Windows Weekly 951: The ODBC of AI

Summary

Windows Weekly 951: The ODBC of AI

TWiT.tv — September 24, 2025
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Paul Thurrott (Maui, Snapdragon Summit), Richard Campbell (British Columbia)

Overview

This episode features Paul Thurrott reporting live from Maui, Hawaii, at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit, joined by Richard Campbell and Leo Laporte. The main themes are breaking news from the Snapdragon Summit (including new Snapdragon X Elite processor details), upcoming Windows releases, the evolution and skepticism around AI’s role in computing, hardware transitions (particularly Windows ARM, Apple's increasing touch, and Chromebook/Android convergence), and notable industry moves (particularly in the AI space and Microsoft's AI ambitions).

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Key Discussion Points

Snapdragon X Elite: What’s New in PC Chips and Why It Matters

[1:58]–[3:05]; [138:40]–[148:44]

• Paul Thurrott is live at the Snapdragon Summit, Maui.
  • Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon X2 Elite and Elite Extreme chips for PCs, promising significant performance and efficiency gains.
  • Unique feature: The X2 Elite Extreme integrates memory onto the die, copying Apple's M-series strategy for performance boosts (“Qualcomm makes X2 Elite faster by copying Apple” — [139:57]).
  • Up to 5 GHz clock speed (“First ARM chip to hit 5 GHz… That’s fast, man.” — Richard, [142:24]).
  • Dramatic NPU (AI processor) gains – now 80 TOPS, supporting “concurrent AI experiences” ([143:19]).
  • “The truth is, these are great chips.” — Paul ([147:40])
  • The catch: Devices aren’t due until the first half of 2026 (“they've already missed the holiday season” — [144:04]).
  • Competition: Microsoft maintains exclusivity with Qualcomm, but MediaTek has ARM chips ready that meet Copilot+ PC specs and may enter the Windows space soon ([145:27]).

---

Windows 25H2 and 24H2: Release, Features, and Insider Testing

[3:25]–[8:22]; [39:04]–[45:19]

• Windows 25H2 is now available in release preview ISO form, with only incremental updates over 24H2.
• Microsoft is still allowing workarounds for local account setup (“everything that worked before as workarounds works fine”— Paul, [5:11]).
• Enablement Package (EKB): Quick cumulative updates for major feature switches (“KB is the old knowledge base… E is for enablement”— [5:36]–[6:52]).
• New way of rolling out AI features: Windows AI Labs.
  • “Think of this as the AI version of that 'get updates early' switch in Windows Update, just for AI features.” — Paul ([41:16])
  • Labs allow users outside the Insider program to sample experimental AI capabilities before mainstream release.

---

ARM Windows Laptops & Platform Shifts

[8:22]–[24:38]; [46:33]–[53:15]

• Paul traveled exclusively with ARM-based laptops, both MacBook and Windows on ARM, reporting robust performance and exceptional battery life.
  • “It is one of the best laptops I've ever used in my life…just excellent.” — Paul, [8:22]
  • “If Intel was involved at any point in this, this would never have worked.” — Paul, [11:03]
• The ARM transition is practically ready for prime time for most users except gamers.
  • “For mainstream users, these are the best computers.” ([50:21])
• Hardware deployment details:
  • Copilot+ PC requirements now include best security features by default, modernizing the Windows platform’s security posture (“Windows Hello ESS is incredibly stringent, and you get it by default…” — [50:23])
• Even for businesses, Paul and Richard note compatibility concerns are now minimal—line-of-business apps usually work via emulation or .NET recompilation ([47:26]–[48:21]).

---

The Fate of Touch Interfaces – Apple, Windows, and Chromebook

[17:10]–[18:49]

• Speculation and divided opinions about Apple adding touch to Mac laptops.
  • “There's a big debate in the Apple community…should we or shouldn’t we?” — Leo ([16:46])
  • Windows touch support is no longer universal; many high-end enterprise buyers actively avoid touch and neural processors to cut costs ([18:08]).
• Chromebooks and Android tablets are converging; Google appears to be prepping Android as a desktop-class OS, fueling speculation about ChromeOS’s future ([75:29]–[78:51]).

---

AI, Hype Cycles, and Industry Shifts

[19:04]–[27:28]; [97:47]–[124:44]

• AI Trough of Disillusionment:
  • “We're just cruising down the trough of disillusionment.” — Richard, [21:39]
  • The team draws parallels with the dot-com bust: AI hype is fading but foundational technology persists.
• End-user skepticism is “the slop” of AI—most users see no real benefit yet ([23:03]–[24:38]).
• AI Marketplace Dynamics:
  • Microsoft is pursuing independence from OpenAI, introducing model choice (Anthropic, Microsoft AI models) to Copilot365 ([98:04]–[100:34]).
    • “This is more about Microsoft and OpenAI splitting up…” — Paul ([101:38])
  • Microsoft is reportedly developing a marketplace where publishers can be paid for content used in AI training or synthesis ([119:10]).
    • “The notion of getting paid for the work you do…is not a horrible idea.” — Paul ([120:50])
• AI is becoming an ‘everywhere’ feature:
  • “The ODBC of AI” refers to backend interoperability, enabling agents to integrate and automate work across apps and services ([121:13]–[123:07]).
    • “For this to work, a lot of things have to happen, but one of those is that all the apps and online services…have to adapt and expose connectors.” — Paul ([124:44])

---

Notable Moments & Quotes

Snapdragon X Elite & ARM Transition

• “It is one of the best laptops I’ve ever used… And the battery lasted across both flights.” — Paul ([8:22])
• “If Intel was involved at any point in this, this would never have worked.” — Paul ([11:03])

AI Hype & Disillusionment

• “We're just cruising down the trough of disillusionment.” — Richard ([21:39])
• “The world is moving ahead, guys…with or without you.” — Paul ([24:38])

Platform Convergence & Change

• “The seasons go by and the first time you turn on the heat…the smell [is like] what's going to happen with unused NPUs — one day they’ll turn them on and blow the dust out…” — Paul ([19:09])

Microsoft’s Business Direction

• “If you think this is expensive, maybe do it somewhere else, because that’s their strategy.” (on Xbox console price hikes — Paul, [155:57])

Technology & Human Connection

• “Anything that increases our connections with human beings…is a good thing. A brilliant idea.” — Leo ([164:10])
• “Pick one story that, from your experience, tells people about the person you care about…then tell them the story.” — Paul ([160:58]–[164:02])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Snapdragon X Elite, Paul’s ARM experience
  [1:58]–[3:05], [8:22]–[11:03], [138:40]–[148:44]
• Windows 25H2 status and features
  [3:25]–[8:22], [39:04]–[45:19]
• Touch debate (Apple, Windows, Chromebook convergence)
  [14:49]–[18:49], [75:29]–[78:51]
• AI skepticism, industry aftermath
  [19:04]–[27:28], [97:47]–[124:44]
• AI agents, ODBC analogy
  [121:13]–[124:44]
• AI model independence, MS/OpenAI drama
  [98:04]–[101:38]
• Xbox hardware and pricing
  [155:00]–[157:34]
• Heartwarming stories and closing community remarks
  [160:23]–[166:49]

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Additional Discussions

• Windows AI Labs: A new way for stable builds to sample AI features ([41:16]).
• Apple and ARM Memory Tagging: Windows ARM devices could rival Apple’s memory safety advances with further updates ([53:00]).
• Chrome and Gemini AI integration: Google is opening up Gemini AI browser features to more users across platforms ([128:53]–[131:35]).
• Chromebooks running Linux, value/cost proposition: Modern Chromebooks are more expensive and capable, but still face expectations and driver challenges ([81:38]).
• Back of the book: Notion 3.0 launches with agents on the free tier ([159:30]), the importance of sharing meaningful stories ([160:23]–[164:49]), and a Swedish whiskey review by Richard ([168:25]–[174:13]).

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Conclusion

This episode is a nuanced snapshot of the PC landscape at a moment of profound hardware and software transformation. Qualcomm is making serious moves in PC chips, Microsoft’s Windows and AI strategies are broadening and becoming increasingly independent, and the hosts reflect on how, as the AI hype cycle wanes, human connections and genuine functionality matter more than ever.

---

Notable Quote of the Week:

“For this to work, a lot of things have to happen, but one of those is that the apps and online services, etc., have to adapt and they have to change. And as they do, you’ll have these agents that can be more and more powerful…”
— Paul Thurrott, [124:44]

Memorable Moment:
Paul, reflecting on friends and storytelling:

“For the people you really care about, come up with one story from your experience that tells people, without knowing them, something about that person that is meaningful… And then if you get the opportunity… tell that person the story.” ([160:23]–[164:02])

---

For more details, see:

• [Notion 3.0 — now with agents (tip)] [159:30]
• [Snapdragon X2 Elite announcement] [138:40]
• [Windows AI Labs] [41:16]
• [Chromebooks with MediaTek, future of ARM PCs] [145:48]
• [Copilot AI agent interoperability, ODBC analogy] [121:13]

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurad is here. He is actually at the Snapdragon Summit in Maui and we have breaking news about a new Snapdragon processor. Paul has all the details, plus a look at a variety of new features coming to Windows soon. It's going to be a jam packed episode. Stay tuned. Windows Weekly is next. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell. Episode 951 recorded Wednesday, September 24, 2025. The ODBC of AI. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners and you dozers. This is the show. We cover the latest from Microsoft with a dynamic duo of Microsoft coverage. He's back. He was missed. Richard Campbell is here in beautiful. The host of Runners Radio and dot net.

[Richard Campbell]

Very foolish. Foolish thing to fly on a Wednesday. I'm never doing it again.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, you got stuck in the airport in Frankfurt.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. Was coming back from Valencia to Amsterdam and I figured, ah, it's an internal flight. It's not gonna be a big deal. Land in Frankfurt. Ah, your next leg's been canceled. Thanks for playing.

[Paul Thurrott]

That stinks.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, we know if you're not here it's because you moved heaven and earth and. Or attempted to.

[Richard Campbell]

And I seriously considered making them fly me the next day and getting a hotel room just to get on the show.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

We miss you. But not.

[Richard Campbell]

I didn't want to miss the wedding and that's what I was trying to get to Amsterdam to go to a.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, that's right. Did you get to the wedding?

[Richard Campbell]

I did get to the wedding, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. That's all that matters.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And now we're not going to talk about where Paul is because we're phenomenal. Phenomenally jealous. Paul is in Maui Wowie.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Even in the. In the tropical paradise, Paul is. Is still a little. Little grumpy. You want to go to the beach? Are you tired?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I don't. I don't think you could swim on the beach right where we are at this particular resort. But it's been a long time. A lot, A lot of travel. I know Richard does this kind of stuff all the time, but I am not.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hard, isn't it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's hard all time zones in whatever number of days. I mean like just like you are.

[Leo Laporte]

You are the guest of Qualcomm in.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Maui at the Snapdragon Summit.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, yep, yep.

[Richard Campbell]

This is exciting. I hope there's a new Snapdragon.

[Paul Thurrott]

There is. You really need one. There's stuff to talk about. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, well, let without further ado.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, there's going to be some ado because the NDA time frame is. I think it's. What time does the show end here for you, Leo? Like 2pm 2 in the afternoon? Yeah, I think it's 1.30pm Your time is when we can talk about what they're doing.

[Leo Laporte]

You're embargoed.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, yeah, we will get to it, but I have some other things to discuss related to the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so if you're listening after the fact, just fast forward the last half hour of the show and we'll move Richard's Whiskey segment up and that way we can have the Snapdragon.

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

You want to start with Windows?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, why not? Okay, just because there's some semi big news, which is just that Microsoft these days doesn't really announce a lot in the way of milestones for different Windows releases. They're kind of quiet about it and kind of strange about it. And I'm sure there will be a 25H2 announcement at some point. But it's also. We're in a weird era where this big new version of Windows is coming out. It's not so big and it's definitely not new because all of the features that are in IT are in 24H2 as well. So it's kind of a weird kind of a point. But I don't know if it was last week, two weeks ago, we had gotten ISOs for the release preview version of 25H2, and they have not sort of publicly unveiled this, but there are on Microsoft servers now the Release version of 25H2 is available and it is the. Is it the same? I think it's this. I believe it was the same build. No, I'm sorry, it's a slightly newer build than the release preview build. If you're on the release preview now, you're actually on a newer build. So if you download the ISO and install it fresh, you'll have an update, you know, and of course you'll have another one by the time it really ships. But if you want that stuff now, it is available x64 and ARM and there are also the EKBs, which are these cumulative updates that are tiny and install very quickly. You still have to reboot, but it just flips the switch. And so we'll start enabling the 25H2 features, which again are the same as 24H2, but that so that's happening. I guess so. You know, it's pretty exciting. And I can now finally verify that despite all of the concerns about Microsoft continually closing all the loopholes for setting up Windows without using a Microsoft account or, you know, whatever the different issues people have with that stuff, everything that worked before as workarounds works fine. You know, the F10, you know, orb, whatever the, the little path the command is still works great. You can do it offline, you can do a local account if that's what you want. All this stuff works fine. So no, no major changes there, which is good.

[Richard Campbell]

But how did they get EKB out of enablement package?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Well, we know, you know, KB was the old knowledge base, you know, back in the day.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, KB is a knowledge base.

[Paul Thurrott]

But it, No, I know, you understand, but they use, if you look, every one of these cumulative updates that we get for Today for Windows 11, start off KB, some numbers, so they still, there's still KB numbers even, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the excellent kb. Is that what you're saying?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's the extreme KB entitlement. Ah, kb. Maybe. I, I, this is my guess, but it's just like the terminology.

[Richard Campbell]

Is the knowledge base of enablement. I'm pretty sure that's a Dungeons and Dragons term.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's better than the knights of the British Empire.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't, yeah, you put it in your bag of infinite polling and off you go. I know it's a weird term, but I, I think they wanted something that was short and I don't know, EP didn't make. I don't know. It's an enablement package is what it is. So, yeah, I have installed it. There's nothing to say about it whatsoever other than that it works, you know, it's, it's, There it is.

[Leo Laporte]

So, so the E is for enablement.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S all I care.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't get the enablement Karen package or something. Something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Karen, it's for you. Karen.

[Richard Campbell]

I know you wanted to speak to management. Here you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

I yelled out the word Karen at someone who was complaining about something and she looked and I said, I knew it.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, Karen, over here.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nobody appreciates my humor. Anyway, so this trip, not this trip to Hawaii exactly, but I. When, but this trip, this trip for me, meaning we went to Mexico from Pennsylvania and then we're there for two days and then came here in some horrific early morning flight. 10 hours of flying with a break and a break. A 10 mile walk in the San Francisco airport, which is undergoing Renovations. And it's just fantastic because my wife has a broken foot and that was not a problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, geez.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it was unbelievable. It was a really. So I'm still like a little out of it, but when we fly home on Friday, we get home, get home in Mexico at four o' clock in the morning. So it's just, it's gonna be a little while before I'm, you know, feeling okay. But I, through some quirk of scheduling, I flew here. Sorry, I didn't fly here. I flew to Mexico with two Windows on RM based laptops. Like I does.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean this is like a first. So I had in a MacBook Air and an iPad which are all like ARM machines, you know. So like I literally, I'm ARM only. And when I came here to Hawaii, I brought the thinner and also bigger screen but the thinner of the Snapdragon laptops, which is the base unit, if you're familiar with the Snapdragon X lineup. Right. There's the Snapdragon X now, which is the low, really low end one, the plus of which there are four or five SKUs or whatever. And then the Elite, which is the high end version. This is the lowest end one you can get. It doesn't have any burst mode anything. It doesn't, whatever. It only has 16 gigs of RAM, it only has 256 gigs of storage. And it is one of the best laptops I've ever used in my life. And I flew with this thing on both flights and didn't power it. And it was, it was excellent. Like it was just excellent. And that was really interesting. But yesterday they had the first. I think, I'm sure the video's up. The CEO of Qualcomm, Cristiano Amon, just did like a, like literally called it CEO Vision Keynote. Now you hear that phrase and you're like, here we go. Like this is just going to be utter nonsense. No one, you know, obviously no product announcements, whatever. Actually there was some interesting stuff that he talked about at this, which I will get to later. But during the event I wasn't sure if they were going to post the video, so I used my Pixel to record it with the Recorder app, which I'd done before in meetings. It's actually very accurate, identifies different speakers and things like that. It's nice. So I'm using this laptop, the one I was just talking about, and I'm taking notes and as I'm taking. And I am taking photos with the phone as well, even though it's Recording the thing. Right. So I had this. It was like the first. Maybe not the first, but it was maybe the best example yet of kind of like that Apple like experience. You get where you take a photo of the guy on stage, you take a couple, whatever, and then you get a little notification from phone link and you click on it and then you can save it to your computer and then you can post it to social media from your computer while I'm taking notes while it's recording. And it was like, oh my God, things can work like, oh my God.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, and you're doing it all on a phone. Like, it's very multitasking of you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And I think the fact that these are all ARM based devices is not coincidental, by the way. I know.

[Richard Campbell]

That just means they had batteries though.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, yeah, true. But also are reliable and actually just work. Right? Yeah. And I, look, I know if you're an Apple guy out there listening is you're like, you know, whatever, we've been doing this for years. Yeah, you have. I know. And that's the one thing about that kind of insular Apple environment that I'm a little jealous of. And I, but I, I had this little moment of, you know, it was an hour long or whatever, but where everything just worked and it came after flying for 10 hours in the air and the laptop just worked. And I was like, this is not the experience that I have usually with computers. Right. And I just want to hear Mahon the point that if, if intel was involved at any point in this, this would never have worked. And I just want to be super clear about that because it's a fact. So that was really neat for me. I, you know, I just had a moment. I don't usually get that. And now I'm looking at the notes and I realized I must have moved something around because that shouldn't have been there. But just to return to the 25h2 one moment, yesterday was week D. Well, this week is week D, but yesterday was the Tuesday of week D where we usually get the preview update for the next month. We did get one for 23H2, which was just bug fixes, but we didn't get one for 24H2. And of course 25H2, you know, isn't out yet. But my guess is because this has happened, I want to say, two or three times earlier in the year, we'll get one. It will be today, tomorrow, maybe Friday at the latest, but it will happen. And I, my guess is that it will be the it will be what will essentially be the 25. You know, the. The initial, you know, what will become 25H2 as well. So if you're on 24H2 and you kind of, you know, sitting there clicking, you know, where's the update? Where's the update? Where's the update? It's not there, but maybe by the end of the show, maybe by tomorrow, whatever. I think we're going to get it pretty soon. So that will. That will happen eventually.

[Richard Campbell]

Cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Yeah. Richard, you were not here last week.

[Richard Campbell]

But I want no apologies.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I just want to keep reminding people of how unreliable you are.

[Leo Laporte]

No, stop it.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, no. He. No, I'm joke. I'm joking. Because like you said, I mean, Richard does everything he can to be here. And, and it's, It's. It's actually rather incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

But, man, we do miss him when he's not here.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah, no, of course. But I was talking about the iPad and how, like this, you know, this is an interesting thing, and I'm going to get into this a little bit more with Android, actually, in a moment there later. But I think the reason the notes got screwed up is I put the notes on the iPad. And one of my complaints about last week was the thing I don't like about the iPad now is it's so counterintuitive, but it's that you touch the screen. I want. I don't want to touch. Well, I just. I think I just by in scroll. Trying to scroll in this thing with my finger like a. Like a caveman. I think I moved one of the note thing. I think that's why that little bit about arm stuff was there. I don't think that was supposed to. I think. I think I moved it by mistake anyway. Stupid iPad. I hate you so much. I hate you.

[Leo Laporte]

It does take some getting used to touch. You know, I do that on the phone all the time. I'm trying to scroll through Instagram and I accidentally press the button that says post, and suddenly my camera's on. Things like that. And it's just the problem with touch in general. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

In Instagram, rather, when you're posting photos and you have to scroll up a little bit to see the next. You know, so you can select the next ones. It does this thing where it just slows down and then I'm looking at two weeks ago right in the grid, and I'm like, what? So, you know, look, I get it. I'm clumsy. I walk into walls. I'm not, you know, I'M not perfect. I get it.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a little trick on the iPhone, little known trick up in the upper left corner of the phone, there's the time. Not all apps. Many apps. I don't know if it works in Instagram. If you tap it, it will scroll back to the top and if you tap it twice on many apps, the second time I'll scroll to where you were so you can. Yeah, that's really handy. I know it works on some apps. It doesn't work on all apps. I should see if it works on Instagram.

[Paul Thurrott]

But that's interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's kind of. It's one of those things. In the early days of the Mac, they had very strict user interface guidelines and everything kind of worked the same. And it was great. As soon as the iPhone came out, there was really no rule.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I was gonna say now we have things for Liquid Glass.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And it's just like. Well, sometimes you pull down to refresh, but that's not always the case and there's no rules. So the UI is kind of opaque, but that's one.

[Paul Thurrott]

I wish it was. Leo. The problem with the UI is I can't. You can see through it now. There are certain apps where, like.

[Leo Laporte]

Not opaque anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly. You can't read the text. It's like.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, I'm not a fan of Liquid Glass. I really. I'm really not.

[Paul Thurrott]

But anyway, I tried to live with it all summer and as I just. Last week just turned off all. You know, you go into accessibility and you like, lower all this. I can't. It's just too. It's. It's ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Tapping the time on Instagram, it looks like, brings you to the top, but does not restore your old position. But if you just want to get back to what.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, usually I'm. Usually am at the top. Right. That's the point. I'm looking at the latest photos, right. That post, you know, some number of them. And I don't know how I. I'm so sensitive to it. I watch myself because I'm thinking, like, what am I doing that causes this? And it just happens right in front of me. I see it just like it goes scrolling. I'm like, what?

[Leo Laporte]

This is touch. This is a problem with touch.

[Richard Campbell]

And the question is, is it a bug or is it you, like, you just don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look, the funny thing is, I have enormous fingers. I get it.

[Leo Laporte]

But there's a big debate in the Apple community because there's a strong rumor that they're going to put touch in their laptops starting next year.

[Richard Campbell]

But because all the Windows ones have got it pretty much these days.

[Leo Laporte]

And so there's this debate about, and I think a legit debate. Should we or shouldn't we?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Why am I touching the screen? I'm trying to look at my fingers in the way.

[Paul Thurrott]

That is actually the biggest problem. And I, it's another thing we talked about last week actually. Richard, sorry, but like I, I very much prefer non top, not touch, non touch screens on laptops now, you know, which I've kind of come full circle on because originally I was like, this is great. This is a great idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Me too.

[Paul Thurrott]

I thought Apple should do it, if only to ease the creation of apps that are using a touch interface. So like an iPhone or an iPad app or whatever because you're using some kind of a, like an emulator on screen to be, you know, it'd be nice just to, just for testing the apps. I figured, you know, developers would like that, you know, maybe. And now it's like, yeah, no, you were right in the beginning. You shouldn't do this. Like, yeah, we're doing touch. Like, okay, why? Like, what are you doing?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they haven't announced it, so they may, it may not happen. But there is a good, it's an interesting question. We were talking about it on Twitter. We had Nicholas De Dion on from Consumer Reports and they of course buy laptops and review laptops. And he said only about half of the Windows laptops they have in there have touch. But that's because they review low end, a lot of low end stuff. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I have noticed their touch used to be just pervasive and now it's not. And so interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe there's a reaction.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, this one is a low end laptop, so this one actually doesn't have touch. But when I review laptops, you know, you get like the full spec sheet for all the possibilities because there's all these display choices depending on the model and not. It's always, you know, no, but many times, even in the premium space, if there are say six display choices, it will be really three. But it's touch, non touch, touch, not touch touch, you know, so I know.

[Richard Campbell]

In the enterprise side of things where they're, you know, you're going to buy 1500 of them, anything, every, you know, $20 you can take off the machine matters. And so scratching touch is an expensive feature and if they don't think they need it, they want it out.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I, yeah, I very much want it out myself.

[Richard Campbell]

They're also big on making sure they don't have neural processors too. Like, why am I paying for this when nothing uses it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, boy. Yep, that's. Yeah. Oh, boy. Someday, man. Someday we'll use it someday.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just really interesting to look at how hardware is bought when you're buying at scale rather than selling to any.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, if you. Everyone's experienced this at some point. You. The seasons go by and the first time you turn on the heat, let's say in this, in the fall, one year as you do it, it blows all this dust out of the system because it's sitting there not being used first.

[Richard Campbell]

It cooks it first so you can smell.

[Paul Thurrott]

You get that smell, right?

[Leo Laporte]

It's fall, the burnt smell, the burning leaves.

[Paul Thurrott]

But that's what's going to happen someday. You're going to be using a laptop and it will use the mpu and you'd be like, what's that smell of dust? And it's like, it's like, oh, you've had this thing sitting in there that's never been used. And it's like it's had to blow all the dust clean out the pipe.

[Richard Campbell]

The thermal paste is finally melting in.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that's so. I don't know. Someday. Someday. That's. And the reason I thought of that was because what's going to happen is someday you will be using it, but you'll have no idea. You know, that's the problem with this feature. It's. Yeah, one feature in one app will use the MPU and that little. No one will be doing this. But if you were looking at Task man, you could see the thing Spike and he'd be like, nice. Yeah, yeah, look at that. It's using the mpo. Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, I think I want to write an alert that says when the MPU gets above zero, send me a message.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like an event viewer message.

[Leo Laporte]

Do any of those tools that break that out? I know a lot of them do. Cpu, gpu. I wonder if any of them break out.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, Task manager has mpu, so you can, you can do it. Yeah. If you. If you have a copilot plus PC and you can kind of leave it over in the corner and run something and you can, you'll see it.

[Leo Laporte]

So you could see. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I only know that because I look for it. But I mean, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like Richard said, the truth is in day to day, no one's.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, yeah, I definitely need to. I now I'm going to have to write that script. It's totally scriptable to actually do a monitor on that.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, like, because of the design of microprocessors today. I know this is the case with Intellisum. It's everyone. This happens to everyone. There'll be like an empty space on the die because of the way things are, you know, oriented in there. And I think someone was like, you know, we got this empty space. You want to just throw an MPU in there? It's like, yeah, why not? You know, is it like, is it better to have it be empty or is it better to throw in an NPU and then maybe you never use it, but maybe you do and I don't know. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Someday all computers will have npus.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yep. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

For no reason or not.

[Richard Campbell]

We don't know how this is going to end up.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, where are we on the Gartner hype cycle on AI now?

[Richard Campbell]

I were just cruising down the trough of disillusionment.

[Paul Thurrott]

It feels like cocktail in one hand and a cigar in the other going, no, this is. This is more of a roller coaster. This is not a bell curve. You know, it's multiple.

[Leo Laporte]

It's up and down.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it is noticeable though, that there is a little bit of a souring, I think.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, you're seeing the investors starting to pull back. Like, feels like early2000.com boom, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Like just people are looking around and going, well, okay, that didn't work. That's a better example than maybe people understand. Because, you know, when you think about something like the intern, the dot com boom and bust or bubble, whatever. The truth is, we didn't emerge on the other side as cavemen with no online services or anything. Like, actually, I mean, that stuff was important. It's just that, you know, there was a service in New York, remember, that would like develop, like would literally a friend had them deliver a single candy bar to his house. Right. No delivery fee. So it was like a 50 cent purchase. Some guy rode over on a bike or something and it's like, seriously, this makes no sense.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not gonna.

[Paul Thurrott]

That doesn't mean that delivery services or food delivery services of the Internet goes away. Right. So I actually do think you're right in the sense that AI will follow that pattern. Like where there's a lot of over marketing of AI as a thing, there's. AI is just, you know, it's everywhere.

[Richard Campbell]

The keynote that I've sold all over the place for the fall, like, I'm doing it Six Times is called after the AI hype.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good. And people want to hear it.

[Richard Campbell]

As soon as I changed the name and did the restructure on this, they're like, that's the.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I think the thing that's unique about this is not so much from the perspective of businesses and investors and things like that, but rather from the perspective of end users is that as something like the dot com bubble burst. I think from people's perspective who had just gotten online for the first time in most cases. Right. That this was amazing. This was not going away. This is changing everything. It was still a big deal. I think with AI, there's still this groundswell or whatever of perception that this thing is fake. It's. There are these like, like everything is slop now. Yeah. And that's very, that's very hip head. Yeah, I, this, that part bothers me because there are real benefits to stuff and there's some really great stuff that is occurring. And I think, you know, you got to be careful just as a person, not knee jerk rejecting something and then never revisiting it. Yeah. The world is moving ahead, guys. I'm sorry. Like, it's going with or without you. It's. I, I would. Yes. I, you know, I know a friend, we have a wife of a friend who is just super sensitive about. She has one bad experience at a restaurant. Right. Whatever it might be. She's like, we're never coming here again, ever.

[Richard Campbell]

Going.

[Paul Thurrott]

My wife's like, well, hold on a second. Like, this is a Michelin star restaurant, you know, or whatever. You know, it's. It's a little hardcore for me. I mean, obviously if you have enough bad experiences in one, we give them three strikes. Three strikes. Yeah, whatever. But it's like, but she's like super hardcore about it. Like, and I think a lot of people like that about AI and it's like, okay, so, yeah, there's going to be a headline every time something happens. You know, it's like with Apple Watch. Every time Apple Watch saves someone's life, there's a news story about it. But you know what they never write news stories about are the guy. The guys who are wearing an Apple Watch have a heart attack and die. And the thing never warns once. And you know, it's not that this thing can't be beneficial. I'm not trying to say all that stuff is fake or bad or not or, you know, that there are more people dying with it than living. I don't mean it like that, but like, you don't hear those stories. And in the same way a story about, like, I used something and it just worked is not particularly interesting. You know, there are stories where people will say, well, here are like 10 real world ways that, you know, can benefit from AI or something like that. Yes, okay, that's fine. But I mean, like, the, the time when you ask a question and you get it and then you move on with your life. You don't really. This is not something people discuss. You know, no one says, like, hey, use Google search, and I found the thing I was looking for. You're like, well, maybe these days they do it because it stopped happening. But, you know, it's, this is just. You know what I mean? Like, we don't talk about that stuff. It's just like, yeah, you just, you just Work occurred.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the fun, the fun one, if you use the Gartner hype cycle and put the AI the AI hype moment against dot com boom is you go, well in. Who's Netscape? It's like it's open AI.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting. Interesting, Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And the difference, of course, you know, we didn't have this one industry superpower that could destroy anything at the drop of a hat, right?

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, you have all the industry superpowers destroying all the small companies by.

[Paul Thurrott]

Taking their leadership and colluding together in ways that are probably illegal. But, you know, whatever, everything's fin.

[Richard Campbell]

Everything's fine. Yeah, we're not buying, they're not buying up the little companies. They're just taking all of their senior people and giving them big signing bonuses to come work for the big company. That could go wrong. Everything's fine. We're fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think concentration of money has never been an issue in the history of mankind. What do you mean? I, I. What's the problem? It's going to be fine.

[Leo Laporte]

On that note, can we take a break and return with Windows Weekly? Paul Thurat in. In a fine fetal. Oh, I'm sorry, no, he's in Miami. No, he's in Maui.

[Richard Campbell]

He's in something with an M. Almost the same.

[Leo Laporte]

And in fine fettle, British Columbia, Mr. Richard Campbell. We will have more in just a moment, but first, a word from our sponsor. Threat locker. We're talking on security now, and this has been Steve's new drumbeat on security now is it's no longer sufficient to train your employees not to click the link. Mistakes happen. Bad guys will get in. Perimeter defenses are not enough. You need something better. It's pretty clear. Look, Jaguar is still down three weeks the production line's been shut down because they were hit by ransomware. Imagine three weeks of your product production gone. Ransomware is just killing businesses. And by the way, city government, schools, hospitals, a lot of infrastructure worldwide. Well, there is a solution. The solution is Threat Locker. Threat Locker can protect you, prevent you from becoming the next victim, even if your employee clicks on that little blue link. Threat Locker is zero trust. Done right, and that's the whole key Threat Locker zero Trust platform takes a proactive. And this is the key. Deny by default. Those are the three words you want to hear. Deny by default approach. It literally blocks every action unless you explicitly authorize it. That's the only way to protect yourself from known and unknown threats. Zero days supply chain attacks. That's why global enterprises like JetBlue trust threat locker, Y infrastructures like the Port of Vancouver trust Threat Locker. It shields them from zero day exploits and supply chain attacks and provides complete audit trails for compliance. It's incredible. As more cyber criminals turn to malvertising, this is just one of many avenues. Now they're getting into your network, but you gotta have more than traditional security tools because your employees just aren't gonna be the line of defense you think they are. Attackers are creating convincing fake websites. They impersonate popular brands like AI tools and software applications distributed through social media ads and hijacked accounts. Then they use legitimate ad networks to deliver malware affecting anyone who browses on work systems. This is almost impossible to stop. Traditional security tools miss these attacks in many cases because they use, you know, they're tricky fileless payloads. They run in memory. They exploit trusted services that bypass typical filters. Well, that's why you want ThreatLocker's innovative ring fencing technology. It strengthens endpoint defense by controlling what applications and scripts can access or execute. And if it's a brand new script that just came in through the transom on some malware advertising malvertising, it's going to say no. It contains potential threats. Even if malicious ads successfully reach the device, they can't execute. It's brilliant. Threat Locker works in every industry. It supports Windows and Mac environments. So no matter how heterogeneous your network is, it's protected, detected. It provides 24.7us based support, and for compliance, you'll love this enables comprehensive visibility and control. Ask Jack Sennasap. He's the director of IT infrastructure and security at Redner's markets. He says, quote, when it comes to Threat Locker, the team stands by their product. Threat Locker's onboarding phase was a very Good experience and they were very hands on. Threat Locker was able to help me and guide me to where I am in our environment today. End quote. Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily, and I might add, surprisingly cost effectively. It's really affordable with ThreatLocker. Visit threatlocker.com TWIT to get a free 30 day trial and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com TWIT we thank him so much for the support of Paul and Richard and Windows Weekly. Threadlocker.com Twit back to Maui.

[Paul Thurrott]

Every time you say that now I think of Net Maui for some reason.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right. It's all about the product. They've hijacked that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's too bad. Really. There's so much more. What part of Maui are you in?

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you on the Kaanapali coast?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's like the northwest coast of the island.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, that's. That's a nice area.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, it's. Yeah. So hopefully everything I need is at the resort here because there's nothing near here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you can't get anywhere.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wake up to a rooster in the morning, which is kind of enjoyable.

[Leo Laporte]

It's curious but, you know, chickens are, are rampant in Hawaii.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah, they're all. Yeah, we eat breakfast. There's chickens all over the place.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it used to be a big problem, more in Kauai, but I guess it's spreading out of Maui too. I think it was in eat. It was the hurricane. Well, the hurricane everybody had was keeping chickens. Chickens have been part of Polynesian cultures since they came in the boats to Hawaii. But then the hurricane released them all and so now there's a massive wild chicken population.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I feel like we're living in a bird sanctuary here.

[Richard Campbell]

Which is essentially what the Hawaiian islands used to be.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Pretty nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh man.

[Leo Laporte]

So nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I hope you're New Zealand too. Right. Like New Zealand was just. There's no native mammals to New Zealand. It was just birds.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. I hope you're having a little fun, Paul, and not just, you know, work.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean, so we've been here one time before we. That time we did more stuff. You know, we rented a convertible drone around. Like this time we're just staying here and we're just, you know, we're just exhausted. Like if you. I don't know if I probably can't share this easily, but if you could see my calendar for this week. It's just blocked. It's just the whole thing is blocked. It's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Are there a lot of influencers there talking to their cameras and dancing?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not as bad as an Apple event. Like, it's probably what you're showing there.

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah, this is the Snapdragon event. I think this is last year, though. I don't think this is. But yeah, the Apple event was apparently jammed. Victoria's song from the Verge was there. We talked to her last week and she said you couldn't get down the stairs in the Steve Jobs theater because there's so many people going, I'm here. At the Apple event. She said there was one woman dancing to unheard music, the music she knew she would lay in later for her TikTok video. I mean, I am.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't have patience for this kind of stuff. I know that will surprise you because I'm usually very patient.

[Leo Laporte]

You're such a patient man.

[Paul Thurrott]

But no, I mean, it's kind of a. Look, how do I say this? Qualcomm makes chips. This is not exciting stuff. You know, so most companies, intel, amd, whatever, they'll go to whatever industry event, ces, ifa, whatever, and they'll announce products there and they'll have their press conference and they're well attended, you know, And I don't know what possessed this company at one point to be like, we have to go to Hawaii. And, you know, it's happened between Asia and the United States.

[Leo Laporte]

They're going to get lots of people to enjoy the fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. But the thing is, that's very expensive, you know, and, like, one of the things I look at is you compare, like, the quarterly or annual revenues of a company like Qualcomm to, say, a Microsoft, a Google, even an Intel, Really. Whatever. They're not right there. You know, they're spending a lot of money to get people to come to these things. And look, there's no.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's not just Qualcomm.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it is. That's what I'm saying. Like, in other words, in this case, like, you don't see the bigger companies doing this to this scale.

[Leo Laporte]

And I don't need to, probably. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I guess it's a little strange to me. Look, it's fair to say that Qualcomm ships power, the majority of, I don't know, mobile devices. And they're. Look, you know, obviously they're exp. As well. They're expanding into automotive and Iot and computers. Right. I feel like they don't have to do this, but they do. And, yeah, you get this audience that look, some of them are hardcore chip nerds. Those people exist, there's no doubt about it. Some of them are more kind of mainstream. Well, our general interests may be personal computing type stuff, like me. And. Yeah, some of them are like younger kind of camera, like with a rack with three phones on it. My wife commented that she's never seen a. Anything with like, other than a selfie stick where you have like a rig where the phone's in it and it's like this thing, like a gimbal and it's moving around. She's like, I've never seen that, but I've seen multiple versions of that. And now I've seen one that has three of them in it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's hysterical.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I was like, yep. And she goes, I guess if you had to review three phones, I'm like, I'll just stop you right there. No one does that. No one normal. Like, it's. It's. It's just a. It is. It's an interesting. I don't know. It's an interesting thing, but I don't know, it's. It's like. It's pretty here. I. It is pretty. I appreciate that part of it. I get it. Palm trees are no longer as exotic to me as they used to be because they're all over Mexico City. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I see you now live in the tropics. So you don't. You don't really.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So I'm, like, a little less impressed. We were out in the balcony. I was like, I will say, I don't see a lot of water in Mexico City. And that's kind of pretty, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Best thing we did in Maui was we rented a jeep and drove the road to Hana.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's really isolated on the south coast and it's just beautiful.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Really loved staying there.

[Paul Thurrott]

So we kind of came up that road actually on the way here, oddly. But, yeah, it's a pretty. It's pretty. It is pretty. Yeah, it is in the middle of fricking nowhere. And I mean, like in the. In the scope of the planet, if you think about, like, the biggest ocean, obviously the middle.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, you're in it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it is. It's a great place for just holding it with my hand. A base pixel 10 at the sky. At night I can get galaxy cloud shots and it's amazing. Unbelievable. Like, that stuff is awesome. Yeah. But, man, you know, it's expensive and it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I would Love to live in Hawaii, but I think I would get funny about the fact that I'm on a little piece of rock walking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, that's the thing. So all around this area there are part. Like I said, you can't swim in the beach here. The, the beach is eroded to the point where it's not like a smooth thing going up to where we are. It's more of like a drop off. It's just. And, and Steph, my wife, commented that as the waves come in, you can see it's churning the sand. And I was like, you know, this, the end game here is this thing disappears. I mean, this, like it's gonna just rub it down to nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

And then people don't realize that that's how there's. Why there's a beach at Waikiki is because they truck sand in because it is being washed away constantly.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's great, the erosion.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to rebuild the beach. If you go to Hana, it's all volcanic rock right up to the waterline. It's not. There's no.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no sunbathing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And I don't know if you ever walked on that with your bare feet, but.

[Leo Laporte]

No, not still. It's. I love Hawaii. It's so beautiful.

[Paul Thurrott]

So. It's beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

I hope you get a little R.

[Paul Thurrott]

And R. Yeah, I'm going to have to. I'm exhausted. Yeah, I got, I mean, I, I fall asleep by 9am by 9pm and wake up by 4am and I just.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, your time, your, your clock.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm all screwed up, confused.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I got a solution for you coming up.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, can you ship it here?

[Paul Thurrott]

Because I'm going to need it.

[Leo Laporte]

I will.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'll ship it to you.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll send it to you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. So. La la, la la. Where are we? If you're familiar with. I was going to say if you're familiar with Windows, then you're in the right place.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly. Yes. Okay, just checking, just checking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Good, good, good. I'm on the right show.

[Leo Laporte]

Not this week in Maui.

[Paul Thurrott]

So if you're familiar with how Microsoft tests new versions of Windows, new features for Windows, you know that starting with Windows, introduced the Windows Insider program and that sometime between then they announced that and I guess delivered it in September, October 2014. And then Windows 10 was what, July 2015? 2015. So yeah, so we've had that sometime in the interim. I don't remember exactly when they introduced that little switch in Windows Update in the Settings app where you can elect to receive new features before they're released. Kind of unstable. They don't really use that language, but. And that's when you would get the promotion for the week D update that we did not get this week. So they have this kind of formal program for beta testing, as we used to call it, the Windows Insider program. But then they have this thing where we want to expose it to more people because obviously that would help if more people could look at these features early. And they do things like release app updates through the Insider program too. Right. So actually we're going to talk about one of those soon or some of those sin for a notepad, paint and stamping tool, for example, that are kind of outside of the builds that we get through the various parts of the Windows Insider program. There have been hints recently in Windows of something called Windows AI Labs, and now we have started seeing it more often. And the Verge got a quote from Microsoft explaining what this is. And so the way I would frame this and the reason I just discussed all that other stuff is that outside of the Insider program, they're going to allow people who are using Windows and stable, as I think of it, to opt into these Lab programs to try new AI features that are experimental at the time, that probably will be in individual apps to start, like Paint, but could also be part of the system maybe at some point. And so we have a screenshot that is showing this in Paint. So we know that Paint is one of those places where they're adding a lot of AI features. They're going to have experimental features that may or may not make it eventually into the product. And so that's going through what they call the Windows AI Lab. So I would think of this as the AI version of that switch in Windows Update just for AI features. Like, you could opt into this at some point. It's not super broad yet, but we'll all start seeing this eventually. So that's happening because there can never be too many ways to test things in Windows. So. All right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I don't know why this isn't just in the Insiders program. This is.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think it has to do with numbers and engagement. You know, early on with the Insider program, they used to talk about how many millions of people at some point it was well north of 10 million. It was 14, 16.

[Richard Campbell]

Like that was a feature.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, there were a lot of people in it. And I feel like they've screwed around with it so much. And of course, the way they deliver features now doesn't lend itself well. To these big milestone builds. Yeah, we're getting new features all the time. So I'm not saying that Windows AI Labs make sense, I mean, but. But if you're going to be adding discrete features all over the place at any given time, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. What's weirder about this is like it's not product based. Like shouldn't you just be a Clipchamp Insider with its new AI features? Yes, you can be checked in on that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Why is it specifically AI features?

[Paul Thurrott]

Because. Well, I'm saying because I'm kind of guessing in a way, but the way they described it was they're looking at novel AI features that would come to Windows. So Windows as a platform has system capabilities, but also individual apps that people like Notepad, where you write or paint, where you work on images or whatever. So it makes sense for individual features to go to some apps and some of them maybe go to multiple apps. I don't know, whatever it is. But. But I think there's like everyone else is, we're trying to find our way in this area. Like what makes sense, what doesn't make sense. Some of the early pushes that we have, that they have, Microsoft does that maybe don't go anywhere. Some of the unexpected ones are like, oh, this is pretty great actually. We'll talk about a gaming feature later in the show that Microsoft kind of was first market with, was mocked for and now everyone's copying it. And that's like recall. It's a great example of that actually. So recall is like, oh, this is a security nightmare. Everyone's freaking out. Guess what? Everyone's doing it. Google does this explicitly on the pixels, same exact thing, screenshots. Because if you. And in that case it's actually worse because you have to sit there and manually take screenshots, it doesn't do it for you. But if you want to try to find something later, there's just something that works really well right now for whatever reason in AI where we have an image and you can do OCR on it and you can have a natural understanding or not a natural like understanding of what is in the image and process that very easily. So it turns out a screenshot, you know, which is for a person, a visual thing obviously that you can look at and understand. But for AI is also something that's really easy for it to get the context of and understand. So, you know, Microsoft is, you know, the crap on for recall. But now everyone who does AI is doing exactly the same thing and it goes, look, it's two way street. I mean Microsoft copies everything that OpenAI does. You know, Copilot, Vision, Gemini Live, whatever they call it, screen sharing everywhere, everyone has the same stuff. So when you make a platform, if it's Android, iOS, Windows, whatever, you have to think of these things on a different level. It's easy. If you're a video editor maker, you're like, okay, obviously these features will be good for AI, but when you're Windows, it's like, okay, what makes sense. There's going to be some hits and some misses. So. Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

But you know, it's good to German and to get more customer feedback from them in the process. Like that's all that is good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And it's look, it's opt in I. If there's anything that doesn't annoy anyone at Windows, it's when it pops up stuff and asks you questions, it tells you to do things. So this is a good approach. But the people that do want to get into it can do it and the people that don't can not. So it's, it's probably okay. We'll see. I haven't seen it yet myself, so I'm kind of curious how this goes.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, just another channel.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right. These things all fill out of order to me now. Sorry. I think I was. I probably did these show notes on like three hours of sleep and then also move things around like an idiot. But last week Microsoft had a post about the coming end of Support of Windows 10, which is like asterisks because not really, just kidding. But they were like, hey look, if you are going to migrate anyway, you're going to get a new PC. Maybe you get an ARM based PC, you know, and they kind of list out all the reasons. It's like there's nothing new happening here. There's nothing really that is now all of a sudden this is better. But since Microsoft announced Copilot plus PC a year ago, since Qualcomm shipped the Snapdragon X Elite and then plus to PC makers and then to us via computers, there have been, it's not a slow boil. It's kind of, I would say a steady increase in compatibility hardware and software. And I feel like by the third or fourth quarter of last year we had gotten past all the major hurdles. The Microsoft language on this is that through telemetry they can see that 90 plus percent of all of the apps that people actually use are running natively on ARM right now. Nice and fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you agree that that's what people should buy? If you're Buying a new computer.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, 100%. And with the exception of certain use cases. Right. Obviously if you're a gamer. No, you don't buy this thing, you know, but I just, I mean, I babbled about this but I mean the battery life, the reliability, the general performance, the, the compatibility is off the charts. It's absolutely fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Businesses should buy it.

[Paul Thurrott]

That, that was kind of the point of this. So that one I have a little less insight into that. Obviously the, the instances of what I will call a custom apps or line of business apps or whatever that might have been written some time ago will either be web based, in which case they're fine, or native apps, meaning x86 or x64 or whatever, in which case they will run emulated. And the truth is that stuff run honestly, it runs great. Well.

[Richard Campbell]

And if it's written in. Net, you just recompile.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right. That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

As long as you're on core, like if it's better.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we're talking about enterprise. You got a lot of. So you're saying like core meaning what now is. Net, not. NET Framework, the old framework, but the newer. I don't remember the exact timeframe on that stuff but. NET Core has to be 10 years old now. It's got to be somewhere there. Close to 10 years old.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, you're right. It was only really a grown up as of NET five, arguably.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh no, absolutely. There's no doubt. There are hundreds of thousands, millions. I don't know what the number is of lob custom apps in enterprises that were written longer ago than that and are on the. NET framework or on whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

And you're right, it is millions.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's got to be. Right. Should be honest about that. But in my experience, and this is what they have testing labs for this Microsoft and Qualcomm. That stuff runs great on arm. Actually.

[Richard Campbell]

It wouldn't be on Microsoft to optimize the snot out of running a. NET framework app on arm. If you really want the enterprise to move there, enterprises are going to hold. I couldn't encourage enterprises to move to the original ARM gear ARM laptops when we didn't have the update pipeline straight yet.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, right.

[Richard Campbell]

And arguably it's still not straight.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was garbage until a year ago. I mean, I mean, and I don't mean like it was a little worse. I mean it was garbage. But the leap with Snapdragon X Elite is. Or it just acts, I guess is astonishing. It's just. It's a.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a. It's a good machine. So he's like, what's going to motivate Assist Admin to go to the CFO to say we should include these in the hardware lineup? There's really only two things. Fewer tech support tickets, lower price.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And AI. AI.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, not AI. Not going to be a thing anybody cares about at all. That's the way they're marketing it, which is stupid. But no.

[Leo Laporte]

How about security? It's the same, right? It's the same.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's better, actually. Yeah, it's just smaller.

[Richard Campbell]

Attack Surface.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, this is the best, you know, the best. I'm doing air quotes, if you're listening. Platform in the Windows space in the sense that there's less cruft, it's more modern, it has the best security technologies. By default you can get an x64 computer that is not a copilot plus PC that has windows, hello, ess. But the PC maker has to actually go and make that happen. And that did not happen a lot. It still does not happen a lot. It's a requirement.

[Leo Laporte]

Talking about something that Apple has done on their silicon that is based on an ARM memory tag.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right, the memory. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And Apple does memory integrity protection. Do you know if by default ARM PCs turn the.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not exactly the same, but yes, this is part.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't have the same thing, but there is something in there that protects you very much and it protects you against buffer overflows, memory error, of course.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's turned on. You think that would make a huge difference.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. So it doesn't mean that you can't. So Windows has this. Suite is the wrong word, but like suite of security technologies. Right. And for a long time, as a PC maker or as a customer or whatever, you could kind of cherry pick what you got, which you enabled. You know, these are things like, you know, Secure Boot, TPM two point or One Point, whatever, the Secure Core PC technologies, whatever it is. Right. There's all this stuff and you can. Some have fingerprint readers and facial recognition and some have whatever. So there's all this stuff. And I think one of the best things about Copilot plus PC that doesn't get a lot of press but is important to Enterprises is that that stuff is all. Now the default. They've raised the bar on what the default is. So there's a lot of raising of bars on defaults in Copilot PC memory storage, you know, mpu, obviously. But it's also that security technology and that doesn't get a lot of play Windows. Hello. ESS is incredibly stringent and it's, you get it by default, it's enabled by default. It's not something you have to go in and turn on, you know, it's just there. And yeah, so yes, these are like, you know, again, the best computers, but if you're a gamer, obviously, no. And then there are, you know, every time I mention this I hear from readers or people listening to show maybe who work in an environment where they have very specific, super specific kind of old school needs around like serial ports and some kind of device control or whatever it might be there. Obviously there's always going to be something. But those are the same problems we had when we switched to 64 bit, when we switched to whatever. Different architectures, these things happen, whatever. But for mainstream users, I mean, this is why I said I didn't expect to do this. I wasn't planning on it, I wasn't plotting it or whatever. But I flew from, I almost said Boston. I'm so tired. So from Pennsylvania to Mexico with nothing but arm devices, right? Two RM PCs and not a single x64 anything. And man, that felt good, you know, and again, not on purpose, that wasn't a plan, but it's just the way it worked out. It was great. And it's just, you just see it in the, the reliability and the, the uptime and you know, you don't see the security, but it's there. It's just part of it, right? I can't tell you. Like, I review a lot of laptops. You open a laptop lid, that little eyeball thing is looking for you and you're like, right here. You're like, make sure nothing's in the way of the camera. I'm like, I'm right in front of the camera right here.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm here.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like, maybe you move a little further away. I'm like, I, I'm always in the same place. All right, I'll move. It's like, nope, you got to type a new pin. And that's what happens on x64. It's not what happens on ARM. I'm not saying it never happens, but actually it never happens. So I'm sort of saying it.

[Leo Laporte]

So the hardware on the Snapdragon Elite, it does support the ARM memory tagging extension, but that's what I mean, like.

[Paul Thurrott]

It'S a search that.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm saying it's not enabled currently in Windows on arm.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, okay. So there are, there are these security protection features that are available in Windows. It's not just arm, right. I mean, but I don't. When I saw the Apple thing, I said that. This sounds awfully familiar.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's a takeoff on what ARM offers. It's an enhanced version of what ARM offers, but apparently.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I didn't put this in the notes, but there are companies that make ARM chips that don't do a lot with them. They accept what arm. The company arm holding makes whatever generation we're on, Cortex 9, whatever it is, and they take that and they basically repackage it and they sell it in whatever form. But then there are companies that highly modify it. Apple is probably one of the more extreme versions of that. But actually Qualcomm too, right? I mean, the Qualcomm phone chips that are obviously mass produced are a lot of their own IP that came up during that trial. The computer stuff that they have now through Snapdragon X came through Nuvia, which is also. They're a very highly optimized and customized set of chips. So it depends. So arm. Yeah, ARM is the company does stuff and you can use it or not, you know, as you. When you license it, you can take it and use it as it is. And there's. They're starting to do more in. What do you call it? Like different for like chips, specialized point.

[Leo Laporte]

Of view of a enterprise. That would be a huge, huge defining factor if you had much better security.

[Paul Thurrott]

So there are all kinds of reasons why a PC.

[Leo Laporte]

There's probably compatibility issues too, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

There are, but that's not as serious as people think. Back in the 90s, when we went from 9x, Windows 9x to NT, there were these two things that occurred. One was the performance went way down on the same computer because it was more resource intensive. But the reliability and actually the security as well. But reliability went way up. So as a developer writing at the time, like Delphi apps, I could crash a Windows 9X computer by blinking.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I was delighted in the fact that I couldn't take down NT4 at the time with the same apps. Like, it was really good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's moving everything out of ring zero in user space. Right? That's the.

[Richard Campbell]

It was also protected memory. So when you tried to write outside of the memory, it just killed the app.

[Paul Thurrott]

And essentially per user security, where those things are isolated from each other, which gets better over time. But at that time, people found signing in as a user to be like a pain in the butt. They were like, I just used to turn on my computer and it worked. It's like. Yeah, but it was, it wasn't really.

[Leo Laporte]

A multi user system and it also wasn't anybody.

[Paul Thurrott]

Can I. Yeah, yeah. So these are kind of like that kind of change. Like sometimes in the beginning it's like, ah, this seems like a little bit of a pain, but it's not so much. You get used to it, it just gets better. And it is, it is better. It's better, it's more secure, it's more reliable. I just like, you know, I'm going to go home, go back to Mexico from here and open the lid of the other laptop and we'll have been gone a week. It's going to come on and it's going to sign me in immediately. It's going to work.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Oh, and that's the thing. So I haven't written about this yet. I had four computers in Mexico waiting for me, which I, you know, I get there, I plug them in, open them up, sign in, update them, update system updates, there's app updates. I don't know that I finished it. I was there for two days. This was going constantly. It took a long time. And there wasn't one of those things that recognized me with Windows. Hello wasn't one. None of them worked. And that's the experience I had to manually pin in to get into these things. In all four cases. If I had had a couple more days, I probably would have written about that. But it was just, I just, I just. There's so much evidence.

[Richard Campbell]

I think the hello data is all local, so each machine has to have its own hello records for you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yep. Yeah, but it's, I mean I've used them for, you know, last time I was there and the time before, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

I. Oh, so these were not new machines. These are just machines.

[Paul Thurrott]

These were. Yeah, they were sitting there. They were already set up. I just had to get them up to date, you know. Right. It's just, it's just horrific. Anyway, I'm sorry. I could just go on about that forever and I probably still will, but. So we just mentioned the Windows Al. Oh, unless you want to. Should we do an ad? I'm sorry, we already done it.

[Leo Laporte]

I have another one. Guess what? Here are two ads, ladies and gentlemen.

[Paul Thurrott]

You want to do the second one now or do you want to wait?

[Leo Laporte]

It's up to you. I mean, it has been an hour. We could absolutely reasonably do another one right now. Or if you want to, you feel like you're ready to segue. Here's the other thing I'M delaying the show a little bit because at 1:30 the embargo lifts in and out.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we'll get there. We'll get there. Naturally. It's okay. Let me go through this real quick because please, these aren't big deals, but no, please. You know, I mentioned how they're writing or they're updating Notepad paint snipping tool oddly. I mean, the three of those all.

[Leo Laporte]

The time, they're smart now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, they are smart. So this, of the three, the Notepad one is the one I'm most interested in. And I know this rubs people the wrong way for some reason, but there's been a lot of work on Notepad. I don't feel like they've screwed it up at all. You can disable any of this stuff if you don't like it. But if you've been using Notepad lately, you know that in addition to spell checking and that built in stuff, that there's a Copilot icon with, you know, rewrite and summarize and make sure to make all these kind of options which are great. And that stuff uses copilot in the cloud. You have to have a Microsoft 365 subscription as an individual or I guess a Copilot Pro subscription if you, if anyone on earth faces such a thing and then you get those features. But now if you have a Copilot plus PC, you're going to get a toggle where you can use it on device and it will just always work on device. And later we'll talk a little bit about something called Windows ML, which I believe is exactly what they're using. But it's a way to use on device models, AI models instead of, or in addition to in a hybrid sense, the stuff that's in the cloud. So you can, as a Copilot plus PC user say I only want to use this stuff that's on device or I want to use both. You know, if I'm online, you can do it. We'll use that. If you're offline or if you just want to turn that off and not use your AI credits, whatever that means. You can use the local model for this kind of thing. Honestly, obviously if you're making an image using a local model versus one in the cloud, it's not going to be as good. But for this kind of stuff, for rewriting and for the tech stuff, actually the on device stuff is pretty good. So this is an example of something and we that works great. It's a Copilot plus PC feature. You'll see this on phones and stuff too. Like, obviously, Apple's doing this work through Apple Intelligence. Google has Gemini and local models like Nano, and they'll do that too. But that's pretty cool to me. Turning Paint into a mini Photoshop is perhaps a little more controversial. Well, I look, I use paint every day. Like, I really like paint. There was a moment there, and by a moment, I mean literally over a year, where they were screwing it up. They've rebounded from that. Paint today is fantastic. Most of the stuff has been additive. The stuff I don't use doesn't really get in the way. So it's fine. It has layer support, which I have to say, I really, really like. And the big project I do in Paint every year is my. The Christmas card we send out as a family. And having layers for that is great because what I do is a grid of photos of the family and stuff. And sometimes you want to. You're not sure if that's, you know, these pictures go well or whatever it is. And by having layers, all those can be in a different layer and you can kind of toggle them on or off and make sure everything, you know, it's nice. Like, that's nice. But now they're heading like an actual project file. So it would work like what, I can't remember the extension for, like, Photoshop, but like a PSD file, like, but for Photoshop, for Paint. So the idea there is that maybe you have multiple rounds of edits, you have multiple layers, you have whatever, and you can save that thing not as a bitmap or a PNG file, but as a. I don't know what the extension is, but like a PSD type file where you can go back and edit it again later and it retains all of the history of the changes you made, etc. So, okay, so the kind of turning this. It's interesting. We'll see how this one goes, and then a couple of other features related to transparency and stuff. No big deal. Snipping tool is interesting to me on many levels. I still can't use it for everything because they don't let you have a mode where you capture the mouse cursor, and I need that for screenshots. But other than that, it's pretty much there and they've been really bulking out the little. I don't know what you call them. It's a mode where you just have that little toolbar up on the screen and you're deciding what to capture. So to me, like, the things that have changed the most in here over the couple of years is there are features that aren't really necessarily related to capturing a screenshot or a screen recording. Like, you can use it to get the color value of something that's on screen, or you can use it to get something on screen that you would then use to interact with copilot, like using visual search or whatever. And okay, so this latest thing is just a quick markup tool. And, and this lets you mark up something live rather than after you capture it. And I just struggle to understand the point of it, but I guess instead of saving a file, you capture the screen, you mark it up somehow. I don't know why you would, but you. Right. Circle something, whatever it is, and then you can share it from there, bring it into visual search, perhaps ask copilot about it. And the file isn't saved. Saved. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So you're trying to avoid saving the file because you're low on disk space.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. I don't know. You don't trust recall, so you don't want to screenshot record of your activities. Yeah, I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not going to do a screenshot while you're doing your markup.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's like a premature screenshot halting, you know, it's like I'm doing half the screenshot. Like, I. The screenshot is a something captured in memory but not captured in disk. On disk. Right. Like. Like, oh, okay. I to me, that's getting a little busy.

[Richard Campbell]

I strongly suspect it was a temp file at some point.

[Paul Thurrott]

But. Okay, yeah, now it's, it's right. I. Yeah, you're 100 correct, by the way. So I don't know. Whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

That's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I'm not, it's not offensive.

[Richard Campbell]

We had a good idea. So, you know, you're just trying to do something.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. That's right. And then there have been some insider build, some actual insider build. So that still occurs. Yep. It had to happen eventually. Once again, Canary, you'll be not surprised if you've been paying attention at all. Nothing going on there. Nothing at all. And then, Devin, beta, at some point.

[Richard Campbell]

You have to admit that Canary's dead and the coal mine's dangerous.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like, I like every time they have a post about Canary, I look at it and there's they. This cut and paste, the same disclaimer at the bottom. And it's supposed to be cutting edge, not necessarily going to be in a. And it's never, it's never cutting Edge. It's.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

If anything, it always gets supposed to be the riskies. Yeah, it's not. It's. It's the stuff everyone has. But later it's. If anything, it's the most conservative of the channels, other than I think I don't use it. So I believe you just download the entire build. I don't think. It's not a cumulative update. I think you just get like a build. It's very strange. It's kind of old school, but dev and beta, which are 25 and 24 H2 respectively, and thus exactly the same. Just a couple of minor things, and at least I think only one of these is specific to Copilot plus PC. But when you use Click to Do, you're obviously. Well, maybe not obviously. When using Click to Do, it's capturing what's on screen. So this can be a graphic or it could be text. If it's text, it can do automatic language translation right on the spot, which is actually pretty good. That's kind of an interesting thing. Obviously, if you're using a web browser, usually there's some kind of a live translation built and you click a button, it will translate the page from whatever, German or Spanish to English, if that's what you need. But you could be looking at something else that doesn't have that. So you can do the Windows key. Plus click Click to Do comes on. Click on the thing and you'll be able to translate it on the fly. So that's useful. That's fine. But it requires a Copilot plus PC. And then where are we at? Oh, yeah. Share with Copilot this one. You missed this Richard last week again. Sorry to keep bringing that kind of thing up, but this is something that will have come up a bunch over time.

[Leo Laporte]

He's punishing you, Richard. It's okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, no, I'm just trying to think. I'm trying to make sure this makes sense to everyone. I just realized he wasn't here. But in Windows 11 today, and then moving forward even worse when you right click on things, that menu, which, remember, was cut down to almost nothing, is now this gigantic thing and getting bigger and bigger. In fact, you and I had the joking kind of conversation about. So sending it to an AI thing is Open with. But. But how is it not like Open with. There's that. Then there are all the apps that add themselves directly to the menu. If the app has multiple actions, they'll have a submenu. Nobody uses this or knows about this, but there is a feature built into the taskbar where you can bring up the little thumbnail that appears when you mouse over. And if you have teams, you can share that screen to teams directly from that little thumbnail, because that's how people think. I don't know. To me, you're in a teams meeting and you want to share your screen or an app and you do it from teams. That's how my brain works. And I think that's how most people work. But there is a feature in Windows that will do that, and now there's going to be a similar feature that will do that, but for Copilot. So you bring up the little thumbnail and you share that thing to copilot. And what that really means is using Copilot vision so that it sees that part, that app instead of the whole screen, which it's probably full screen anyway, but whatever. And then you can do the context aware stuff with Copilot if you want, including speaking to it with natural language, which hopefully is what all of us use. It's some guy at breakfast today saw some friends and instead of saying waving or saying their names, he made like a sound like I would make the call like a dog. I was like. I actually looked at him and I was like, you know, you can use words.

[Leo Laporte]

He must love you at that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm awesome out in the world. People love me. I always just insert myself into things.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, who's that Mr. Sarcastic on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Table four, commenting on everything that's happening. It's like I get bored otherwise, I don't know. People amuse me. Sorry. And then some comments.

[Richard Campbell]

You're making friends everywhere, Paul.

[Paul Thurrott]

I get it. This one's a little subtle. And this is something I'm kind of familiar with. Just because I redocument it every year in the book. I always look at this again. But if you go into the settings app, there's an accounts page and section under account settings, you have things like sign in options, which is all the Windows hello stuff, etc. Etc. There's some confusing language in here with the sections today there's something called email and accounts, and if you go into that, it allows you to add an account that will then be used by, you know, mail, calendar and contacts. Right. There's other users, which is for. It's actually a sign in account or. Well, it would be a sign in account, but it's also an account you can add. So you can sign into, you know, Microsoft apps or Microsoft Store apps, like the store app, actually, or OneDrive or whatever. So you can have those there, but then there's like access to work of school. That's for Enter id essentially. Right. So you have that account and it works. It's also a sign in account. And so there's more, but I'm gonna. I'll just leave it at that. It's always been a little confusing to me and I write about this all the time. I think about it a lot. You know, whatever. They're getting rid of email and accounts and they're just gonna rename that to your accounts, I guess. Because I. I think the original point of this was it was Windows 10. And at the time, Windows 10 had discrete mail, calendar and people apps, right. For contacts. And it was for that. And so you could actually launch any of those apps and add the account there, which again, is how I think most people would do it. But they also had this thing in Settings, and if you did add an account from one of those apps, it would be there in Settings. Likewise, if you went to Settings and added it there, it would be in those apps. So now what we have is an Outlook app, which works differently. And so the instances in which you would use an online account, I can't even think of one. It's an online account that's stored in Windows, your credentials. Maybe it's like an Apple ID or something, but you don't sign in with it. It's not a sign in account. Right. It's not a local account, a Microsoft account or an Entra ID account. I don't know. So they're changing it again. I haven't seen this one yet. I'm kind of curious. This little bit of Windows has always been confusing, even to me. Like, I don't quite get it, but they're renaming it. Maybe that's the best way to say it. And I'm sure that will make everything make sense.

[Richard Campbell]

It'll be fine. We'll all be fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not actually sure, but I'm not sure of anything. I know. All right, so before moving on, just real quick. So we're at the Snapdragon event. I am today. They're going to have all their big announcements. Yesterday they did something called the CEO Vision Keynote, right. Which I think maybe I said this earlier. You hear that phrase and you're like, yikes, this is going to be. Hey, look, the truth is I don't have to do anything here. I'm not obligated to write anything, cover anything, do anything, but I'm going to be present. Whatever. Look, I'm here. I'M going to go to this thing. I have to say this was actually more interesting than I thought it was going to be. The first thing he said of note was about 6G. And the way he brought up 6G is he said, I'm happy to say 6G is going to come together a lot faster than you thought. And I was like, wow, really? Like, okay. And he says, yeah, we're going to have the first, like working prototypes or whatever by the end of 2028. And I was like, yeah, that's not actually faster than I thought it was going to happen.

[Richard Campbell]

But 5G was a struggle. I mean, that's fair.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not even sure 5G exists, honestly, as a thing. Okay. And there's also this kind of vague notion that 6G will have something to do with AI in the sense that we're going to have edge AI, meaning like on device and cloud based AI, and the two will interact, hybrid AI, and that 6G will play some kind of a role in that. And, you know, fantastic years. A couple of years ago, Qualcomm talked about something, they used a phrase like AI is the new ui. Okay. But this is actually kind of starting to come together. And he talked about things like glasses and obviously the XR Android XR stuff and everything. And this notion of context and that in the same way that your computer or phone is trying to understand the world around you and has sensors, like camera being the obvious one, but other sensors as well, like location sensors and things that kind of play into the information that AI and other apps can have about your device and thus about you. There are things like cars that obviously have a location, but also have this screen and have cameras and can have context if you're driving to a place and it could have like an overlay up on the screen. It's like, hey, that place is right there, or whatever. Like, you can kind of imagine how a car could be kind of modernized in a way that it would be useful to people. And glasses, obviously, all the context or whatever it is. It could be a ring, it could be earbuds or something where it's like, hey, something simple. Like your next meeting is at this time. Yeah, every device I have can do that, but we know where you are. And it's like, hey, you were going to buy a pair of glasses or something. You're at the store is right around the corner, you should go, maybe go, you know, you're here, why don't you go do it, that kind of thing. So that stuff I kind Of I'm like, okay, like you kind of people, AI companies always talk about agents that do work for you. And it's like, okay, but what is that? What are you talking. What do you mean? And it's. It's this kind, like, he honestly gave some pretty good examples of that kind of stuff, so I. A little credit for that. But the thing he blurted out, which is tied to this iPad conversation I think I had last week, where I really feel strongly that these kind of simpler devices now that they can do computer like things, well, become much more interesting and more of the mainstream kind of computer in the sense that, like, maybe the PCs we use today are more like workstations or whatever. And when I was in Berlin at ifa, Lenovo had two different types of tablets that were like this with keyboards and everything. I thought, wow, it's really interesting. But he brought out. What's the guy's name? Rick Osterloff. Is that his name? The guy who runs Android at Google?

[Leo Laporte]

Osterlo, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oso, sorry, nice guy. And he had like the first Google phone, you know, the Nexus One or whatever it's called. He had it working. He goes, yeah. He goes, I've had this thing since day one. He goes, still works here. It was on. He goes, I don't know why I'm not getting updates, though. Is that something you guys are doing? It's literally from 2008. Right. But Google has talked. Well, Google's another one. Weird. They go back and forth with Android Chromebook. Is this the right thing for bigger screens? We have folding devices now. Is it Chromebooks and laptops, or do we. Whatever. And over the past year, it's been pretty obvious they've been moving toward Android as the underlying platform. And. And it makes sense for all kinds of reasons. But just from a hardware compatibility standpoint, if you make a Bluetooth module or an accelerometer, whatever the hardware thing is, it goes out to Android and there are billions of people using it. Like, the support for that's going to be fantastic. Sure, if you put it in a Chromebook, it's going to be hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, but you just don't get the same level. So they're like, I'm going to replace the underlying stack and make this thing Android. So it's possible, they don't really say it this way, but that Chromebooks could basically be Android someday, but with the desktop version of Chrome on it. And that's actually kind of compelling, I have to say. So in the same sense that the iPad now with ipados 26 is really good as a kind of productivity device. If that's what you want. There's no reason Android couldn't get there as well. And Google's done all the work for big screens and they've done all that stuff. So he actually blurted this thing out. I don't, I don't know that Google has ever actually explicitly said this, but he said, yeah, I've been using like an early version of Android on a PC and it's great because I can't wait for this thing to ship.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yes, that was a reveal.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. And then Rick answered and said, yeah, he goes, you know, we're really excited about the shift. So I, I think that was the most explicit acknowledgement that Google is pushing Android to be the platform across the board. Which makes sense if you follow Google at all. You know, the, their Android things in.

[Richard Campbell]

It's got the ecosystem around it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yep. So, yeah, I mean I'm, I'm actually very interested given how successful the iPad is, which is all locked down and has its own, you know, all the Apple problems, the notion that Google could do something similar for PCs. Yeah, all right. So I thought that was interesting and I don't know why he blurted. I don't think talked about.

[Leo Laporte]

That's got to be planned. There's no way these things accidentally happen, you think?

[Paul Thurrott]

He said very clearly. It was an off the cuff discussion, Leo. I don't know why you don't believe him. No, they probably.

[Leo Laporte]

But he also, you know, Chrome, Chrome.

[Richard Campbell]

OS never took off. It's a mostly closed source ecosystem. You know, that's why they tried to make Chrome OS go because they'd given away Android essentially. But you know, they're too similar.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, they have a market. Yeah. People associate it with those $300 piece of junk education laptops or whatever. So they, they do the Chromebook plus or whatever it's called with the, you know, with good specs, like almost Copilot plus PC specs. And it's like. Yeah, yeah. So now in Android they're working on, you know, a desktop mode which is sort of there today but will be there more in whatever, probably the third quarterly drop or whatever it is. But yeah, this is where they're going.

[Richard Campbell]

So you can find Android developers. You cannot find Chrome OS developers. Like I don't know if anybody would admit.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, well, you don't have to.

[Leo Laporte]

You're developing for Chrome.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you develop. Yeah. So you make a web app, I guess you could Android apps run on, you know, big screen and then it also supports Linux, which I hope is something they keep. Because that is the thing to me that that puts it over the top, you know, in the Windows space. When we were doing Android on Windows, the idea was this is like the last mile. There are certain apps that are never going to be put on Windows, but they are on Android. We can bring them to Windows on Chrome os. It's kind of coming from the opposite direction. They don't have the big desktop platform behind it. So we have web apps which are fine for a lot of things. We have Android apps for the same thing. Good. But then you can add Android and that gives you things like Visual Studio code, you know, like the GIMP or whatever for image editing or whatever. It is like the Linux as a desktop platform is nothing like. Well, not as good at. Maybe not as good, whatever that means. As for apps, native apps as say, you know, Mac or Windows, obviously, but those couple of things, you know, that just kind of put that thing over the top for you. Being able to do Visual Studio code on a Chromebook is actually a really big advantage. It's something you still can't do on an iPad. Right? Yeah. And that's something zip fixed.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, I had a Pixel tablet until the battery tried to kill me and after that was less enthusiastic.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. That's why I leave mine in my.

[Richard Campbell]

The reality. And you know, and your Linux point is well taken. But the average mortal is never going to make that work.

[Paul Thurrott]

No. And that's why it's weird about. Right? Yeah, that's what's weird about it. The perception in the world, especially for people who, you know, would call themselves power users is that Chromebook is this low end piece of junk for kids or maybe grandparents. I don't want anything to do with it. And it's like, yeah, but you can install Linux, you know, it's like what? Like, you know, it's. It's a, it's a curious combination of capabilities. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Installing Linux on a Chromebook is like a WSL on Windows. It's kind of a.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's for advanced and it's a virtual machine essentially. And yeah, obviously you need a machine with good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not a, it's not a virtual machine. You're choning into it so it's running on the hardware. But, but it's because Chromebook is Linux.

[Richard Campbell]

Chromebook is a Linux under the hood. You're just basically penetrating the UX you're showing into Linux.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I got You Okay. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

I didn't mean because I needed a signal.

[Paul Thurrott]

The only way to get the signal. It has that, right? It has that.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels like you're running inside an environment, but just to be accurate, you're running at full power, full speed.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not. But it has to be. Sandbox. Right? There's some kind of a.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just a shell over Linux. Linux is the Sam, is the soundboard.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Okay. All right. I'm not a Chromebook expert.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess what's amazing is there's some real. Like, I bought my daughter the latest Samsung Chromebook with an OLED screen and the one with the ARM processor, with the MediaTek processor.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's gorgeous. Yeah, I'm very curious about that.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's nice I showed you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no, but I want to experience it myself. Like, I bet it's fantastic. And battery life is probably great. I'm sure it's silent or nearly so.

[Leo Laporte]

Absolutely.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And MediaTek is an example.

[Leo Laporte]

Not cheap. It's 700 bucks.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but it's a. It's a crumple.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a full computer, though.

[Paul Thurrott]

I would say, with the exception of the thing I'm using here, which is 700 bucks, there's almost no such thing as a good PC for that price. Right. That's just very uncommon. You'll always see these, like, here are the best PCs to buy under 500. I'm like, you'd have better luck just flushing that right down the toilet. I.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really true. There's a shame.

[Paul Thurrott]

No such thing, you know, because people.

[Leo Laporte]

Buy these and then they really get a bad experience. Is what happened with Neptune set books. They get a bad experience and it's sour.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly what that. That's exactly what it was.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, as soon as you poke your way into the Linux shell, then you deal with driver problems and so forth. Like, believe me, I. I'm kind of looking forward to you to doing this, Paul, because I haven't heard really good rage from you in a while. That one's gonna get you, like, as soon as you realize the hoops you have to hop through for certain pieces of software you thought should just be a native client is not. Boy, there's gonna be some love there.

[Paul Thurrott]

I try to. I try to project what other people might need or want when I look at these things. You know, there are a lot of things that I think are fine for mainstream users that were. It's like. Like, not quite for me, honestly.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know why people don't Just buy a Mac.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know what I now that the iPad is better I would just say that's the better choice the Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

It's certainly this more the safer choice for somebody who might be.

[Paul Thurrott]

But it's also more complicated and it's.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I mean the iPad. I'm agreeing with you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I think most people iPad would do everything they need.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I do too. I really do. And honestly it does everything I need gaming but. Right. But even that it could do it. It just artificially is not doing it. Apple is supposed to be bringing the A series CPUs to a low end.

[Leo Laporte]

MacBook supposedly this year which is. There will be a five or six.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hundred dollar MacBook I think when you have a MacBook Air that's gorgeous like M4 processor for nine hundred and ninety nine dollars which you can get on sale probably for seven hundred ninety nine dollars a lot of the time that's perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

It's no accident that Apple's bringing this to market. The rumor is in October. I'm going to guess October 16th or thereabouts somewhere in there, somewhere in the middle of the month because I really, I wonder if they're going to. I don't know. Most users will just stay with Windows 10 and they won't even be aware.

[Paul Thurrott]

Of anything by the way. Right. So Microsoft is. I mentioned earlier, I think it was really aimed at businesses but like hey consider Windows and ARM in the Windows space. Windows and ARM is as close as we're going to get to that world. Right. We don't have the opportunity to. We're not going to be doing an iPad device. Like there's. This is not where that ship has sailed. But yeah, if you actually need or think you need a real computer. Apple coming along with a. We're going to guess and say six $700 Mac now. I mean they're going to get some. They're going to get some people.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're kind of wanting Unix, there's a full. There's no Futzon, there's a full shell. I run Emacs on it. I run command line utilities. There's a number of package managers including Homebrew. There's a really good ecosystem around that. I feel like I always used to say on the radio show Windows for business. Windows is really I believe now I know I'm in the wrong place to say this out loud but I feel like it's designed for somebody with an IT department. It's designed for somebody to use who has somebody else managing it or they Are the IT department. They're agency.

[Richard Campbell]

Well and to be clear, the people who make that product have an IT department.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also the.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is fine. I'm not. So I always said Windows for business and Mac for home users. If you don't have an IT department.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So my, my focus is not on business users. Right. But rather on. I don't know what you.

[Leo Laporte]

I got it's enthusiasts, you know the game, you know, if you're enthusiastic, you are your IT department. You can be your IT department. IT department.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Just Grandma and grandpa shouldn't be buying it. And I say that as a person.

[Paul Thurrott]

By the way, I said that last week. Right. I said the same thing. I think we're at the point now where as Windows 10 goes out and if you're a mainstream user, you're not listening to this show. Right. When I say this on this show, people are like, what are you doing, Paul?

[Leo Laporte]

The people on this show should use Windows.

[Paul Thurrott]

They should use Windows. But your parents or your non technical friends and siblings or whatever, there are other choices and soon there will be better choices. But I feel like the iPad, I think Android will get there. You know, Chromebook was Android. I guess, you know, at some point this. But if you feel like you need a computer for some reason, like and a lot of this is just, it's like when you buy a car and it's the what if thing, you're like, well, I'm going to get this one just in case because I may not need this now but maybe, you know, you think you need like you mentioned the terminal or whatever. People are like, yeah, yeah, I'm going to do this. He's right. It has a terminal and they'll never use the terminal. But you bought it because you know, you never know, it's fine. There's nothing wrong with that or you don't know better.

[Leo Laporte]

I think a lot of people buy just because there's a herd mentality. I went to Costco and there were all those nice laptops and I just bought that one because that's what everybody uses. You got to remember there is a burden when you become a Windows user. There's a burden now on you to keep it maintained and secure.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's a burden on you to try not to do that now because it really just does it all the time. But yeah, anyway, the Mac has always been a good alternative or long been a good alternative. And if you make that thing inexpensive enough.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree. I think it's very interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

I guess it's a little simpler. I find going from Windows to the Mac, there's enough little. Oftentimes it's the little things that kind of hurt the most, you know, but.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S muscle memory, Paul. That's, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no, I know, I know. And if you just went straight there and you struggled for a little while and that's just what you used, I'm sure it would be fine. Like, I'm, I'm sure people could get their heads around it, whatever. But. Yeah, no, anyway, I guess my only point is just that if you feel like you do need a computer and Apple does put out this, whatever we, whatever we think it's going to cost 6, 700 bucks, that's going to be a good choice. It's going to be really, there's no doubt about it.

[Richard Campbell]

It's going to be compelling. You have to evaluate.

[Leo Laporte]

You can do what I do. If you really need Windows, I'm running Windows in Parallels and it's, it runs beautifully.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So right. If you, and if you need that one app, they have that whatever continuity mode or whatever, coherence, whatever it's called, which is great. And that's. Yeah. So I think that's. But the instances in which a normal person, a mainstream user is going to need that. Actually, that's kind of gone away, hasn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, yeah, I mean I think everybody just needs a browser now. And that's it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, pretty much, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Speaks us back to the Chromebook. Dad's run abroad.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why a Chromebook makes sense.

[Paul Thurrott]

We've all done these things where you hit that first little, this isn't exactly right, and then use it for a little while and you're like, oh man, there's another one. And then Chromebook to me is always like that. It's like the Windows don't resize normally. They don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm with you. Same thing with the iPad. It's just not quite a PC. And of course a lot of people, somebody in the Discord club twits discord saying, you know, the, all the Chromebooks that the kids get sent home from school with are just God awful. It's that same problem with that we have with netbooks, which is people get a really bad impression from the $200 Chromebooks.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. We saw my daughter when she graduated from college and she told me a story from, I don't know if it was junior high school, high school, but they sent her home with this piece.

[Leo Laporte]

Awful crap.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, Chromebook. And I said, no I literally. I didn't say it this way, but it's like, no, donra mine. So I had this.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you know who I am?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I had this beautiful little.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you know how many laptops I have in the closet?

[Paul Thurrott]

So I got. She had a Chromebook. It had like blue trim, was gorgeous. It was way nicer than the junk that school was giving her. Yeah. And I said, you bring this in and you tell them you're using this. And she did. But she was ostracized for the rest of her career because she had a different laptop than all her friends. And everyone, they were treated like, you know, because. Because they just, they hated her for it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And she was like, thanks. And I'm like, I, I like this is like 15 years ago or whatever. Like, what are you talking about? She like complained about it at her graduation dinner, high school, whatever. I was like, sorry. I was an outcast because I had a. Yeah, because you. I still don't have any friends because of you. Like, I don't think that was because of me, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's very funny.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You got to be careful. Teenage life is tough, I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

Tricky. Let's.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I take a break now? I need to really do that. I'm sorry. We'll take a break, come back. There's lots more. No doubt. And Again, in about 45 minutes, the embargo is lifted and we can find out what's new with the Snapdragon, which.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm very hope I have the time right. I'm going to check that to be sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Well, yeah, I hope you do too. Anyway, sometime. Sometime today, you'll find out. Our sponsor for this segment on Windows Weekly is very apropos, frankly, many companies have IT departments. But I've got a better way to get Microsoft support. We're talking about US Cloud, the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. They now they're so big, now they support 50 of the Fortune 500 so that you can big enterprises use US Cloud. And there's a good reason. Actually, there's three good reasons. Number one, switching to US Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier support 30 to 50%. That's reason number one. Reason number two, it is faster. A lot faster. Twice as fast. Average time to resolution versus Microsoft. And that's an important stat because when your hair's on fire, the network's down, the boss is calling you saying what's going on? Solving that problem twice as fast is good. It's a good thing. There's another reason you might be interested in US Cloud. They will tell you things Microsoft may be reluctant to to tell you. For instance, how to save money on Azure. US Cloud has a new offering. I love this, their Azure cost optimization service. I mean let's be frank here. When's the last time you looked at your Azure usage? It's really easy for it to get out of control. If it's been a while, you probably have some Azure sprawl, you know, a little spend creep going on. Some virtual machines are running but nobody's using them, that kind of thing. Good news, saving on Azure is really easy with US Cloud they offer an eight week Azure engagement. It's powered by VBox that identifies key opportunities to reduce costs like unused VMs, but everywhere across your Azure environment. I mean there are lots of places you could get the same benefit or performance for less. And I'm sure Microsoft knows this, but they're not, you know, this is a profit center for them. But US Cloud's expert guidance and by the way, this is another reason. I guess there are four reasons US Cloud coming from their senior engineers, the best people in the business, an average of over 16 years with Microsoft products including Breakfix. I mean these are the pros from Dover, right? These are the people you want on your team. At the end of these eight weeks, with their help, your interactive dashboard will identify. You don't have to do anything, but you'll have a dashboard that will identify, rebuild and downscale opportunities and unused resources. It's look, information is power. You'll now know what you're using, what you're not using and where you can save. Which means you can reallocate very precious IT dollars. And I know they're precious towards things you really need, although you could also do with a few US Cloud customers have done and keep the savings going. By taking those Azure savings and putting them towards US Clouds, Microsoft supports completely eliminate your unified spend and the saving keeps on going. Ask Sam, he's the technical operations manager at Bead gaming. He gives us Cloud 5 stars saying we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spent on Azure. But once we got to 40 or $50,000 a month, it really started to add up. End quote. I bet it did. It's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance. And you can do it all in eight weeks with US Cloud. So that's four great reasons companies switch to US Cloud. Visit uscloud.com, book a call today to find out how much your team can save. That's USCloud SA. Book a call today and get faster Microsoft support for less. Faster, better, less. I mean, you can't lose uscloud.com back to Windows Weekly and Paul Thorado. Suffering in Hawaii.

[Paul Thurrott]

The air conditioning in this hotel room is brutal.

[Leo Laporte]

This is probably a good time to be in Hawaii. It's fall. It's not super hot anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. It's pretty. I mean, I'll tell you, though, it's humid here.

[Leo Laporte]

And yeah, you're in the town.

[Paul Thurrott]

You really.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, Mexico City's dry because of the altitude.

[Paul Thurrott]

The weather there is so perfect. And yeah, it's. It's pretty here, but man, yeah, the humidity is tough.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have the chickens in Mexico City?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, because we.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Rooster was running between my legs during breakfast this morning.

[Leo Laporte]

We have. Petaluma actually has on the books a law that says anybody in town can own chickens. Like, that's because they're the chicken. We used to be the chicken in the world.

[Paul Thurrott]

I said to Stephanie over breakfast, because of this, I said, God help us. If anyone in Mexico City ever figures out roosters exist, these things are going to be all over the city. Because, like, a. It's like, why do you have this thing? It's like we just like the sound of it, you know, like, these people just love noise.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, more significantly, roosters are hyper aggressive. Like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

They're nasty and they don't want a rooster.

[Leo Laporte]

Contrary to public opinion, it is not just at dawn that the rooster crows. Oh, no. The cock crows at midnight. 2am, 4am anytime it feels like it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah. No, when we moved back to the Boston area from Phoenix, the first house we had in Dedham, not the one we were in for the long time, but the first one the people next door to said chickens and a rooster. And that thing woke us up on the first day. We were like, oh, my God, what is happening? Like, where are we?

[Leo Laporte]

But, yeah, yeah, we get rooster crowing here, too, every day. It's okay now. You get used to it. It's better than the peacocks. We used to have peacocks and they.

[Richard Campbell]

Sound like they're obnoxious.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, yeah. So we have beautiful houses where we live in Pennsylvania. Those things sound like someone's murdering a child.

[Leo Laporte]

It sounds so weird.

[Paul Thurrott]

Don't they scream? It's Like a screeching. Yeah, it's so cute. And it goes. You're like, what the. What's going on there?

[Leo Laporte]

Do not wonder what the fox says.

[Richard Campbell]

No, you don't want to know.

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, on we go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Where are we? So are we at AI, so. Oh, God. Yeah. So I almost exclusively kept this to Microsoft this week, and there's a lot going on.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God.

[Paul Thurrott]

He says. This is so much stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Our AI show is coming up, by the way.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Intelligent machines, 2pm, about an hour from now. Stephen Levy will be our guest. The great journalist. Yeah, I know you read Hackers. We love that book. And Stephen is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, no, that was.

[Leo Laporte]

He's. He's amazing. I love Stevenson.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've read a bunch of his stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah, he was. What, Timer, Newsweek? I can't. He was one of those guys too early for a long time, wasn't he? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so we all know, or if you don't know, please be advised there is a rift growing between Microsoft and OpenAI. And this week it got blown wide open in two ways. I'll mention the smaller one first, because it's in there somewhere, I assume. Yeah. So Microsoft is known to be working on its own, what we're calling now foundational models. Right. Microsoft AI, the organization. If you use GitHub, Copilot, I believe I could be wrong, but I think Anthropic might actually even be the default. But if it's not, it's one of the choices in there. And now they have announced that they're going to start bringing model choice, as they call it, to Microsoft 365 copilot, and I would imagine eventually to all.

[Richard Campbell]

Copilots, because they've been doing this in the dev space for the whole time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's the thing. You see it over there and you're like. Well, you know, they're going to like, you know, they do it over here.

[Richard Campbell]

As well they should.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, what are you doing?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And this goes back. I'll just. Because it's another episode of Windows Weekly. I will mention the word orchestration again because I really feel like the future of this stuff is this thing working on your behalf in the background and always choosing the right model. And it's something you don't think about or know about, you shouldn't care about. It's just going to. We want to get you the right answer. And this is how we're going to do it. We're going to get you push this thing through the right model or models, you know, whatever it might be. And so that's starting. And it's just a subset of what Microsoft 365 Copilot does. But you will have a choice. And like right now, it's that goofy thing where some normal person somehow has to think about the model. And that's not what we're going to be doing later, but that's what we're doing now. But this is a little bit of the opening of the gate, right? Where to date, this stuff has been all OpenAI. But the bigger news, and it's big, is that intel doesn't have $100 billion. Nvidia announced a $100 billion investment in OpenAI. And there's a lot that goes into this and it's also changing already over time. It's just an agreement at this point, but let's kind of structure the deal.

[Richard Campbell]

Matters a lot here.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it does. But. But it's.

[Leo Laporte]

This is just a shell game. This is just banking shell game for tax purposes. And to make your balance sheet look good, I'll give you $100 billion, which you'll use to buy our chips, and then I get the $100 billion back. And there's no net gain anywhere here. It's just a shell game. Right? Am I wrong?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, you're not. I wouldn't. The word just sort of suggests this is not a big deal. In a sense, there's still $100 billion. In other words, this is the rich. I know. They're shuffling money around. I get it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like, Paul, I'm going to give you $5 to give me $5. Thank you. And look, we can both say put on our books, hey, look at this big investment. And I mean, it's bs.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, but it's also a play against Ellison, right? Like Ellison's threatening to do his own chip line.

[Leo Laporte]

He's doing the same BS where they, where they announced. Microsoft announced or no OpenAI, who was it said, we're going to buy $30 billion in center network?

[Paul Thurrott]

Microsoft did.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, Microsoft. But it's the same shell game.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, but I'm sorry, I'm looking at this from a slightly different angle, which is that this is, to me is more about the Microsoft and OpenAI splitting up thing. In other words.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I agree.

[Paul Thurrott]

As these two companies become more independent of each other, they can make these deals on their own. The thing that, to me, that's most interesting about this, other than the amount, is Microsoft didn't find out about it until the night before. Wow. They actually held onto this and then dropped it at the last moment. And unless I'm missing something, unless there was a last or a secret change to their little agreement, Microsoft could have said no to this. I believe, I believe that they still have that kind of decision making power over OpenAI. But, but we know from the shifting of their agreement, I think it was earlier this year, late last year, I don't remember.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think it's an accident. This occurred almost immediately after that, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Well, the fact that it was like, yeah, go. I really. This is the. Your kite has become a teenager, you can't stand each other and they have to. And you have some fight and they're like, I can't wait to go away to college. And like, I can't wait for you to go away to college. You know, like, I think they're in that phase of their relationship. So there was a relatively small thing. You know, remember OpenAI wanted to buy a company that makes a developer a pair. What do you call it? A pair developer AI tool of some kind. I can't even remember the name, but it was basically something cursor or. No, it was not high profile. I think it was something smaller, but it was basically a competitor to GitHub Copilot. And they were like, no, no, yeah, you're not doing that. But then this $100 billion infrastructure thing comes up, like, yeah, please make it 200 billion, just leave, I don't care. So I thought that was kind of, that was. That to me is what's interesting. This to me, this is more about really communicating to the world that they're more independent of each other, you know? And look, if you're worried about OpenAI, I think they're going to be fine guys. You know, they. It seems like everything's going pretty good over there, but also in the context of another development in our little industry here, where last week Nvidia announced a $5 billion investment. I'm going to put that one in air quotes too, because investments are kind of a strong term. What Nvidia did was flush $5 billion away into an intel shaped toilet. Look, I did this simple math in the article I wrote. I'll do it off the top of my head here with you guys again, but. But what they're basically going to do, and this will be good for intel is integrate some version of the RTX graphics chips that they have, which is, by the way, is quite good on a standalone graphics card for a laptop. The most recent intel laptop I reviewed had a discrete RTX graphics card and it plays Call of Duty at higher frame rates, at higher resolutions and at more graphical fidelity than I've ever seen. Like, it's unbelievable this thing, blue screen like three times in a week. But it is unbelievable. It's unbelievable. So I don't know that the integrated version that will go into whatever future intel chip, probably a Core Alter or whatever, I don't know how that will compare exactly, but it's going to be a step up from what they have today. Which by the way, the graphics in Core Alter today are actually pretty good. But what they're competing with here is AMD. And AMD's integrated graphics, which they call APU is dramatically better. It's, especially in the Pro, high end versions, astonishingly good. But it's fair to say RTX discrete anyways is much better still.

[Richard Campbell]

Still considered the reference chipset like for.

[Paul Thurrott]

Gpu, it's really impressive. So okay, that's good. Now they'll, they'll still have their standard reliability problems, they're still intel, et cetera, et cetera. There's some debate what this means to the future stuff because when you think about an Nvidia intel partnership, you're thinking, well, okay, so part of the deal is intel will get their foundry going to some point where Nvidia can use it to make their chips. And no, intel will probably never get it to that point. But that is absolutely not part of it. And also they're not really described this way very often, but Nvidia is absolutely one of the world's biggest companies that make ARM devices. All of their data center chips are ARM based and that's not stopping. They're not moving to x86 or anything like that. So this to me feels political. And in our current environment where we have a world where big tech is bowing down to our crybaby in chief all the time, and Nvidia specifically is having problems with the Chinese government and with getting their chips into China. And there's some exceptions, but some others that are not exceptions. I really feel like this was a toss out to the government, the US government, who by the way just did their own little, what they're calling an investment, but what is really an intervention in intel and that I think these things are tied together because think about this is the math. In the last quarter, if I remember correctly, there were roughly 60 something million PCs sold, which is higher than usual. But PC makers sell between 250 and say 300 million units a year. Intel is probably this, I don't know but I'm going to call it 80 plus percent. Somewhere in there. 80% of those. They're still the biggest maker of chips for PCs despite all the problems. And they make a wide range of chips as companies do. But I'm guessing integrated RTX graphics are not going to go into the celerons of this world and they don't use the name anymore. They're going to go into the high end chips. Right. So a Core Ultra, whatever today, meaning a lunar lake or arrow lake or whatever is some percentage of that. So how much money could Nvidia make per computer, like per chip? What do you think it is? Is it a dollar? Is it $10?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's more than that. Oh, it's big time in a PC.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I mean it can't be because these things already cost. I mean how much could it be? I don't it.

[Leo Laporte]

But I think they have to be pretty high margin.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I think the Blackwells are.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, not margin. No, no, no. I'm talking about you have a deal with Intel. Intel's going to integrate it onto.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I see what you're saying.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. How much are they going to make every time intel sells one of those.

[Leo Laporte]

To Lenovo or it's just. That's more just.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Yeah, yeah. So how much could it be? Like how much? What's the biggest number you think is realistic? Like make up a number five, you know, five bucks. I actually use ten. So at five dollars, if 50% of all of the PCs that go out in the world have that thing, we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars to a company that has more money than God. This is a rounding error for this company. This is not the next growth platform for Nvidia. They're not getting anything out of this. I don't even know why they're doing it. Actually I mentioned my suspicion earlier is why they're doing it. But I know why intel would do it. This is going to help them quite a bit. But this is just ridiculous. And also I just want to say 5 billion versus 100 billion shows you makes a point. Yeah, yeah, yep. Nvidia, all their money, not all their money, but 90% of their money or whatever it is is coming from AI data centers. It's not coming from graphics cards and computers. Although by the way, that business is doing pretty well in that little world and they're seeing growth there now. And those chips are very good. I mean there's no doubt about it. But we're talking about a very limited market, and this doesn't change that, so. All right.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a question for you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I just got an email from Framework saying they're about to ship my. I don't know why you're showing this, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. I was like, okay, that's a very blurry image there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. We're preparing batch. You could show this now. We're preparing batch 11 of framework desktop. It's going to come in for the next four to seven days. Now, I spent a lot of money on this doohickey. Thank goodness. They're saying because you ordered it before April, we're not going to give raise. You know, we're not going to add the tariff to it, which is nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is. You've got the right chip.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the AMD Ryzen AI Max Plus 395. You like that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. That's the best one you can get.

[Leo Laporte]

So I should keep up. I should keep this order.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

I had already canceled it once. I chickened out, and then I said, you know what? I'm gonna do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's good. It's gonna be good. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Thank you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean, that's the AMD.

[Leo Laporte]

It's gonna be good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look, if it has PX64, go AMD. And it's the AI 300 series is the new.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's really cute, too. I mean, it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Max is. It's cute. Okay, that's good. But, you know, it's a cute little dude. It's going to be a good computer. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's the AI Max Plus 395 with 128 gigs of RAM on the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, the system itself.

[Leo Laporte]

It's unified ram. So it is in effect.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I'm. I was thinking this is going to run my local AIs someday.

[Paul Thurrott]

Maybe not. I will do it right now. We're going to talk about that in.

[Leo Laporte]

A little while.8 terabyte storage so that I would have enough room for all the giant models.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I just. Maybe it's crazy. Call me nuts.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm going to call you nuts when you install Linux on it. But I would say, of course it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Going to have Linux on it.

[Richard Campbell]

This thing runs lisp like the wind.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Gosh. Emacs on this is going to be Fantastic.

[Paul Thurrott]

I spent $3,000 on the Emacs box.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an Emacs box. No, but I'll probably put. But you know, I don't Know what? LM Studio or Llama cpp. Something on there that lets me run local. What do you, what do you run, Richard? How do you run your local AIs?

[Richard Campbell]

Are you doing that, I thought in WSL.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're doing it in WSL. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. All right. So he's actually using Linux. I mean, we're going to talk about the Windows, some of the Windows stuff, but Visual Studio code is a good place for this too, by the way. And that's cross platform. And they have a nice job, they do a nice job of filtering for on device, but also mpu types and GPUs, et cetera. So depending on your system. And this is a, you know, this is that your, that computer you're buying qualifies as a copilot plus PC.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently Jeff Geerling already bought four of them to cluster together.

[Richard Campbell]

Of course he is.

[Paul Thurrott]

So he likes them.

[Leo Laporte]

Those YouTubers, they have so much money. I wish I had some of them, actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

Really do.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I know, I know. Although, did you see Mr. Beast, despite making hundreds of millions of dollars a year, is losing money.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He's lost money because he spends so much. Spends even a million dollar per video.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Maybe spend less.

[Leo Laporte]

I, you know, I really feel bad for Mr. Beast, but I think I.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I don't, I don't feel bad. You could give me that much money, I'd retire for the rest of my life. It'd be fine. But like. Yeah, look, I don't know anything about business, but the first thing we did was cut costs. Yes. You know, it's just common sense.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just wild.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like, you want to make money or do you want to throw money away? Let me think. You know. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Bloomberg published the numbers and it was.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, oh, it's hundreds of millions of dollars.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? I mean, yeah, the revenue is fantastic.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's unbelievable.

[Leo Laporte]

430 million subscribers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Now my situation is similar. I have hundreds of dollars and.

[Leo Laporte]

$45 million in sales in his energy drink. Oh, no, that's Logan Paul. Sorry, sorry. Beast. $450 million in sales.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nobody buys my energy drink.

[Leo Laporte]

$450 million in sales last year. 200 million a year in dark chocolate sea salt bars and peanut butter cups.

[Paul Thurrott]

Stop.

[Leo Laporte]

In those Feastables. He's also in trouble with the FTC because he reviews Feastables on his channel without disclosing. It's basically an ad.

[Paul Thurrott]

God. Like every Eddie, every YouTuber stories you see over ads.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, three years of losses. He lost $110 million last year. You gotta be pretty rich to lose $110 million.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think I've made that much money in my entire life.

[Leo Laporte]

No, exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Of course I haven't. What am I talking about? Not even close. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

According to Bloomberg, in 2023, he spent 10 to 15 million dollars shooting videos that they never released because they weren't up to is standards.

[Paul Thurrott]

See, I use Clipchamp.

[Leo Laporte]

That's smart.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Their production values are. I'm not sure what the right word is. Amateurish, childlike, Non existent. It's one of those things, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, there are of course the robers of the world who do these amazing videos, but there's plenty of YouTubers who spend a buck fifty on their video.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're literally watching.

[Leo Laporte]

Informative and useful.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And great.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think putting that business. Informative and useful. That. What is that? That's useless. Yep. I don't know. This is not my world. Obviously. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's fascinating to me. The tagline in this is Jimmy doesn't scale.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Mr. Beast is filming 26, 27, 28 days a month already.

[Paul Thurrott]

So that's to me is the biggest problem with video. It's just time consuming. And if you're. If it's something. No, we're doing a live thing or essentially. But I mean if you're going to make a video like a product, like with production, here's the latest iPhone or whatever. And I'm walking around the park and I'm doing this. And here we are on the thing and zooming it like this is. That's a 20 minute video that took like three and a half days nonstop to produce. It takes a long time. It's hard.

[Leo Laporte]

He started as a teenager in high school selling knives that he bought from China and marked up 500%.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And then you can see how he landed where he landed.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a really interesting. This is a great article from Bloomberg. Mr. Beast on his quest to turn YouTube fame into an entertainment empire. He's got a rein in his spending on Lambos, apparently. That's what it says.

[Paul Thurrott]

That poor guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Poor guy.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm driving a 2011, my car is like.

[Leo Laporte]

He's looking through the window, his nose pressed to the window in this picture from the Bloomberg. And he just looks sad. Mr. Beast is sad.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Those fingers are doing the I'm squeezing your head thing to him, which I enjoy.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to distract. Go ahead. I just. I read this and my jaw dropped.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was like, what No, I saw it and I'm like, just disgusting. But already mentioned cloud or therapy. Coming to 365 copilot. So we can move on from that. One of the big controversies with AI, obviously, is that to train their models, these companies need lots of data. And because they're mostly big tech companies, they steal it because they're, you know, terrible and then they get sued and then they usually to date have settled the most, I don't know, biggest newsworthy, I don't know, whatever. The most prominent case so far actually involves anthropic. And they had reached an agreement, remember, with those authors that was thrown up by the judge, at least temporarily. So we'll see what happens. But it's possible that that goes to court in December and if so, that will be the first big, high profile kind of IP versus AI kind of case and we'll see what happens. They're gonna lose. They're gonna lose big. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. They don't.

[Richard Campbell]

If they get into court, it's their own darn fault. Make a deal.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So it doesn't matter which company you're talking about alphabetically, Amazon, Apple, and yes, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta. That's not alphabetical, but you get the idea. All the companies are doing the same thing, having the same problems. You know, the New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for stealing their content. And I thought did a pretty effective job of demonstrating how that happened. And so we'll see. But Microsoft, they have not announced this, but apparently are working with some big publishers in the US with the idea of spreading this further to create what is essentially a marketplace for AI to consume, that they will pay the publishers when their content is used by AI for whatever purposes, whether it's to help generate information related to answering a question, to training the models, whatever it might be. And so we'll see. This is Microsoft's.

[Richard Campbell]

You've been talking about Microsoft getting independent on AI from OpenAI. This is a path. Right. But they also are looking at the pioneers and all the arrows in their back and saying, what do we do here? The marketplace is a great first step.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I like the notion that they're trying to make this a viable business on both ends. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

There's also a case to be made for more defined data sets. But one of the problems with these language models is they were trained on the Internet. The Internet is horrible and the consequences are apparent. So the idea that you would curate all the content, you're going to train the model with, with and make it valuable, like if that actually works, and nobody knows if it would, that could represent a step forward.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So there's all these different terms for this stuff. You know, one of the ones I think everyone knows by this point is grounding. Right. And in a quality over quantity sense, we've done the heavy lifting of training the model to work a certain way, but now we can ground it in what we know to be a high quality source of information. For example, which is what Google does with NoteBookLM and they have those notebooks that, you know, third parties can create. Kind of interesting, but. Yeah, but to me, as a content creator, Leah would fall, you know, all of us actually, all three of us and lots of other people, you know, the notion of getting paid for the work you do, you know, I know it's a, it's an old fashioned way to look at the world, but is not a horrible idea. So. So we'll see what comes of this. Microsoft has not even announced it, but we'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, if enough people sign up in that marketplace and it actually becomes a flow, then they make a case for, okay, we should start training models on this and see what we get.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

And if they start owning their own models and they can just add them to their model selector engine and you can decide which ones you like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's kind of clever really.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Obviously in the AI space, agents are the big thing right now and maybe always will be. I guess we'll see. It seems like as AI evolves and as it's going to change everything. And I mean that in a very broad sense. I mean, you know, the way that apps work, the way that browsers work, which are apps, obviously the way the platforms work, the way that are the hardware devices we use, you know, it's going to change everything. And agentic capabilities are a big part of that. Right. So on the back end we have things like MCP where we're essentially adding like a, it's not really a component model, but the way for apps or services to kind of expose whatever the ODBC of AI. Yeah, exactly what he said. Well, yes, no, exactly. Right, odbc. Yeah. No, I mean dating back to Olay and well before Olay was dde. Right. In Windows Dynamic Data Exchange and then Olay and then com and Complex and Decom and ODBC and all the data access rdc. I don't remember all of them. It's been a long time. But all those technologies like you have data, you want to interact with the, you want to make it available to the outside world, but in a, you know, in a safe and correct way. Program.

[Richard Campbell]

To be clear, ODBC is. Hey, Microsoft's coming in sixth in databases. How do we do better? I know, let's declare a standard.

[Paul Thurrott]

We'll make a state. Right, exactly. Right, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

So that we can, you know, connect more of our software.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right. And that's what this all is. Right. And we're seeing that in AI for this to work, a lot of things have to happen, but one of those things is that the apps and the online services, et cetera, have to adapt and they have to change. And as they do, you'll have these agents that can be more and more powerful, whatever. So it's essentially an interoperability play. It's fascinating that the industry as a whole has pretty much agreed to how this is going to work. So we're all doing it and you're going to see agentic capabilities everywhere. My app pick this week is actually about an app that now has agenda capabilities. So we'll get to that. But all of the Microsoft stuff is going to be doing this. And so no surprise, there are already AI agents that are built into or can be added to teams and they're adding more and they're going to add more over time. And of course they are. And Microsoft, for whatever, I mean, they're never going to get credit for this because this is kind of just foundational backend work. But our friend Jeffrey Snover played a big role at one point with the Microsoft graph, which was a way to desilo all the data points that people had in their environments. You might have data over here in OneDrive or SharePoint. You might have data over here in. In SQL Server. You might have some kind of SAP back end or whatever it might be and kind of be able to have apps and services that can reach out to those things. This is very similar except for AI. And so these things will automate and do. This is that thing we talked about, like we'll do work on your behalf, whatever that means.

[Richard Campbell]

Possibly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. But they have to be able to get into the stuff. Right. And so not surprisingly, these agents. Agents are within the Microsoft space. So they're agents for things like project Microsoft Planner, Viva, Engage, which I hate even saying out loud. SharePoint, you know, on and on, of course. Right. So these are just connectors, you know, to let these things all kind of work together.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple's doing the same thing, apparently for the Apple Mac.

[Paul Thurrott]

Everyone's doing. Yeah, everyone's doing it, yeah. So, like, the new Pixel have. It's weird because there's different names for it and there's different little whatever, but the interoperability between things is interesting to me. So my wife texted me the other day and she said. She asked me a question about. I think it was someone's phone number and it popped up this little thing I'd never seen before. And it was. I already forgot the name of it. There's a name for this on the.

[Leo Laporte]

Pixel, but the call screening.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, sorry. It's an AI magic cue. And what it does is it. Oh, if you're on hold. No, no, I'm sorry, sorry. It was a text message. She said, what is some person's phone number? And I was going to respond and it popped up and it said, from your contacts, this person's phone number is this. And then I could tap it and would put it into the thing. It just did it for me.

[Leo Laporte]

That's cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Now, it's not universal in the sense that the app has to actually support this. So it's an agent or mcp, like connection. I'm not sure what else to call it.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's interfaceless AI.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Right. Now, the back end, it's very much an interface. Right. But on the front end, it's neat because this is a strong term, but it's anticipating. Not really. But to you it seems like it's anticipating what you're going to need. Right. She asked me a specific question. It could answer it. I did not ask it to answer it, it just popped up. It did at one point give it permission to access because it's. I know it's Calendar, contacts, I think, photos, it works with some number of whatever, Google services right now, and obviously third parties are coming in and whatever. So it's. Yeah, it's useful. And, you know, like the. One of my earliest kind of trying to figure out AI moments, I kind of said, look, without getting into the weeds of the details, if this thing works AI, it will save you time. Right? That's the goal. Going to save you time. Less busy work. And it's a small example and it's one of a million maybe, but it. Yeah, there you go. I didn't have to go get out of the app, scroll through the list of things, click on contacts, scroll through the list of people, find the person, click on it, hold on the phone number. You know what I mean? Like, I. What I just described is not hard, but it's work. I had to do. It just did it for me. And it's like, oh, nice. Like that's nice. So we don't focus on that moat too much. We focus on the AI slop, I guess, because that's how people are. But I thought that was pretty good. So it's a small, like I said, small thing, but small. Okay. The only non Microsoft one in here. I'm just mentioning because this is going to impact so many people. Obviously Google makes the world's most popular browser hasn't been taken away from them for some reason. They have Gemini, which is going great all of a sudden, which wasn't originally. They're adding Gemini to Google. We get this. I did a series of articles about these AI web browsers and to me, Google being the most mainstream and biggest of all, is kind of the most conservative or was adding AI features. They put a Chrome or a Gemini button up in the corner, like that's okay. So if you use Copilot and Edge, you're kind of familiar now. You can have a sidebar still, but it's like a little floaty window thing. Right. Which they moved around a couple times. But it's, you know, the Gemini button in Chrome is very similar, but last week they announced that they're expanding on that capability and then adding a bunch of stuff to Chrome, including over time, these agenda capabilities. And all of a sudden it's getting a little aggressive. So the Gemini button I referred to before, you had to have whatever they call the subscription Google AI Pro or whatever for that to be there at work. Now they've opened it up to everybody and of course there are limits if you're on the free plan and all that stuff. But it's there and of course it's going to be there. It will integrate with all of Google services, Obviously, like calendar, YouTube and maps and blah, blah, blah. It does all that stuff. But. But a lot of the features they're talking about right now aren't there yet. You know, it's like the agentic stuff is coming, et cetera. But I think Google has been seeing what's going on in the world with Perplexity and Comet, with the browser company and DIA getting sold. And then Microsoft is doing Edge and everyone's doing something. Well, except for Vivaldi, God love them. But most of the browser, which I have to say I respect.

[Leo Laporte]

But no, somebody has to do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yep. And it's like, well, you get AI everywhere if you want it to add the, you know, use the one you want, who cares? We don't have to do like, why does Everyone have to do their own thing. Yeah, it's a fair point. But Google is a platform maker. So Google has the, one of the top level AIs, the best, most used browser. So actually this is, this is, it's going to be, this is going to get interesting. Right now it's, it's still pretty calm, but they're going to put it in Chrome on iOS and Android as well. Of course they are. They're going to make it available to Google workspace users, which is not the case today. You have to have a Gmail account and there's a lot more going on. But these things are kind of hard to explain. But if you, most people are probably familiar, you can go to the address bar and start typing and you get like kind of a dropdown. And if you're asking a question, sometimes you just get the answer right there. You don't have to actually go to a thing. And if you are familiar with Google search, you know that there's like this AI mode and they also have those AI answers and those kind of things. And it's controversial, but whatever, it's a thing. And that is also coming to the address bar. So they're kind of peanut butter cupping it like you got your AI mode from search into my browser kind of thing. So they're going to do that. And that's actually, I think is there today, like you can, as you type, you'll see in the dropdown now in Chrome that there are new kind of stock things to click on. And one of those is like, is basically an AI mode kickoff. You know, you're like, I want to have a conversation about this thing. I'm going to use Gemini. I'm going to start from the address bar they call the Omnibox, you know, whatever, the address bar. Because that's how I think, that's how I do things. And it's like, good, we're going to do it from here, you know. So, yeah, this is, it's going to infect everything that we do. There's just no doubt about it.

[Richard Campbell]

Arguably already has.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. And it's just going to get worse. That's the thing. So Google, you know, like I said to date has been pretty conservative and now they're getting kind of aggressive.

[Leo Laporte]

They have, they have a good, good models though. It's funny.

[Paul Thurrott]

They really do. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think they get credit for the quality of.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it didn't start out that way either.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

So yeah, we haven't found out what they did different. That suddenly pushed.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I, well, I think part of the problem for Google was they had come up with stuff very early and knew that this was going to destroy their ad based revenues in search. And they're like, we can't do this. So they held onto it. And then when Microsoft just came out as they did whatever that was two and a half years ago with what now is called Copilot, but at the time was nothing, whatever it was called, I think they were just caught unawares, you know. And so their initial response was to scramble and they did pretty poorly, you know. And you know, they had borrowed originally and then eventually it was Gemini. But yeah, they did pretty bad. And they also had that really high profile failure with the image generation stuff where it was creating like crazy images of. I don't know if it was like Nazi imagery. I can't remember exactly what was happening, but it was also really bad with people.

[Leo Laporte]

And now they've got Nano Banana, which everybody thinks now it's incredible.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it is incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

And Vo and.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yep. And you know, when I, as part of one of the reviews I did for the new Pixels, I took a couple of just, you know, photos or whatever. One's like a selfie, my wife and I, one's me standing up on a hill or whatever and use vo, Veo, whatever it's called, to animate it into like a little whatever it is, 8 to 12 second movie and yikes.

[Leo Laporte]

Amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like it's unbelievable. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, do you use any of these Agenc browsers or do you chew that?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I'm trying to keep a. Footage.

[Leo Laporte]

Of complexities is common.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. Recently I've been using Edge because I just want to kind of understand what's happening there. But now that this stuff is happening in Chrome, I'll probably switch that for a little while and just kind of get a feel for it. Because I looked at it, you know, it's probably months ago now and at the time it just wasn't that impressive. But because I get, I wouldn't pay for it personally, but you get Google AI Pro through like a Pixel purchase or whatever. So you get that in there and that's helpful just to kind of have a better understanding of how it works. But you know, the notion, like you just said, do you use an agenic browser? We're all going to be using a Jeffrey.

[Leo Laporte]

You won't be able to not use one.

[Paul Thurrott]

You'd have to go out of your way. You'd have to really try not to assume this is the way this world's going, but it makes sense. I mean there's a whole thing here in headline news and then the Internet and everything, like kind of killing our attention spans. But we've lost the ability to read long form content for the most part. I don't know that browsing as you think of it, this notion of going to a site, reading something like a.

[Richard Campbell]

Kind of an absolute concept, like a.

[Paul Thurrott]

Person from the 1800s, you know, it's.

[Richard Campbell]

A person from 2021.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. Yeah. That when the world was not just black and white, it was sepia toned, you know, but like I. Yeah, this is. Yeah. For better or worse, you know, this world's changing.

[Richard Campbell]

You weren't. You didn't want to browse, you wanted to get an answer to something.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's the thing. I did have. There's a lot like, you know, this comes up a lot. I brought it up earlier today, but this group of people who just kind of d. Jerk. Reject this outright, you know, and there was a guy as part of a debate over this stuff, this is months ago now, but he said something like, does anyone else just miss. Like you could just go to your favorite GeoCities site and you know, it was great. And you know, and I was like, yeah, no, no, nobody does miss that. I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you talking about?

[Paul Thurrott]

You just gave me PTSD mentioning the G. Yeah, like I talking about. Yeah. So I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a break. We got another half hour. The embargo is lifting as we speak on Snapdragon, so we'll talk about that in a little bit. We got the back of the books Xbox segment. Well, you check. You got a minute to check while I talk about our sponsor, Cash Fly. This show literally brought to you by Cash Fly. When you go to our website, it's coming to you from Cash Fly. That's our content delivery network. For over 20 years, CashFly has held a track record for high performing ultra reliable content delivery serving more than 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. We know because we're one of those companies at TWiT. We've been using Cashfly practically since the beginning. We love their lag free video loading. You may not know it's Cashfly, but I bet you love it too when you start those videos. Hyper fast downloads, friction free site interactions. You'll be in good company with groups like Adobe and Microsoft and lg, the NFL and many more that rely on Cashfly. Cashfly's proof is in the petabytes events stream smoothly to millions of concurrent users worldwide. Less than one second latency. Online games start 70% faster, they scale instantly and they play without lag. Software downloads flawlessly during releases, patches and updates. HD video plays on demand with ultra fast sub second start on every device. By the way, this is important. When people come to your site and they start a video, if it doesn't start right away, they'll leave. I know. I'm that impatient too. Podcasts like ours reach global audiences at record speed at any scale. We literally deliver more than 2 petabytes a month months of data via Cash Fly. That's a lot of data. By the way. Cash fly has had 100% availability in the past 12 months. We like that because we don't want to get those complaints. Hey, I can't get your podcast and it never happens. Cash Fly delivers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs. And you can do something now with Cashfly that we've been doing for for some time, you can shield your site content in their cloud. The other thing we really liked about Cashfly is they were very flexible with us as we got started. We didn't really know, you know, we had a variety of services. We didn't know what our peak load would be. You never pay for service overlap with flexible month to month billing for as long as you needed at Cash Fly. And then once you figure it out, discounts for fixed terms. Once you're happy, design your own contract when you switch to Cash Fly. That's the point point Cash Fly. It's like gaining an extension of your team. When your entire business model depends on delivering massive amounts of content like ours. You just can't afford to go it alone. And you can count on personalized help anytime from a tenured expert who gets it engineered. Engineer 247 we love cash Fly. You will too. Learn how you can get your first month free at cashfly.com tweets C-C-H-E-Flashly.com/twit and I'll say another thing I say a lot. Thank you cash fly. Cashfly.com TWIT continuing on Xbox time, Paul.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually, unless you want.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh wait a minute. You just pasted in a whole Holy moly. You want to do the X2 Elite? Go ahead.

[Paul Thurrott]

So we've been waiting a long time for this. I'll just get out the BRAD news first. We're going to continue waiting a long time for this because the first devices aren't expected until the first half of next year. So I hope it means January, not June, but frick's sake, Microsoft anyway, or Qualcomm. So the first gen of this chipset was the Snapdragon X. I guess that's the whole thing they wanted to do with the Elite, but there was the plus and then the non plus, right? So, X, whatever. So what they're announcing today is the X2 Elite and also a second higher end model called the X2 Elite Extreme. This is not in any of the materials that they're putting out into the world. But talking to people that I know, I discovered that the difference between the X2 Elite and the X2 Elite Extreme is that the latter has the memory built onto the die.

[Richard Campbell]

Speed, speed, speed.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's all about speed. Yep. And when I was told this, I was like, I thought that's what you were doing. And no. So it's actually in a separate can.

[Richard Campbell]

But on the chip lock.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is one of those things with hardware that I guess it makes sense when you think about it. I don't think most people think about this, but distance matters. And one of the advantages of like say, Lunar Lake, as with, you know, the Apple and silicon stuff, is that because it's there, the distance that things occur between the CPU or whatever processor and the RAM is minuscule. Whereas if it's. Even if it's right next to it on a board, it's still a distance. Right. And so there's a lag there, if you will. So the X, the X1, I guess all of them, and then the X2 Elite are the same BASIC architecture in the sense that the RAM is, you know, not integrated onto the die. But with the X2 Elite it is. So I asked Laurent, the guy who writes a lot of most of my news stories, I said, I shared this with him ahead of time, and he said, do you mind if I write about this rather than me writing about it? I said, you can, but your headline has to be written like this. Exclusive colon. Qualcomm makes X2 Elite faster by copying Apple. Ow. No, no. It's the right thing to do. Like it's the right thing to do. Same rough target market, you know, laptops and mini PCs. The X2 Elite Extreme targets what they're calling ultra premium PCs. I guess this is the third gen version of the CPU. The first gen was obviously in Snapdragon X, but the second gen was in the. The phone chip they put out last year, which was based on that. Right. So this is the third gen. It is. Well, the performance differences depend on who you're looking at. So 75% up to 75% faster CPU performance than the competition at ISO power. So I would assume the competition means Intel AMD and not. Well, maybe it means the Mac 2. I actually don't know. They don't really say that but we'll see if they. They're going to have their press conferences today, we'll see what they actually say. But compared to their predecessor in the PC space, the X, you know the X elite, 31% faster performance at ISO power while using 43% less power. So it's actually a lot more efficient as well, which is fantastic.

[Richard Campbell]

Second generation chip design, you'd expect it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. First arm chip to hit 5 gigahertz.

[Richard Campbell]

That's fast, man.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. 3 nanometer manufacturing process RISC processor at.

[Leo Laporte]

5 gigahertz is an interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Combo.

[Paul Thurrott]

The big one that I was looking for was the GPU stuff and they are claiming that this new Gendrano GPU is 2.3 times as fast per watt and power efficiency compared to the previous gen of their chip. So that's actually a big deal because if this thing's going to be used for games, et cetera, or just high performance, anything engineering related, whatever, that's actually very important. This one's kind of. This one kind of came out of nowhere, at least for me. Their NPU is now 80 tops, which is double what it was in the current version. And the way they describe it without explaining it in any way. So I'm curious again how they talk about this today is this enables what they call concurrent AI experiences on.

[Richard Campbell]

Does that mean that previously the couldn't do concurrent?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, like in other words before it was single, essentially single core, like style processing. I think it might, you know and then of course the latest Snapdragon based modems, et cetera. So it's going to do 5G if the laptop maker wants to do that, Wi Fi 7 et cetera, et cetera. So that's all good. Yeah, but not well, they've already missed the holiday season so it's like it's happening now. Although I suppose there's a world where they could have announced today and maybe that happened, but it's not happening. So the actual PCs won't be coming out until the first. But I hate the way they say it. I couldn't say first quarter. You couldn't, you know, first half of 2026 and you know they're going to miss this.

[Richard Campbell]

Might be ready for Christmas 2026 actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

I bet it's I bet they're going to, I bet they do the May reveal June like they did.

[Richard Campbell]

I'd also point out when they originally announced the Snapdragons back last June, it was only the elite. The pluses and stuff came out later as the bidding numbers came in.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So right now these are all going to be fast because they haven't made them.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So this is Right. So I don't know anything about what else they might do but yeah, you're right. So there was, there were three revs of this post original launch. Right. So there was the plus which became or was I think originally two or three different models. They did an eight core plus and then they did the X which is like not + orally just x. And it's, it's basically the same as the 8 core plus but without whatever burst processing mode. And that's what I have, that's what I'm using in this thing and it's even the low end one's fantastic. That's the thing. Like these are actually, these are great chips. Like they're really, really good. So we'll see. Oh, they announced something for a phone too. I don't pay attention to that crap. So.

[Leo Laporte]

So I got a question. Somebody in the Paul is asking this also in the Discord chat is the Microsoft exclusive with Qualcomm still in effect?

[Paul Thurrott]

Nobody knows. This is always private.

[Leo Laporte]

So this would be.

[Richard Campbell]

Microsoft never announced this exclusivity either. We just presumed it was true.

[Leo Laporte]

But it seems to be true.

[Paul Thurrott]

We've absolutely heard, I mean not directly from Microsoft. It's true. It is true but.

[Leo Laporte]

And we'd also heard it would expire had expired but apparently it hasn't unless Microsoft Qualcomm.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well they did honestly they did hit it out of the park but they're again not confirmed by Microsoft but allegedly had expand or extended it. So I don't know if it's going year to year at this point but you know MediaTek is known to be working on something with or well that's.

[Leo Laporte]

What that Chromebook has is a MediaTek processor.

[Paul Thurrott]

And yeah and when I, and I actually when I covered that at the time, if you look at that MediaTek processor, it is a copilot plus PC spec chip. It has all it makes all of the requirements.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And but they don't put it in a PC.

[Leo Laporte]

A Windows PC.

[Paul Thurrott]

Not yet, but they're going to. MediaTek has. I'm on the MediaTek kind of media thing now if you, if that makes it a press thing Which I never was before.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think they're in Maui. I think they go and they're going to do it in Indiana.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think they're doing it at the Newark Airport. Hilton Express. You know, it's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, but you get breakfast, so.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's exactly right. Yeah, you get a waffle maker. It's nice. No, I look, their chips, I don't know that much about them, but they're used in high end Samsung tablets. They're used in a lot of Chinese phones that are high end. Like not cheap phones. I mean, there's no. And they just released a new phone chip too, by the way. But. But now that I'm on, it's clear to me that I'm part of who they think of now because they're getting into the PC space. So.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's imminent even though it hasn't happened.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's absolutely imminent. And I was curious.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it seems it's all Qualcomm all the time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right now it is. Yeah. But this, look, they've been very open about it too. Like they. In the sense they haven't said this, these guys are coming, but they've said, look, we know competition is coming. Like it is happening. Like they've.

[Leo Laporte]

And they are ahead of the pack. Right. Right now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, there's no pack, so we don't really know.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it's easy to be the leader when you're the only one in the round one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, we are the best chip in our class. Who else is in your class? We're in a class by ourselves. Okay. So yeah, no, I look from experience, these chips are great. I mean, they're great. You know, they are great, but competition's good. Whether it's media tech. AMD at one point was rumored too. I don't know whatever came of that. Nvidia. Nvidia. Maybe by themselves, maybe with Mediatek, you know, we'll see. Samsung is a long time ago now, but they were rumored to be working on this. You know, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

I will say, you know, one of the complaints that's fairly obvious and getting increasingly true in my mind is this is taking a while. I mean, if they meet the June 2026 timeframe, that's two years after the initial products. They're revving their phone chips every year. They have multiple tiers.

[Richard Campbell]

That also means they have multiple teams working on these chips too. Because it takes a long time to get into a fab.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like just to actually get it producible.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Realistically, if you're going to put a new chip every year, you've got three chips in development.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So I. I can't recall if we've ever discuss this, but it is perhaps interesting and relevant to note that IFA came and went without any major new PC processor announcements for the first time that I can remember. So intel has been releasing chips every year and they do it in stages and they've kind of mixed around like what gets announced in the fall and what gets announced early in the year, but whatever. But they typically do two big announcements every year and then other things. But two amd, same thing. Amd. Intel did not announce new generations of their stuff at IFA. AMD did announce the step release of the Zen 5 stuff which is the A300. So the chip that's in Leo's Framework computer is the one, the better one that they announced in January. So since last September, a year ago September, they did like kind of a half step forward Intel. Well, I guess intel did too. If you think that Arrow Lake is a half stake step forward, it's a half step. It's a half step in some direction. But it's a different architecture than Lunar Lake. So it's not like next gen. But they didn't replace Lunar Lake or Arrow Lake or anything really in this month. AMD didn't either and Qualcomm didn't either actually. Although they're going to announce this, but this will be next year and by the time this does ship chip, I would imagine we are going to have new gen intel and possibly AMD chips as well too. Right. So the industry is not standing still. But then again, I don't know, like it says all of a sudden it is kind of slowed down a little bit. I mean I know Intel's having some problems, right? I mean, but that's what I heard. Someone, I don't know, someone mentioned it.

[Leo Laporte]

You mentioned a toilet I think. But maybe.

[Paul Thurrott]

Did I use that word? That's a little strong.

[Richard Campbell]

I just feel like Qualcomm is hedging their bets here on PC. Still. You think about the quantity of chips they sell in the mobile space. That's why they pay for those kinds of teams to keep that kind of pipeline going. Nobody's sure these are going to take off and let's face it, they've sold some, but they haven't taken off.

[Paul Thurrott]

All I can do is kind of devil's advocate this because I really don't know and I'm actually hoping to find I'm going to talk to people about this because I'm a little confused here but. But maybe the perspective here is that they have. I can't keep track of their naming, but whatever the phone chips are called. Last year's flagship Snapdragon chip was based on the Elite X. Right. So they've taken this architecture, which originated in the data center by the way, brought it to PCs. Awesome. And then they brought it to the phones. And so they today also are announcing a second gen version of that, which is, which in their language is Gen 5 because, you know, but whatever, it's fine because again, I don't really track that stuff as closely but the, I guess that work is super important because that's the volume. But also these are, you know, phones by nature, they're small, they have to be super efficient. I mean, there's hopefully a virtuous cycle thing occurring here. So we'll see if they talk about that again. I haven't. That stuff's going to be later today. But whether the phone chips kind of informed what they're doing on PCs, if that excuses a two year time frame instead of a one year time frame, I'm not really sure. But that's my guess is it was really more strategic for them to get that going. And they did bring Snapdragon X down to lower end computers. And if it wasn't for tariffs, I mean this thing, the thing I have, the 14 inch version is probably in the $600 range. It probably would have been $500, right? That would have been the world's first good $500 computer if they had done it. But now they have to be a little more expensive because of the tariffs. So anyway, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Paul Thurrott]

Are we. I can't. What time is it?

[Leo Laporte]

We're running out of time. It is. It is 12 minutes left.

[Paul Thurrott]

So then I'm going to skip all this stuff. So Xbox Console prices, Microsoft's raising them for the second time this year. Unprecedented. If you look at the announcement, which by the way was made on the support website for Xbox, which is a little weird place for an announcement. There's an even weirder bit of language there where they say, all right, this is happening. It's happening on October 3rd. The prices, by the way, if you had bought a computer, sorry, an Xbox Series S one year ago would have been $349. After this price hike will be 449. The most expensive Xbox series X, which a year ago today was 499, will be 649. Like yikes. Like it's 150 bucks.

[Leo Laporte]

That's tariffs. You think?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, 100%. But the language of this announcement, it's like, okay, this is what's happening. We understand these changes are challenging. Looking ahead, we continue to focus on offering more ways to play more games across any screen and provide value for Xbox players. Wow. I mean that's. That just. That's explicitly. This is not the future of Xbox. Like that's. Yikes. So it's like, well, if you think this is expensive, you know, maybe do it somewhere else because that's, that's their strategy. So that's big. And then, oh, Gaming copilot. So this is the thing I see Google's copying this with Android, right? So Google this week announced something called the Sidekick. What's the word for copilot? For games, right? So if you play games on a PC, you can bring up the game bar and you get that little mini edge browser. We can look stuff up like, okay, cool, now they've added the gaming Copilot. That's live. I've actually seen it, I've never used it because God, who would use this thing? But whatever, you can chat with the thing. And the future of this is you're playing a game and you're talking with it as you play, or it's talking to you and saying, hey, it looks like you're having a hard time getting by that ogre behind the hill there. Here's the way to do it or whatever. Like it's gonna, that's where this is going. And Google is doing exactly the same thing on Android. So if you play Google play games on your Android device, you're gonna get Gemini popping up doing exactly the same thing. It's like exactly the same. And that's kind of fascinating to me. So there you go, There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to take a quick break because we're moving right along. We got the back of the book just around the corner here. Just a reminder that this show exists. All the shows exist. Twit exists thanks to the generous contributions of our Club Twit members. See those Club Twit members, they're all hovered there in the discord. We think it's a really good value. 10 bucks a month, 120 bucks a year. There's family plans, there's corporate plans. There's even a two week free trial if you're at all skeptical. But let me tell you what you get ad free versions of all the shows, access to the best darn social community in the world, which is the Club Twit Discord. And inside the Club Twit Discord.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Where'd you find that picture of me? That is, that is a bit of ancient history. Inside the cloud. This is from a video that I made many, many years ago on how to build your own PC. And in this video you could show the screen, Kevin. I actually cut myself. But because it was a cheap production, we kept on going. And I think you haven't really Built your own PC until you injure yourself doing it.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, there's a rule. You have to have blood in the case.

[Leo Laporte]

You had blood too, didn't you?

[Richard Campbell]

I did, absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So see, it all holds true. Everybody's joined the. The twit. Well, I wish everybody was the club twit. We would love to have you. It makes a big difference. 25% of our operating income comes from club members. If you can see your way to spending the money, I. I ask you, please, help us out. If you like what you hear, if you're getting value out of this, I think it's worth the money if you do too. Twit. TV club twit. And I promise not to cut myself if you don't. Continuing on the back of the book. We got some stuff to do in the next 10 minutes, including Brown liquor, but let's start with Paul's tip of the week.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think you've built a computer unless you've cut yourself. By the way, it's true. I'm going to blow through most of this notion. 3.0 is out. They've added. They're adding agents.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I noticed. I couldn't get to it.

[Richard Campbell]

They could tell you about it, too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, they're proud to tell you about it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you used it?

[Paul Thurrott]

No. I'm most interested that they're not charging for it like you can. If you pay, you get more, but you can actually use it on the free plan. So it's actually. You can try it. So that's interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. The book I wore came out. This is the thing about all the companies like Spotify, Epic Games, instead of going after the Apple tax. Worth reading. There's not a single revelation in it, if you've been paying attention. This stuff, there's no new information, but it is a solid kind of chronological retelling. I wanted to do this. I don't really have enough time for this, but I wrote this thing I had told us. I told a story.

[Leo Laporte]

Take your time. It's okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

I want to make sure Richard has time too, but. I'm sorry. You know how we all have these stories we tell. We tell repeatedly. You get a good story, it's like it just comes up, whatever. And I realize, like, one of the stories they tell us about this bartender we know from back home, and we go to this place every Friday, and my wife was away just like a year ago, and I just went by myself and I walked in the door and Maddie is her Name. And she held out her hand and she says, give me your keys. And I'm like, what? She's like, give me your keys. And I'm like, why? Like, I haven't been drinking. What are you talking about? She goes, give me your keys.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. So I gave her the keys. I'm like, why? And she goes, you have walked out of this restaurant three times in a row without taking your leftovers. You are not leaving without your leftovers. I was like, oh, my God, that is amazing. That's hysterical. And I guess the last time she had run out to the parking lot, I missed her or something. And I was like, I love you. That is so good. And I just told. Like, we know a lot of people who are bartenders who work in restaurants and stuff. And I just told this story about her and I. And we'd come back from Berlin or whatever, and I was like. We saw her and I was like. I'm like, I gotta tell you that I tell a story about you all the time. Time. And of course, she loved it, but the people who she works with were all over the. Listening to the story, whatever. And it sort of occurred to me, like, a kind of a fundamental exercise would be, like, for the people you, like, really care about, like, come up with, like, one story that, from your experience with them over time, that tells people, without knowing them, something about that person that is meaningful. Like. Like, you know, like, you. Without knowing this person, you already can kind of. You already kind of know something about her, right? It's like, she's really good. We love her. Like, she's great. Great. And I thought, because we're doing Windows Weekly, like, you know, Richard is one of those people for me. And before, you know, we've. Since, you know, we've traveled together, we've done things. You know, we do the show now and everything, but, like, million years ago. And I. There's all kinds of stories I could tell about Richard, but, like, we had a meetup at. It was a Microsoft event. It was in Florida, I think, and it was. We had, like, a meetup. And so Mary Jo and me and whoever else, and it was mob scene. And I'm. I do that thing that I do at these meetups where I'm, like, holding up a wall in the corner, and I'm just. You know, people are just, like, surrounding me like it's a zombie attack, and I can't get out of there. And Richard and I had talked earlier, and we're like. I was like, hey, we're Gonna be. We're gonna be at this thing. We should. You know, we could hang out and talk or whatever. And it was very clear that this was never going to happen because it was so. It was just so busy, you know, it's too many people. So I saw Richard. I could see him across the room, and I could see him, like, he's over here. He's, you know, he's talking to someone else, and I could see him, and I'm like, I want to go talk to Richard, but I can't. And at some point, Richard pushed his way through the crowd of these people, and he handed me a drink, and I'm like, what's this? He goes, you need a drink. And he said. I goes, look. He goes, you're obviously busy. It's fine. He's like, I just. And I was like, man, that was so thoughtful.

[Richard Campbell]

And.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that's. But that's. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that sweet?

[Paul Thurrott]

But that is. That's Richard. Right? I mean, like, he's just very thoughtful.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a. Mitch.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think for a lot of people, it's like, we should talk. You know, let's hang out a little bit. And then you go there, and I. I'm talking to other people. So some people would be like, oh, what a dick. Know. And Richard was like, I get it. Like, you know, he's. And he's thoughtful. So I. I just.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I. I like this tip. Pick one story for everyone you care about.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like. And then if you get the opportunity, because this is the thing that just happened was like, then tell that person the story. Or.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, oh, tell them. Yeah. Or blog it and send them the link.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Sometimes they might not remember it. Right. Which is kind of funny. Or they don't remember, or they didn't maybe attribute the same.

[Leo Laporte]

This is really sweet. I really like this, Paul. I like it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It's a neat idea. I think it's a neat idea that I came up with. So obviously it's a neat idea, but I think it is a neat idea. Like, I think it's a fun thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I think anything that increases our connections with human beings, especially for us as technologists, people enmeshed in all of this, is a good thing. I think this is a brilliant idea. A brilliant idea.

[Paul Thurrott]

And anyone who's listening, just think about it for yourself in your own little world or whatever the people, you know, And I don't know, it's. It's, you know, the one that. The other one that's in that such A softy.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul, Nobody knows this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, this is my. My brother, who is just one of the greatest people on earth. Really. We're really good friends. We had season six, the Celtics. We go, when? All the time. And we're in the back.

[Leo Laporte]

Is this the picture?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's for. That's from when they won the championship, when we were there.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is a great.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're in the back row and my. Of that section, and my brother is elbowing me in the side. I'm like, what? He goes, look at this. And there's this woman as part of a couple walking up. She had no clothes on. She was like. She looked like a street person. And this is the middle of the winter, and it's in Boston, and this is not how people look or dress. And it was like, she really did stand out, but she was gorgeous. But, I mean, it was, like, weird. And I was like, okay, Jonathan, like, get over it. Calm down. And so we're watching the game, and then people walk up behind us because we're in the last row. You can kind of sense it, and you can tell they're kind of arguing. They're not sure if they're in the right place. We both started out. It's the couple. So my brother goes, oh, you guys are over in the next section. They're like, thanks. And they start to turn around and walk up.

[Leo Laporte]

How'd you know?

[Paul Thurrott]

Guy stopped and came back. He goes, how do you know that? So I turned in my chair to face my brother and I said, yeah, Jonathan, how do you.

[Leo Laporte]

How did you know?

[Paul Thurrott]

And he turned red, like, immediately. So my brother, who's the nicest guy on earth, can't help helping people. He can't stop himself. But then he had to explain. What? How do you explain these people? It's because your wife is dressed like a prostitute.

[Leo Laporte]

Your wife is so attractive. And I couldn't help.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was just. You could feel the thought occur, like, he took a step away. I was like, wait a minute, you don't work here. Like, how do you know this? It was.

[Leo Laporte]

I saw you earlier. I love it, Paul, that in this picture you're wearing Celtics green and your brother's got a Boston Red Sox cap on. Is wearing a Red Sox T shirt. Well, representing Boston, I Love behind me.

[Paul Thurrott]

At this game, was wearing a Bill Walton mask. And he spent the whole game hugging me from behind.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He was doing a little pre gaming.

[Paul Thurrott]

A moment of solidarity.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Nice. Very nice. That's Paul's tip of the week. Be nice to your, your fellow man. Now run as radios. Coming up, who do you have this week?

[Richard Campbell]

Grabbed a show while I was at KCDC in Kansas City with my friend. Mandy Wall's been on the show before. Great topic. She was talking about it at the show and I thought it'd just be an excellent one, which is the fact that we have so much dependency on all these third party both, you know, services as well as libraries. And it's just like when you have an incident and you realize it's from a vendor component to your application or to your resource, like, what do you do? Like, what are the procedures around all of that? So, and Mandy's from PagerDuty. Like she knows her way around all these sorts of disaster responses. So we just talked through how we document the dependencies that exist in inside of all these different products that we, we use and what the call logs look like. What is the approach to contact them. Just do your homework here so that you can respond faster and know why you might be out, who could be involved in it and what to do next. Just a powerful conversation as usual for someone who just knows her. You know, she just fought the fight like, you know, she's already got the bloody hands from dealing with it. You save her, you'll say. She'll save you the pain. Well spent.

[Leo Laporte]

Half hour Intelligent Machines is coming up. Steven Levy's here, our guest. We're going to have a great interview, but we cannot wind up this show without a little whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and one that I pushed was I had ready the last week and didn't. Wasn't able to use it. So now it's moved up a week.

[Leo Laporte]

Is there any left is the question.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, it's long gone because my, I was staying with my friend Remy again while I was in the Netherlands. It was his son that was getting married and he owns a whiskey shop now, so. And he knows I'm going to talk about the whiskey he feeds me on the show. So it's big deal for him. So he pulled out a weirdo. The High Coast Queries for the Mongolica. So the story of the distillery is awesome. It's about 450 kilometers north of Stockholm in Sweden, up on the Gulf of Bosnia, which makes it 60 degrees, 63 degrees north north, making it the fourth furthest north distillery in the world. There's a couple in Norway when Iceland's even further north. Boy, it's cold up there. Holy man. Right on the Angerman River. In fact, the distillery is about 30 km up from the Gulf Is cold good for whiskey? Well, this is a great question because it does affect the style of whiskey they're making then. The site itself is called Box. And originally this distillery was called Box. That was called that because in the 1850s they built a sawmill there and made boxes. And then when the mill burned down in 1890.

[Leo Laporte]

A little on the nose.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, Not a witty name.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, very literal, you know. So the mill burned down in 1890 and they built a coal power plant. The same site ran until 1912 and it continued to be used until I started out in 1912. It shut down in the early 60s and this left to rot after that. And there's this artist named Matt Van. Matt Dall, who bought the building in 1991 before it was torn down and he turned it into an art gallery. He's. His family's been in the region for a long time and they were trying to support the region. And so he's an artist and a clever one. If you go look, his art is beautiful. And so he, he bought the building, then used it as an art gallery. But they were trying to bring in more business into the area and he and his brother Per, along with a bunch of others are all had fans of whiskey. So decided to start a distillery. They committed. They built the company in 2007 and did the finish the building refit in 2010 and their first product comes out in 2014. And they make a pretty traditional whiskey for a modern whiskey shop. Now they've gone old school in the sense that they bought an old bobby mill like 100 plus year old for milling the grains. They only use barley of course as they're making whiskey. They big unpeated malt comes from Sweden. The peated stuff comes from Scotland. Stainless steel washback, small 8,000 liters, pretty, pretty tiny. They use a Belgian yeast. They do a very long ferment which again is a side effect of being cold, so 80 plus hour ferments. But they've gone after the Japanese style, so their wart is quite clear, which is the way the Japanese like to do it. They don't do a cloudy wart. Two sets of four size stills, a three 800 liter wash and a 2500 liter spirit it and then sort of a modern style take on their warehousing. It's steel shells, wooden floors, all wood construction. They stack high, seven high, but the barrels are small because they do relatively small production. About 300,000 liters a year is not a big, big place. And you can become a shareholder in the company and Lay up your own cask there if you wish. And their regular product, they make both peated and unpeated, are aged in bourbon casks and so forth. And that is not this whiskey, this particular whiskey. And by the way, the place is no longer called Box Distillery. Started out that way. But there's another whiskey maker called Compass Box, which I will literally talk about next week. I also had one of theirs that it was a bit of a conflict in the name. And in 2018, they switched to this High coast name, which is a good description of the area is High Coast.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I know from making a sourdough bread that a cold ferment is often desirable.

[Richard Campbell]

More tastier. Exactly. And so this is the argument is that. And they also allow the yeast to ferment out, so they go to about a 7.5 wart, which is pretty high. So the yeast is literally killed by the alcohol, and then they leave it longer to allow the lactics to work. So they're really. It's a. That's a very Japanese approach to making wart, but they know that's the style they've gone after. And I'm. In that sense, I'm not a huge fan. But this particular whiskey is the cuirass line. So it's an experiment by them. They're making a base whiskey and they're using different barrels, and they're going very barrel strong on this. So the first edition was based on European oak. It was called the Robur, which is the Latin name for the European oak. The second edition was the Alba, that's American oak. Both very familiar. Then they did the Patera, which is a. The European mountain oak, which you almost never see in whiskey. And this one is even rarer still. This is the Mongolica, which is an Asian oak that's native to Japan, China, Korea, Mongolia and Siberia. It's different from the Mizunara oak, which is typically used in Japanese. So very rare wood. And this is why Remy brought it to me, because we're going to taste something that you're not going to taste elsewhere. And that being said, it wasn't a great whiskey. It's an experiment.

[Leo Laporte]

Good story.

[Richard Campbell]

The wood notes were really cool. So it's like. And this is a hundred Euro bottle of Whiskey, so like $160, and you're not going to get it anywhere. It's incredibly rare. They don't make very much of this, but it's the ideal whiskey for someone who's deeply into whiskey, which is why Remy brought it to me. It's like, hey, try this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

This is a wood you've never tasted tasted before. And it was distinct but just not a phenomenal bottle of whiskey. So that it's a great experiment. The whiskey I'm going to talk about next week is plays in the same realm where it's like whiskey for friends who like whiskey as opposed to something I want to drink, you know, in celebration, have fun with and so forth. So, you know, will I buy it again?

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Richard Campbell]

Am I glad I had it? Damn right. I like you for sure. I've tasted something, something aged in Asian oak and that's odd. And for me, that's a great experience.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

From high coast, the quercus for Mongolica, which must make more sense in Swedish. But anyway, I don't think that's true.

[Richard Campbell]

But no, very much experimentalized.

[Leo Laporte]

Quercus is the, is the genus of the European oak trees. They make the barrels.

[Richard Campbell]

All the quercus is. That's just the name of an oak tree.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Quercus alba is American oak workers. Robar is European oak workers. Minasura is the Japanese oak.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Mr. Richard Campbell, he'[e-mail] and dotnet rocks and God willing and the cricks don't rise. He's here every week.

[Richard Campbell]

I'll be home next week as well. And I got a great whiskey for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Great. Paul Thurat in Maui. Going back to Mexico City after this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Maybe the time zones will settle down for you. You'll find Paul atherot.com become a premium member. Lots of great content, including that story about having a story about some of your closest friends. I love that idea. He's also got some great [e-mail] including the Field Guide to Windows 11, which includes Windows 10 built right in, just like Windows 11 and Windows ever Everywhere. A history of Windows through its programming frameworks, which is really fascinating.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Remind me next week I'll tell you my favorite Paul story because I've got one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's nice. That's nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not the hunter is not supposed.

[Richard Campbell]

To become the hunted as a story. I tell of you all the time in exactly the same format. And I will tell it next week because we are out of time.

[Leo Laporte]

We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 yesterday UTC. You can watch us live in the club, of course, in the Discord. Everybody else can watch on YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn or Kik, but you don't have to watch Live because it's a podcast, which means we make on demand versions available everywhere for free. The RSS feed, of course, can be picked up in your favorite podcast client, but you can also go to our website, Twitter, TV www dot. There's links there to the YouTube channel and the RSS and even a couple of podcast clients if you need a little hand finding one. But do subscribe. And if you subscribe, please leave us a good review because that helps spread the word. Thank you for being here everybody. We will see you next Wednesday on Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Bye. Bye.

[Leo Laporte]

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