Campbell]

But that was a fun drink to have with my buddy and really fun whiskey to write about. I have some South Africans with me, so those will come in later weeks. And still on the ride for unusual drink.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I thank Remy for that. Amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

The only thing better than owning a whiskey shop is having a friend who owns a whiskey shop. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, everything's coming up 26 this time. Thank you, Mr. Richard Campbell in Stockholm, Sweden. He's far away, but he's near and dear to our hearts. You'll find [e-mail] that's where Run isradio and.net rocks his podcasts live. Thank you, Richard, for making the trek. Paul Thurrott'[e-mail], t h u r o ott.com make sure you become a premium member for all the great goodness. And his books [e-mail] including the Field Guide to Windows 11 and Windows Everywhere. And we look forward to the hands on Windows covering this new share feature. That's cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Mr. T, Mr. C, thank you for being here. And a special thanks to all our club members who made this show possible. Possible. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. I mention that because you can watch us live if you want. Club members watch Inside the club, inside our discord. The kind of behind the velvet rope access that only club members can enjoy. Otherwise, you, everybody else, you can watch in seven platforms. YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. But you don't have to watch live. We have on demand versions of the show on our website, Twit TV, WW. There's also YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. Great way to share little clips with friends and family, spread the word or subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get automatically as soon as the show's done. And if you do that, please, if your podcast client allows reviews. Leave us a five star review. That would be very nice. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. We will see you next Wednesday, Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Bye.

[Leo Laporte]

Bye.