Windows Weekly 946: Backing up the Intel Truck

Summary

Windows Weekly 946: Backing up the Intel Truck (August 20, 2025)

Episode Overview

In this episode of Windows Weekly, Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell explore the state of Windows 11, recent tech industry rumors, PC hardware trends, and the ongoing reinvention of productivity with AI. They discuss the latest Google Pixel announcement and its lackluster impact, unpack updates in the Windows Insider Program, and dive deep into privacy within AI tools and browsers. The hosts also tackle industry shifts in PC sales, especially Lenovo’s banner quarter, and take an enjoyable detour into favorite productivity apps and rare whiskies.

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Main Themes

• The challenge of standing out and meaningfully innovating in today’s tech landscape, especially amid AI and hardware commoditization
• Microsoft’s evolving vision for Windows, natural language transformation, Copilot, and the persistent importance of privacy
• The realities of PC market cycles, with Lenovo’s surge and the unraveling of old Intel dominance
• Community, nostalgia, and thoughtful critiques of both old and new tools—plus a little whiskey love

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Key Discussions & Insights

1. Google Pixel 10 Launch Event—Celebrity Hype and Missed Substance

Timestamps: 01:27 – 08:52

• The event was heavy on celebrity appearances (Jimmy Fallon, Jonas Brothers, Steph Curry) but light on meaningful product details.
  • Leo: “There was so much banter, so many celebrities, so much back and forth movement that you really didn’t hear a lot about the device itself.” (03:09)
  • Paul: “This is like Apple giving away a U2 album that nobody wanted. You’re not in touch with the kids.” (05:08)
• Real-time translation demo: does it in your own voice, impressive but skepticism remained.
• No real incentive for existing Pixel 9 owners to upgrade despite minor hardware improvements.

2. Windows Insider Program: UI Change Frenzy & Copilot Evolution

Timestamps: 10:00 – 20:27

• Microsoft leadership (Pavan Davuluri) maintaining consistent messaging about the transformation of Windows via AI.

• The “Vision” series and frequent UI experiments signal Windows’ evolving strategy but also user apprehension.

• Copilot App’s UI now resembles Microsoft 365 and Home Hub, sparking speculation about a future with no Start menu.

• Semantic File Search, now available for Copilot+ PCs, is about on-device AI searching—though naming and availability changes are confusing.

  “Anytime anyone from Microsoft talks about Vision, which is hilarious and an oxymoron in their case…everyone kind of cringes up a little bit. It’s like, oh, don’t ruin it.” – Paul Thurrott (10:38)

• Natural language prompts are poised to replace menus and dialog boxes – but legacy options will remain:

  • Richard: “Nobody actually wants a dialog box. Nobody wants options menus.” (14:29)
  • Paul: “They’ve never taken anything out of Windows ever. So don’t worry, you’ll still have your mmc, you’ll still have your Infinite Dialogues if those things make you happy.” (15:53)

3. AI Features Commoditized, Privacy as Differentiator

Timestamps: 23:04 – 35:17

• AI orchestration is everywhere, with big players (Microsoft, Google, Apple) pushing integration but offering similar capabilities.
• DuckDuckGo’s “Duck AI,” Cogi Assistant, and Brave Browser’s approach: focus on privacy, anonymized data, and user control—emphasized as a niche selling point.
  • Leo: “If you can get orchestration and privacy, to me, that is a differentiator.” (31:28)
  • Paul: “We’ve gotten very used to giving away the whole farm... The Internet’s free.” (33:54)
• Discussion on the public’s continued apathy toward privacy:
  • Richard: “The public seems to be remarkably uninterested in privacy.” (32:09)
  • Anecdotes about casual device use and security slip-ups among friends and family.
• Prediction: AI services will not remain free forever; expect an “enshittification” cycle as described by Cory Doctorow.

4. PC Industry Check-in: Lenovo’s Record Quarter & Intel’s Waning Power

Timestamps: 46:38 – 59:44

• Lenovo sets records in market share, revenue, and profits, despite mediocre overall PC market sentiment.
  • Revenue and profit both up substantially year-over-year.
  • Speculation about sales rushes ahead of tariffs.
• PC upgrade cycles are now determined by hardware depreciation (five-year mark) rather than raw performance gains.
  • Richard: “We no longer turn to get the latest. We turn because we can't afford the maintenance sense.” (47:25)
• Discussion of tax depreciation, business vs. consumer purchase patterns.
• Intel’s co-marketing dollars (“backing up the Intel truck”) no longer winning out: AMD’s share rising.
  • Paul: “He’s like, that’s the Intel truck dumping the pile of money on our front lawn. He goes, that’s why… That’s coming to an end or has ended.” (58:22)
• ARM laptops, particularly cheap Snapdragons, earning rave practical reviews from Paul.

5. Productivity, Note-taking, & Editor Wars

Timestamps: 98:11 – 105:33

• Brief celebration (and critique) of Notion’s new, but still clunky, offline feature. Still no way to offline-sync whole folders/trees.
  • Leo: “What we really want is for our entire Notion to be offline right.” (100:24)
• Obsidian and Anytype emerge as serious, privacy-oriented competitors, with local markdown storage and database features.
• Paul: “Other than that, [Notion is]… the stickiest app I’ve used. Functionality is great.” (101:22)
• Leo: “Obsidian, to me, has replaced Notion… because it’s all local…”
  • Emphasis on the rising value of local storage, markdown, and open plugin ecosystems.
• AI integration options within these tools have also become a selection criterion, with Obsidian offering broad third-party integration possibilities.

6. Windows & Notepad: Change, Backlash, and Tradition

Timestamps: 35:28 – 40:49

• Notepad gets another update, with context menu icons/captions to match Windows 11, which sparked outrage for some stalwarts.
  • Anecdotes about Mary Jo Foley’s famously strong negative feelings toward adding features to Notepad.

7. Xbox & Gaming Segment: ARM, Game Streaming & Ecosystem Moves

Timestamps: 78:11 – 92:25

• Xbox app on Windows 11 ARM machines finally allows local game downloads (for some), but most heavy-duty AAA games crash or don’t work.
  • Paul: “Both of them [Doom, Call of Duty] just crash immediately when you run.” (83:18)
  • 30-year-old classics run fine: “Native res, 60 frames a second. Awesome.” (84:02)
• Game library integration across third-party stores (Steam, Epic, GoG) in Xbox app.
• Game Pass updates, Gamescom announcements, and discussions of remastered favorites like Gears of War.
• GeForce Now updates: up to 5k, 120/360fps—practical limits aside.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Paul (on Google event): “Geeks have Pixels. Yes, right. But it's a geeky phone. I want a bare metal.” (04:19)
• Leo (on AI commoditization): “If you can get orchestration and privacy, to me, that is a differentiator.” (31:28)
• Paul (on privacy): “We’ve gotten very used to giving away the whole farm... The Internet’s free.” (33:54)
• Paul (on Intel): “That’s the intel truck dumping the pile of money on our front lawn... That’s coming to an end or has ended.” (58:22)
• Richard (on maintenance cycles): “We no longer turn to get the latest. We turn because we can't afford the maintenance sense.” (47:25)
• Paul (on Windows vision videos): “Anytime anyone from Microsoft talks about Vision...everyone kind of cringes up a little bit.” (10:38)
• Leo (on Notepad and Mary Jo Foley): “We just should get her something that's just like she wants—a typewriter. You understand? A computer typewriter.” (40:43)

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Additional Topics

AI Browser Developments (65:09 – 72:32)

• Gemini button in Chrome; minimal and slow-burn integration of AI.
• Brave discloses, then helps fix, a security issue in Perplexity’s Comet browser.

Gaming News & Recap (78:11 – 92:25)

• Xbox app’s ARM improvements are half-baked; many games still fail.
• Gamescom updates: Call of Duty, Indiana Jones for Switch 2, upcoming hardware (ASUS Rog Ally), and price hikes for PlayStation 5.

Back of the Book Segment

- Tip of the Week: Windows ReadMe newsletter launches soon; annual Windows 11 Field Guide coming with upgrade discounts.

- App Picks: Notion’s offline update (but the real power is in Obsidian/Anytype for privacy/markdown fans)

- Richard’s Whiskey Pick: Chichibu Distillery (Japan), rare and mythical malts from Ichiro Akuto; “the definitive craft distillery in Japan,” lauded for unique whiskies like the “White Label” blend.

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Conclusion

A lively, opinionated, and deeply informed episode, Windows Weekly 946 provides a tour through conflicting currents in today’s tech—how companies flail for attention, users weigh privacy and productivity, and AI quietly becomes omnipresent yet indistinguishable from one platform to the next. Rich in anecdotes, industry context, and a few inside jokes, this episode is both a snapshot of current tech and a testament to how the best tools, whether software or whiskey, always have a story.

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For Quick Reference

• [00:01] – Google Pixel event: underwhelming launch, celebrity overload
• [10:00] – Microsoft Windows “Vision”: AI, Copilot, legacy app support
• [20:27] – Copilot UI/Insider program changes, app actions/Intents
• [23:04] – AI commoditization, privacy & orchestration as key features
• [46:38] – Lenovo’s record quarter, market trends, Intel/AMD/ARM shifts
• [78:11] – Xbox/ARM gaming, Game Pass, Gamescom news
• [98:11] – Notion’s offline feature, Obsidian/Anytype/Browsers for power users
• [113:21] – Richard’s Whiskey Pick: Chichibu Distillery

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Memorable sign-off:

“Thank you all, everybody watching. Thank you all, you winners and your dozers. We’ll see you next time on Windows Weekly.” (128:19)

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(All times in MM:SS as requested; quotes attributed per speaker and timestamp.)

Transcript

[A]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard are here. There is lots to talk about. Windows 11, that rumor that SSDs are being borked by the Windows update last week. And yeah, the Xbox segment goes on and on. Plus a whiskey you really can't buy for love or money. But you might want to try all of that. Coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 946, recorded Wednesday, August 20, 2025. Backing up the intel truck. Hello to all our winners and dozers. Here we are once again. It's a Wednesday time for Windows Weekly. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you our man of the hour, Mr. Paul Thurat from thurat.com and our man of the hour, Mr. Richard Campbell. Net rocks. There's too many hours. Too many hours in the day.

[B]

Which hour did I get?

[A]

You got hour number one. We are starting a little late, which of course podcast listeners won't know because we always start exactly when you want us to start.

[B]

So you know what to do. Just pause and then wait like 20 minutes and then restart, just like the live experience.

[A]

Yeah, you'll feel like we do because we were watching a Google Pixel 10.

[B]

Announce, which by all accounts went off wonderfully. Is that not the case?

[A]

I confess a little nervous when I saw that Jimmy Fallon was going to host.

[B]

I know, me too.

[A]

That was kind of a statement. Like, you know, we know you don't really care about our Pixel phones, so we're going to bring in high powered celebrity talent.

[C]

Is that what that was?

[B]

Okay.

[A]

The Jonas Brothers, Steph Curry. He's now apparently Stephen Curry of the Golden State warriors basketball team. And then a number of celebrities from YouTube, including, call her Daddy's Alex Cooper, whose demo of the photo coach in Pixel went so poorly, they didn't even really show the final result. It was like, see.

[B]

It did not work.

[A]

It was terrible. Jimmy Kimmel was Jimmy Kimmel. I'm sorry, Jimmy Fallon. I know they are interchangeable, basically, but Jimmy Fallon was apparently exhausted from an overnight flight.

[B]

Oh, geez. Didn't see this one coming, huh?

[A]

Yeah, it just, it. It was, I think, misguided on Google's part. Kind of their version of the Samsung Calamities of the last few years.

[B]

So is it still like Rick Osterloff or whatever is the guy.

[A]

Rick's great. Everybody loves Rick.

[B]

I think he's great. I don't write like, what's.

[A]

Let him do the thing.

[C]

Yeah. Why are you decorating this thing? Just talk about the phones.

[A]

Jimmy invited him over to the couch, they sat down, they did banter.

[B]

Oh boy.

[A]

The problem was there was so much banter, so many celebrities, so much back and forth movement that you really didn't hear a lot about the device itself.

[B]

And really a lot to say, right?

[A]

There's not a lot to say.

[B]

You nail it. So the problem is, this is the problem Microsoft had when they were doing with his phones. Like you get this celebrity you like, blah, blah, blah. And the question you really want to ask this guy is, so Jimmy, what model iPhone do you actually use?

[A]

Yeah, because you know, he uses not using a pixel.

[B]

Like, you know, he's not.

[A]

Like, you know he's not.

[B]

That's too bad.

[C]

No, if he really wanted to do this, you would have gotten him a pre release version of the phone he'd had for a couple of months and.

[B]

Then you would have seen, there would have been hints of it, you know, like people would have looked at the exit for something of his social media posts.

[A]

Excuse me, who cares what Jimmy Fallon uses?

[C]

Yeah, yeah, but so why bring them at all, right?

[A]

Google's real problem is that they are a distant third in this. You know, it's really Apple and Samsung. Yeah. Oh yeah, it's Apple, Samsung. Worldwide, nobody buys pixels.

[B]

Yeah, I was going to say worldwide, they're not even, they're not even eighth. I mean they're probably.

[A]

Well, we all have pixels, ironically. Yeah, no, geeks have pixels.

[C]

Yes, right. But it's a geeky phone. I want a bare metal.

[B]

And this, right, this follows, this is like, this is what the Amiga was back in the day. Like everyone who knows anything about anything is like, I have to have an Amiga. And then everyone else is like, yeah, whatever. The world goes on and this is what always happens. It's like those in the know.

[A]

It's my sense that Google knows that for years their attempts at phones were seen as kind of reference versions, as developer devices. Maybe kind of like the Surfaces early.

[B]

On, I was going to say. The parallels here are rather.

[A]

This is, this is what we think a good Android phone should be. Nobody cares. Nobody followed their lead, Nobody bought the phone. So now it feels like Google said, oh God, we gotta get the consumers excited, let's bring in some celebrities.

[B]

This is like Apple giving away a U2 album that nobody wanted. You know, like, what do you, like you're not in touch with the kids.

[A]

You know, they kept saying kids words that I think now I had an actual Verifiable kid on with me, Micah Sargent. And I said, micah, you're going to.

[B]

Translate who's what, like pushing 40?

[A]

No, no. Mike is under 30, man.

[B]

Is he really?

[A]

He's in his 20s. Yeah.

[C]

Wow.

[A]

So he's a young fella.

[B]

Well, good for him.

[A]

And so they were using words like cronk. And I said, people use cronk. He said, not in years.

[B]

So I pulled my kids.

[A]

That attempt fell flat.

[B]

I'd be like, guys, stay still. I'm making a Vine.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[B]

My kids are like, seriously, you have to stop this. And I'm like, no, I'm never going to stop. Hold on. I'm going to put this on MySpace.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Anyway, not that I'm gonna buy a 10. I think my nine is fine for another year.

[A]

Well, me too. I don't.

[B]

I.

[A]

There was nothing to push me to the 10 at all.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

If you had an urge, spend. To buy. Spend a lot of money on a fold with an awful lot of bumps on the back.

[A]

They got that nobody's buying. I'm especially given that the Samsung fold is so good.

[C]

Right.

[B]

So I wanted to see this to make that decision. But my problem's gonna be I'm gonna be away September, October into November, and I. So I can't like get it, you know, until, like, I can't get it right away.

[A]

So. Good news. They announced the Pixels will be available in Mexico for the first time ever.

[B]

Yeah. But bad news, electronics in Mexico are very expensive. So. Yeah.

[C]

Whoops.

[B]

Well, that's good though. Okay, good. Maybe they'll open a Google store. I could hang out like a. Like a flunky.

[A]

They also showed, as they have many years in a row now, real time translation on the phone. You can make a phone call to somebody speaking Spanish. You speak English. And it was. The latency was low. And the one feature that they added, which I thought was great. It does it in your voice.

[B]

Yeah. Nice.

[A]

So suddenly Paul Thurat would be fluently speaking Spanish, finally.

[B]

Because it's never going to happen in the real world, so.

[A]

But again, I'm, you know, Google showed this stuff for so long, I'm so skeptical. I just don't. I have to see it and use it? No, I don't.

[B]

I. It's. They're dramatically more expensive. They.

[A]

They're not this time. Not this time.

[B]

12. I think it's 1200 bucks for.

[A]

1200 bucks for the top of the line.

[B]

Well, that's the base model. Pro XL.

[A]

Pro XL. That's the base model. Is 799.

[B]

Yeah. I don't want a base model on me.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I don't know. I don't know.

[C]

Fully loaded.

[B]

Yeah. But I. Yeah. We are obviously at the point where the, you know, the year over year upgrade is minuscule. Although pixels have a big problem with the tensor processors like processing power and battery life and heat, you know, and hopefully. I know it's gone down to what, like 3 nanometer with this version.

[A]

Yeah. They could have spent more time talking about how, hey, this is the best processor we've ever put in a phone. They didn't even really emphasize that the AI models they were using for some of this stuff, like the language translation were local. We know it's the Nano, so we know it's local, but I knew that, but they didn't say it. Yeah, I think there was.

[B]

I think, I think you kind of said this earlier. I think they're. I think they were trying to shoot for more of a mainstream.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Audience.

[A]

Yeah. But did it work?

[B]

I don't think anyone's paying attention to this. No, I mean I am. I, I do care. I mean I'm being. It sounds cynical. I, I actually, I love Pixel, but I don't know. I have one of the latest Samsungs. It's fantastic. Obviously the iPhone's a thing. I don't know. I don't know. What are you gonna do?

[A]

Anyway, we're not here to talk about Google.

[B]

What are we not here to tear down Google, but we have a couple extra minutes, so. Yeah, that's fine.

[A]

Let's talk. I don't know. By the way, did you see that notion which we use for the show is now. It's a big announcement on the front. It's okay, we'll talk about it. New feature.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Long awaited feature.

[B]

But yeah, it's something Microsoft word had in 1983. But I. But you know what? Doesn't mean it's not useful.

[A]

Of course, Google spent. I was surprised. I thought maybe they'd downplay AI, but they, they started right off with AI and did nothing but show off AI features. Really?

[C]

Yeah. You have to.

[A]

That's it. It's all about AI now.

[C]

Yeah. If you're gonna. If you're gonna play in the space.

[B]

Apparently. Just got a text message from the New York spca.

[A]

Oh, we have your dog.

[B]

And. Yep. If you don't subscribe, the dog gets it.

[C]

Nice.

[B]

I don't know what that's all about. Okay. Oh, okay. Let's talk about Windows. Sorry, Windows. Windows. Windows. What's happening with Windows. Oh, yes. So I think last week or the week before, we talked about the video that had kind of one of the Vision videos they're going to be doing for Windows, whatever, the next version of Windows, I guess. So they made another video, but it's not part of that Vision series. But this one has Pavan Davaluri, who is the guy that runs Windows and Surface, and he said exactly the same thing. It's exactly the same.

[C]

I mean, that's good, right? Like, at least the messaging is common, not arguing. Well, effectively.

[B]

So the problem is anytime anyone from Microsoft talks a about Vision, which is hilarious and an oxymoron in their case, or just about Windows and like, what we're going to do in the future, everyone kind of cringes up a little bit. It's like, oh, don't ruin it. Don't run it, don't screw it up. You know? And so when it was David Weston and he's the security guy and he was talking about AI and what, you know, how the Windows is going to change, I was like, guys, relax. This guy's not in charge of product strategy. He doesn't have anything to do with this. And then Pavan comes on, he's like, all right, now you can stop relaxing. He actually is in charge of this. But we talked about this a little bit before the show started. But the TDLR or whatever is. Yeah, of course it's going to change. We have AI, Right.

[C]

Yeah. It's a Vision thing. Right. Like, they're just trying to figure out. They're playing with ideas.

[B]

You can tell they're playing with ideas because they change the UI like, literally every month.

[C]

Sure. I saw this Charles LaManna video with. What's his name?

[B]

The.

[C]

The old head of Dev Div.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And. And he was talking about ERP and. And all that software change as well. And I ultimately. Daryl Taft just published a piece on that video and quoted me and a bunch of other RDs because we're all thinking, like, listen, especially when it comes to information worker software, where you're just accessing data and looking in different ways, like, I don't know how much software you really need anymore, if the prompts can pull it accurately.

[B]

Yeah. Also, if my experience with the Windows app SDK is any indication, maybe it's time to give up on native apps. Just a thought.

[C]

Well, you know. No, no. Accounts Receivable Manager job was to run an ERP thing. It was to get the money into the company.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Right. And so whatever tools, it's like, you Use the tools to get. They get you to your real goal, which was to actually make sure you get paid.

[B]

Yep. So, look, I know a lot of you are freaking out, so I'll just say this. You should freak out. Your lives are over. Everything's ending. It's all going to be terrible. No, look, I can't speak to little details, but look, we have Windows. It works with keyboards, mice, touchpads, smart pens, Touch. Right. We do all this stuff. So natural language interactions. It's actually something we've been talking about forever, but now it's become a big thing, obviously. But also this kind of capability that we used to sort of associate with like Google or Microsoft Lens, which they're sort of calling Vision now, like Copilot Vision, which is the ability of the device, in this case the PC, to understand the things around you using sensors and cameras and whatever else. And also things on the screen. Right. That you're interacting with. So this is one of those areas where I think phones are going to be impacted a lot more because you're always with them and you're out in the world with them. And it's super useful to hold up a phone to a building and say, what is this thing? And it's like, it's a building, you idiot. No, I mean, we'll say whatever. The, you know, whatever. The business is very useful. But, you know, for the productivity scenarios or whatever, the things that we do do in Windows today, develop software development. Obviously there's use cases here. I mean, it's, it's fine, sure, that no one's taking your keyboard away that way. That'll be Windows 12.

[C]

And my goal using this machine was not to have the opportunity to click on with a mouse.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Like, I, I have stuff to do.

[B]

I mean, thanks to a mild case of Tourette's, I've been talking to my computer for years. I've been usually in defamatory ways, but that's not going to change.

[C]

You know, honestly, the lang, the language. I see a lot of developers speaking into their LLMs for programming is shocking too. It's. They're all one big moving HR violation. Good news is they're only talking to software.

[B]

Nice.

[C]

But, but listen, nobody actually wants a dialog box. Nobody wants options menus. Like, we don't want any of those things. In fact, you always say what your intent was while you go searching through all those menus. I just did it where we're setting up. It's like I got to check the volume levels on the microphone.

[B]

That was My goal, I always make this comparison. It's like the Infocom parser back in the day when we those text based adventure games or maybe the Sierra online version that they would do in their graphic like King's Quest, et cetera. And this was the 1970s and then the 80s and these things were not very sophisticated. So it was just a database or table of words and if you didn't get it exactly right, it wasn't going to do anything. And so you would get into the types of conversations that Siri users get in today where you're like, I'm sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about. But the natural language stuff, it's interesting because it doesn't really. Well, maybe it does. I was going to say I'm not sure it solves the problem, but it does. Right. So we've had a. Certainly in Windows but generally speaking with all the data we have now especially we have a search problem if you will. And we have indexing and metadata in ways that kind of help try to make that better. But the natural language AI bit that goes on the top I think is what we'll put this over the top, I guess, for lack of a better term. So yeah, we weren't waiting for AI to solve the problem, but no, and.

[C]

To be clear, they never taken anything out of Windows ever. So don't worry, you'll still have your mmc, you'll still have your Infinite Dialogues if those things make you happy.

[B]

If you want to add fonts to your system using that box that came inside Windows 95, it's still there, Everything's good.

[C]

The Visual Basic runtime still in the box.

[B]

Still there. Yep.

[C]

Net 4.3, that's what I got to do. Still in the box.

[B]

I'm going to go back to VB3, I'm going to just do everything I do will be 16 bit VB3 apps.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Because honestly, as far as like being native code at this point they're just as close, you know, what's the difference?

[C]

I mean, and to be sure they will make another variation on Windows X or any of those things to try and strip all of that way away, to sort of focus on. Fail mightily and it will fail again.

[B]

Yeah, yep, exactly right. So yeah, look, Windows 11 is.

[C]

Oh no. And I blame you, man. I got a Windows 11 everywhere now that my Windows 10 machines are gone, they're off. These new machines are in play and they're 11.

[B]

I'm not sure how that's my fault, but I do prefer it to 10 at this point. I will say that that is true.

[C]

Yeah. It's funny you say that, because I had to hop back on the 10 machine. I was doing the last things like, ew.

[B]

Yeah, no, that's what. And that's a good test for an upgrade. You go back to the previous thing, and if you missed the new thing, it's probably a pretty good upgrade.

[C]

Great. Probably a hint. I mean, you should be annoyed with the new thing because that's just par for the course, but you're more annoyed with the old thing.

[B]

Yep. Yep. So we've had an incredibly busy day today at my site for whatever reason, so we're kind of behind on things. But there's a couple of stories that I kept refreshing to see if Laurent has gotten to it yet. But he will soon, I promise. But there have been some announcements today in the Insider program that are kind of interesting, including that thing we were just talking about. So, Semantic File search, which, by the way, I think they might have just named it, or I should say renamed it, because that's what they were calling it originally. And then for a long time it was Improved File or Improved Search or Improved Windows search with semantic indexing or whatever that is. Apparently. I thought this was generally available, but anyway, it's available across any PC that's enrolled in the Windows Insider program, in whatever tier, channel, whatever we call these things. Assuming it's a Copilot plus PC. Right. Because this uses the on device AI stuff. And yes, I, like. This is the name I thought they should use when they worked. When they moved away from this, I was like, I don't understand the semantic search, even if it's kind of technically inaccurate, is, you know, it's concise at least. So maybe I'm trying to understand this. Oh, that's interesting. I'm sorry. It is available. So this is now available through the Copilot app in Windows. Right, Right. Okay. That's the distinction. I was like, I thought this was out. Okay, so there's that, and then they're screwing around with the Copilot App AI or App ui. Sorry. Yet again, it's starting to look a little like Trello, frankly. It started off as this really minimal experience. Of course, it started off as a kind of pane, and then it was sort of a resizable pane, then it was a floating window, then it was an app, and then it was sort of a web app, and now it's really an app again, whatever. But I kind of like the recent iterations of it. But now, of course, what it looks like a little bit is the Copilot or the Microsoft 365 copilot app, which used to be the Microsoft 365 app, which used to be the Office app, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Which is a way to go back to some of the things you were working on earlier. Right. So it lists the documents, maybe you grounded it with and has links like that. So honestly, that's fine. Also honestly, it looks a little bit like a Home Hub ui, like it's on top of Windows, but maybe it should just be its own thing. And maybe there's a hint there that as we talk about that future that nobody wants, where there's no Start button anymore again, which went over so well or whatever, I mean, maybe we're kind of looking at it, maybe this is the first step toward that. It's kind of hard to say, but. But anyway, if you are in the Insider program on a PC, you can actually, I guess you don't even update the os, you just go get the app. So upload, you know, you can check this stuff up today. So, you know, you still look forward to this.

[C]

You're starting to see the elements of the road ahead here, right? This idea of no applications, just click to do or say to do.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

Yeah. If the software needs to be involved, the software gets involved.

[B]

I think I talk about this every week now and I'm sure for the past at least two weeks I've threatened to actually write an article about this topic and I haven't yet or haven't finished it, but there is a very interesting thing to me and actually this might be just part of the developer background thing. So it's something Richard would really appreciate as well, I think, where you can draw parallels to what I'm going to call the kind of back end programmability, if you will, that AI will take advantage of either out in the Internet through online services and websites, but also locally on your device through apps, where these things are going to expose interfaces that the AI will work with. And you don't bring up the UI anymore, you don't bring up the website and it doesn't move the cursor for you and type things into a box and do it the way you do it, it just does it. Right. And you know, baby steps, obviously we got to get there. I mean, those things need to be updated to support that functionality. And I've used this specific example because it's simple and it's maybe the only good example so far. But Windows 11 has these app. I almost called them Intents. That's the Apple term app actions that work with click to do, et cetera, and eventually across whatever Copilot services. And the Settings app with the agent, which literally is a custom Microsoft MOO or MU local model that has been customized or grounded in all of what settings can do as an app, is that natural language interface. This is instead of today where you can type in a search and it's like Infocom or Sierra Online. You could just say, look, I just want to do this thing. And they're like, yep, here you go. And it just kind of does it. Right. And so that's the beginning, I think, of this capability in Windows. Google today announced, let's see if I can get this straight, that they were integrating Gemini Live, which is their version of Copilot Voice, essentially where you sit there and talk to it, you have a conversation. Right. And it will interact with apps. And so I think in the beginning it was, you know, tasks, calendar, maps, and one other thing I don't remember, but now they're adding more of those. And the idea here again is like, you know, it's not. The app's not going to come up. It's not going to. And then the other app, you know, it's. But as it gains these capabilities, integration capabilities, that thing becomes more powerful because you're expanding, you know, the range of things it could do pretty dramatically. And it's going to be available to third parties, of course, and pretty soon that's going to be it.

[A]

And so isn't it interesting that there's a. That they're all doing the same thing? They all have different names for it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, they're all doing.

[A]

It's. It feels like maybe that's they're copying each other, but that there's not a lot of innovation. Or maybe this is all we just. What we want.

[B]

Yeah. So I think there's a combination of factors. It is fascinating to me that because of the kind of Lee, or regulatory governmental thing that's going on in the United States right now, they very much appear to be racing to get as much done while they can, where there's no oversight whatsoever and just get it done. And so these companies that would normally maybe compete and hold features for themselves are making everything open and everyone's doing everything and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But there's a minor story today that was later in the notes, I'll just mention it now because it kind of factors into this, which is duckduckgo which is privacy security focused as browser and whatever services, they have an AI or. Yeah, they have an AI chatbot called Duck AI. They don't make their own AI. Right. They let you connect it to other AIs and they put protections in place so it's anonymous and private and you know, you know, like Apple is trying to do as well. They added Support for a GPT5 mini, not full GPT5, but also web search results and. Okay, so this is a minor thing. There's not, not many people listening to this. Not many people out in the world are actually going to use what I just described. But it does speak to something here, which is that when these capabilities are just available everywhere and for free and with pretty good limits. Right. Like we've talked about how in GitHub Copilot, which I use not quite every day, but I'm going to say four to five days a week, easily, have never run into the limit on the free version. You know, people are going to bounce around a little bit. The stickiness of AI, I think it's commoditized. Yeah. It could happen in time. But the thing is, if you go to Gemini, let's just say, and you're like typing away and you're doing blah, blah, blah, and it's like, oh, hey, you reach your limit, sorry, see you tomorrow. And you're like, no, you won't. And you go, all right, chat GPT and you do it over there.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

That's what people are going to do. Right. And so these things, because they're all kind of roughly the same or any given day sort of get into that.

[C]

Category, at least 80% is the same.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I think it makes, you know, you just move around. You know, it's like when you do it like a free YouTube TV offer and you get it for a month free and then you close it because you don't want to pay two bucks a month and you sign up with a different account and then you do it for another, you know, like people are going to do that or they're already doing it. Right?

[C]

They're doing it. Yeah, they're right. We have programmers with multiple instances of different LLMs doing different roles in their software development process and, and burning tokens at different rates and then.

[A]

Well, you know, you use up all your Claude tokens. You just go over and use ChatGPT5.

[B]

These companies are all working with each other. I mean, you can access GPT5 now, some version of it in probably a dozen different places. Right. Including Microsoft.

[A]

So my question is, is that because they're all filling the same need or they can't innovate and they're just copying one another. It feels like a company could step up and say, hey, we're going to do something no one else is doing.

[B]

Well. So to me, the big. Well, there's a bunch of issues, but one of the big things, well, we're going to do AI later. But brave comes into this.

[A]

We're always doing AI, aren't we?

[B]

It's actually small for this show. It's a little small. But it's really interesting to see companies approach it from a different angle. Like, privacy security is an obvious example because you're not getting that from Comet, you're not going to get it from Google. You get it to some degree, maybe with Microsoft, depending on the kind of account you have or whatever. But. But is that going to be a mainstream selling point? I don't know. But here's something you probably already know about and you could just wait for, which is Cory Doctorow, who I guess two years ago ish coined that term. Insuredification is actually coming out with a book called Insuredification in October, if I'm not mistaken, which I've already preordied, because.

[C]

Love is Go order now.

[A]

Make sure you use natural language search, though, because he is not. He's changing the word to be polite.

[B]

Oh, funny. Okay.

[A]

If you search for insertification.

[B]

I'm sorry, I'm changing the word to people. Yes. I'm sorry, I'm trying to turn this into a PG thing, so.

[A]

No, it's fine and I appreciate that. I'm just saying your natural language search should be able to make the distinction.

[B]

It's a Boston accent. I just add an R. It's a. Yeah, you know, where there isn't one. Or don't use the R where there is one or whatever. Anyway, the point of his book is that it's not just describing it. We understand it. Right. We see it everywhere, but it's to get by it. Like, how do we solve it? And that's kind of interesting to me because it hits us at so many areas of our lives. But I think what's going to happen is once all this stuff is mature, everything's built out. We have all these AI services. They're all interconnecting and MCP ing and whatever the hell that is, they're going to start charging us for it. Right? And charging us more for it. I mean, they're going to charge more at some point.

[C]

They have to pay for what they've spent.

[B]

Yeah. It doesn't get like free, it goes from free, you know. So you see that.

[A]

We're kind of already seeing that chat. GPT5 is somewhat rate limited because of their. Sam Almond said we've run out of GPUs.

[C]

Yeah. They're not rate limiting because of cost, they're rate limiting because of resources.

[B]

Yeah, right, right.

[A]

Costs be damned. They have plenty of money.

[C]

But I saw this great study about how on July 4, because all the Americans were partying, those who were using the AI models got massively faster and better results because the load was down.

[B]

In our defense, as Americans, we do have a lot to celebrate and. Or at least a need to drink a lot. I don't know.

[C]

Yes. And. Well, and continuous explosions. Let's not.

[B]

We do like explosions. I think that's one of those cross the aisle things that we can all agree on.

[C]

We can all agree on. On for one day a year. There's just a continuous stream of breath.

[B]

Just blow stuff up and enjoy. It's just. We'll just enjoy it.

[A]

The dogs aren't real happy about it, but everybody else is.

[C]

Sedate the dog and put the poor little bugger in the basement and.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Poor, poor kitty.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

All right.

[B]

Well, that was one of 127 topics. Let's see.

[A]

Can I just say, by the way, I do think that private or.

[B]

There.

[A]

Will be a distinction. There will be a differentiator, which is private versus public. We just found out, by the way, I don't know if it's a mistake or an intention that if you share a link, a Grok AI result as a link with somebody else. Like I share it with you. It's now public. So. Hey, Paul, I have this condition, this disease. I asked Grok about it. What do you think? You share it with your doctor.

[B]

I'll tell you what.

[A]

Guess what?

[B]

I think your blood pressure is a little high, Leo, is what I think. I'm looking at your records. Yeah.

[A]

So I've been using. So that's one of the reasons I stopped using Perplexity. Because it's pretty clear Perplexity's goal is gobble, gobble, gobble mine every bit of information it can about you and then sell it on DuckDuckGo is a good choice. We had the founder of COGI, which is a public benefit corporation, trying to replace Google Search. But they have. And this. I don't think people talk about it that much. Cogi.com Assistant is a Assistant much like Perplexity. It's an orchestrator, as you. As you say, but has every model in it.

[B]

Now, the real question is, this is what's interesting to me.

[A]

This is the future.

[B]

Why would you use ChatGPT if you could use this?

[A]

And it's private. Now, here's the question. Because when you use ChatGPT here, it's probably using the API. Is the API going to give me the same results as if I use the ChatGPT app?

[B]

Oh, boy.

[A]

We don't know.

[B]

Well, this site was written for Internet Explorer, Leo, so no, you got to.

[A]

Use IE7 or nothing.

[B]

Exactly. Right.

[A]

So this has all the models. I mean, it's really kind of cool. And Kagi says we anonymize the data.

[B]

So that this is what we're looking for. So Brave's going to do this. DuckDuckDoog does do this.

[A]

I think it's great. So I stopped using Perplexity, and I find this is just as good. It's the orchestration. And you were the one who taught me this phrase.

[B]

Well, I'm repeating it. I just.

[A]

I understand.

[B]

So it's a good word and it's accurate. Like it's. It's the right word.

[A]

Yeah, but that's what we're buying. And if you can get orchestration and privacy, to me, that is a differentiator. I don't know most people.

[B]

So I. I was. I guess I was kind of heading there earlier.

[A]

I know. I was just. No.

[B]

No, I. I mean, no, this is your. That's what I'm saying is, I don't know. To me and you and to people, here it is. We know the difference. Does my wife care? Does my mother care? I can't. I don't know.

[A]

I think if you get more stories like that Grok story where. Yeah, people.

[B]

Yeah, right.

[A]

They might start paying attention. They might go, what?

[C]

I don't know.

[A]

I shared that with my doctor, and now it's searchable on Google.

[C]

And yet the public seems to be remarkably uninterested in privacy.

[B]

I know, I know. I've always found this to be incredibly alarming. I've seen people, adults, like, this year in Mexico is a big thing. They pick up their phone and they just start using it. And it's like, you do you not. You don't have a code. You don't have a face thing. Like, they don't have anything. They're just, like, just using it.

[C]

Whatever, you lose it. I had a friend hand me his phone and say, look at my email outbox. There was a Spam mail coming out of it. It's like, dude, your email has been compromised. You need to change your password. Oh, no, I couldn't change the password.

[B]

Oh.

[A]

Oh, yeah.

[B]

My mother. That's a really good mother, called me yesterday and she goes, I think I got a spam text that was supposedly from your son. Here's her grandson.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And I said, did it come from money? His. Was it his number? And she said, yep. And I said, what does it say? And it said. It said, hi, Graham, comma, whatever. And I said, well, that's what he calls you. It's kind of an unusual name for a grandmother. What makes you think this is spam? And she says, well, this kind of spam's going around all the time now. And I said, spam, where someone texts you and says, graham, I need something. So I said, if you want, I could call my son and. Or text him, see if, you know, be an orchestrator. So I did. And he's like, yeah, I'm going to Boston to see some friends. I'm going to go visit her if she's around. And I'm like, yep, she'll be delighted by that. So I called her back. I wasted a half a day.

[A]

Don't knock it, though, Paul. Thank goodness she's.

[C]

At least she's checking.

[A]

She's proactive.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

I mean, it's better than the alternative. You know, there's somebody in the. In the chat room said, yeah, but.

[B]

Cocky's 150 Canadian dollars a year, right?

[A]

That's the point. You want privacy, you're going to pay for it.

[C]

Yeah, that's right.

[B]

And I think that's the sticking point for people. We've gotten very used to giving away the whole farm.

[A]

The Internet's free.

[B]

Well, Google Maps is free, but they have your whole. You know, we're at the point with Google Maps. This is a very specific example where if you're not paying attention, you'll look down and you'll see a little green leaf in the directions. And it means you're going the most efficient way, not the best, fastest way for you. And it will. It used to, like, you'd be driving on the highway and you say, listen, there's a thing coming up. What you want to do is get off the highway, driving this little back road, and get back on the highway. And you're like, okay. And every time you do this, you're like, yep, that saved me a lot of times. This is great. I'm pretty sure we're at the point now where it's like, nope, Google is just evening out the traffic. Some people it's going to be like, you go this way. Some people it's going to be like, you go this way. And I don't know that I trust it anymore. You know, we've gotten. So that's like an insertification thing right there. Like, who. Who's the master that is overseeing this thing? Like, what's the prime directive here? Because I don't pay it, you know, so is it doing the best job for me now, or am I doing the best job for it now?

[C]

You know, and I assure it's the latter.

[B]

Yeah, I don't really have a good answer to this. And this might just be a conspiracy theory idiocy thing on my part. I don't know. But I. I find myself wondering every time it's like, hey, we found a better route. And you're like, I'm gonna save 32 seconds. Do I do this? I don't know. I don't know. There's no way to know, right? You can't know.

[C]

Yeah, it's a great. It's a great assessment as to whether any of that's worthwhile.

[B]

I don't know. All I know is I used to drive across the country with a AAA trip kit, which is like this paper thing on like a little folio that, you know.

[A]

Those are great.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, it was great back in the day, I loved it.

[A]

They put a little magic marker where your route was supposed to go.

[B]

Yeah, that was wonderful. Yeah, it's really nice. It was like an assistant. An AI, if you will. That was. It was fine. Okay, let's see. Let me lightening around the rest of this Windows Insider stuff, because who cares? So we have had beta and dev and now two Canary builds since we last met. Beta and dev, as before, the same. The big thing that is there is just some selection. Models. Selection, models, mode. Sorry, I was like, that doesn't seem like the right word for click to do. And so this is much like snipping tool. So when you bring up snipping tool, it's like, oh, do you want to draw a circle? Do you want to. You know, whatever. It gives you these things. And I don't know why we need this many ways to do things, but whatever. And then the rest of it's got just minor improvements to taskbar, file explorer, et cetera. Nothing notable. You'll be delighted to know that if you're on the Canary channel, for some reason, you finally got all the copilot PC features that everyone else has had for a year and a half. So that's fun. And then today, there was another Canary build that just added some minor new features that have, you know, we've already talked about elsewhere. They're just things that are just around in other parts of the Insider program. So nothing major. But I'll tell you what is major. Another update to Notepad. And if you ever want to see Mary Jo Foley, just, just overreact, just mention anything coming to Notepadge. You just knee jerk cannot stand it. And I've tried. I wrote a. I wrote. I told you this. I think I wrote this article just a couple of months ago whenever they added, like, the markdown support to Notepad. And I wrote this because everyone lost their minds. Everyone was like, oh, you know, losing their minds. And I was like, I wrote an article called In Defense of Notepad. And then I was like, three, two. It was my phone. Mary Jo, she's like, you're an idiot. They're just screwing this thing up. It was like it hit Mary Jo before it hit the Internet. Like, I was like, somehow she had a direct channel. I knew I was going to hear from her. It happened in two seconds. And I made the case to her, like, I made in the article. Like, look, obviously you could add features to some things, some app or whatever, Windows, whatever, and screw it up, right? And there was a time when they were updating the Paint app early on in Windows 11, and they completely screwed it up. They got rid of all the keyboard shortcuts we all knew and used. They got rid of dark. Well, they added light mode that was like this bright, shining spotlight, but no dark mode. And it was terrible. And then it literally took them like 18 months or more. It might have been longer, but they finally got it right. And today Paint is, you know, well, it's actually better than it's ever been because there's all these additional new features. It's great. But Notepad, I just say they've never screwed it up. Like, they've added a bunch of stuff to it, but the stuff, if you don't like it, you can literally turn off all of it. You don't have to use any of. Just still works with plain text. It's great.

[C]

Yeah. Still normal text.

[B]

So with that as a background, I'll just say they're adding another change. So if you're familiar with the context menus in Windows 11, right? So you right click the desktop or a File Explorer window or whatever, you get a context menu. It's new, it's modern, it's smaller, simple. And if you hold down the shift key, you can get like, the old Windows 10 version, which is ugly and terrible and complicated, but people seem to love it because it has these features maybe, that are missing from the default context menu. If you want to, you can edit the registry, bring back the old menu. So it just could be there all the time. Like, you just. That's what you get when you right click. Like, so a little bit for everybody there. But this is something they kind of screwed up as well. Instead of having this humongous menu with like, cut, copy, paste, you know, delete whatever the choices are, they put the common commands as icons at the top. Of course, no one knew what those commands were because the icons look like hieroglyphics. So now they have a little bit of a. Like a text caption or whatever under them so you can see what they are. It will say cut under the scissors or copy under whatever that's supposed to be, and so on, right? You're like, okay, there you go. You got it right and good. So now it's a lot. It's not tall anymore like it used to be. It has all the commands. No, not all the commands, but it has reasonable selection of commands. They are doing that to Notepad and with the same effect. So you're not losing any commands on right click. But the common ones, cut, copy, paste, and I guess delete, select all, and something else, whatever, are like they are in File Explorer or they will be soon. Like icons with little captions. Good. Let me tell you. You know who doesn't like it?

[A]

Mary Jo Foley.

[B]

She was on Twitter or whatever we call it now, just ranting about it, and I was like, mary, come. Come on. Come on, man.

[C]

Is this really the hill to die on? There are so many other choices.

[B]

This is. I get it. I mean, look, I use Notepad every day. I write a notepad clone every day.

[A]

We just should get her something that's just like she wants a typewriter. You understand? A computer typewriter. Can we get her something? Like, there must be something like that.

[C]

Oh, sure.

[A]

Distraction free. There is. There are. There's things like IA Writer on Mac. I don't know if there's.

[B]

That's the thing. Like, I don't know. Yeah, I. A writer is on Windows. It's not quite as good as the Mac, but it's good.

[A]

Typewriter mode.

[B]

Typora is typewriter mode. Awesome. Yeah.

[A]

Why doesn't she use those?

[B]

I don't know. She has difficulty with change.

[A]

I think Windows comes with notepad and it should be simple.

[B]

I feel like this is an example of what you were just describing where Mary Jo's psychosis is out on the Internet. Now we're talking about it.

[A]

We love Mary. Mary Jo.

[B]

She gave it to AI or something. And now we're just.

[A]

Now we're all part of the. The insanity. Let's take a little pause. Pause. We got lots more to talk about. You're watching Windows Weekly with the immortal Paul Thurat.

[B]

Well, I'm going to prove you wrong as soon as I can.

[A]

I'll never forget, I think it was the last time I did live with Kelly and Regis. And I'm sitting in the. In the makeup chair and Kelly comes in and she says, my immortal beloved. And I was looking. I like, who is she talking? And you were like, finally, finally the recognition I deserve.

[B]

I love it.

[A]

I don't. I think she was stoned.

[B]

I don't know.

[A]

I don't know why she said that. I've been calling her ever since and she never picks up. So I. I don't know.

[B]

Regis Philbrand was a. What I would call a guilty pleasure because I hate those kinds of shows. And I just loved him there something about him.

[A]

Yeah, I love working with him.

[B]

I found him.

[A]

What's a gigabyte, Leo? Gigabyte.

[B]

You keep saying that.

[A]

What's that?

[B]

I know, it's so great. I. It was like if Jerry Pernell was friendly and funny. Yeah. You know, that was.

[A]

That was one of the highlights of my career.

[C]

Loved it.

[A]

I don't know, 20 or 30 of those early 2000s. And I really, really enjoyed doing that.

[B]

Was a lot of fun.

[A]

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[B]

Yeah. So Lenovo is the world's biggest PC maker.

[A]

Their number one. Dell used to be their number one.

[B]

Yeah, HP was for a while, then Lenovo several years.

[A]

That's still the top three though, right? Dell, HB and Lenovo, they kind of trade places.

[B]

I mean Dell's doing everything they can to get out of the top three, but yeah, but yeah, this has been kind of a weird year for the PC. I mean obviously there's a Windows 10 end of life thing happening, you know, this year and, and we're not in an age where we're going to get a lot of upgrades like we did in the past, but you know, whatever.

[A]

You don't think businesses are going to.

[B]

Say, okay, fine, we're just. They are, but they do, they do this on their own schedule, right?

[C]

Yeah, they do. And you do it when your hardware is coming out of warranty, Right. Four year mark, five year mark.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

You know, we no longer turn to get the latest. We turn because we don't. Can't afford the maintenance sense.

[A]

I don't, I'm not a tax guy, but what are the rules about amortizing the cost across years? Like can you, can you write them off for five years?

[B]

They appreciate over five years? Pretty much, yeah.

[C]

They have no value at the end of five years. Like so that's.

[A]

But that's gonna be.

[B]

You can.

[A]

The time frame. How long can we, how long can we depreciate these?

[B]

I can afford it. I apologize.

[A]

The doorbell.

[C]

There you go.

[A]

He's getting a delivery. If it's Chipotle, I'm going to be disappointed. It better be a PC. So what's tax. What's the tax deal? You could. Lisa would know this. That did change though. I saw that.

[C]

That was maybe in the US I mean the deal's pretty much been all the same. Machines are essentially valueless once you buy them.

[A]

Three years, five years.

[C]

Well, we used to turn them every two because the upgrades were substantial. You could measure the productivity boost and you got new machines. But that stopped a decade plus ago. Yeah, you know, like it just.

[A]

Processors aren't vastly faster.

[C]

Doesn't mean. Yeah. And so really it was about, hey, these out of warranty. Machines aren't worth the maintenance cost. So you don't wait for them to fail and replace them. You just flop them at five years.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And then most hardware leases are structured that way, too. That's the simplest way to go. They're all 60 monthly.

[A]

So there is a time frame roughly five years where at this point you've completely fully depreciated the product. It's worthless. And you would get some. After five years, you get a benefit from upgrading.

[C]

It would be a better incremental, depending on what kind of work you're doing. That's all questionable. The bigger thing is just support and reliability. And you get the Gladys os, which has been true for a couple of years now. Pretty much you're just buying machines with 11 on them already.

[B]

Right.

[C]

But I don't see anybody rolling over early. They'll play the ESU game or whatever's necessary to turn over their hardware when the timer expires.

[A]

Would you get your Uber Eats, Paul? Was it. Is it.

[B]

So we have a UPS that has the delivery has to be signed for, so.

[A]

Oh, yeah, I know that feeling.

[B]

I'm like, I hate that. 1245-245. My wife's like, do I have to be here? I'm like, yeah, you have to be here. I'm on.

[A]

So they're right on time at 3:15. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[B]

So anyway, I. I saw the truck out there while you do. I went and grabbed another drink and I could see the truck. I'm like. I was like, oh, maybe I'll luck out and he'll just come. And then he. Of course he came right after we started recording again.

[A]

That's fine. That's.

[B]

Sorry.

[A]

All right. So I was. That's okay. I was getting tax advice from Richard anyway.

[B]

Yeah, that's good.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And this is an IT perspective. Right. Like, that's what I want. Machines differently than consumers do. Exactly. Use your machine until it falls apart.

[B]

It's not coincidental that the top three PC makers are also major sellers of commercial PCs. Right? Only in the top five. Well, maybe that's not fair, but I would say in the top five only. Apple is kind of specifically focusing on consumers. I mean, obviously they sell a lot.

[A]

Of stuff, but they have a fraction of the market.

[B]

Right. Well, they're not that. They're probably in fourth place. I mean, they're, you know, they're doing pretty good. It's like.

[A]

Because they're the only ones that make it.

[B]

That's the difference, you know, I guess I mean they make good computers. I'm not, I'm not dumping.

[A]

Oh, they're excellent. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

No, but, yeah but, but I, they don't have the presence in the commercial market like Lenovo, HP and Dell do, so obviously.

[A]

But Lenovo had a banner, banner car.

[B]

Yeah. So this thing like it doesn't actually make any sense. Right. So we've had the tariff issues going on. We've got this end of life thing that isn't really going to trigger a huge boom.

[A]

How much of this maybe was to get ahead of the tariffs you say?

[C]

That's what I would do.

[B]

Yeah, that could be some of it. But they set records. They set records on piece unit volumes, on revenues. Their market share is higher than it's ever been. It's like so this is, you know what, it's a low margin business. So 389 million on revenues of almost 18.9 billion in one quarter. But those are 108 and 22% gains year over year. Like those are, those are big numbers for a PC maker.

[A]

Their revenue doubled.

[B]

Yeah, like you could. Well their profit probably doubled. I don't think the revenue doubled, right?

[A]

No, the revenue doubled. The profit was 2%. Oh yeah. Vice versa. It's profit doubled.

[B]

You wouldn't see revenue double it. But the look, HPA to my knowledge has not yet done their earnings probably because they're not going to look anything like this. Dell did and their PC business is struggling frankly. They just rebranded everything. They're terrible. But that's what you would expect for these companies. I mean it's not a great market but. And by the way Lenovo does do other things. I mean they do have a group. Well they have phones as well but the Motorola phones aren't that great. And revenue wise they do have an infrastructure group that does server and AI stuff and whatever. But it was a 13, 13.5 of the 18.8 billion in revenues came right from computers.

[C]

W. It doesn't make any sense but it's really spectacular.

[B]

Yeah, good for them. So that's neat. Anyway, just thought that was kind of.

[A]

It isn't that they make massively better. I mean they make good hardware, they.

[B]

Make great computers and they are also doing a lot of experimentation. Right. Chris Hoffman, remember he showed us that kind of rolling screen device that was wild. Thinkbook like. But they're always doing stuff like this. Like they're always, you know I have a double screen laptop that's in right now that I find infuriating. But you know they're they're experimenting like they're like. And maybe this is tied a little bit to that conversation up top. It's like where things are changing. Like, what's this going to turn into? You know, we'll see. It's going to turn into a giant phone. That's.

[A]

What are they the. They're the number one PC maker now.

[B]

Yep. By far. Yeah. They have 25% market share. That's unit sales this quarter. 30% of the computers they sold were AI PCs, which means they have an MPU. Right. So it's not Copilot plus PC, but also the intel chips that don't qualify for that would fall into that bucket.

[A]

It's also really good for Linux.

[B]

Yeah, right. Well, because they support. No, it is important. Well, because they explode. Dell does a pretty good job with this too, by the way. Yes. Dell actually sells like officially supporting the drivers and all that stuff and then. Yes. Selling the computers with Linux on there if you want. Right. No, that's important. I mean that's, that's good. But yeah, I, I don't, I don't know that that's important to their revenues or whatever, but I like that they do it. It's. It's good. No, it's just like the more.

[A]

Do you recommend. You think the Lenovo makes the best laptops or would you. Is that your favorite?

[B]

So. Oh boy.

[C]

These are real personal preference kinds of things.

[A]

It is. Because there's not that much real difference.

[C]

No.

[B]

Well, yeah, I, I mean I have a person like, I really like the, the Microsoft stuff, which is stupid. Right. I would never recommend this to most people, but I really do like laptop, for example. But HP or Lenovo, I would say those are both. Right. Kind of Neck and neck and it depends. Yeah, I would go ThinkPad X1. You know, I wish there was a Think1 X1 carbon 16 inch without a numeric keypad. Like that would be close to being perfect because it's so light. But there are HP laptops like that. I just bought a 16 inch HP base level Snapdragon X laptop for like 600 bucks. It's unbelievable. Wow. Unbelievable.

[A]

But that you bought a laptop.

[B]

I bought it. Yeah. Well, it is. I, I bought. So by the way, why would you.

[A]

Buy a laptop, Paul?

[B]

Because they won't send me the cheap ones. I wanted to see what it was like and it's. I can't stop using it. It's so good. I don't even know what to do. Like, it's, it's a problem.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But I have bought three computers now since the beginning of last year and I had before that not bought a. Well, I buy used computers actually. But as far as like buying a brand new computer, I couldn't even tell you when the last one I bought was a long time ago. And this is not coincidental. All three of them are arm.

[A]

Oh, that's interesting.

[B]

Actually four if you count the one I bought for my daughter. So yeah, I mean that's where my head's at. So I would say Lenovo or hp. Yeah. And go for the premium segment devices, not the consumer Y ones.

[A]

Yes. You don't want consumer pieces.

[B]

Well, unless you like crapware and terrible. You know, nobody likes. Maybe you do, I don't know.

[C]

But clear. There is no Copilot plus PC that's specifically aimed at the business market. Yet this is still a consumer product line.

[B]

There technically are in the sense that the Snapdragon ThinkPad T whatever is. That's it. There's an Elitebook, I think it's called Ultra X or whatever which is just a laptop but technically is a business laptop. But I think the thing that's interesting about Copilot PC if you look at the few models that are in that part of the market market they're really selling to individuals and there's always an intel or AMD equivalent. Whereas on the consumer side you will see unique devices, you know, here and there because there's no, you know, they don't have to worry about, you know, upsetting anyone. You know, they're not going to Suddenly just drop x86 or whatever for like ThinkPad x1 carbon, you know, but they'll do like one T version, you know, that's okay. And then they'll do an AMD and an Intel. Right. And that's an interesting example of a laptop where you can actually get all three and then you can kind of compare them like had apples to apples or whatever.

[A]

Okay.

[C]

For all the options that it's. Yeah. Just looking at the list and they're, you know, they lead with the AMD machines. Like clearly they have a bias for what they want you to buy or.

[A]

AMD gives them co marketing dollars or.

[B]

Actually the real story there is intel can't anymore, they can't afford it. And so AMD this year has their best ever market share and they're mostly selling AMD and it's because PC makers can now offer it as an option.

[A]

Is that going to change now that the US government owns Intel?

[B]

I. I'm just kidding. No, I don't think that changes that. So I.

[A]

Apparently they. Apparently the federal government is taking a stake in intel for reasons I don't.

[B]

I know. I literally just like, rebooted when you said that so.

[A]

Well. Hey, it works so well for the Chinese. I think we should do it too. Yeah, we want our golden shares.

[B]

I don't want to talk about this. All right. So I just. It makes me crazy. All right, so, yes, intel has had their thumb on the scale for the past 20 years. Right. Right. I told you the story. I ran into a guy at. It was IFA last year in Berlin. And this. Actually, it was the slap. We were talking about this laptop and I said, so you have like the T. Whatever number amd, intel and Snapdragon. I said, how come you can't. Why can't. Why don't I see an X1 carbon with an AMD chip? And he goes, beep, beep, beep, beep. I'm like, what's that? I'm like. He's like, that's the intel truck dumping the pile of money on our front line. He goes, that's why.

[A]

That's a very funny answer.

[B]

And I was like, okay, I see. So that was kind of interesting, you know, like. But I. That's coming to an end or has ended. Like, they don't. They can't afford this anymore. And you're actually seeing it like. You're seeing it like there's way more AMD availability now.

[A]

That was the intel inside sticker that you had to peel off your keyboard. And you know, the ads where you'd see and, you know.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And all of that. And that.

[B]

They call it co marketing dollars tinnitus, by the way. It's.

[A]

Yeah. Do you hear it? I think so. Yeah.

[B]

All the time.

[A]

Not anymore. Not.

[C]

Well, this is interesting. I'm. I'm looking around on the Lenovo site and it's all intel and amd.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And there are two ARM machines. That laptop.

[B]

And this is in the business space.

[C]

This is because they make more than that.

[B]

I mean, they. But, okay, so they're saying they're out of them.

[C]

Right. They're all in limited stock.

[A]

They're sold out.

[B]

Out. Well, we're. We're a month away from a big Snapdragon event, by the way, so you would hope. Well, I mean, we'll see what happens.

[A]

Well, that's interesting. We should talk about that at some point.

[B]

Yeah, we will.

[C]

We will. Yeah. So they clearly are clearing out the old Snapdragons to get ready for the new one.

[A]

Would you at this point prefer an ARM based.

[C]

Yeah, well, that's all he's. By buying.

[B]

That's all I buy. I just bought a 600. So you know Snapdragon, when they announced it, it was Snapdragon X Elite. And then as they got closer to launch, they said we're going to have A plus as well and each of these will be arranged. There's some number of cores and this.

[C]

Was the Bin dual core boost. And yeah, as our yields continue to decline, we're going to offer new variations.

[B]

Right. And then there was, I think maybe it was IFA last year there was like an eight core plus. You know, they added, that was the thing they added, added. So you flash forward to January this past year at ces, they announced Snapdragon X. So it's not X plus or X Elite and it's basically the base level, X plus. It's slightly less clock speed, but I think other than that they're roughly identical. That's what's in this little hunk of junk I buy, which is, by the way, it's one of the best computers I've ever used. It's awesome.

[A]

Really?

[B]

Yeah, I love it.

[A]

In fact, I wish I like everything now. Windows Unarm is compelling.

[B]

I literally have three instances of Visual Studio going on this thing on the same time, which is, is. It's. I can't. I love it. I just love it so much. It's like, it's awesome. So anyway, but yes, to us, to people in the industry, it's like, what are they doing? They're moving kind of slow. Like they're moving down market, they're binning, they're, you know, they're, they're putting these chips into cheaper computers. But you got to remember, you know, not quite a year, little 15 months ago, whatever that was when they launched it, you know, Snapdragon X at the time, X Elite, I guess pretty much in the early plus versions too. You know, this is a very specific part of the market they're going after that kind of premium thin and light, you know, what we used to call Ultrabrook part of the market. And we still to this day, even though one was announced to see us, do not have any desktop form factor ARM devices, obviously there's no dedicated GPUs. We don't have like gaming class devices. So for that generation of chips, like where they could go and where PC makers asked them to go, by the way, was lower price points. And so that's what they've done. And so hp, the thing I bought hp, announced it, I think in May, released it in early July. And I bought it, I think as soon as I got home from Mexico. I was waiting to buy it and I was like, and it's way better than I thought it was going to be. It's kind of freaking me out a little bit bit. It's really good. It's a really good laptop. I wish I could have gotten it with like a beefier, you know, like more RAM or, you know, something just to be, you know. But it's. I don't know, it's surprisingly good. So we'll see. Graphics are on the card or on the table, whatever it is for the next gen. And that's the rumor at least. So we'll see. We'll see where it goes. All right. We got a rifle through some of the stuff. We're kind of losing track here. Do you want to. Do we need.

[A]

Yeah, Let me just say, so that everybody knows, so that there's no confusion. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. We're really glad you're here. Special thanks to our club Twit members that make this show possible.

[D]

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[A]

Right, let's move on. What's next?

[B]

Okay, so a couple of AI things, nothing too major. I, I've been kind of evaluating the AI browsers, such as they are. This is slice in time stuff. I bought, I bought, I got the Gemini button in Google Chrome and I was like, that's kind of interesting. Where did this come from? And I looked this up and if you go back to Google I O and watch the video, let's say it's 90 minutes long, there's a 25 minute segment somewhere in there where they say, and we're bringing Gemini to Chrome. Hey. And then they moved on. That was all they said about it, right?

[C]

Yep.

[B]

And I was like, okay. And I believe it is limited to people who are on a paid Google AI plan, like Google AI Pro, the 20 buck a month thing, which used to have a different name, but I only have because I bought a Pixel last year. So I got it for free for the year or whatever. And that might be why I got it. I don't think, I think it's us only. I think it's only if you're paying. I don't think it's. But this is where it's going, right? So you're like, okay, this is the world's most popular browser. This is what browsers are. What does this look like? It doesn't look like that much. It is just a button. If you are familiar with Copilot mode in Microsoft Edge where they move the copilot button over to the address bar and you click that and it comes up with like kind of a minimal little window. It looks like that, but it's up in the other space. You can move it around so it's not covering the screen and it will remember where it was. And the little fun thing they did was they, it's a tray icon for it. So if Google Chrome is not physically there, you know, visibly, you can still bring it up and there's a keyboard shortcut for it. Just like there's a copilot, right. So if you want to just interact with copilot, you can just do it from anywhere. It doesn't have any of the vision, slash, whatever they call it stuff for your computer, it does for the browser. So I asked, like I was looking at the desktop And I asked it a question. It says, well, based on the new tab window you're looking at, it seems what you're asking, it's like, no, that's not a. I'm asking you. So it has to do that kind of thing. So there are basically four what I would call big bucket AI features in Chrome right now. And only two of them are actually bigbucket. And one of them, the thing we're talking about right now is not available to everybody. So there's not a lot going on here. But this kind of makes sense because they own the market, they're going to move slowly, they're not going to go radical on the ui. They've kind of learned that lesson, right? They're just going to keep it. You know, it looks like a browser. You don't open it, you're like, oh my God, everything's different. Why did they move things around? It's like, nope, it looks exactly the same. It's fine. The other thing they added was in this game, this was earlier they added Google Lens to Chrome, which on, you know, desktop doesn't seem that useful. But I actually used this to when we were in D.C. sitting at a bar. It was this fun little lamp with a little. And you plug it in with usb, it was brass. And I was like, that is really cool. And we actually really need that in Mexico. And I usually need like three of them. And I'm like, I bet I could use AI to find this thing. And I did not use AI, could not find it with AI. It was freaking me out. So when I was writing about Google Chrome and what they have, I'm like, I took a picture of it, I'll pull the picture in and see. And I found it immediately. I bought three of them on Amazon like two seconds later, like it found it really, really well. So that worked okay, but not a big deal. Oh yeah. So Brave today disclosed a security vulnerability in Comet, the Perplexity browser. Which, you know, you might.

[C]

That's their job. That's not their job.

[B]

Well, but here's the thing. So they made an interesting disclosure in this discussion where they said, we're working on adding these agency features to our browser. We're going to do it in a way that protects your privacy. This is sort of what the duck AI thing I was talking about does for the search chat or whatever. And so they're like, well, obviously we're going to go look at what's out there. And it turns out, yeah, these no name companies, no one's ever Heard of. They don't really care about this stuff too much.

[C]

So hey, you're just trying to get a product out in the market for anybody to care about, right?

[B]

That's right. But Brave and Perplexity did the right thing in this case, which I think is interesting and important, which is they disclosed it to Perplexity privately. They Perplexity fixed it two days later. And then Brave came back and said, it's mostly fixed but there's still one problem, whatever. And then they made another fix and that fixed it and they sat on it for two to four weeks, whatever the timeframe was, and it did fix it. There were no known exploits or whatever. And so Brave came back and said, all right, we're going to disclose this publicly, but we're going to give you a two week warning. So you know, we're doing it and when we're doing it and we'll let you know when it's happening. And it just kind of all went, this is the way it should go. Like it was the right thing to.

[C]

We found it, we fixed it, we've explained it.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Why did Brave find it? Which is. That's kind of odd.

[B]

Well, because I. Because they have engineers that are looking at agenic capabilities and what they're trying to do is anonymize and privatize the interactions between the AI and the person. And they're probably having trouble doing it. And they're like, well, how does.

[A]

Oh, they look?

[B]

And they're like, oh, they don't. That's hilarious. And it was just like the thing you said with the GROK thing.

[A]

So I don't trust Perplexity anymore. I really.

[B]

The thing that they were able to get into was the authentication tokens for the user to get into. Perplexity. They have a email address that's your account and then there's like a one time passcode that you get through email, I guess. And they actually were able to get both of those things every time. And they were like, okay, so the problem is you're asking IT questions about this, but your browser is this and it has all these other tabs open and I guess at that point maybe they fix it. Comet used to do just use the context of everything you were doing. So one of them could have been like your medical page at the doctor. One of them could have been the fight you're having with your wife or whatever. One of them, One of them could be anything, whatever. And that's what they found was like, yeah, actually everything's. Everything was like wide open. Anyway, they fixed it. So Perplexity is totally safe now. I wouldn't worry about it. Whatever. Gemini added a memory feature because everyone has to have that. So obviously you don't have to.

[A]

I like that though.

[B]

You have to have it. This is the assistant.

[A]

I don't want to start over every time.

[B]

Right, right. Yeah. It's like typing in the source code to a program every time you want to run it. You know, it's like I just want to just get there, please.

[C]

Yeah, let's just go.

[B]

Yeah. And then I mentioned this earlier, but just a quick refresh on this duck AI, they've added GPT5 mini, which is I guess the default, although it wasn't when I looked, but it will be. And then they're integrating web search results. So if you need up to date, you know, results, they'll do it and they do it automatically. You can force the issue. You can actually go say, I want this to be a search, but this is a minor form of orchestration. But that's what you want. Like they still have a model picker, but for some reason when you ask a question, we'll say, all right, is this a question that would be. Would benefit from a lot web search because there's more recent information. If yes, then we will do it and if not, we won't. Right. So okay, that's good. And then then Grammarly in December bought either the company was called Coda or that was the. No, it was the company product or I remember. And then in May they bought a second company, AI startup.

[A]

Superhuman.

[B]

Yeah, Superhuman. And they also secured a billion dollars in financing, by the way. And the idea was we're going to move past what we have now, which is this kind of spelling and grammar writing help help service, AI based and just be like an AI productivity suite. And so the Coda editor is the basis for. They're describing it as a new editor, but they've had an editor for forever. But Grammarly has this editor and if, whether you use it there, meaning it's AI in their editor or you know, in Word or whatever app you're using, Google Docs, they also have several AI agents, all of which are based. Are tied to writing in some way. And so there's like an AI grader that will evaluate what you've written and say you're likely to get this score from your teacher, like grade based on because it knows what the grade level is, et cetera, citation finder, reader reactions, humanizers, proofreader, paraphraser AI detector, plagiarism checker. It's like these are all like super legit, productivity focused. Like you know this. Good ideas, they're good ideas. Whether it's good or not I can't tell you. I have started using Grammarly again against my better judgment because I am kind of curious about this. These things do all work. If you don't pay for Grammarly by the way, you get more, you know, more of it if you will, more usage or probably whatever. I'm sure it's limited in whatever way if you don't, if you don't pay. But they actually all are making all of this available to everybody so that's, that's good for them I guess.

[A]

I feel like this is going to be a hot category as these smart editors.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So this is notion and it's also an existential threat to Grammarly. Like if they don't do something somebody else is going to be in the space and there'll be nothing.

[B]

The necessity for Grammarly never made sense to me because Word has existed for 35 years. It by now should have the best grammar and spell checking in the world. You would think it doesn't but Google does what they do. They have AI in search and whatever. They should be pretty good at this stuff. It's like why does anyone need this? Well as soon as you start using something like this and look, I mean I write for a living. I'm not saying I'm good at it but I do write a lot. And you turn this thing on and it's like it's all these yellow and red lines and you're like oh my God, what have I done? But it finds things. I don't always agree with it.

[C]

Right, but you get your grade 10 grammar teachers now standing over your shoulder.

[B]

As you type the, the you know what mean I whatever.

[C]

Hunting your commas, wondering why you use the ellipsis.

[B]

It's useful. It's useful in the same way like you know, you're out at night or whatever, you get a text message and you get the AI help there with whether it's literally writing or just the way you word something or just spell checking. Right. If you're maybe it's your boss or your mother in law or someone, someone you don't want them to be like idiot, you know like, like that's really helpful. So I. Grammarly? Yeah, Grammarly is doing what a lot of other companies are doing. And you see this a lot with what I call little tech companies now, especially where they're doing or trying to do to Google Microsoft what Google did to Microsoft, which was come in underneath no cost, basically basics, not as full featured, but they're kind of web based approach to what like a word processor or spreadsheet might look like. You know, at the time when Microsoft was and still is. Right. Absolutely dominant. And so now you get these other companies and now it's just like a bunch of mix and match. It's like start at the board. What are you using? I'm using Trello Notion substack, you know, like whatever. Like I just. There's all kinds of this stuff. It's crazy.

[A]

It's like it used to be where you have instead of one app that does it all, you have a bunch of apps stitched together.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Hey, before we get to the Xbox segment, I wanted to ask you if you had any thoughts on this story that There's a Windows 11 security update that came out last week that is causing some SSDs to die. Have you seen this?

[B]

Yeah. What's the problem?

[A]

Yeah, this is. What's the problem? I don't know. No problem with me.

[B]

But fix for a fix for a fix wasn't this.

[A]

Yeah. So it was two releases, KB506, 3878 and 2660 that sped up a slow startup because of certain installed stuff. But apparently something in it caused large file transfers to cause the drives to disappear and sometimes not come back. Which is a big.

[B]

That's why I based my new NAS all on SSD storage. I just want someday it's just going to disappear.

[A]

A couple of people posting on x discovered this. Twelve of the 21 drives they tested became inaccessible. Only one, though a Western digital drive, could not be recovered even after reboot. So it's. Fison's been kind of.

[B]

There's not a lot of information out there about this. No, I haven't read about it because it feels a little anecdotal, you know.

[A]

Yeah. And it's not a huge number of machines, so. Yeah, maybe it's just anecdotal.

[B]

I'm not saying it's not real. I just don't. I don't know. I just don't know. Like. Yeah, I don't know.

[A]

Yeah, it's too, too soon.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

All right, well I'm sure we'll keep an eye on that and have more to say about it if it turns out to be more than just a few scattered incidents. You are watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell. The thing people like on this show, besides Whiskey, which is coming up, is the world famous, the one, the only. We are the number one Xbox podcast in the world.

[C]

Thanks.

[B]

No, we're not.

[A]

Hey, we live in a land of hype and opportunity and I'm going to take advantage of that.

[B]

That okay?

[A]

It is the best darn Xbox.

[B]

I like how positive minded you are.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

Hit it, Paul.

[B]

It will be the best Xbox segment you hear during this episode of this podcast that I promise you.

[A]

It's pretty obviously.

[B]

So there's actually a lot going on, believe it or not. I feel like last week was a little on the late side, but I think it was last week. I'm losing track of time here, but there were the two big Windows and Arms stories, remember, related to gaming last week and now we have another one. And I really do think this is not coincidental timing. It's very curious to me that this is happening now. So if you play games on Windows, you may know, or even if you don't, you may have seen there's an Xbox app, right? And what is this thing? And it depends, right? So if you play PC games and you, you buy games through Microsoft, they'll appear there. The big draw though is for people who have Xbox Game Pass because that will list all the games you can download and install and play as part of your subscription. And if you have Xbox Game Pass ultimate, you also get game streaming. So whatever the selection of Xbox series X games that you can stream to your PC or whatever device will appear there as well. And they are, in fact, this is actually in, in insider builds right now, but they're adding support for third party stores as well. So if you have Epic Games installed, Steam, a couple of Gog and then one other, I don't remember the other one, it will actually collect those games into your library view in the Xbox app. And when you go to, if you have to download them, you'll obviously get them through the other store over the other app, but they'll appear there as games and you can, you know, as you play games. It's kind of a hub, right? It's a dashboard, if you will, because it looks a lot like the Xbox dashboard on the console. So last year we just talked about this in June, Microsoft's partners hardware partnership, the first Copilot Plus PCs, they're all based on Snapdragon X, which is Windows 11 on ARM. And this thing includes the Xbox app. But if you run this app on an ARM machine, it doesn't do anything. You can't download any of Those games from the app or you couldn't. I said this is changing fine. Finally the only thing you could do was stream games, right? So if you had a game pass ultimate subscription, you could go to the, I think it's cloud gaming thing on the side rail there and it would show those games. You could stream them. Right? Because you can stream to anything. You can stream to an Echo device or probably any Iot device these days, whatever. And I always thought that was kind of weird because as it turns out, some games, not most games, but some games, games do play fine. It seemed to me like Microsoft would have the facility to. Because you know, we're not talking about millions of games. It's a couple hundreds of games maybe. And you know, you could rate them. How well do they run an arm and just show you the ones that will actually work? Like why not just do that? And now they are finally. Well, they're not even doing that actually. So now if you have a Windows 11 on ARM, Snapdragon X based PC, you have to be in the insider program for Xbox, which is not a big deal. Anyone can sign up and then you check for updates, you get a new version of the app, you get that multi store thing I was talking about, which is not a big deal yet. And you get all your games like you do on a normal computer. Fun. So the first thing I did, this.

[C]

Is what they were holding out for. They don't want to say this run. This doesn't. It's just like everything runs.

[B]

Oh, Richard, I love how you've gone through this.

[A]

Running an emulation. Richard.

[B]

Hold on, hold on. He was normally so, so cynical and now so naive.

[C]

Yeah, no, it was the anti cheat problem. Right, okay.

[B]

Yeah, that was one of the stories from last week. So what you said, what they haven't done is the thing you think they have done and what they should do, which is only show you the games that will work. They just show you every game.

[C]

Yeah, no, I think that's what they were holding out for is they wanted to say everything runs, but everything doesn't run.

[B]

So the first thing I did was install.

[C]

You want truth though? Let's not get crazy.

[B]

So I can't do this for every game because these games are humongous. But I've done a few. The latest Doom game, Doom Dark Horizon or Shadow, whatever that called the latest Doom game and then Call of Duty because why not just go for the gold, right? Call of Duty Black Ops 6, full install, took half the day to get there. And both of them Just crash immediately when you run.

[C]

Oh, nice. Okay.

[B]

They do not work.

[C]

They don't get errors or anything. They just fail.

[B]

Nope. It starts up and it crashes hard with the same error message. Right.

[A]

Because you've downloaded gigabytes of data.

[B]

Oh yeah. Many, many gigabytes. I think it was last week, probably last week. Yeah, last week we talked about whatever the parent company is now, Bethesda slash Raven slash, whatever, released remastered versions of Heretic and Hexen, which are those original DOS era Doom Engine games, right?

[C]

Yes, the first game, Doom Engine games back in the day that.

[B]

Yes, that game installs wonderfully and runs great. Great on arm. So even on the little X, you know the low end one, it works great.

[C]

30 year old games work perfect, works great.

[B]

Native res 60 frames a second. Awesome. That works great.

[C]

Scale it and stuff, right?

[B]

Oh yeah, they're doing stuff to it. It looks good, runs good, no problems. But yeah, Doom and Call of Duty not so much. So I've been meaning to push more games through this and see how it goes and I haven't had a chance yet. I'm sorry, but I'll look at this. I originally thought, I think as Richard did, I think that they were showing you a subset and then when I saw it was every game, I said, well, I know that's not going to work, so I'll just try it, we'll see what happens. And what happens is it crashes. Yeah, what happens is you waste lots of your bandwidth in time and then nothing works. So if that's your, you know. Well, you are a Microsoft user. Maybe we're used to this, I don't know. So that's that. And then Gamescom is this week. It's in Germany, I think it's in. Where's it in Germany? Maybe somebody knows, Hamburg or somewhere. I don't know. It's not in Berlin though, I can tell you that. So Microsoft promised they would have some big announcements and they have. And on the software side, Call of Duty 7 or Call of Duty Black Ops 7, which I have to say, lost me a little bit there when you read the description. Well, it says following up on the storyline from Black Ops 2 and Black Ops 6. And I'm like, oh, okay, the. No, it's like, it's like, it's like when you're watching Lost and you have no idea what they're referring to and they, you know, there's like, it's like, what are you talking about? Okay, I'm sure it's fine, whatever. It's just more Call of Duty I. It's going to be interesting to see a battle. I almost said battleship. If Battlefield 6 maybe puts a dent in Call of Duty, I think there are a lot of people are ready to move on to something and I do like the kind of modern Warfare look and feel of it. But whatever. Indiana Jones is the first Microsoft game coming to the Switch two, right. Oh, they. And that was the only game they said let's go to Switch. So they specifically.

[C]

I wonder what Nintendo's requirements are. Like. They're not easy hoops to jump through those guys.

[B]

Yeah. I mean based on the fact that you can play like. Like I do play Call of Duty, the latest version on a. Any piece. Yeah. Laptop, modern laptop. Like in the past year, year and a half. I mean there's no doubt that the Switch could handle this game really well. Like, I mean, welcome to the fold guys. But I. We haven't heard that. Although remember before they did get Activision Blizzard, they were talking very specifically like we want to bring Call of Duty back to the Switch, back to the Nintendo. The last Nintendo game I believe, or the one I played was Call of Duty 3 where you could use the num chucks to throw grenades, which would course cause you to. Which is why that wrist strap was so important because you really want to go for the distance. You don't want to throw that thing. And then on the hardware front, they announced the timing, not the pricing for the Asus Rog Xbox Ally, sorry handhelds, which is October 16 based on the rumor.

[C]

Trying to make Christmas here.

[B]

Yeah, it's probably going to be 6 to 700 bucks and then 8 to 900 bucks depending, you know, for the two models. It's going to be in there somewhere, I would think, which, you know, it's less than a Pixel 10 Pro XL or whatever that's called. I didn't link to this for some reason, but Sony has finally succumbed to the madness of tariffs and they're raising the price on each PS5 model in the US by $50. Because they're not passing the savings along to us, I think is what they're trying to say. They're tired of paying that.

[C]

Nice.

[B]

Yeah. And then. Oh, I skipped one. Sorry. So this is actually a little late, right? Yeah, it's like the 20th, but usually we get two of these a month. These are the announcements about the game pass games that are coming across the different platforms.

[C]

Yep.

[B]

But we just got this. I think it was yesterday. But for the remainder of the month, several new games coming. But the Big one. Well, Dragon Age, the Veil God is probably pretty big depending on where you're at. But the big one to me is Gears of War Reloaded. Right. This is the remastered version. So this is the second time to my knowledge or to my memory that they remastered the game. The first one was when. This is a million years ago. Seriously. It was like 2006 when they were doing games for Windows Vista or games for Windows Live or whatever. It was the Xbox. Xbox thing that we weren't calling Xbox. Halo 2 was one of the games they brought to Vista and then the original Gears of War. And because it could play on a PC, they added back the level with that Tyrannosaurus Rex looking thing which is now in the console. It was kind of like an end boss thing, which was awesome. And some additional other things and I'm sure they resonate whatever. So yeah, you can expect this thing to every five years redo this game, you know.

[C]

Yeah. Because it gets traction. Looking at the rest of the list, by the way. Goat Simulator. Hilarious. Like so dumb. So funny.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

So old. Yeah, it's the Remastered edition. And for the anime fans, like Persona is a very important game line. Like Persona 4 is a popular game. Yeah.

[B]

It's like Hurdling.

[C]

I don't know.

[B]

I don't know. But Gears are reloaded, man.

[C]

Oh yeah, yeah. It's a big game.

[B]

I played this game through to completion at least two dozen times. Like I played it so much, I'm not sure I have the capacity to play it again.

[C]

But more importantly, the fact that you now know you have finished it. Now when you struggle to pick it back up again, it will make you angry.

[B]

Yeah, right, Right. That's. Yeah, that's true. You know me very well. And then. So GeForce now is a cloud streaming game service. Obvious. Have been using whatever class of GPUs. Nvidia GPUs. Obviously it's an Nvidia company. And now I guess if you pay for their most expensive subscription, you'll actually get updated quality like up to 5k, which I'm sorry, I don't care what kind of connection. That's never happening. But 5k and 120 frames per second using RTX 5080 GPUs.

[C]

You know what this really means? They finally get the black belt production squared away and they have enough.

[B]

They can actually kick the 50 down.

[C]

To the less expensive products.

[B]

Apparently it will Support up to 360 frames per second.

[C]

At 1080p, you don't have a screen that'll do that either. No, I've been stressing my 5080, and it's a lot of torque, man. Like, that's a lot of video card.

[B]

The.

[A]

What's your 0 to 61 of the.

[B]

I'm sorry. I have a laptop that has a RTX 5000 series. I think it's 5080, but laptop GPU. Right, right. And it's. It is like when you went to HD back in the day or to 4K where you feel like, oh, my God, my eyes are brand new. Like, I see things in the game I never saw before. Little wispy smoke effects, nice leaves.

[A]

Maybe that's HDR as much as anything else. Right?

[B]

HDR is part of it, but it's HDR that actually. But it's also.

[A]

Also like real HDR.

[B]

Yeah. 2.8K display, OLED, HDR. And then these graphics. So it's cranked up. It's like all the effects are on ultra. The thing runs at like 140, 150 frames a second. And it sounds literally like a jet engine. If you were hanging onto the wing like you were that creature in that Twilight Zone episode. Like, it's. And it doesn't stop. It's like. It is the. I've had to turn the ball.

[C]

I was building some space animations with frame pack.

[B]

Pack. Yeah.

[C]

At. At 16 gigs, fully load in the card, and I could cook food on that machine.

[B]

It's like the. It's like the Ford Mustang approach to performance. It's not, like, efficient and battery powered.

[C]

Brute.

[B]

It's. It's just like a.

[C]

You know, you got 11,000 pipelines to fill them. Boy, you're gonna fill them.

[B]

See, if I was making ads to this thing, I'd be like, is it a Hemi?

[C]

Nice.

[B]

It sounds like it sounds like one, that's for sure. Sure.

[C]

It's going all right. That's good.

[A]

Well, now you know why that's the number one Xbox segment in the whole wide world. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Paul Thurat, the king of Xbox.

[B]

I'm not even the king of Call of Duty. I'm. I am a surf in my own kingdom.

[A]

Eleven, are you not?

[B]

I am prestiged up nicely, but I. That's just. That's a stupidity time. It's not like skill. It's just, you know, I could run around and get shot in the head all day, and I'd still be like, you know, still be up there somewhere. But from unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena.

[D]

From comedy gold to relationship fails.

[B]

Amazon Music's got the most ad free.

[D]

Top podcasts included with prime because the.

[B]

Only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing.

[D]

Download the Amazon Music app today. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Now through August 26th, it's back to Deals time where you can enjoy storewide deals and earn four times points. Look for in store tags to earn on eligible items from Kettle, Haagen, Dazs, M&M's Ritz, Chips Ahoy, Arrowhead, All Poppy, Charman and Red Bull. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event long savings. Shop in store or online for easy drive up and go pick up or delivery subject to availability restrictions applied. Apply Visit Albertsons or Safeway.com for more details.

[A]

Kids, guess what's coming up. It's the Back of the book. Just around the corner on Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. We do this show every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, unless Google decides to go a little long with their silly announcements. 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. We stream it live on eight different platforms. Club Twit members get behind the velvet rope Access in the Club Twit. Discord. Discord. But the unwashed masses can also watch us. You know and you know who you are on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. How about that? How about that? Of course you don't have to watch this Live on demand versions of the show made available of all of our shows on the website, Twitter, TV WW for this one, that's audio or video. There's also a link to the YouTube channel channel so you can send clips to your friends and pester them with little tidbits from Paul and Richard. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get auto magically as soon as Kevin King is finished taking out all the swear words. All right, on we go. The Back of the Book Kicking things off with Paul Thorat's Tip of the Week.

[B]

Yeah, this one's a little on the light side, but this is a weird busy week for stuff at the site. We're doing a big change behind the scenes to the way our memberships work, like on the back end, which is a nightmare. Chris Hoffman, who was on a few weeks back, is starting his new newsletter, which I can now tell you is called the Windows readme, which I think is really cool.

[A]

The Windows Readme. Love it.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

One word. R E A D M E. That's right.

[B]

Yeah, that's a good name. And he's got some cool, like, kind of branding stuff. So if you're already on Windows Intelligence, you'll just get it. If not, we're going to probably this weekend we'll switch links in the search.

[A]

Not the best search. SEO. I just searched for Windows ReadMe and I found.

[B]

Oh, well, it's. I think it's still, like. I don't think it's public yet. Like, you know what I mean? I don't think it's. But it's.

[A]

You might have to say something like newsletter at the end of it just to make distinguish it from all the other Windows Readme.

[B]

It's probably windowsreadme.subsack.com or something. Something.

[A]

Okay. Oh, I found it. I found under Re letter. Yes. Is that right?

[B]

Re letter. No, I don't. I don't know.

[A]

I think. Well, I don't even think right. Let me see the Windows readme.

[B]

That's it. Yeah. Yeah, it's. It's not live yet. Like, it's. It. But that's the name of it. It's not.

[A]

That's the place.

[B]

Yeah. That's where it will be.

[A]

And Re Letter will be the host.

[B]

The Read Letter.

[A]

What's Re Letter? That's what it says here.

[B]

I don't know what that is. Is. Oh, that's. No, that's. No, no, it's on substack.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

This is just a site pointing to it. I don't know what that is.

[A]

Yeah, maybe they were stealing your thunder.

[B]

It's not mine. It's his, but whatever.

[A]

Yeah, but you're in it, aren't you?

[B]

Well, we're partnering. I mean, he's, you know, we're. Yeah, it's.

[A]

You, too?

[B]

Yes. I mean, it's his thing. It's fine. Whatever. So I have a premium newsletter that I have been very lax on, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna kick that going. But one of the other things that. To all this is the book. Right. So I haven't really started on the 20. Well, now I have, but the. The new version of Windows 11 Field Guide. Because one of the problems is It's. It's published LeanPub, but they don't have this sense of, like, you bought the previous edition, you get 50% off or whatever the deal. They don't do that. Right. So I had to figure out, like, a way around that, you know, Like. Anyway, what I figured out was I'm gonna. I'm gonna do what I. For this book, what I did with the last book. So I'M gonna give away the the existing Windows 11 field guy with the new VE and then move to an annual thing until it's up to speed. But it's a new format, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Anyway, I have a post about it in my study if you care about this stuff. So if you just buy the new book, it's going to be super cheap. It's going to be like five bucks or something. So, okay, the biggest story of this week and then what is the phrase? Richard Trough of disillusionment I think I went from the high highest highs to the trough in about three seconds flat was I woke up this morning and I saw in my feed Notion adds Offline support and literally the hallelujahs rang out, the music was playing, the doves were led into the sky and destroyed by the hawks we have here. But then you look at it and you're like, oh, notion, how do I turn it on?

[A]

What is.

[B]

I was worried that it was going to be a paid only feature, which would make sense. I keep waiting for that moment. But no, anyone can do it. You have to manually enable it note by note or page by page. There's no sense of did I just have. This whole notion's a little strange if you haven't used it or if you're not familiar with it. You've got this kind of sidebar with all your pages. I think of them as notes, but whatever. But a page and, or a note, whatever it's called, can also serve as a container, essentially, right? It can have other notes within it and if you look at that page directly, they'll appear as links. But if you look in the sidebar, they're like that tree view you would get in File Explorer if you turn that on that we used to use in Windows 95, and you can't go to the top of a part of the tree like I have a Windows Weekly set, like a section or whatever.

[A]

To get that whole folder, I just.

[B]

Want the whole thing offline. No. Well, I can, but I click, click.

[A]

Click one by one.

[B]

So in that sidebar there's a menu. Click one of the items. Items. It's a little toggle switch offline and then you can see the sync and you can see it happening.

[A]

And well, that's, you know, that kind of fits the way it has been in the past because that's how you would lock a page or make it bigger or stuff like that.

[B]

But if it's the top of the tree, so to speak, if it's like Windows Weekly in this case, the whole thing. Yeah. It should say, oh, do you want to do all of them or do you want to do more of them? Or it just. But no. So baby steps. They. They're going to make it better if you do pay them. If you have favorited any pages, those will automatically be made available offline unless you. And it will also. I think it takes some. I don't know if it's 20 or whatever number of the most recent NOC access will always be available offline as well. It's not good enough, frankly. But this for me has been a minor issue because the way, for whatever reason as I use Notion, I often have connectivity on planes. So planes would be the offline time for me. Right, Right. And it's worked fine. I don't really need it that much when I'm on a plane and when I do use it, it's fine. But I guess maybe this will solve that.

[A]

What we really want is for our entire notion to be right.

[B]

Yes. So the other issues with the Notion that I think have historically been a little more serious are things that Notion is a cloud service. So all your stuff is there and not here. There's no version of it where you're like, well, move it to my thing or move it to OneDrive or whatever. You can't take control of it. And I don't kind of like that. Well, I guess these are the same thing, actually, but it's just. There's no local. You can't just save it. So if you use Obsidian, I think anytype might work this way as well. You can, they're just. In that case.

[A]

Markdown, it's all local.

[B]

Markdown.

[A]

That's why I switched from Notion to Obsidian. I moved over.

[B]

Yeah. If you're an Apple guy, you can save it to icloud. If you're a Microsoft guy, you could save it inside OneDrive. It will just sync everywhere and it works everywhere. Right. And I do wish Notion was like that because I have to say, other than that it's. I mean, perfect is a strong word, but it is the stickiest app I've used.

[A]

Functionality is great.

[B]

Yeah. It's unbelievable. Like you get really sucked into it. Like it's. I get really used to it. It's. I love it.

[A]

I love Obsidian.

[B]

I picked the point.

[A]

I made the change.

[B]

I think about you all the time when it comes to this kind of thing. Because I just did this literally. I think it was yesterday. I installed it again. I googled it. I think I asked AI. So I Have this. I need to output plain, literally plain, no extraterraneous tags, anything HTML. And it still doesn't exist. I mean, there might be a version where I could write something that would make it do this.

[A]

But even in the community. Plugins. You've looked in the plugins?

[B]

Oh, yeah, no, there's some famous ones. Yeah, there are. But if you look at the code, there are little span tags and little descriptors on the. That described like, the style or whatever and. No, I want literally like the cleanest. If you pure HTML, if you copied and pasted from Notion into a. Like, in my case, the WordPress editor, and then looked at the code, it is the cleanest code. It could be. It couldn't be cleaner. Right. And when I do it from Obsidian, it's gross. But then, you know, with the plugins, I could try different things. I. Like, I can get it better, but you can't get it fully, like just perfect.

[A]

That's. That's a showstopper. If that's something you.

[B]

It is for me, but I keep trying all of them. I guess I could do this. Like, I. I'm like, I. Obsidian is so there. Yeah. There's a great interview with the CEO of Obsidian, by the way. I think in the Verge cast, maybe if you haven't seen or heard it or whatever, I would look at that. It's. He's.

[A]

Obsidian, to me, has replaced Notion. Because I've got many of the features that I loved with Notion, the graphical headers and the.

[B]

Well, I'm going to make you love it more. Leo, I'm just going to. What I'm about to say, I think is going to really resonate with you.

[A]

Okay. By the way, I used GPT5 to vibe code a weather duty.

[B]

Yeah. No, it's awesome.

[A]

So watch. So I can actually say. So Lisa's in Dallas. I wonder what the weather in Dallas is. And it goes out and looks it up. Not only does it look it up. Oh, it's cooled off quite a bit. But it gives me.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Well, it was 103 yesterday, so it's actually warmer in Petaluma today than it is in Dallas. So anyway, I think that there's a nice. This is. Go ahead, give me other reasons to love it.

[B]

Yes. If you use Notion and you want to use AI, you could probably use. I'm sure Grammarly probably works at Notion. I'm not even sure of that. But whatever probably does. Does. But. But Notion is trying to sell you AI. Right. Like, Notion has AI. It's in the product. They're trying to sell it to you. Whatever Obsidian is doing. Nothing like Duck AI or Brave with Leo or whatever is doing where it's like you, You. You can just plug in whatever AI you want to.

[A]

Yeah, I have.

[B]

Or not.

[A]

Several. You know, or not. Which a lot of people say, oh good. I don't have to use AI, but I have. There's an Obsidian plugin called Harper that's an open source grammar checker that I use.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

There's one called Copilot, no relation. That will go through your notes and make connections and stuff. There's a lot of choices. So.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

No, I've looked at any type too. If you. If you end up playing with any type, let me know because I'm.

[B]

Oh, I've played with it.

[A]

Tempted.

[B]

I. Yeah, no, that's one I also look at. Yeah, that one's interesting. It's. Yeah, they're both.

[A]

I am just such an Obsidian fan now and because it's all lore local and I do pay for Obsidian Sync so that I have. And they just added a feature which gives it real parity with Notion, which is a database feature which was the original Notion feature.

[B]

Right. Yeah.

[A]

It pulls from property based on properties so you can have all of your movie reviews in a database with images from the pictures on the COVID and so forth. So I mean, I just. I feel like this is for me if you actually.

[B]

Yeah, these are the big ones. I mean, obviously Notion is kind of the king of the hill in this area. And then. Yeah, Obsidian Anti Tab. Those are the ones I keep going back to personally, but there's like Joplin and.

[A]

Oh, there's.

[B]

And then 1100 others. Like there's so many.

[A]

I've used all of them.

[B]

Yeah, same. I've tried each one at least once. You know, like emacs.

[A]

Org mode.

[B]

That one.

[A]

I've used them. I've used them all. I just use it for a daily journal, but Because I can interlink to other pages.

[B]

You just want everything to work wherever you are, you know. And I.

[C]

That's just crazy talk, but okay.

[B]

I know I'm a dreamer, man.

[C]

What can I. Yeah.

[A]

Imagine all the people just wor. Synchronized notes.

[D]

Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Now through August 20th, 26th, it's back to deals time where you can enjoy storewide deals and earn four times points. Look for in store tags to earn on eligible items from Kettle, Haagen, Dazs, M&M's Ritz, Chips Ahoy, Arrowhead all Poppy Charman and Red Bull, then clip the offer in the app for automatic event long savings. Shop in store or online for easy drive up and go pickup or delivery subject to availability restrictions apply. Visit Albertsons or Safeway.com for more details.

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[A]

All right, that was your tip. We're going to pause briefly for a little club twit plug and then see I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm. I'm doing a bad thing. I'm doing a mean thing to you. I'm making you stay tuned nice for the, for the Richard Campbell Whiskey pick of the week and just an odd one a little bit and we got it. We got a good one for you. But first I want to do, I really do want to thank we did this morning. We did the, the coverage of the Google event which we could not have done without support from our club members because a we don't sell advertising. We used to sell advertising for it. We don't sell advertising for it because we can't stream it publicly anymore because of Apple. They kept giving us Strikes on YouTube and stuff. So we now can do it in the club with support from the club members and I really appreciate it. 25% of our operating revenue now comes from your support. So club members, thank you. If you're not a club member and you want to keep Windows Weekly and security now and this week in tech and intelligent machines and all the special stuff we do in the club like The Untitled Linux show and Hands on Windows with Paul Thurot and Micah's Hands on Apple and Scott Wilkinson's Home Theater Geeks and on and on and on. All of these. That happens because of our club members. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the club Twit Discord, which is really a lot of fun. It's become kind of my favorite place just to hang out. Even when there aren't shows on the club Twit Discord is the place to be to just talk with other smart people sharing important information. We also do a lot of events in there now that are for club members only. Micah's crafting corners coming up tonight night. He's going to be making some Legos. I might do some sewing. I got to sew buttons on my shirts. September 5th, our photo time with Chris Marquardt. We got our AI user group on the 5th as well. We do so many things in the club and I, I really would love to have you in it if you're not a member. See that? See that QR code in the upper left or that URL in the bottom of the screen? Please go to Twit TV Club Twit and join the best darn club in all the land Club Twit. Thank you in advance. And another thing club put it makes possible Richard Campbell's fabulous back of the book. Well, let's start with a plug for runners radio.

[C]

Your.

[A]

Yeah, your own. Your very own podcast.

[C]

Thanks. Yeah, I've been going on coming staring 1000 in the face. Right. It's gonna be any day.

[A]

That is so congratulations 998.

[C]

Yeah, thanks. Paul and I are gonna have some fun with it. Great questions.

[A]

Or you can do the thousandth together. That's nice. Yeah.

[C]

Yeah. It's fun to hang out with someone and just make fun of the whole thing. But Martina Grom is my guest this week. She's been on regularly and in the past we've talked about securing your data estate. This whole issue around how do we get our data in sufficient order that we can let loose the M365 co pilots and really understand that. And of course a lot of this has been speculative. Folks are doing it, they're not doing it so forth. But Regina came back to me with a okay, I've now done this for six different companies. Let me tell you what I've learned. So we were real brass tacks. Like these are the things you need. There is a governance toolkit that exists and you can start with subsets of data. But you know, one of the angles you really pushed on was with Microsoft Purview. And Purview is one of those, it said, you know, this is your, your data loss prevention, data markup sort of toolkit that you probably already own whether you're using it or not. If you've got E file, you know, you get all of these features, you don't really have to buy it separately. It's only if you're real, stripped down in the M365 size. You might have to pay something for Purview. So it's one of those things you just have to configure and get to work on the piece. Now I, we've talked about this before that this is about marking up data and making sure that copilot knows what to use, dealing with archives properly. But she really drilled into you can also monitor what data the copilots are utilizing through Purview. So it's not just, you know, tagging the data in the first place and monitoring people's usage for dlp, but the copilots themselves. And so it's a way to gauge are we getting usage, what are the copilots being pushed on, are they looking in the right places? Like have we done the correct thing? So really walked us through the process of being successful with these tools over time. It's not a one shot and you're done. It's. You can regularly observe, you can see set up monitors and so forth. You can see if data gets misused and you can track down where those things happen. So it's a lot less of a black box. And I really appreciated all those insights that really helped us understand this is how you manage it well. And she pointed to a number of papers including the data Security Posture Management for AI as there's great documentation now the stuff's mature. If you scroll down a bit, you'll see the in the show link. We've referenced all of the products and the documents to help you have more success with M365 as an administrator.

[A]

Oh, look at that. Yeah, GRC. I love it.

[C]

Just trying to put it all in place.

[A]

Well, thank you.

[C]

Martina is based in Austria, so of course she's concerned about the EU rule set. So we certainly talked about that part as well.

[A]

Nice. Yeah. Well, now that we've gotten that out.

[C]

Of the way, a little bit of work, ready for some play?

[A]

Let's play.

[C]

To be clear, I'm on a dry week right now. Last week I was in Kansas City with A bunch of my friends that involved an awful lot of whiskey, including that lovely rivalist that I got a chance to tour the Union Horse distillery. And next week I'm going to be fishing in Montana. Oh, it's not something I do very soon at all. So this is the week where I'm like, I'm taking it easy. The liver.

[A]

Give the liver a break.

[C]

Yeah, a little cruise. But I wanted to talk about a whiskey that I been pursuing for some time. A We hadn't talked about Japanese in a while. And with a name like Chichibu, it's probably Japanese. And Chichibu is outside of Saitama, Japan, which is about 100 km northwest of Tokyo in the sort of rolling hills, plains areas into the interior of of Japan. This is central Japan where you have below freezing winters and very warm summer. So large temperature room. It can be very humid there. If you've ever spent a summer in Tokyo, you've been very sticky. That's the sort of reality of it. And we are talking specifically about a fellow by the name of Ichiro Akuto, whose family has been in distilling and brewing for over 300 years. Direct family lineage over multiple generations since 1625, obviously mostly Saki. But in 1945, at the end of the war, his father established established a whiskey distillery called Henryu. So this is not as old as your famous Japanese distilleries that you know well, like Nikkei and Yamazaki, but it's still an older distillery, unfortunately. While they had the great boom in the 80s, that was followed by the Japanese economic crisis in the early 90s. And it did take out his grandfather. The Hanyu distillery shut down in 2000 during because of that financial crisis, crisis and who knows what else. But his grandson Ichiro did take control of about 400 casks of whiskey from his grandfather's distillery. And a few years later, starting in 2005, he started putting together editions of some of these very old whiskies they called the playing card series. These are considered unicorns. I've been looking to just try a couple of them. They're very hard to come by. There's not very many, many of them. And they did make 54 different bottlings, aka a deck of cards, 52 cards plus the two jokers makes this whole thing in 2020 a full card series. All 54 bottles was sold at auction for $1.5 million. What? Yeah, it's a little nuts.

[A]

54 bottles, not barrels, bottles.

[C]

Yeah, bottles. So this had been collector had been rounding up One of each of all of the, of the card series. And he had, when he had the complete set, he put it up for auction and did very, very well. So yeah, like I said, I've always been looking for these. But in the meantime, while Ichiro had been establishing relationships and doing work with his grandfather's barrels, he started up his own distillery called the company Venture Whiskey. And he did and he called it the Chichibu Distillery because it's in chijibo. So started construct. The company was set up in 2004 when he started selling his grandfather's whiskey. In 2007, he completed the distillery was operational in 2008. So it's young, you know, they still only, you know, 15, 16 years running. And he's trying to make purely Japanese whiskey, but he at least initially using a fair bit of Scottish malt. He certainly uses Scottish stills. But in his angle of being more Japanese, he the, the production lots are very small, so he uses a stainless wash tub. Only 2400 liters. They stir by hand, so as much hands on as possible possible.

[A]

That was this here.

[C]

Those are still.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

The Washington will be stainless steel. It's. It might be in the pictures of somewhere. By the way, they have no website, so I just gave you links to the Facebook page and the Instagram because they literally have no website. They just don't.

[A]

They have not bought, they don't need one, my friend.

[C]

But they've got eight washbacks that they've made out of Mina oak, which is unusual because it's a very difficult wood. We talked about this before. The Japanese oak, typically they're not big enough until the trees are over 100 years old to even try and make staves or wood from. And it's also not a real straight growing oak. So it takes, it's a challenge to assemble these things. And the wood grows mostly in the far north, but he's managed to round up enough of it to make his washbacks from it. So this is where fermentation takes place unusually in wooden washbacks, specifically for using this oak, which introduces its own flavor. Flavor. Most folks when you're using Mizunara for aging whiskey find it's not that good in short term use. But if you age for long periods of time, it brings up really nice flavors. So the fact they use it in washbacks is unusual. But traditional washbacks are often cedar or Oregon pine. They, they're often wood because it does hold on to the Lactobacillus in a particular way that does introduce a character to the fermentation.

[A]

Are these. Are these the washbacks you're talking?

[C]

That's the washbacks we're talking about. Exactly.

[A]

Very typical Japanese style.

[C]

Yeah. The strap. The strap model. Yeah. And so these are. I mean those are 3,000 liters each. So they're fairly big. There's. There's eight of them. But again, it's. Nobody else does this. There's other wooden. It's the only one with a Japanese oak. They do have Scottish stills. 4 size of Scotland stills. A pair of 3,000 liter ones, wash and a spirit still. So that's pretty traditional. They decide on the head, heart, tail, cut by taste. So they're not necessarily timing things. They literally look to the character of the whiskey. Because their runs are small, they don't make a huge amount of whiskey, about maybe only 90,000 liters a year. So this is very craft distillery and it's, you know, kind of secret. They don't have a big public presence and they only make small batches and they often win awards. But they're not well seen and not in. Not in many markets when they, when a production lot goes up for sale, they're sold out in hours. Is it typically a run of three to five thousand bottles in a given lot?

[A]

Is it that good?

[C]

I still don't know. It's like.

[A]

We don't know.

[C]

It's very mythological. Right. But he's mostly been aging in bourbon casks, but now starting to use the. The Mizunara wood as well. And his warehouses are old school Scottish, so dirt floor, wooden racks, three to four high. Try to keep it as cool as possible in that hot environment. He is starting to use some Japanese barley, which is fairly hard to come by. He's even started using Japanese Pete, doubly difficult to come by. And he's been doing his own floor maltings, again, only in very small lots. And most of his whiskeys had no age statements because he's just not been around that long. So they're pretty rare to. To assemble the. One of the very few I've run across that actually had an age statement on it. He has his first. First 10. So the first 10 years old and they're incredibly rare. I found one for sale for 1600 US which I'm not prepared to buy. So. But they're famously his most award winning. He won a lot of awards. When he first went in production 2007-2013, he won best Japanese whiskey every year at the World Whiskey Competition.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

But he's now moved into doing a Lot of blending work both with his grandfather's collection and with other distillers. Not that he reveals who it is but he's now four years running winning. It's one thing to win the best Japanese whiskey. You know when your Japanese whiskey, that's one thing. But he's winning best blend in the world now four years from 2017 to 2020. And that is combining between five and 20 year old whiskeys from four to six countries including his own and then again small production lots. But Andy, that whole facility there, they have no visa visitor center. They don't. It's not open to the public but once a year typically in February around a celebration time in that part of Japan for industry experts only. He will do six tours of 20 people. So. And Ichiro is part of that tour. Like it's a big deal to be with them. Now that being said, there is one whiskey you can typically lay your hands on of Ichiro Chiros. And I couldn't, I could have gotten one if I'd been planning more but I thought I'd bring this one up and I'll probably go pick one up. And it is the Ichiro malt and grain they call the white label blend. So that's the combined whiskey, it's typically about 75 U. S can go up to as much of 100 depending on where you can find it. And it is an exotic blend and it's unique in the, in the species. The industry thinks it's, it's, it's the bee's knees. For what for it's by far his least expensive whiskey. The white.

[A]

Is it this 111 proof one?

[C]

Nope, that would be probably $1,000 that one though. They call it the white label for release. It is white and yeah, that one's in the local liquor stores here in B.C. and it is available in some that sometimes in total wine, sometimes above MO Certainly in some specialty shops. You'll find that one they say they made. Want to look for any of the others? Others prepare to start at 500 for any of his special editions.

[A]

It must be good.

[C]

Anything like that.

[A]

Well, now we know what to give Richard for a gift.

[C]

Yeah, you know it's not. There's not a lot of unicorns that I chase around anymore. But this is an odd little distillery. It's been around for a long time. It very rarely publicly markets itself in any way because they're selling everything they make.

[A]

Doesn't need to.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, they're as busy as they can be. He's Sort of considered the definitive craft distillery in Japan.

[A]

Nice.

[C]

So it's just an odd duck. And. And I'm just trying to figure out if me making YouTube videos about whiskey makes me an f professional to get in on that February tour is. I'd like to walk through this place by far, but probably pretty tricky to get a spot.

[A]

Yeah. I think you should invite Richard to Chiro. I know he's a big fan of Windows Weekly, so.

[C]

So obviously, yeah, he's listening right now, I'm sure.

[A]

Who wouldn't be? Wow.

[C]

Anyway, you know, you know, I. Folks talk about me getting into the weeds, so I thought, here, you want to see where weeds go?

[B]

This is.

[A]

This is weeds, baby. We're talking weeds now.

[C]

Way in the weeds.

[A]

Way in the weeds. Very cool.

[B]

You know, he get into the weed or just the weeds?

[A]

He only has 9,000 followers on Instagram, which tells you that he is. That isn't that well known, right?

[B]

No, no.

[C]

And I think that's almost intentional. Right? Like, you have to know enough to know. They apparently are working on another distillery, a larger one, so the production may increase sometime in the future, but for now, we have this little, you know, quiet little distillery and kind of in the middle of nowhere that's making very unique product and trading on what his grandfather made. Made decades before.

[A]

Chichi. Boo. C H I. C H I bu Distillery.

[C]

Chichibu.

[A]

Chichibu. Now we really got to get a bottle for Richard so that we can all enjoy it together. Richard Campbell is in Madeira Park, California. Okay, let me start over. Richard Campbell is in Canadia. He's in Madeira Park, British Columbia. Columbia, for one more weekend next week.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Oh, look at the sunflower. Where'd that come from?

[C]

It's growing out of the garden there. Yeah, look at that.

[A]

It wasn't in the shot last time.

[C]

No, it popped up while I was away. Wow. There you go. Yeah. It's a beautiful day.

[A]

That is a picture perfect day. Puffy clouds, Madeira Park. You're leaving town, though, Tomorrow I am, and I won't.

[C]

And next Wednesday, I will be on a drift boat. Florida. Fly fishing. So no bandwidth there. Sorry.

[A]

A river may flow through it, but no bandwidth.

[C]

So no bandwidth. No.

[A]

I'm gonna be on the Montana bound.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Have a wonderful trip. Yeah. Yeah. Paul Thurrott will be back next week. He is, of course, at. Well, Richard'[e-mail]. that's where you can get all 998 of his run, his radio episodes and net rocks, of course, is show show. He does with Carl Franklin. Paul [e-mail] which is behind the scenes being fresh paint.

[B]

Yeah, we're painting the underbelly. No, wait.

[A]

Yes. And his books [e-mail] now. There isn't yet a way to subscribe to the new Windows Readme but there will be soon. We'll have a link when that is the case. Although you subscribe to Windows Intelligence. Yeah, yeah, right. Subscribe there in the subscription.

[B]

You'll just be pushed over on Mac.

[C]

Flow through.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Very nice. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. Thank you to our club members and thanks to all of you for joining us. We will see you right here next Wednesday. And we'll have to get a fill in for Richard. Unless you want to do it alone, Paul, it's up to you.

[B]

Yeah. I could. Could ask Chris again, Paul, probably.

[A]

Chris was great.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Be a chance to promote the new thing.

[B]

Yeah, right. That's be good timing for that update, actually. Okay.

[A]

And then we'll see you back in two weeks.

[B]

Richard, say hi to Tim Huckabee for me, please.

[A]

I will.

[C]

Huck.

[B]

See that little. That little evildoer?

[C]

Yeah, he's in Wyoming right now. I just got a message from him off of Starlink or something.

[A]

What does he walk to?

[C]

Montana? He just skips from fishing location to fishing location. Pursued by bears.

[A]

What a life.

[C]

Yeah, now he's got something going on. But yes, Scott Stanfield's joining us too.

[B]

I told this story about Tim Huckabee, but he was appearing in the Windows Vista launch in New York. And I saw him on the sheet when I sat down. So I got up and I walked out back. No one questioned me because I look like I'm from Microsoft. And he was in a dress. He was in a chair with a thing on him, a tarp, and the woman's doing his hair or whatever. So I was like, shh. And I was like, get out of here. And then I got up on the chair, literally with my feet on either arm of the chair. I had a little brush and it.

[A]

Was like, oh, beautiful, beautiful.

[B]

And his eyes were like, clunk. And I was like. I was like literally standing over him in a chair. It was awesome. It was awesome.

[A]

Hysterical.

[B]

He was like half asleep. He had no idea. Just getting his hair done right up on him. That was beautiful.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

That is a nightmare to wake up to that.

[B]

You don't want to see me next to you when you wake up. I can tell. It's worse than a horse's head.

[C]

And Tim and I have bunked together a bunch of times.

[B]

I love Tim.

[C]

That's great.

[B]

Please do say I said I will.

[A]

Well, thank you gentlemen. Thank you all, everybody watching. Thank you all, you winners and your dozers. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly.

[D]

Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from libc. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience and their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads, go to libsynads. Com. That's L, I B S Y N Ads.

[A]

Com.

[D]

Today.