Windows Weekly 963: I've Got an Apple Guy

Summary

Windows Weekly #963: "I've Got an Apple Guy"

Date: December 17, 2025
Host: Leo Laporte
Co-Hosts: Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell

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Episode Overview

In this penultimate (and self-described “Abbey Road”) episode of 2025, the Windows Weekly crew looks back at a year marked by the rapid evolution of Windows 11, AI everywhere, and fascinating shifts in hardware—from OLED laptops to AI PC specs. The hosts share personal tech stories, reflect on the challenges of “AI first” integration, dissect Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, and explore the shifting landscape of gaming, both on Windows and the rumored return of Half-Life 3. Along the way, the conversation meanders through apple and banana lore, a deep dive into Tasmanian whisky, and the quirks of holiday podcasting.

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Highlights & Key Discussion Points

1. Personal Hardware Journeys & OLED Laptops

• OLED as the New Must-Have:
  • Leo shares his journey to buying a new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon with an OLED screen, based on Paul’s hardware reviews.
    • "I've decided I only OLED screens from now on. I just love them." [03:01, Leo]
  • Discussion about storage and RAM pricing, and the challenges of finding the sweet spot for specs.
    • "Two grand for 32 gigs of RAM, which is enough for me on a laptop." [04:32, Leo]
  • Linux adventures: Leo ditches Windows for Pop!_OS with the new Cosmic Desktop and reminisces about the friction of configuring Linux the old way.
    • "It's a little bit a throwback to the old days where you have to do things like type startx." [05:14, Leo]
  • Paul and Richard riff on Lenovo’s latest hardware, the “Aura” edition ThinkPad, and quirks like the new Copilot key.

2. Windows 11 in 2025: Features, AI, and Frustrations

• An Overload of Updates:
  • Paul recounts the massive number of Windows 11 updates ("1177 updates we got to Windows 11 this year") and focuses on both useful and surface-level improvements.
    • "This is about as minor of an update you can get year over year, but the number of actual functional updates you got is pretty impressive." [10:09, Paul]
  • Security features get spotlighted (quick machine recovery, Smart App control toggling), as do Copilot+ innovations like click-to-do, semantic search, Widgets, and Windows Studio Effects.
• AI Features: Where’s the Value?
  • Mixed reception for AI features in individual apps and across the OS.
    • "The AI functionality that Microsoft has added to individual apps is often quite good in my opinion." [15:44, Paul]
    • Praise for Paint, Photos (especially Super Resolution), and Notepad’s AI writing tools, but critique of confusing rollouts and inconsistent requirements (NPU vs. GPU, etc.).
• Copilot+ PC Chaos:
  • Ongoing confusion over requirements for “AI PCs,” NPU cards, and whether features like Windows Recall really need certain hardware.
    • "Please let my giant GPU be treated as an NPU... That's not happening, but not yet anyway." [13:27, Paul]
  • Paul muses on the possibility of “Copilot Plus PC V2” creating even more market fragmentation and spec frustration.
    • "We might be looking at this, right? ...Please don't do this to us." [50:26, Paul]
• Opt-In Is Good (But Rare):
  • Praise for Microsoft finally making features opt-in and off by default, especially on controversial AI features.
    • "One of the good things is they finally woke up to opt in, off by default. Opt in. Yes. This is the way many features should be." [54:01, Paul]

3. AI Everywhere: Microsoft, OpenAI, and Sulaiman’s Candid Interview

• Exclusive Interview Reactions:
  • The hosts dissect Mustafa Suleiman’s Bloomberg interview—applauding his candor, humanity, and realism about the current state of AI and “agentic” features.
    • "Literally the first thing he says is, yeah, it's not there yet... It's in dev mode is the way he called it. It's not generally available yet. When it does work, it's the most magical thing you've ever seen. When it doesn't work, you just bought something you didn't want." [64:10, Paul quoting Suleiman]
  • Discussion of the tension between real AI progress, over-marketing, and the gap between hype and daily usefulness.
    • "It's been sold as too futuristic and too exciting and too much. And then you see what it is, and you're like, okay, so I made a watercolor picture of a banana... It's not curing cancer, right? ...The hype has outperformed the reality." [88:41, Paul]
• The Microsoft–OpenAI Relationship—Details Emerge:
  • Revelations about Microsoft’s limitations under the OpenAI agreement (couldn’t pursue AGI independently until the partnership was restructured).
    • "Until OpenAI restructured their partnership yet again, Microsoft was not allowed by contract to pursue AGI or superintelligence independently. The deal was OpenAI would do that, Microsoft would get it." [80:39, Paul]
  • After changes, Microsoft can now do its own AI research; they still have a license to everything OpenAI produces through 2032.
• Thoughtful Rollout or AI Spam?
  • Comparison of Microsoft’s aggressive, default-on Copilot approach to Google’s more experimental rollout (e.g., CC in Gmail Labs).
    • "Maybe this is a better way to roll out AI... you should be able to go to that thing and get it if you want it, but you should never be bothered by it if you don't want it. It's like, yep." [84:32, Paul]

4. Gaming, Emulation, and the Still-Unknown Future of Half-Life 3

• Windows 11 on ARM: Gaming Adventures:
  • Paul revisits gaming on the latest Snapdragon X laptops, discovering improvements since launch but ongoing inconsistency, especially with non-optimized AAA titles.
    • "The needle is moved. It's moved in the right direction, but it's still in the same general space. Meaning it's just not... You don't buy this computer for this." [46:53, Paul]
• Epic Games–Google/Apple Settlements:
  • Recap of recent legal victories and settlements between Epic, Google, and Apple—restoring Fortnite to app stores, and highlighting the dysfunction (and slow change) of mobile app markets.
    • "It took five years of billions of dollars of legal battles, but Google finally saw the common sense that I've been trying to ask these companies…" [106:55, Paul]
• Half-Life 3 Rumors & Gaming Legacies:
  • The crew muses on persistent rumors of a Steam Machine launch exclusive, how a new Half-Life could upend the market, and the deep replayability of classic titles.
    • "I literally would drop everything I'm doing to play this game all the way through." [112:25, Paul]
    • "It wasn't even more complicated than that. ...That was the reality—massive multiplayer games was just so much more money." [113:59, Richard]
    • Nostalgia for both Half-Life and games like Fallout: New Vegas and Halo.

5. Tangents: Apples, Bananas, and Whisk(e)y

• Apple "Guy" and Fruit Stories:
  • The episode’s title comes from Paul’s local apple orchard connection ("I have an apple guy" [31:18, Paul]), prompting a detour into regional apple varieties, cider-making, monocultures, and bananas in Mexico.
    • "Big Banana wants a banana monoculture. Ask your banana man about that." [35:44, Paul]
• Tasmanian Whisky Deep Dive:
  • Richard Campbell shares a rich history of Tasmanian distilling and offers a review of Lark Symphony No. 1.
    • "Bill Lark is without a doubt the first person from the Southern Hemisphere to be put into the Whiskey Hall of Fame in Scotland." [149:49, Richard]
    • "Symphony is actually... a blend of Tasmanian whiskies. This particular one... is Australia’s best blended malt in 2025." [147:13, Richard]

6. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Windows Updates:
  • "1177 updates we got to Windows 11 this year..." [08:48, Paul]
• On AI Overload:
  • "I think the hype has outperformed the reality." [88:41, Paul]
• On AI Job Loss Panic:
  • "That was your boss making a horrible decision. That was not AI stealing a job. That was someone just being an idiot or being malicious and they were going to fire them anyway and just using that as an excuse." [71:10, Paul]
• On Rolling Out AI Features:
  • "There's no reason to accept the defaults in Windows 11 I guess is what I'm trying to say." [127:20, Paul]
• On Nostalgic Gaming:
  • "Half-Life is like Star Wars. I owned it in every format available every time... These games were just fundamental." [117:00, Paul]

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Key Topic Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | |----------------------------------------|------------| | OLED Laptop Journey, Linux switch | 03:01–06:09| | Windows 11: Features Recap & AI | 08:46–19:54| | Copilot+ PC Chaos/NPU Confusion | 11:45–14:00| | Widgets, Studio Effects, AI Features | 14:42–19:46| | Gaming on Windows 11 ARM | 36:02–47:29| | Copilot, AI Hype & Sulaiman Interview | 63:33–80:39| | Microsoft & OpenAI Relationship | 80:39–88:41| | On Rolling Out AI Features | 76:03–89:58| | Epic Games vs. Apple/Google | 106:11–112:23| | Half-Life 3 Rumor Discussion | 112:05–121:10| | Apple/Banana Fun | 31:18–36:02 (apple guy); 33:06–36:02 (bananas)| | Tasmanian Whisky Review | 134:05–151:58|

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App/Tip & Recommendation Section

• Tip of the Year:
  • Paul recommends “deinsurdify-ing” Windows 11 using tools like Tiny 11 Builder (for clean installs), Win11 Debloat (post-install), Rufus, MsEdgeDirect, and ExplorerPatcher to reclaim a bloat-free OS.
    • "There’s no reason to accept the defaults in Windows 11." [127:20, Paul]
• Game of the Year:
  • Surprisingly, Paul finds himself lauding Fortnite, especially on ARM hardware:
    • "The thing I like about Fortnite is it's the smallest of the games... It plays great and it plays really well in Windows on ARM." [130:02, Paul]
• RunAs Radio Episode Pick:
  • Richard’s guest: Michelle Bustamante on modern security, Zero Trust, and the shift in cyber defenses.
    • "...an intense conversation about dealing with modern authentication, thinking through the cybersecurity frameworks from NIST..." [132:22, Richard]
• Brown Liquor Segment:
  • Richard reviews Lark Symphony No. 1 blended Tasmanian whisky; traces its mythic origin, current ownership, and taste profile.

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Closing Thoughts

This episode is equal parts year-in-review, technical deep-dive, and cozy holiday chat, with the Windows Weekly hosts striking a balance between skepticism (especially regarding AI hype), nostalgia for great hardware and games, and honest appreciation for moments of human ingenuity—be it in code, in the kitchen, or in a bottle of whisky.

For listeners seeking a snapshot of 2025’s Windows ecosystem, AI’s promises and pitfalls, and the lived experience of the tech-savvy (with a side order of apples, bananas, and Tasmanian drams), it’s a rich, relatable listen.

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Next week: A non-standard episode; then in two weeks, a holiday special with stories, fire, and a look forward to 2026.
Regular shows resume January 7.

Transcript

[A]

It's time for Windows Weekly. A look back at Windows 11 in the year 2025, inundated with new features. We'll cover them all. We'll also talk about AI. An exclusive interview, not ours, but an interview with the head of Microsoft's AI revealed quite a bit. And Paul's game of the year. You won't believe it. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Ferrata and Richard Campbell. Episode 963, recorded Wednesday, December 17, 2025. I've got an Apple guy. It's time for Windows Weekly. Why, hello, you winners and you dozers. Here we are, our last show of 2025. Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell. Actually, technically, it's the last show we're doing, but we did a show for Christmas Eve in which there was imbibing and storytelling and a fire, a roaring fire. It was cozy. The cozy edition of Windows Weekly next week for Christmas Eve.

[B]

That was really fun.

[A]

It was. Thank you guys for doing that. Richard, I see you've got the flannels on, which means you're back in British Columbia.

[B]

The first thing I grabbed. I've got to put it on. It's the last show of the year. Gotta go with a Canadian Texas out here.

[C]

Can I wrap my feet in some of that? My feet are freezing.

[A]

It's cold.

[B]

Yeah, it's been proper cold.

[C]

What does it say? Oh, no, it's actually up to 40.

[A]

It's cold.

[C]

It's been freezing this week.

[A]

Very cold.

[B]

You know, the ocean keeps it moderate, so it's. It's near freezing, but not quite. Yeah, it's quite stormy around in the area.

[A]

Oh, stormy.

[B]

Yeah. We had a couple power blips and things.

[A]

So does it feel good to sleep in your own bed after all this?

[B]

Well, to be clear, the upstairs above us is totally gutted. Right. They're reheating it all. So I'm sleeping.

[C]

So he's still not sleeping in his own bed?

[B]

The guest house? Yeah, the guest house is.

[A]

But you're not in the boathouse. We thought you might be doing the.

[B]

Show from the boathouse. Yes, but the crew's not in this morning.

[C]

As recently as 10 minutes ago, Leo, he thought he might be in the boathouse. I might have to run.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

In America, we call it the doghouse, but.

[C]

Right.

[A]

So ironically, I've got somebody out my window working on our front door. So if you hear a lot of loud noise and buzz saws that's what that's all about. Turns out.

[B]

Well, that's what I figured my line would be, is if the tile guy showed up and needed to cut tile, then I'll run to the boathouse. Yeah. But if it's just the kitchen guys, they're just moving boxes around. Not a big deal.

[A]

Construction. Construction.

[B]

But it looks like they just came in and did some measuring, dropped some stuff off, and they're leaving again, so I'm glad.

[A]

Hey, I. I've been reading Paul's laptop reviews all year, looking for. I. I wasn't going to buy a new laptop till next year when Apple's releasing its M6 Max with the OLED screen. Because I really like OLED. I've decided I only OLED screens from now on. I just love them.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

But then with RAM prices, you know, through the roof, I thought maybe I should buy now or forever hold my piece.

[C]

I mean, the good news, though, is, like, GPU prices don't look as bad anymore.

[A]

I know I don't really need a GPU because I got the desktop. I mean, that's where I don't want a laptop with gpu. But I did want a decent laptop. And so I looked at all your reviews at the OLED choices, and I ended up getting this, which I'm very happy with. The extra one is carbon.

[C]

Extra carbon? Yeah.

[A]

Oh, my gosh. It's like £2.

[C]

It's such a. I know. It's great. It might be less than £2. I don't.

[A]

It is slightly less than £2. I don'T understand how they get it so light. It's like there's nothing in here.

[C]

You feel like something's got to be wrong here. But they do a lot of, you know, they hollow out all the little bits they don't need. So it's got a kind of a webby frame to it or whatever.

[A]

But I'm thrilled. And the screen is gorgeous. It's not. It's not touch, which is okay by me. I don't want to get it all fingerprinty. And as you can see, the Windows login has changed quite a bit. Oh, wait a minute. That's not Windows.

[C]

Bastard.

[A]

First thing, I started updating, so, you know, it comes with Windows. I started updating an hour later. I said, what am I updating for? I'm going to wipe it off anyway. So I just stopped.

[B]

I'm feeling very smug about building my machines back in July.

[A]

You were good. How much RAM did you put in there?

[B]

Oh, 64. Both yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

So this has.

[C]

That would be like a car payment.

[A]

I know.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

This is about two grand for 32 gigs of RAM, which is enough for me on a laptop.

[C]

And that's good.

[A]

It's a little scant on the storage. It's only a terabyte. But this is really. I know, isn't that funny?

[C]

You know what though? I will say I. I've always kind of dialed in the minimum storage on phones, tablets, computers, whatever. But now that I'm playing video games on computers, I actually need like at least a terabyte. Like just Call of Duty by itself is half.

[A]

That's huge.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So I'm not gonna. This is. This is just an Emacs machine, so I don't really need a lot of storage or anything. And at first I put. People are asking which Linux. And it was first cache OS with i3 Windows Manager.

[B]

But.

[A]

It'S a little bit a throwback to the old days where you have to do things like type startx and to map the keyboard you have to.

[C]

Did it come on like floppies?

[A]

Yeah. How did you. It was. It's a little.

[C]

It was like a slackware floppy.

[A]

And the thing that was finally driving me crazy, I could not figure out and I tried everything I saw online how to make CAPS Lock be Control. Because I hate CAPS Lock and I always want that. I hit that every time because that's where I think the control key is. So I ended up putting. I thought, well, this is a good time to try POP os. They just released the Cosmic Desktop final, you know, first official version. So. And I'm quite liking it. And I still have, you know, it's got tiling and all that, but.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, but you kept Windows and like a. Like its own partition. No. Something. No.

[A]

Wipe the whole drive. No. What do I need Windows for?

[B]

Wow.

[C]

Which is. See the title of this episode. Interestingly, see.

[A]

Command line, baby, Command line. But OLED with a black background in Emacs. And that's crisp and sharp and.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Loving it. So anyway. But that's based on your review. You reviewed it way back at the beginning of the year.

[C]

But nothing you said is based on my review. So I.

[A]

Not the Linux part, just the hardware part.

[C]

I don't recognize anything that I would have said in anything you just talked about.

[A]

Oh, you liked how light it was. You said it's well made. You like the screen?

[C]

Yes. That machine Perennial is just.

[B]

Yeah. I don't know. There's been a bad carbon made.

[A]

It's funny because I went when I logged into the Lenovo website and it had my history. And I've purchased a few thinkpads in only thinkpads.

[C]

Is that an Aura edition? I think. Is that the only way you can get that now?

[A]

Yeah, it's Aura. What the hell is that?

[C]

So Aura is a partnership between intel and Lenovo. So there used to be four, but now there's only three kind of unique features that are, you know, only on those computers.

[A]

That's why this Aura pamphlet is kind of thin.

[C]

Yeah, there's not much going on there. It's.

[A]

That's it. But it does have a copilot key, which will be completely useless. You know what they do. That's nice, though. There's a little hint because it's got the copilot logo and then a little menu key logo right below it.

[C]

So that was the old control. The right control, which was the menu.

[A]

Key, used to be the menu key. And then there's a fingerprint reader right next to that, which I don't know if I'll be able to get working on that. I probably can, but I'll see drivers.

[C]

Yeah, I'm not sure.

[A]

It's probably a synaptic.

[B]

I don't know.

[A]

I'll have to look and see who. Who makes it there.

[C]

No, there's. I feel like it's not semantic, but maybe actually, because it's a. It's one of those match on. What do you call it? Match on print or whatever it is. It's like all the logic is inside.

[A]

Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah.

[C]

Match on.

[A]

And I like having a fingerprint reader. I really do, because then I don't have to, you know, log in and all that stuff. Anyway, I just thought I'd report in. It did. Windows looked very nice on it as.

[C]

It was updating for the brief moment. It was. Yeah. No, that's nice.

[A]

I'm sorry. I'm an apostate in this show. I'm a heretic.

[C]

It's okay. Yeah, I like your kind of a level set. It's okay.

[A]

I apologize.

[C]

No, it's fine.

[A]

I apologize. I'm gonna. I'm gonna bow out now and let you real users, you real computer guys do the show.

[C]

Yeah, the real computer guys. Yeah. I mean, so we're hitting the end of the year, literally. Right. So I think Leo said this up front. This is our final, like, live show or streamed. It's not really the final show, but the final one where we.

[A]

Final news show. The final one where you're not Drunk?

[C]

Yeah. Normal. Yeah. Norma. Oop. And let me get off of these white screens. Cheers, Louise. Yeah. So actually there wasn't much going on in Windows this week, but I thought, you know, this is maybe the right time to think about, you know, this past year and like, what of the 1177 updates we got to Windows 11 this year, which originally I was going to say 5 and it was like 10, and then I got to like 12 or 13 and I'm like, all right, I got to stop. I think I only got back to June or July and I was like, it's just too much. But there's a lot of stuff and some of this is just superfluous, not superfluous, surface level kind of stuff, you know, like the Start menu, the dark mode stuff in File Explorer. But, you know, actually going through this, I'm gonna, I, I have to go through this again because I have to do my end of year recap stuff for the site. But it was a big year, really. Even though, you know, Windows 10 went out, obviously, but we got.

[B]

I was still surprised by it. I thought they were going to push it back again. So many seats.

[C]

It's still supported technically and, you know, we'll see. I don't know, but maybe they wanted.

[B]

The 30 bucks each, you know.

[C]

Yeah. You know, 25h2, not a big deal in the sense that it's identical to 24H2.

[B]

Well, it is now. I don't think they planned it that way, but that's the way it went down finally.

[C]

Well, I mean, it's the way it's been for a couple years. Right. Like every supported version of Windows 11 is basically identical from a feature standpoint, but in this case, the underlying part of the foundation or whatever you want to call it is the same as well. Right. So it's not. This is about as minor of an update you can get year over year, but the number of actual functional updates you got is pretty impressive. And actually, as I look at this list, I'm thinking to myself, okay, so here's the next episode of Hands on Windows, but I'll just show you this stuff for here. I will say, looking at actual kind of the types of internal type features that I at one point had said, we don't really see this stuff in Windows anymore. We're starting to see more of which I like. For example, the security features that they often talk about at Ignite, like quick machine recovery and administrative protection, which is still half rolled out. And then there's a change coming to Smart App Control. I can't remember if we discussed this. It's not in the code live yet. But the way it works now is when you first install your computer, it's in kind of like a test mode. If it doesn't find any problems, it will enable itself, but more often than not it just turns itself off. And once it turns itself off or you turn it off, you can't re enable it. So they're actually going to change that. And you'll be able to toggle this thing on and off like a normal feature, which is kind of cool. And then a lot of this stuff too is kind of the Copilot plus PC stuff. Right. So click to do is a huge deal. The supporting external.

[B]

I'm sure this would be the year that would have gone away and it just. Everything's an AI PC.

[C]

Yes. This is on my list for questions about next year, right?

[B]

Yeah, no kidding.

[C]

But yeah, there's this matrix of features, right. This is the. Trying to understand what's going on with Windows 11. So in addition to. Or just Windows, right. In addition to the differences you might see between say home and Pro and then Enterprise and whatever else we. This has introduced this other sort of SKU as well and confusing matters. Every PC is an AI PC, sort of. And we have Copilot and other AI features that don't require an MPU or that Copilot plus PC spec. So, you know, just keeping us on our toes, I guess, is the way to kind of say that. But Windows Studio Effects supports external and USB webcams now, which is new. And that's Copilot Plus PC only because it requires the MPU. All Windows PCs do or will soon support external fingerprint readers as well with Windows low ess. So it's the first time they've ever supported any hardware, device or component.

[B]

And these are things that were supposed to be Copilot PC specific. Like when I think about making my workstation into a Copilot PC, I need to get one of those readers to be able to have vss.

[C]

Yeah. If it's a desktop for sure, it.

[B]

Would be the path to recall, right? Well.

[C]

Yeah, actually, yes. Yes. I don't see any reason why. Yes, yes, that's true. Although technically, if you have a Copilot plus PC class cpu, you should still be able to get recall. You don't have to have Windows hello ESS to get recall. It's just that it would be.

[B]

I thought that was one of the security requirements.

[C]

That's what I'm. I'm Actually doubting myself. As I said, the bigger one here.

[B]

Is, please let my giant GPU be treated as an npu.

[C]

Yeah, that's not happening, but not yet anyway.

[B]

If they made me buy an NPU card to get that, I think I'd do it only on one of the machines because I think it's ridiculous, but I would do it.

[C]

You'd be easier or more likely to find a utility that would make a GPU look like an MPU and just enable this stuff. You know, Like, I. I don't understand how that.

[B]

There's no reason this should already have been resolved. Like I said, I figured this would have been done by now, but somehow they're dragging it out.

[C]

Yeah, I don't. I feel like there are forces at work here that are beyond our knowledge. You know, that there's agreements with third parties, maybe companies like Qualcomm, that might factor into. There's a lot of stuff going on here. But, yeah, I agree. I'm kind of blown away that this stuff hasn't changed yet. All right, so click to do reside Start menu. You know, it's big widgets, by the way. I suspect most people have not seen this yet. I'm going to look at this computer and see what this one has. Yeah, this is still the old one. I've only seen this on one computer, but the new version of Widgets is actually quite attractive. And the display.

[B]

You're starting to like this.

[C]

No. Well, the stories are all still garbage, but the default display is just the widgets, which I think is what most people imagined when they heard about something called widgets. And the Discover feed is on a secondary page and you can replace it. Not that there are other feeds, but I kind of like that they're separated because when I bring that thing up, it's like, I don't care about these stupid MSN news stories, which are terrible. The widget stuff is pretty good. So that's kind of cool. Again, but I've only seen it on a single computer so far. Copilot Vision, which I think is a big deal. I think any AI vision type thing is a big deal. It's a bigger deal on mobile when you think about it, because you can point your camera at anything. You're out in the world. It's pretty useful like that. But on Windows you can use the camera with it, but it's mostly about what's on your screen. Right. So this thing plus click to do if you have a Copilot plus PC are kind of central to the Whole using AI to understand what's going on around you kind of thing, which I think is a big deal. The natural language stuff is a big deal. So think about. These are mostly Copilot plus PC experiences other than the Copilot app itself. Right. Which you could also use this way where instead of clicking on things and doing exactly the right thing, you can just kind of talk to it. Right. And so the agent and settings works this way. Copilot + PC, the semantic search and Windows search. Copilot + PC but all your interactions just with Copilot. Right, Works that way as well. So that's kind of cool. The this has happened in two waves. Later in the show we're going to talk about an Xbox update, but it actually impacts Windows. And Microsoft added Bluetooth LE support to Windows earlier in the year, I want to say mid year. But now they're using it in the context of the Xbox stuff. We'll talk about that later. But aside from just discoverability stuff like improved audio quality for whatever, like for game chat, which would be the Xbox thing, but just for voice calls as well. So that like that's actually kind of a big deal. We're seeing that happening on mobile OSes as well. That's good stuff to me though. And this is I guess semi controversial with some people, but the AI functionality that Microsoft has added to individual apps is often quite good in my opinion. So all those AI functions in Paint, which will vary between a normal computer and a Copilot PC, meaning there's more on Copilot plus PC. Some of that stuff is really good. Genitive fill, gender of erase object select, you know, it's just very useful in that kind of creative environment. Photos, same thing. The restyle image stuff is really cool. Super resolution I use all the time. It's an awesome way to upsize any image. So if you have these old scans of old photos, Maybe that are 320 by 240 or something, give this thing a whack because it goes up pretty high and it works really well in my experience. So that's worth looking at. And then most controversial of all, of course, Notepad. Right. And so this one's kind of confusing to me because this one, they're actually going in the opposite direction. But most of the AI features in Notepad will work on any computer. So the writing help writing tools, what are they calling that? Summarize, make it longer, make a short Internet poem, whatever. That's all kind of cloud based ui, but cloud based AI, if you have a copilot PC. You do have an option now to go in and say, actually I want to do this stuff locally. It's not going to be as good, but it's going to be pretty good. And it works offline, right. So it's kind of an interesting. It'd be better if it just handled that automatically, but maybe it will someday. So that's pretty good. And then snipping tool, same thing. I mean, for me, because I need the mouse cursor in many of my screenshots because I write books and for, you know, site stuff, whatever, I can't use it. Right. But other than that, it's super complete. And there's a bunch of AI functionality in there now which is really useful, including things like Ask Copilot search or Visual search of Bing integration that aren't so much about capturing the screen. Saving a file, which is the typical use of this, like you're taking a screenshot. A lot of this stuff now just works. You're not actually saving the thing, you're just doing something with it and then you can move on from it. You don't have to save the file. Right. And so it sounds non intuitive, but it's. That stuff actually works really well. So, yeah, pretty good. So I'm going to hold it at that because I could go on and on, but, well, full screen experience, I should add that too. So that's in the process of rolling out. But obviously if you have a handheld gaming PC, you're going to want this. But if you're gaming on a laptop or even a PC and you're using a controller, it may make sense to boot into this environment. Actually, even if you're not using a controller, right, because it uses a lot less ram, a lot less going on in the background, you're going to get higher frame rates, etc. You know, it's, it's. It's a good thing to try if you are using a controller. The thing that's fun about it is everything works with the controller. You don't actually. There's not. There's never really that point. You have to pick up the mouse to do anything. So it seems like they've mostly solved that. So, you know, that's pretty good.

[B]

It's cool.

[C]

Yeah. So that's the. I guess that's most of the year. I don't know what I'm.

[A]

I was hoping it would take a little longer, but. Okay, good.

[C]

Sorry.

[B]

By the way, I did find I can get a 40 tops NPU in the M2 form. Factor for about $200.

[C]

Right. So if you did that, what happens though, if you do that and then it doesn't enable anything?

[B]

Well, I presume it won't. Right. Like it's. Yeah.

[C]

So I mean, do you have to reinstall.

[A]

This is a CO processor that goes in an M2.2 slot.

[B]

Yeah, it goes in an M 2.2 slot. There's lots of different things you can get in M2 slots. Right.

[A]

I guess M2 is really just PC. What is it? PCI Express or.

[B]

Yeah, it's PCIe. Exactly.

[C]

Right.

[B]

It's actually closer to the bus than the slots. Yeah.

[A]

So while we usually think of that as being where you put your storage.

[C]

It's mostly used for storage. But actually I think. Isn't that the same slot they use for like WI FI cards essentially in the little.

[B]

You can put WI FI cards there too.

[A]

So is the NPU CO processor, is it a gpu? It's not a gpu.

[B]

It's just actually an npu.

[A]

Who makes those?

[B]

There's a couple of them, but they're all using the same Kinero chip.

[A]

So it's just a Canaro. Okay.

[B]

Panera is the. Is the.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. So it's not any of, you know, it's not the like whatever the hexagon or whatever they call the.

[B]

Well, because normally they're sock. Right. They're all on the die with the GPU and the cpu.

[C]

Right. So this.

[A]

Yeah. I didn't know you could buy an NPU separately. That's. That's very interesting.

[B]

Well, and they generally don't offer it because you need the right drivers and things like that. But it is a possibility, right?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

AMD even threatened to make one on the regular PCIe slot, which wouldn't be hard. It's all the same form factor, essentially.

[C]

I buy not just have a GPU that had both, you know. Yeah, that'd be another way to do it.

[A]

NPUs and GPUs are essentially the same. Yeah, they're related.

[B]

I mean, they're both scalar processors, right?

[C]

Yeah. But I'm related to my brother. We're not alike at all. So I don't know. I mean, your analogy is falling apart pretty quickly. Yeah.

[A]

No, that's really interesting. So can you can Kinera C A.

[B]

N E R A K I N.

[A]

A R A Kinera like Kinsale. But they don't sell it direct. You just.

[C]

No.

[A]

And they're now owned by nxp. Apparently they got bought. So this is. This is probably a hot new Category. I had no idea you could do this.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

I'm not sure it's hot or new, but it's okay. New to me.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

The next question you have to ask is, what if I put in two?

[A]

Yeah. And of course PCI Express is not going to be as fast as it is would be on the.

[B]

On the sock. Yeah, Sock is the. Is the ultimate. But M2s are pretty darn fast.

[A]

What's the matter? Oh.

[B]

Oh.

[A]

Do you want. You know what? I'm going to do an ad while you clean up the mess you've made. Once again, Paul Thurat.

[C]

What have I done? Let's break. Desk is going to be sticky now. Sticky.

[A]

What'd you spill? Poke?

[C]

What do you call this?

[A]

Coca Cola Kombucha.

[C]

Yum.

[A]

It's not gonna be sticky. It's gonna be fruity and it's gonna have good probiotics.

[C]

Yes. There's gonna be a little lawn growing on here.

[A]

I want to show you this while we're. While you're cleaning up, I have something to talk about. Our sponsor for this segment. This looks like a nice picture hanging on the wall, right? Actually, I've got the stand on and I'll take the stand off. But this is the new Aura Inc. Digital frame. No, that's not my mom. Although I'm sending mom one for Christmas. Our sponsor for this segment on Windows Weekly. You know the name Aura, I'm sure, but they consistently, year after year have been picked as the best digital frames. But some people don't want another screen in the house. And they really don't want another screen on the wall. That means you gotta plug it in. It's a screen. It looks like a screen. I mean, we've got enough screens in our lives. Wouldn't it be nice if you could change the photos on your walls every day? But it's like a regular picture on the wall. That's this. The new Aura Inc. It is cordless. It is a color. Right now I got a black and white photo. Let me put a. Let me. By the way, I wanted to show you because black and white looks great. This is an image I took of a character in town. This is their new cordless color epaper frame. And the technology in this is mind blowing. Meet Ink, Aura's first ever cordless color e paper frame. Featuring a sleek 0.6 inch profile and a softly lit 13.3 inch display. Ink feels like a print, functions like a digital frame, and perhaps most importantly, it lives completely untethered by cords With a rechargeable battery that lasts up to three months on a single charge. Unlimited storage, and the ability to invite others to add photos via the aura frames app. It's the cordless wall hanging frame you've been waiting for. And the images just look great. Now I have it set. You can have it change every two hours if you want. I change it overnight so. Because I want it like to enjoy the picture for 24 hours, like look at it on the wall. That's nice. I don't want to think of it as a digital frame. I want to think of it as a photo on my wall that just happens to change every day. And with that, I got at least three months. I charged it when I first got it. I just charged it again last week. So it goes a long time. They put so much engineering into this. It's really a breakthrough in epaper technology, Inc. Takes there's millions of tiny ink capsules in here. Transforms them into your favorite photos, rendering them in kind of this beautiful vintage tones. They put a lot of thought into this. There's a lot of design innovation. The graphite inspired bezel really looks like a real frame. The paper textured matting on this looks so good. It looks like a piece of decor, not a device.

[B]

There.

[A]

There's a more colorful photo. See, that's off the coast of Newport. Newport, Rhode Island. And unlimited free photos. You just download the app, connect it to WI Fi. So it's a great gift for grandma. Somebody else in your family that you want to share pictures with. And they just added. It's not in the ad because it just added it a new feature where you can text. You have to obviously authenticate. But once you authenticate and you can send a link to people, other family members saying, hey, if you want to send images to my Aura inc. Here's the link. And now you can use text messaging, which is great because how often you know. So for instance, what I'm going to do is load this up before I send it to grandma. I'm going to set it up for. Load it up with pictures from, you know, the family photo album. All those slides that we would only see once a year because they'd bring out the Kodak carousel and set up the screen and then you don't see them again for another year. She loves this. She loves this because it's great to see those old pictures, right? And she knows everybody and brings back memories. But now I can text. We're sitting around the tree opening presents. Just text pictures of the Grandkids to grandma and she'll get them right away. That's so cool. What a great gift for anyone, especially someone who's not a digital guru or somebody who just doesn't like screens. You don't want to add another screen to your life. You're adding a photo, a photo frame that just happens to change every night. It also has a really cleverly designed magnetic stand that just kind of clips in, just clicks in, and then stays in. And so you could put this on your desk anywhere, and then it can go either way again, it could be horizontal, the portrait, or it can be in landscape or in portrait mode, depending on what. And if you have a picture that is a landscape shot like this and you turn it on inside.

[C]

And you.

[A]

Turn it on its side, it will automatically rotate, but then you'll have borders. So I, you know, I keep it in landscape mode because most of my pictures are in landscape mode. Why have all the photos, all those great photos? I have 60,000 photos that no one ever sees because they're on the hard drive. Why have them stuck on the hard drive?

[B]

Put them on the wall.

[A]

Sleek, subtle, and stunning. Ink blends the warmth of a printed photo with the versatility of an e paper frame. And no chords, no fuss. Just your memories beautifully displayed wherever you want them. Head to auraframes.com Inc. To see for yourself. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. That's auraframes.com Inc. Act now they're offering a limited time holiday discount then soon though. So aura a u r a frames.com ink I've been changing it for the show, but I really like the idea of changing only overnight. So that way, every morning it's kind of like, oh, what a nice picture. What fun. Really is a great gift. Grandma's gonna love it. Auraframes.com Inc. Thank you, Aura, for your support. Paul, I presume, has cleaned up the kombucha. There's kombucha all over the highway.

[C]

It's cleaned up as much as it can be cleaned up.

[A]

You didn't spill it in the computer?

[C]

No, it was all over the desk and my stapler and my tape.

[A]

That's the last thing you would want to do is spill a kombucha into a computer.

[C]

Kombucha explodes. You know, like, you pour it and it's like, whoop. It just bubbles out like a volcano.

[A]

Yeah, not good for the motherboard. I spilled coffee into a Mac laptop. Once I brought it into the guy.

[C]

That could be the end of it. You Know the guy.

[A]

It was the guy because it had cream and sugar. And the guy. I spilled it in there and immediately, of course, took it apart and, you know, tried to dry it out, brought it into the guy. He said he smelled coffee into it. Smell coffee into it, didn't you? I said, yeah. He says, I smell it. And he opened it up and. And we looked at the motherboard and it was like, short shirted all the way. You're gonna have to replace the motherboard. There's no way to. No way I can fix this. And I mean, new motherboard for a Mac laptop. You might as well just buy a new laptop.

[C]

Check it.

[B]

Yeah, it's everything on.

[A]

I think that's true for everything. It'd probably be true for this Lenovo. Don't spill coffee or kombucha into.

[B]

Not a good thing.

[A]

Your devices. All right, so I've given Paul a little respite. He is refreshed. Did you get a new can of Kombucha?

[C]

No, most of it's still in the glass. It's just that I overflowed.

[A]

Oh, you slopped it. Oh, that's.

[C]

Look, I still. God, what a mess. This will be fine. It'll be fine.

[A]

What flavor are we having?

[C]

I'm going to throw away this whole room. It's mixed berry sparkling fermented tea with probiotic.

[A]

Probiotic? Yeah. They call it tea if it's not alcoholic.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

Because normally kombucha is alcoholic because that's how you eat it.

[C]

This is an alcoholic.

[A]

Hey, sorry.

[B]

Like, you were drinking it for the flavor.

[A]

I. I drink Health Aid and they call it a probiotic tea because I think it's. I mean, it's got trace alcohol.

[C]

Yeah, we don't have any. We don't usually have juice. You know, like, I kind of want something that's like, cranberry juice would be good. Oh. But, yeah, festive for the cider would be fantastic. Yes.

[A]

We used to. I mean, you. Gosh, you. You could go out to the orchards where you are, right?

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Oh, yeah, we used to do that in the fall. It was so fun. We go out to Macintosh apples, which they don't put in stores because they don't wear very well. They get all.

[C]

I mean, we have an apple guy. Leo. I don't know you have an apple.

[A]

Man, but I have a guy for that.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And. But we would go. And you go. And you get the apples. You can pick them yourself. You. You get them. They're delicious, Max, and just. Just perfect for the season. And Then as you're leaving, you get a jug of apple cider. Like a big jug.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And then sometimes if you're crazy, you leave it. If you can't fit in the fridge, you put it on the porch because it's freezing.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And it turns into the trunk of the car.

[A]

We talked about this last week. And it turns into a hard ice.

[B]

Talking about apple jacket. Yeah. Yeah. Taking the ice out.

[C]

Yeah. The one thing we never did when Richard was here that we talked about was like. Like a mulled Something like a mulled wine or a. Oh, it smells so.

[A]

Good in the house, too, when you do that.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Or like a. What do you call it? Like a butter. What is that thing? Like the hot buttered rum kind of. Hot butter would be good.

[A]

Just get a big pot, put a bunch of apple cider in there. Some cloves, some garlic, cinnamon, a cup of peel. I don't know, Whatever.

[C]

Cardamom.

[B]

You kind of get it.

[C]

We're overdoing this because don't put garlic in it. Last week we were away, but the week before, we go to the farmer's market, we see our apple guy, and we bought a bunch of apple cider. It's like my form of working out. I just carry giant jugs of apple cider around the farmers market.

[A]

Apple cider thing in the world, not apple.

[C]

She's like, you sure we need as much? I'm like, I'm sure we need more than this much, but this is all I can carry.

[A]

God, now I have a craving for apple cider.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah. It's so good. All right. So good.

[B]

It's also the one thing you can do, and I think I did this on the show with apples that don't taste good is they still make good cider.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Or make pies. I mean, tart apples make the best pies.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

But there's tart good for that.

[A]

Start in the banana bread.

[C]

If you script. If your bananas are brown, just make banana bread.

[A]

Banana bread. You know what I do bananas. I mean, this is. I'm sorry, you want to talk about windows? Never mind. What? I won't tell you.

[C]

No. What are you doing? Good. Now I want to know what.

[A]

I let them get really brown.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

On the outside.

[C]

You let them get brown like. Like a madman.

[A]

Well, Lisa, she won't eat a banana that has any spots at all, which I think is crazy. They're not good until they're. You gotta have spots on them. That's when they're sweet, when it's flecked with brown and has a golden hue Bananas are the very, very best for you I could sing a song but I won't. Anyway, you open them up, you cut them up into little chunks. You put them in a Ziploc bag. You put them in the freezer, and you freeze them. And you do that until you have four or five bananas worth. Then you put them in the blender, frozen, maybe put in a little bit of vanilla. If you want, you can put in some other fruit, but I don't. I just put in a little. A dab of vanilla and maybe a little liquid if you need it. And you blend it and it makes banana ice cream. That's so good and so good for you because it's like eating a banana. It's not like eating ice cream, but it scratches that itch.

[C]

Well, now, I'm sure I told the story when it happened, but we were in Mexico last year sometime. I don't remember. We went to a little abirote. It's one of those little corner stores getting whatever, milk and whatever. We don't really cook at home or eat at home that much, but we're standing in line, and I was like, you know, I'd like to get a banana, but I don't want a bunch of bananas. I just want a banana.

[A]

A banana.

[C]

Do you think they would sell me a banana? And she's like, yeah, probably So I didn't want to tear it off. The little. You know, the little bunch.

[A]

How do you say banana in Spanish?

[C]

I think this is banana. I. I don't know. It's interesting. It's good. Yeah, I'm actually not.

[A]

Seems like a Spanish word, but who knows?

[C]

I think it is. I think it's just banana. Banana or banana. Yeah, it's probably the same word. Anyway, the old lady in front of us finally gets up to the counter and she. I didn't hear what she said, but what I saw was the guy take the top of a thing of aspirin, take one aspirin out and give her the aspirin she paid for. One aspirin. I looked at Stephanie, I was like, get a banana. Like, we're definitely. I'm definitely going to be able to buy one aspirin. I just want one banana. Like, aspirin. Like what? Okay. Banano.

[A]

That's how you say it.

[C]

Or platano.

[A]

Platano, which is a plantain, which. Yeah, but I bet the bananas in Mexico City are not like the bananas here. They're. They're more.

[C]

They're often just plantains. Although. Well, no, but the banana I was talking about in that store, that was just a banana. That was a normal banana. Like, as I know, a banana.

[B]

So it wasn't a Cavendish.

[A]

A Dole.

[C]

It's a Dole. That was a Dole banana.

[A]

Is that where they are? Cavendish.

[B]

Cavendish, yes. Which replaced the Groshell when the last blight went through. And now the blight's wiping out the Cavendish as well.

[A]

Yeah, because we have a monoculture of bananas. Yes, you need to have that.

[C]

That's what big banana wants you to think of.

[A]

Big banana wants a banana monoculture. Ask your banana man about that.

[C]

Let me tell you, I don't have a banana man, sadly. But try it. Maybe in Mexico I could have one. Not here.

[B]

You could try a red Dhaka. Like, there's some pretty cool bananas.

[A]

Oh, there's so many better bananas than the Dole.

[C]

All right, so we lost 90% of our audience. Let's so. La la la la. So over a year and a half ago, I went out to New York. I think it was early May, sorry, early April, maybe late March. And this was going to be my first hand with Snapdragon X Elite. And I was worried about it because they had announced this in October. I kept waiting for the other. Every generation of this thing has been terrible. There's no way this is going to stand up to what they were saying. And it was better than I thought. I walked away from this very excited. But one of the things I was really surprised by was we got to play games on this thing and this was never going to be the thing. Like, I never understood this. So control. There was a racing game, I think Baldur's Gate was one of the games. And they all seemed to be working great. And I was like, okay, that's a surprise.

[B]

And emulation too, right?

[C]

Yeah. Right. Yeah, that's what's amazing. Right. And so when we got back, or rather when we got the actual copilot plus PCs, the first gen versions, the first wave of them, of course installed a bunch of games. It doesn't work at all. It's terrible. So it's the one thing about Snapdragon X which I had never expected it to work anyway. That was that most, to me, the kind of cardinal sin of technology, which is it's not consistent. Right. Every once in a while you'd find a game work fine, but most games didn't. And even those that could work, you had to do a lot of work to make it work. And it was just. It was just too inconsistent. Right. And so even though there were a handful of games that worked pretty well, I was like, okay, you're not going to buy it for this reason and you're not going to.

[B]

Also, it's mostly anti cheat problems.

[C]

Right?

[B]

It was avx and stuff like that.

[C]

Well, that and you know, just. Yeah, I mean that's a big chunk of it for sure. But it's not just that. Although yeah, maybe it's hard to say, I mean at the time. So obviously there are these technologies built into Windows Auto super resolution, et cetera where you can run the game at a much lower res, kind of make up for the emulation hit. But it looks great to you. So even though it's running at 1366, it looks like it's running at 1920 maybe or something like that. That's the theory. But it was just such an inconsistent experience. I just not something like I could recommend. And I have, I mean in my case personally, I have obviously these other computers floating around so I can use other computers to play games. No big deal. And I don't, you know, when I travel and stuff, the battery life and all the other good stuff about Snapdragon outweighs that. It's not a big, big deal. But there have been a lot of improvements since then. Right. Qualcomm partnered with Epic Games to bring Fortnite to Windows 11 on ARM. Also the anti cheat stuff. Right. Theirs is called Easy Anti Cheat. And then there's a lot. There was additional work done on the Prism emulator by Microsoft. I think it's called AVX compatibility which is one of those things that just brings in a whole class of games.

[B]

But you don't see it coming at it from both sides. Right. Like there is improve the emulator to tolerate more stuff. There's fix the underlying code so it doesn't conflict in the first place. There's do ARM based compilations and actually make it a native game.

[C]

This is the big thing. Yeah. And that's, that's going to be. I feel like Microsoft's going to have to make that part of what I'm going to call the Windows Xbox or Xbox P, whatever you want to call that, like the spec. Like if you're going to publish a game to this thing, you have to at least compile it for ARM or something. We'll see if they force it on people. But later in the year though. Well a. The Fortnite shipped right. Fairly recently, I guess it was. Qualcomm came up with something called Snapdragon control panel which isn't as good as I thought it was. But the primary use case for this thing is make sure you have the very latest GPU drivers and AVX support, which will help with the performance of games. You can also use it to tweak games, but it's manual. It's not like an automatic process. You know, a lot of, like AMD or Nvidia software will see what the games that are in your computer and like, optimize them for the. Whatever the graphics chipset is. And it's kind of a neat thing. We don't really have that on our ARM yet. I'm hoping we will.

[B]

But it reminds me of all the shimming you could do for Windows compatibility back in the day, too. Right.

[C]

I think they're still doing it. I think that's. I mean, honestly, it's probably the same technology. It's probably the same BASIC subsystem as doing it. But Microsoft also enabled people with Windows 11 on ARM PCs, copilot PCs to have the full Xbox app experience. Right. So the way that it worked until, I don't know, three, four months ago was you only got the. If you had a, at the time, a Game Pass ultimate subscription, you would see the games you could stream, and that was it. They were working, but you couldn't see anything else in your library. Now you can see the full library. And there again, I was hoping for something a little more automatic. Maybe there should be a button somewhere I can click and say, just show me the games that I know are going to work on the system. So maybe I have Game Pass. I get them through there. So I did something stupid like I installed the latest Call of Duty at the time, and that took half the day. And guess what? It didn't work. You know, it didn't even run.

[B]

And it was 500 gigs or 300 gigs.

[C]

Well, now it is. Yeah. So the base game is 300 gigs and then it's about 500 with. If you install two and Modern Warfare two and three. Yeah. Incredible. It's just incredible.

[B]

A lot of disk.

[C]

Yeah. It's just astonishing. So I thought, you know, I'm gonna try this again. You know, I've been talking about that win 11 debloat software. I applied that to my first. I reset my Surface laptop, did a bit, just a normal install. Used Windows 11 debloat to literally clean it up, which worked great. Works fine in arm. And I'm sitting there staring on this thing. It's got like a terabyte drive. It's got nothing on it like, you know, I'm gonna install some games, I'm gonna see what's going on here and see if anything's changed. And from a high level, I will say it's still inconsistent. This is the problem. I wish that Snapdragon software or Windows itself or what, or just the Xbox app or whatever you want to say would automatically optimize for these chips and just make it as good as it could be. Right? Or at least give you a screen. We can, you know, just something. But it's not automatic. You have to really play with it. And you know, again, it reminds me.

[B]

Of shims like you, you don't. You can't really have a plan on how to do this. You have to try, just try stuff and see what happens, right?

[C]

And unfortunately, because these things are games, sometimes those things take a while, right? You know, you have to run this utility, make a few settings changes or one, you know, go back in, rerun the benchmark thing that might be in the game or whatever. Like, I did this. I spent the better part of an entire day just doing what I just described. Fortnite, by the way, works great. Like, it works great.

[B]

No problem.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, just normal. I had never. I mean, I've played Fortnite, but just to kind of see it. I've actually been playing Fortnite. I think I mentioned this maybe last week. One time I actually came in third. It was the closest I've ever gotten. Still one time I came in 18th, but I usually get wiped out pretty quick. But I kind of like it. You know, it's cartoony, obviously, but whatever. But that works great. And it looks awesome on that scoot. There's something about the screen. It must be HDR or whatever, but it's just gorgeous. Like, it's super rich, contrasty, really nice. That works great control. Which, by the way, they just announced the sequel is coming soon. This was one I had tried that day in April or March, whenever that was a year and a half ago. So I knew it worked. And it still works. Of course it does. Of course. Now it's running on a Surface laptop, full res, so it's like almost 2500 by 1650 ish, you know, because it's three by two display, but 30, maybe 30 to 40 frames per second depending. I at some point played with the resolution and tried to improve the frame rate and all that stuff. But it's a single player game. It works fine. It's nice looking. The beefiest game that I got to work well on. This is that Callisto Protocol game, this is a third person, I guess, adventure shooter kind of a thing. It's atmospheric, a lot of good sound effects, etc. I had tried this, I guess last summer, a year ago summer. And it was unplayable, basically. I think it was just bad. And when I ran the benchmarking on this, it said that it's running at like 18 frames per second. I'm like, okay, this is going to be garbage. But when I ran the game and you can leave the counter on the screen, it was like 30 to 35. And again, it's a single player game, so actually it's pretty good. I suppose there could be like an action sequence where maybe it slows down a little bit, but it looks great. And this is the game where I noticed there's like an auto sr, which is the auto super resolution feature. There's actually a widget in the game bar. Now for this, you can see if it's on or not. You can control it from there. That was actually pretty useful. And I bumped it down to 1920 by 1280. And I think it was. I think it was in the 35 to 40 frames per second range. So honestly. So it looks good and it runs well and, you know, good. I had recently installed pubg. This is a game I hadn't looked at in a long time, but if you are into this kind of thing, you know that it was out before Fortnite. Big thing, like battle royale games, huge. And then Fortnite happened and it's not as huge, but I was looking. I don't remember where I came across it, but I saw some screens from this. I'm like, this is actually really good looking. It's like a realistic kind of Call of Duty looking thing. And I was like, it's not like cartoonish. It's not like Overwatch or Fortnite. I was like, okay, can I give this a shot? So I played this on some of the intel computers. You know, it's fine. It does not work. It just doesn't work at all. It took whatever amount of time to install, but does not work. And so the final one, I already knew Call of Duty wasn't going to work, but I tried Battlefield 6, so I don't remember.

[B]

It's huge.

[C]

Well, so Battlefield 6 is interesting because it's, you know, competing with Modern or with Call of Duty. It's better looking. You know, if you play this thing, it's astonishing, like how realistic the graphics are in multiplayer. Like it doesn't make any sense. It's beautiful. It's not really, you know, I'm so used to the way Call of Duty plays. It's not exactly the same and it's expensive. You know, I bought it on sale, you know, a Steam, I think it was. Steam. Steam, yes. Like on Steam or maybe Epic, it doesn't matter. But they were having a sale and I was like, all right, I'll give this thing a shot. Yeah, it does not run. So there's nothing I could do to make this thing run. It just didn't even come close. It never got off the desktop. So you know, if you kind of add that all up, it's like, I guess I'm shooting three for five. But of the three that worked, I mean, honestly, they all kind of over performed, if that makes sense. They look and play better than I thought they were going to. The games that didn't run, especially Battlefield 6, like that's, that's no surprise. I mean this thing is not designed for that. It's kind of a high end game. So I would say the needle is moved. It's moved in the right direction, but it's still in the same general space. Meaning it's just not. You don't buy this computer for this. Right. Although by the way, if you like Fortnite, that's an awesome experience. So if that's kind of your game and that's like all you care about or you care about like maybe lower end games where it doesn't matter. Honestly, it's pretty great. It looks gorgeous. But it's still a very kind of iffy experience speaks to.

[B]

Is the ultimate solution here. Just they have to make him native.

[C]

Yeah, no, yes, 100% because I think.

[B]

This is the direction Steam wants to go in anyway. Right, right.

[C]

Yeah. So yeah, they want this thing to run natively like well or to run I should say because they have their own. What's their. The thing they have on Steam is Steam OS is.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Gabe Cube.

[C]

No, but what's. No, the, I mean the emulation thing, they have like a wine based emulator that works great.

[A]

Why is it called Proton? They have a new Proton for it though.

[C]

I can't remember. So yeah, so there's something. I believe it's called Fex, which is doing this for ARM and for. You know, this will bring it to Android, it will bring it to those, you know, the glasses thing or the headset thing they just showed off. But it could benefit Windows on ARM as well. Right. And so any, like, let's face it.

[B]

If Gabe Decides you don't get to put BPA in the Steam store until you.

[C]

Oh, yeah, no, then it just happens.

[B]

It's over.

[C]

Yeah, that's right. That's right. So that will be a good day. But we'll, you know, we'll see. And then this is not something I wrote and this is something I will again expand on at one point, but in keeping with our earlier little conversation about some of the better things that occurred to Windows in Windows this year, when you think about the next year, which isn't that far away, suddenly what is it that's coming? What's the big deal? One of those items was the thing you brought up, which is like, we have AI PCs, we have PCs, we have copilot plus PCs.

[B]

Stop.

[C]

Just make. Well, the easiest way is the way that won't happen, which is just intel amd, whomever put mpos in your. All of your chips, just. Yeah, just do the full, you know.

[B]

40 plus and an MPU that fits into an M2. That's every desktop, not that hard to put in.

[C]

Yeah. And actually, so that laptop that you.

[B]

Have, I believe Studio 2 has an MP unit.

[C]

Yeah, I believe it has, but I believe it's an add on like Microsoft put it in. But that is an add on because.

[B]

That, it's like a. It's like a 26 top one. It's under the copilot.

[C]

I mean, it's pre copilot plus, but it's. I think it's technically essentially like a desktop chipset. And it's like the one chipset that has like an add in or did at the time.

[B]

They don't need it or it might be. It's just. Yeah. An M2 slot or something like that.

[C]

Oh, yeah, maybe. I don't know. But anyway, Microsoft did that. Right. So if you were to open this thing up, you'd be able, I think you'd be able to see that because it's not integrated onto the chip.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

But Microsoft did that to get the MPO in there. So. Okay, there's that. Oh, no, I'm sorry, there's not that. So I should say one of the things, you know, thinking about this coming year is whether that will change.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Will there be. Will that brand kind of go away or will they just keep going with it?

[B]

My nightmare scenario, then everything's a Copilot plus PC.

[C]

Well, right. But here's one little negative possible outcome. There's a Copilot Plus PC V2 spec that has an 80 tops MPU as a requirement or Something, right? And then we have a further dividing of this market where now we have some things that only run if you have 40 more, but some only run if you have 80 or more.

[B]

And again, if I can, there's 1500 sitting in that 50, 80, right. Like.

[C]

I know, I know. I'm just, I'm just trying to, you know, the way my brain works is I always go right to the, the worst possible scenario. So that that's a possibility. I feel like it's less of a possibility now because it hasn't been super well received. So God help us if this thing had taken off in a meaningful way. We might be looking at this, right? This would be like we're gonna have PCs, we're gonna have different levels of copilot plus PCs. Guys, please don't do this to us. But I just, you know, again, want to throw that out as a possibility, but I don't think that's going to happen. We know 26H1 is coming so. And this is going to be a lot like the 2024 Mid Year Copilot Plus PC launch where it's going to be for that Snapdragon chipset, in this case the X2, which is coming out in the first half of the year. And then there'll be a 26H2 I'm sure they'll call it, which will be for everybody and there'll be additional stuff but it'll be just like 2024. Again, we know that agentic features are coming to Windows. Will they work? We'll see. I will say, you know, as we talked last week, a little bit the agentic stuff is the, the 5G lie of AI. I mean it's like the, the most exciting use case. It's the most interesting. It's the most far away from being reality. Like it's so the, the delta between the marketing and the reality is in a different planet. Like it's. Yeah, just off. So we'll see. You know it's going to have to work. Well, I guess it doesn't have to work but it will probably work at some point. But will next year be the year for Windows? We'll see.

[B]

Yeah, we've got Pavan two years ago now or a year and a half ago now. He's unified teams. It's just a question of how long it takes to get everybody aligned and actually push out a version. And the pressure is high. They have to do something in the AI space.

[C]

Space.

[B]

Like they've got to go.

[C]

Yep.

[B]

Oh yeah, I can't see how you get to 26 without a Windows 12, an AI.

[C]

And that's the big. That's the big one. Although I feel like it's possible we've been talking about that for two years. You know, I don't remember. I'm not good at that. But it was, it's at least a year and a half, but it might be, might be close to two. But now the 10's gone, essentially. You know, Windows 11, what, the first version came out in to 2021. Right. Mid 2021. So we're. Yeah, we're actually only four and a half years into this, so I don't know. We'll see.

[B]

Remember when they used to put out an OS every other year? Crazy talk.

[C]

They used to put out an OS every six months. I mean, technically, right. Depending on how they want to measure it.

[B]

But the Windows 10 twitch doesn't count. That was a particular moment of crazy.

[C]

Well, yeah. Every generation of Windows since Adon has had its own little. Well, even Vista, I guess it had its own little special crazy. But I don't know, I feel like, honestly, despite all of the controversy in our little world, right. This is not a controversy out in the world world, but in our little world around the agentic stuff in Windows and nobody asks for this and all that, nobody wants this, all that stuff. This is in many ways the least controversial of the controversies that have occurred over the years as far as, you know, how it's going to impact people, plus or minus or pro or con or whatever. And maybe this should have been on my list of things that were good this year. One of the good things is they finally woke up to opt in off by default. Opt in. Yes. This is the way many features should be in anything's arguable. But inarguably in my mind, this is the way all these big AI features should be. You should, you can be told about it. You pick it. If you pick. No, it leaves you alone. Right. Microsoft's not good at that. So.

[B]

No, no, it seems like really want that feature out there and they feel like they own your operating system.

[C]

Yeah. And I, look, I, I see their point of view, you know, to a small degree because remember back in the day, so to speak, when you think about Office turning into a bundle and then a suite where you had these individual apps and whatever, and then it became, well, there were server, you know, Office servers, right back when we still had a lot of on prem infrastructure. But eventually that goes to Office and then Microsoft 365 and one of the benefits of these things is that once you know that the user is always going to have access to every one of the things that we make, it makes it easier to make all those things work better together because otherwise you're doing a lot of if then elses. Right. Like, oh, so you have Word. Great. Do you have Excel? No. Oh, then you can't do this thing I was going to tell you about. Like it's when you, when you have it all, you know. And look, there's anti competitive, you know, aspects of this. I understand that. But you know, one of the little benefits is if you have everything, it's easier for the developer, you know, Microsoft in this case to, you know, enhance all of them together.

[B]

Right.

[C]

You don't have to worry about whether or not they have parts of it. Little bit, you know, parts. And so yeah, the thing is not.

[B]

Going to build for a copilot PC when there's just few machines around. Like, it's just.

[C]

Yeah, right. So you can, Right. So you can kind of see the problem. Right. And so, you know, when you, I agree, for example, that recall should be off by default. They can promote it, you know, and they do. And you should decide whether or not you want to use this feature or, and then apply that to whatever else. The problem is at some point, if this is a system level feature and you, you know, as a developer, maybe you're going to support this app for whatever reason if you know, you're, you have a subset of the audience that could even get it and now you have a subset of that audience that enabled it. And so why bother, you know, and that's the other side of that coin.

[B]

Right.

[C]

Because there's two sides to this. So it's like the right thing for the consumer, for the user, just not Microsoft strong suit, you know, but you know, they were kind of forced into it. Good. And, but it also cuts their ability to kind of make this thing work better with other stuff. Right. So you know, whatever. It's the right, it's still the right choice, but just want to be cognizant of that. All right. And that's all I got because literally there was no news. We had one build all week and it was an area build that just added features we were already talked about that are in other places. So nothing exciting.

[A]

We can talk about bananas some more or apples if you want to look. Fruit kind of conversation.

[C]

I do, I do know the name for Apple in Spanish. Banana. That one's a, that's plenty of plenty.

[A]

Or Banana. El Banana.

[C]

Yeah. What is apple would be Mana.

[A]

Oh, yeah, that's right. It's kind of unpredicted, unpredictable.

[C]

Yeah, but that's just. It's, you know, it's one of those Spanish 101 type terms. Like, you'll. Right. You know, you'll get it. You'll get it the first week, you know.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

What's my name? Do you like apples? Yep. How do you like them apples?

[A]

Sugar Bee. It's my Sugar Bee. There's so many apple varieties. I think. I think Richard's got to do an apple talk. You've actually been doing a little one.

[C]

Well, you gotta. If you're gonna do that, you should talk to our apple guy because he has this giant truck with all these bins and depending on.

[A]

Does he have a horn? Is there a special 12?

[C]

Yeah. No. He'll literally say, like, my. You know, my wife's picking through. And she. He'll say something like, what are you going to do with those apples? And then she's like, I'm going to make a pie. And he's like, oh, you might want to try the. You know, whatever.

[A]

You know, the gravity.

[C]

I've already fallen asleep this. I got this far into the conversation. I've already, like. I'm looking, you know, somewhere else. But he likes the apples, you know.

[A]

All right, break time then. And then we will talk about AI.

[C]

I'll just spill my drink again and we can get going.

[A]

Paul will spill a drink in the rhythm. We do have Xbox news. We do have tips and apps, and we even have a dark beverage, which looks kind of interesting.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah, there it is.

[A]

I'm very interested.

[B]

Initially, all the way from Tasmania.

[C]

Yay. The other double.

[A]

Tasmania. The. The island is divided into north and south. And in the north, they drink one kind of beer. In the south, they drink the other kind of beer.

[C]

It's not a big drink. The blood of those who live in the north.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But they definitely have a beer rivalry going on, which I thought was kind of interesting.

[B]

Down there.

[A]

Under no circumstances will they drink Fosters. I just.

[B]

No, no, don't.

[A]

Don't even bring it up.

[B]

Not even Australian.

[C]

It's Australian for beer.

[A]

No, it's not. It's definitely not. Our show today, brought to you by Framer. We're a little punchy, aren't we? Because it's the holidays, I think.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Framer is a. You probably know, framer as a web design tool. But you know what? It's so much more now if you're still Jumping between tools just to update your website. You got to know about Framer. Framer unifies design, CMS and publishing on a single canvas, which is nice. It means no handoff, no export, import, no hassle. Everything you need to design and publish in one place. I know. You know. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites. Now Framer's redefining how we design for the web. With the recent launch of design pages free canvas based design tool. Framer is more than just a site builder. It's a true all in one design platform. From social assets to campaign visuals, to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site. Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish. And here's the best part. You can use Framer free. It's free. And I'm not talking like really limited thing. It's a full feature design tool, unlimited projects free, unlimited pages free, unlimited collaborators free. All the essentials you need. Vectors, 3D transforms, gradients and wireframes. Everything you need to design totally free. Framer is your entire workflow in one place. No figma imports, no messy HTML. It's faster, it's cleaner, it's more efficient, it's. It works the way you do. Okay? And you can do more than design just design websites. I mean, it's great for that. But also Framer lets you create social assets and campaign visuals. You could do icons, you could do all your site resources, all without leaving the tool. No switching back and forth. Did I mention it's free now there's a pro version too. I'll tell you how you can save on that in a minute. Framer stands above the others because it's not just a site builder. Framer is a true design tool that also just happens to publish professional production ready sites, ready to design, iterate and publish all in one tool. Start creating for [e-mail] design and use the code WW for a free month of Framer Pro. That's framer.com design. Use the promo code wwramer.com design promo code www. Rules and restrictions may apply. We thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly and Paul and. Are you tired? Are you tired? Richard Campbell. What's going on there? What's going on? Are you.

[B]

Battling the dog?

[A]

Oh, there was a. There was a. There was an animal in there we didn't see in the picture down below.

[B]

No, I was leaning in on the dog.

[A]

Sweetie, what kind of dog do you have?

[C]

It's a little.

[B]

It's a poodle cross.

[A]

Oh, Poodles make very good cross breed. She's.

[B]

She's a sweetheart. Yeah, but not my idea. I didn't want a dog, but I was outnumbered one to one, so.

[C]

Yeah, I lose those fights too.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. I'm. I'm liking our cat. I feel like a cat's pretty easy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I was a dog guy and I brought a dog.

[C]

I like both family, but I love.

[B]

Dogs, but they're a lot. Wouldn't keep cat up here with the coyotes around.

[A]

Oh yeah.

[B]

A little bit too hazardous actually. I'm afraid for her too. She's not big enough to deal with kayak.

[A]

Something that could defend itself, carried away.

[C]

By an eagle or something.

[B]

At one shot you should have gone up a tree. And if you didn't, it's too late.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So let's talk about AI, shall we?

[C]

Yeah, I mentioned before that I'm a fan of sorts, I guess, as much as I can be of Mustafa Suleiman. Right. It's the guy who runs. He came from, what was it called? You almost said Inception, Inflection and DeepMind. Before that, Acqua hired by Microsoft to start.

[A]

He was one of the founders of DeepMind, wasn't he? I think he was.

[C]

Oh yeah, it's him. And Dennis, this is a great interview with him in Bloomberg. Really long one. In fact, there's a podcast version. I think that one is even longer. It's actually pretty amazing. One of the things I like about this guy, and it occurred to me as I just started writing this, that he reminds me very much of Phil Spencer. Right. So that guy runs Xbox. Super plain spoken. And he'll just blurt out the truth all the time, like he can't help himself. Like, I love people like this, you know, Mustafa Sulaiman is probably a lot smarter. He's probably one of those kind of genius types or whatever.

[B]

But point out this guy's already sold through two different AI companies where everybody else is trying to get one. DeepMind got acquired by Google and Inflection got acquired as well. Clearly he's doing something right.

[C]

He's doing something right. But more importantly, because most of these people are like these kind of cold, dangerous seeming robot types, he comes across as a real human being and this is the big thing for me. He's well spoken, but he's also kind of plain spoken and just honest and I like that. So I'm not going to go through this whole interview. It's long. If you're interested in this topic at all, you should just go listen to or read it, but, but one of the first things they asked was about this agenic thing. And I kind of, I just made my case a little while ago. This is the furthest away from this. His description of this is so far from the Microsoft marketing it's almost hilarious. So literally the first thing he says is, yeah, it's not there yet. He says we're still experimenting with that. It can do it. It doesn't always get it right. It's in dev mode is the way he called it. It's not generally available yet. When it does work, it's the most magical thing you've ever seen. When it doesn't work, you just bought something you didn't want, you know, and it's like nice. So. And you know, he explains why it's going to be okay and you know, the little protection spilled in and so forth. So I like that. That was the first thing I was like, okay, nice. This is kind of, you know, there's obviously the artificial general intelligence goal that, you know, OpenAI has. He prefers something called, I think it's like super human intelligence, I guess or even super intelligence. But the idea is that the human part of this is important, that this thing should exist only to serve humans. It's not something to replace humans. This is that kind of copilot type thinking or whatever, right? That literally it's your co pilot, not its co pilot. He also makes the case because this is argument that AI is moving so quickly and it's crazy and it is. But he says he's like Microsoft, it's been around for 50 years. We're careful. 90% of the S&P 500 uses us for email os's everyday productivity. You know, we can't pushing on the.

[B]

Base on the moving fast thing too because it isn't actually moving all that fast. But everybody's very interested in making people believe it is.

[C]

So we're okay, so we're going to get to this. I'm kind of. This is fascinating to me in a way. Yeah, I guess the difference between, well, a difference between AI and what came before AI. So by which I mean OS and productivity app features, right? Spell checking, grammar checking, et cetera. These things were not in the news. So if Microsoft added like 18 new features to Microsoft 365 one month, it wasn't on CNN. No one was talking about it. Right. It was just part of our little world world right now this is a big deal because it's crossing that kind of business consumer divide. It's big with consumers. There's so much money involved. And a lot of that's the bigger.

[B]

Issue is there's way too much money.

[C]

There's a lot of drama. You know, he talks about that, right? And you know, he is a little more, I'm going to use the word sanguine. Sanguine, sanguine. Than I am. Sanguine, sanguine. Thank you. I can write, but I can't speak. But he also says, look, the clock's ticking on this. We need to watch this. He's pro regulation, which I love. He's like, there's a lot of money that had been promised in multiple directions. But he also said, he says, look, it costs 90% less today to ask a question of the best AIM models in the world compared to two years ago. So that's interesting. Now, it's still astronomical. That's like saying you could have bought a Lamborghini, but now you have to settle on a Ferrari. Whatever, it's expensive. But that's an interesting perspective, which I kind of like. He talks honestly about where Copilot is compared to, say, Gemini 3 and ChatGPT, although this is before the GPT 5.2.

[A]

Is Copilot still using OpenAI's models or is it all Microsoft?

[C]

Mostly, yeah. Yeah. They're starting to enable this.

[A]

Okay, so you choose the model when you use Copilot. What's the default?

[C]

Well, not typically, but that's where it's going. Right. In other words, if you think about how GitHub Copilot works, how a lot of these AIs work, you either get a picker or ideally, what it would really do is just use the best one every time. I think that's going to be.

[B]

The general approach is a funny concept, right?

[C]

Yeah. But he just says, look, he's like, Gemini 3 is great, but it has some niche skills that ChatGPT doesn't have. Thus Copilot doesn't have. It's very fast. But he also says, you know, copilot has features that Gemini 3 doesn't have too. And he goes, you know, he's like, we're really good at vision. You know, the thing I mentioned up top, you know, so, okay, you know, I mean, it's whatever. Like I said, I like that he's pro regulation, talks about job loss. You know, I had written, well, the article that I wrote about this, I kind of mentioned, you know, this. This kind of overblown fear that AI is stealing jobs. And of course, you can't say any or write anything online without someone coming back and saying, you're wrong, you're an idiot. Here's why. Or maybe that's just me. That's my experience. But you know, the original. Wrong again, monkey boy kind of a thing. Like, I made a joke about deep bone. I called it deep bone thrombosis at the time. And someone wrote me and said, that's not funny. I know someone who died of that. And I said, well, then we can't have humor because that would be true of anything, I guess. Right. I mean, everything I do will offend somebody, so whatever. But I had written that, you know, the AI job loss thing I think was. Is kind of like not fud. But it's like a. But it is a. It's like a sewing fear kind of a thing, you know?

[B]

Well, and it comes straight out of science fiction too.

[C]

Yeah. Like, I think people are preaching robots, like literally doing their job at a desk. Like, you come in one day and there's a white shiny robot and there's like, you know, you're not necessary anymore, Paul. We got this other guy that does this now. Anyway, so someone wrote in and said, well, that's not true. He said, I work at this company. And they fired three developers. And they said the reason they did it was because AI could do their job. And I said, that was your boss making a horrible decision. That was not AI selling a job. That was someone just being an idiot or being malicious and they were going to fire them anyway. And just using that as an excuse, which is the other thing we're going to see a lot of.

[B]

So we often do. And there's been plenty of those. There's also been mass hire backs when it didn't work out that well.

[C]

Yeah. And so you guys can all welcome or have your happy future where you're not actually an employee of that company anymore, but you're a really high paid external consultant or whatever. Right. So I mean, that's one possibility. But anyway, I don't want to go through every single thing he said, but here, anyway. But it's this. I wrote a longer piece about this from my site, but go back and read the original or listen to it on a podcast. It's a Bloomberg thing. He's an interesting guy. He might be one of the few good human beings in this part of the world, so to speak. The other one was that woman who used to be The CTO of OpenAI, who left and formed her own company. What is her name? Thinking Machines. Mira Moradi. Yeah, she's another one. She comes off as like a human. I don't see enough.

[B]

I don't know why that seems to me such an anomaly. But, yeah, you know, the bigger weirdo factor is billionaire.

[C]

Yeah, it's. Well, it's. Right, so AI is the perfect nexus of terrible. It's like billionaires, the smartest people on Earth who are usually really socially awkward or just. Which is that inhuman thing. Like when Sam Altman is like, up there with his stupid, I am a human. I have a love interest. No, you don't. No, you don't.

[B]

But Altman, Zuckerberg, Musk, they're all pretty strange. And they were all billionaires. I've met a few. Every one of them weird. Where scientists can be awkward, but often are, you know, pretty straight up, like, you get it. They. They speak in a different language, but they're not that odd.

[C]

Yeah, it's like autism 4K, you know, it's like the more advanced version. It's just. I don't know. That's. I mean, that's. That's who this part of the world.

[B]

I think if we had fewer billionaire spokesperson people, we'd be better off off.

[C]

That'd be probably better off. We had fewer billionaires. That's not as well, you know, which, by the way, is one of the things he talks about as well. Universal income, you know, is something. You know, the Star Trek future where it's like, but what about the jobs? I'm like, you know, work is called work for a reason. It's something people don't like for the most part. I mean, you know, I don't know what we're worried about exactly, but. But anyway, we talked about this last week, I guess. Okay, the Microsoft copilot news this week is hilarious and perfect. Apparently if you own a certain newer LG smart TVs, you woke up one day and there was a copilot app on your. Whatever the home screen thing is at the bottom there.

[A]

So annoying.

[B]

Didn't we just think about having the.

[C]

Option, oh, my God, they can't put a copilot key on your remote. So what they thought they would do is gouge a hole in the middle of the screen instead. And that's what they're doing. So that's too bad. The good news is I know someone who has one of these TVs, and he's like, it's just a. Just goes to the web. It's like a. Basically like a web page. It's like there's nothing to it. It doesn't do anything.

[B]

It's Not a thing.

[C]

But it is sitting there like a wart that you want to just dig out of there, but you can't. So hopefully there'll be enough.

[B]

So it's occupying screen space. It only just goes to the web and it doesn't really do anything.

[C]

So when you're taking up space, you're useless and now you're in the way. So you're perfect. It's perfect.

[B]

Really. It's just an, it's an anti branding exercise. You know, we haven't felt enough hate lately, so let's throw an icon on your TV against your will so you can hate us some more for all.

[C]

You foolish but well meaning people who bought a smart TV and then decided to sign into whatever stupid account that company has. Congratulations.

[B]

You know, you know, I have a smart TV and I configured my pie hole to block its ability to call home.

[C]

Yes. This is one of the smartest uses for that kind of thing. Totally. This is. I know I'm going to sound like an old guy, but I just want a screen. I'm old enough that I remember when you had a screen and you pressed the power button and the screen just came on. It didn't have to go through a boot process. There weren't, you know, it wasn't like.

[B]

A little os, Mr. Thurat, honestly, just.

[C]

A screen, like a dumb screen. It's like the Leo's laptop. He said, you know, it doesn't have touch. I'm like, right, it's. It's a laptop.

[B]

When you had an ethernet port on the screen, you had concerns. Right. Like this.

[A]

I don't, I think, you know, this is a big kerfuffle now because Firefox is adding AI and I think companies have got to start realizing just sprinkling things with AI is not making many requests.

[C]

We're actually going to talk about this because this is the right way to roll out AI functionality. There's no one answer, but there are different approaches and I'm going to talk about one that I think actually is in our space. I think is a good. Is like the right way to do it.

[A]

But you'd agree, stuffing it on your smart TV?

[C]

No. Microsoft stuffed it into Windows 11 and then moved it eight times, then rewrote the app two more times, made it.

[B]

Bounce a couple of ways.

[C]

It's.

[B]

The idea was to put it into the App Store and if people want it, they could install it. It's not that hard to.

[C]

Not that if you did that, no one would.

[B]

Well, well, of course they wouldn't because it's terrible. But that's the whole point, right? Like you should be good enough for people to select you and if you're not, well, you get what you deserve.

[C]

So that type of thing only happens when you have an actual fair market with competition, you know, and regulation to keep the bad behaviors in check. And Microsoft does not exist in those worlds. So it's this is a be true to yourself thing inevitably pretty much. I mean any company with enough power and market size is just going to start squeezing the vice. I mean it's just the way this has always happened. This is why we have regulations, why antitrust exists. There's no such thing as negative option.

[B]

Billing, right, where prices are going to go up unless you call us and tell us not to do it to you. It's just not right. This is what regulation is all about.

[C]

Yep. Yeah, I know I don't see this as much anymore but a couple years ago every time I wrote whatever article but whatever it was some government something it's always like you know, we don't want governments designing user interfaces. It's like eh, that's not really what's happening. But then again now we have like Google Quick Share can share to airdrop. It's like maybe this isn't such a bad idea, you know. So I don't know. There are good examples in both directions obviously. Bunch of OpenAI stuff. In the past week I've only written about a few of these things but they did come out with their response to Gemini 3 which is GPT 5.2. They came out with their response to Nano Banana Pro. I think just yesterday they announced there's a new feature of ChatGPT called Images what's in the sidebar and it's an images experience and it looks pretty great by the way.

[B]

The code red response. Right. Altman freaked out.

[C]

And then my personal favorite because I always like the kind of Godzilla versus King Kong thing. Disney invested a billion dollars in OpenAI. There's more going on here we're not 100% sure about. But part of this deal is people using ChatGPT can use Disney characters when they're making images and stuff. This was something that was illegal before. Two seconds after announcing this, Disney sued Google for doing exactly what I just said. Because you can go to Gemini or yeah, Banana Pro, whatever and say I would like something that looks like Mickey Mouse but it's me and it's a Christmas thing or whatever and it would make a Mickey Mouse thing which is technically not supposed to be Allowed. Well, Mickey Mouse actually is that.

[A]

No, some Mickey Mouse's are some Mickey Mouse.

[C]

Okay, but you get, you get the idea. There are hundreds and hundreds of Disney characters. This is, you know, they're the Nintendo of entertainment or video.

[A]

Start to make the deal while this stuff is still in copyright.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

All they got was stock I guess though. I mean, I don't know. I'm not sure I'd want OpenAI stock right now.

[C]

It's a, it's a bet, you know, I mean, better spin the wheel. We're gonna see one of those things is a million bucks or whatever, you know, I guess the others are. You're doing better. But I don't, I, you know, that was part of that Suleiman interview. He was asked they, this person only did this three times but. But said, I'm going to give you the names of people in this industry because he knows it. They all know each other. It's like to say the word or phrase that comes immediately to mind. Right. Dennis Hassabas, the guy who co founded DeepMind, great scientist, exceptional. Elon Musk is a bulldozer. And then Sam Altman he says courageous. But then he says written as a paragraph of text. But he really qualifies. Everything he says about this guy, it's like, like he may well turn out to be one of the great entrepreneurs of our generation. If he can pull it off, it will be pretty dramatic, which is not quite damning with faint praise. But you really.

[B]

A lot of qualifiers.

[C]

Yeah. Yep. But there you go again, like accurate.

[A]

Actually though, that's my point.

[C]

Like this guy's honest. And this is an example of that. This is Microsoft's. Well, one of Microsoft's biggest partners, whatever. And he's like, you know, we'll see. And also I'm writing the software I'm working on will replace everything they're doing, you know, so there's that, you know, kind of thing. Okay.

[A]

Are they still friendly partners?

[C]

I don't know that they were ever friendly. I mean they must have been in the beginning, I guess when they were so one of the things that. So, okay, I'm just, I'm going to read this entire interview because literally he touches on every one of these topics. So. So I should have said this. Actually this is one of the more important bits to this. There's a part, I guess I didn't know or I didn't explicitly know. Maybe I'll say this and you will say, no, this was obvious, but to me this was not obvious. So Microsoft invested in OpenAI. It went up to about $11 billion. Part of this partnership, which was mostly very secret, was that OpenAI had to do everything through Microsoft infrastructure. And Microsoft got everything, they made everything right and they own some percentage, we don't know. But there was. The theory is it might have been 30, 33%, whatever, but there have been two major changes to that relationship in the past year. One was earlier in the year when they restructured their partnership, which allowed OpenAI to seek other cloud infrastructures if Microsoft was asked first and said no. And now they've partnered literally with every player in the industry, including some I've never heard of, Right? So they have started, spread. They wanted way more compute, I guess, than Microsoft was willing to provide. Then in October, OpenAI restructured. So they have a for profit company that's owned by a nonprofit company, kind of like mozilla. Microsoft owns 27%. I'm like, okay. But then the way he describes it, because he's working on this thing that will replace what OpenAI is doing, he doesn't really talk about that too, too much, I mean, which makes sense, but that's essentially what he's doing. And he described some bits of this partnership I didn't know was the case. So until OpenAI restructured and they restructured their partnership yet again, Microsoft was not allowed by contract to pursue AGI or superintelligence independently. The deal was OpenAI would do that, Microsoft would get it and they would have this infrastructure, you know, the hardware, and Microsoft could just do what they were doing. But part of that new agreement was, okay, you couldn't get infrastructure somewhere else, but we're going to do our own thing too. And that was part of it. I thought that was kind of interesting. So whatever happens, as of today, Microsoft still has a license to every single thing that OpenAI makes through 2032. So whatever they come out with, you know, GPT 5.2, like I said a day later, Microsoft said, hey, this is in Microsoft 365 Copilot. It's in Copilot. You know, they get everything right. And so there's no six months or year they don't get it. They get it immediately. They own it or they own the right to it. They license it. They have that license. So interesting. I didn't know that Microsoft was prevented from pursuing this stuff independently. So that was new to me. But maybe that was common, maybe that was common knowledge. I don't know. Oh, yes. So just because we've talked about it, Opera Neon which is their agencic browser is now sort of generally available. I think this might still be a wait list, but I think anyone can get it is 20 bucks a month. So you either want this or you don't. You know, it's like Comet. Well, no, it's not like Comet because it's literally, I think you can only use it if you pay. Well, it's like Comet, but you still have to. You have to pay, I guess is the way to say it. And then because you guys somehow talked into this early, somehow Google announced something yesterday which is basically like that Outlook. You open Outlook and it's like, here's your day, here are your meetings, here's what's going on, whatever. But for Gmail, it's not built into Gmail. They're doing it as a Google Labs account experiment. It's called cc, like CC bcc, like for email. And the email it produces looks really cool. You can totally customize it. You interact with the natural language. You can email the thing back or just email it and suggest changes and say, I want this, but I don't want this, or I want now I want this, whatever it is. And it's just like a little, you know, here's your day thing. And that's neat. And I was thinking, you know, they have all these things that people largely have not heard of, like Mixboard, right? Or notebooklm, which somehow is gotten pretty popular. But these are like things that Microsoft would just put into what they had typically. Like, in other words, if Microsoft was going to do something like Notebook lm, which actually they have, they would build it into something they already have. In this case, they build it into Copilot. But you could imagine them building into say like OneNote or maybe even Loop if they were going to keep going with that. So Google has this kind of, you know, obviously Google does AI and they have AI everywhere but. But they also, you can kind of tell with these things, it's like, okay, we think this is going to be a good idea. The CC thing will absolutely be a featured Gmail. It's just obvious. But we're going to experiment with it first. And it made me think with all the forced copilot usage and all the changing of UIs and all the stuff Microsoft's been doing, it's like, maybe this is a better way to roll out AI, right? Somehow I think both of you at one part, another on the show said something like, you should be able to go to that thing and get it if you want it, but you should never be bothered by it if you don't want it. It's like, yep. And that's what this stuff is, right? Like, I don't even know how you'd find out about this stuff. Like, you. Google just does these things. They're experimenting. Like I said, I think CC is an obvious one. It will become a part of Gmail, in my opinion. I don't know.

[B]

I'm really pleased that, that they're at the place where they're now doing that. Right. Like that says the Gmail team is now taking what's happening over on Gemini seriously enough that.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. But the fascinating thing to me is they're not just pulling the trigger on just, all right, we're putting this now. We're going to put this in Gmail right now, right? And it's like, no, let's experiment with, let's see how it goes. We're going to get feedback, we might make changes, whatever. They don't do this with everything. I should be clear about that. But I like the feel of this. And oddly, as I started to look into this and I was looking at things like, well, what else does Google have that might be considered this kind of a lab type experiment or whatever, I was reminded that back in September, Microsoft announced something called Windows AI Lab. Right. And Windows AI Lab is what Google Labs is to Windows, oddly. And the idea is you'll be, I don't, I've never seen it. I'm not even positive they've ever done anything like it. But you might get a little pop up in like the Settings app and it will say something like, hey, maybe you'd like to try some experimental features in Paint or photos or whatever. And you can sign up or you can say, I'm not interested. The button that doesn't exist in any UI anywhere in Windows, by the way. And it just leaves you alone. What an idea. What an idea. Actually, that might be in the. Maybe that's in the Settings pane for Paint or whatever. So I'm not sure I'm going to run paint and see if I see this. I've never seen this. Like I said, I've never. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I'm kind of saying it doesn't exist. Like I don't, you know, it's a good idea anyway. So even Microsoft, I'm sorry, not Paint Notepad, even Microsoft has. At least part of it has come to this. Maybe we should try. Maybe this should. These should be experimental, right? I mean, I think I think things like agents right now should be really experimental. Right?

[B]

Sure.

[C]

Yeah. I don't see this in here, but.

[B]

Well, I think, anyway, part of the frustration that people have is simply presenting these things as products when they clearly aren't products yet. Right?

[C]

That's right. That's right.

[B]

And if you just showed them as the experiments they were so that we could be experimenting with them and set our expectations.

[C]

I always, you know, this is another one. Like, remember, I think it was. It was Qualcomm. This would have been three, four years ago. Longer, I don't know. But, you know, Cristiano Amora's on stage. He's talking about 5G. It was still coming at the time. And he says, this thing is going to be so fast. You're going to be boarding a plane. You're standing in line to get on the plane and be like, oh, I forgot to download a movie to watch on my phone. And you're going to go to your phone, whatever it is, Netflix, whatever, find the thing you want. Want. Click the download button and nothing will be done downloading before you hand the guy the ticket. Now, I'm not saying no one has ever not done that or whatever. I know I will now hear from the guy that has. But the truth is, if you didn't download something before you got on a plane, I get bad news for you. You're probably not getting it right. Like, even if you have WI fi on the plane, you're probably not getting it. So that always seemed like this wonderful dream. Like, it's going to be, like, instantaneously fast, you know, which is why we need 6G now. But. But I feel like a lot of the AI stuff is a little bit like that. It's been sold as too futuristic and too exciting and too much. And then you see what it is, and you're like, okay, so I made a watercolor picture of a banana, and you're like, I mean, it's. It's cool. It's, you know, I. It's nice. But I mean, it's not. But it's not curing cancer, right? Like, so I think the hype has outperformed the reality.

[B]

Oh, no. And I think. I think it's part of what's turning everybody off. It's just like, enough, enough.

[C]

Well, it's incessant. I mean, it's just incessant.

[A]

Remember that great chemistry demo they did at Ignite?

[B]

I thought that was really cool. That's the thing is, there's such excellent ones. Like, that's Right. Let's not ignore the fact that DeepMind has solved protein folding.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And has published 200 million, you know, completed protein folds after 60 years of effort. It was a. By humans, was able to produce 150. Right. Like, right.

[A]

I remember it was folding at home. People were throwing in their extra CPU.

[B]

Folders to help and they managed to get one. One.

[A]

So really, is that all they got? Is that all folding at home, guys?

[B]

One.

[A]

Yeah, it was a computationally challenging thing.

[B]

Incredibly difficult. Yeah. But, you know, once again, it's like there's certain classes of work that generative AI does an astonishing job on, and this is one of them.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And it's incredibly important.

[C]

Not so much. Yeah. So you may. What's the name of this company now? Grammarly, Which I. Not Grammarly. God, these are different companies. I'm sorry. Duolingo got in a little bit of trouble sort of when the CEO said, yeah, we're not going to hire any more of these outside. We're going to have employees, but we're not going to have any more of these consultant types. We're going to use a lot of AI and it's going to dramatically increase the volume and quality of the content we have in that content being language courses of various units and sizes, whatever. So I'm using this app. I've been using this app for probably, actually it's over a decade, actually. But whatever the timeframe for Spanish. And so I had gotten up to level 130 and so Duolingo at some point realigned their courses so that, well, first expanded their courses and then realigned them so they match up with whatever the international standard is for language learning. So. So you can go in and say, well, between 121 and 130, you're like a G6 or whatever the terminology is, and you should be able to understand basic phrases and talk to people fairly fluently, whatever it is. So I was thinking, it's Spanish, right. So this is going to be like one of the most popular ones. I have this thing. It's going to be infinite. There was a time 10 years ago plus, where I finished French and finished Spanish later, but now those things have expanded to the point where I couldn't live long enough to finish these things, except I finished Spanish. And the thing is, as I told Richard when he was here, like, I don't know Spanish. I know some Spanish, but. But I'm like, like, I'm like, I. I'm like, I don't know how. What so it turns out their language coverage of Spanish is not complete. If you go and look in their little guide to it, it's from 130 to 1 to 140 will equate to whatever the number system is for the standard. But they don't have those courses, so, like. But you have AI. How is this. Oh, Siri. Why did you have to. Seriously, Siri just came up.

[A]

Seriously.

[C]

Well, she's like, I'm sorry. I don't know. You're always apologizing. Siri, just be. You. You're stupid. It's okay.

[A]

The word for apple is manzana.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. The word for banana. Stop talking. What are you doing, you insane person?

[B]

Stop.

[A]

I'm at.

[C]

Anyway, it's the.

[A]

It's funny because it's the AI you least want to talk to, which is.

[C]

The one that's always piping up. I know the most. Someday, maybe I'll want to talk to Syria. Today's not that day.

[A]

Gemini is going to be the default. It might be good, but I don't.

[C]

Have anywhere to go now. Like Duolingo. There's no more courses, so I would have to go in and configure it. I have to say I want to throw away all my progress and just start Spanish over, so I can be like, meamo Pablo again and go back to lesson one or whatever. And that's bizarre to me because there should be infinite Spanish lessons. This should be the one. One of the five that they just have a million, you know, Thing.

[A]

Yeah. Of all the languages in all the.

[C]

World, that blew my mind. I guess I'm gonna learn chess. I don't know.

[A]

Is that a language?

[C]

No, but they teach chess and math and music, and they teach.

[A]

Oh, interesting. I didn't know that.

[C]

Yeah, no doubt. It's all terrible. I'm sure it's just frustrating.

[A]

You see that? Coursera is buying you Demi.

[C]

No. Wow, that's interesting.

[A]

Yeah. That's a big.

[C]

If you had said Corsair was buying you Demi, that would have been even more interesting. That would be something. But Coursera is buying Udemy. Interesting. I guess that makes sense, right? I mean, 2.5 billion. That makes no sense. Really? They have that many? Wow. How is it worth a lot of money?

[A]

You know what the two letters are that make it worth 2.5 billion? AI?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Coursera to buy Udemy, creating a $2.5 billion firm to target AI training.

[C]

They should rename AI to AIOU. You know, I love it. Sorry. E, I, E, I, A, I, O, U, I don't know how to say it, but. Yeah, one of those things.

[A]

I love it. I've taken courses on both. I don't. There's not that much to distinguish them.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Right. Yeah. And what's the big one, though? Because I still did pick.

[A]

I thought Coursera was the big one.

[C]

There's a big one. There's another one. I don't know how I'd find this. I get emails from. I've taken courses at this other one that I can't.

[A]

Well, there's. You know, LinkedIn learning is huge.

[C]

I would never use anything that had the word LinkedIn in it.

[A]

It's a Microsoft company.

[C]

That's terrible, though. Much. What is the name of this thing?

[A]

I've done courses from MIT on.

[C]

Yeah, no, it's.

[A]

What was the name of it? I can't remember now.

[C]

God, it's bug. I can't believe. I can't think of this.

[A]

EdX. That was the one I. I used. I really, like.

[C]

I feel like I've used all of these things at some point. Right. Like.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

What?

[A]

I did some programming courses on EDX that were good, but that was because it came from uc. The British uc. University of British Columbia. Ubc. Excellent, excellent courses.

[C]

This is going to bug me now.

[A]

I'm taking MIT open courseware courses on. But I'm doing that on YouTube, so I don't know.

[C]

This is very strange.

[A]

The big four, according to somebody, are Udemy, Coursera, edX and LinkedIn Learning. So I don't know what you're thinking of, Paulie. Oh, master class, maybe?

[C]

No, this is very strange to me. All right, I'll figure it. I can't. I don't understand why I can't. I just.

[A]

No, I don't think HubSpot's one of them. Gum Road. OpenAI cookbook log. No, no, these are not. What am I? It's the best online learning in 2025.

[C]

I feel like. I will find this. I will find this beat code.

[A]

I don't know what you're thinking of. I don't know. Are you thinking of, like, the brick and mortar ones?

[C]

No, no, this is an online thing. I've actually paid for courses for programming. I think it was early iOS and Android stuff.

[A]

Khan Academy. Teachable.

[B]

I love.

[C]

You're like. I've heard of all of these things and none of them are that thick.

[A]

You're thinking of.

[C]

It's crazy.

[A]

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

[C]

What's going on? I'll find it. I Swear to God, this isn't just in my brain, but it is right now, just in my brain, which means I can't access it. I don't know what's going on top anyway.

[A]

Okay, okay, okay.

[C]

Have we think we pretty much handled that? Yeah, I think so.

[A]

The AI segment. Have we done the AI segment? AIs in everything, including.

[B]

Are we going to let the AI segment go? That's really the question.

[C]

Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff I didn't put in on purpose.

[A]

Well, that's fine because there's a whole show coming up in about, I don't know, an hour.

[B]

Yep, Yep.

[C]

Udacity.

[A]

Udacity. Why didn't I think of that one?

[C]

Well, why didn't I think of it? That's the only one. This is one I've spent the most money on.

[A]

I've spent money on Udacity, too. I actually like Udacity a lot.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

This week on Intelligent Machines, we are interviewing CJ Trowbridge on AI, sustainability and resiliency.

[C]

So that'll be a short conversation, huh?

[A]

I know they're a YouTube. YouTube did their graduate degree in artificial intelligence. Ethical artificial intelligence, also an oxymoron. That'll be interesting.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Well, I want to cover the whole range of topics, and I think one of the big topics right now of AI is sustainability is can we afford it? Can we do it? It's killing RAM prices. It's killing all power prices, apparently. I saw a story this week that all of the skilled construction workers are employed building data centers, so you can't get them to build bridges anymore.

[B]

We're creating another supply chain crisis, essentially.

[A]

Yeah. The infrastructure issue, and a lot of.

[B]

This is pre order, like, it's. They. They don't even have the gear. Right. Like.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And you have to wonder, like, if when the bubble finally bursts, like, how much of this just won't ever appear. Right.

[A]

In any event, we also, I should mention, as I did earlier, that there will be a very special Windows Weekly next week, because it's going to be not. Yeah, it is going to be Christmas Eve, so actually, there'll be nothing. Come to think of it, there'll be nothing. It'll be very special in that there will be a hole in your podcast app where Windows Weekly used to be, because I can't make people work. We're going to recharge, Recharge, rest, relax, recharge. And actually, I don't. I shouldn't when I'm gonna. Because I enjoy it. We do have the special recharge logo. Creation of Joe our. Where'd it go? Did Joe. Did you take it down? Creation of our res. Here it is. This is a special badge just for you, Richard Campbell. Some days the brown liquor segment starts a little early. This is. You were actually playing with a dog, but we thought, we, we actually thought you'd passed away, so.

[B]

No, I hadn't died yet.

[C]

Not quite yet. I did have that effect on people.

[B]

I'm getting better.

[C]

I'm sorry, you're still talking like, okay.

[A]

I get it, clonk. But for New Year's Eve, we are going to do a fun holiday special with Richard and Paul sitting around the fire sharing stories. That was a lot of fun. I enjoyed doing that. All of our shows are doing best of us, but we're doing some different, different things. Intelligent machines. We're going to take what, what I think are the most, some of the most important interviews we did of the year. Ray Kurzweil, Emily Bender, Mike Masnik, Pliny. It'll be very interesting. We're going to do for security now. We're going to do a legendary episode, the vitamin D episode. We're going to bring that out. People haven't heard that in a while, so it's going to be a little different. And then we are Sunday doing a special twit, which is going to be a lot of fun. You guys have done our holiday shows. Steve Gibson will be back. Paris Martineau and Micah Sargent. We'll sit around and probably look back at the year. Micah covers all the tech news and Paris covers intelligence and radioactive shrimp. And Steve Gibson cover security. So we'll probably look.

[C]

Radioactive shrimp.

[A]

That's her. So her beat at Consumer Reports. She's an investigative reporter for food safety and she broke the story of radioactive shrimp and lead in your protein supplements.

[C]

Yeah, but is any of that worse than Copilot? I'm just.

[A]

No.

[C]

Just asking questions.

[B]

No.

[A]

All right. We do have the Xbox segment. We have the brown Laker segment. We have lots more coming up. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Our show this week brought to you by Outsystems, the number one AI powered, low code development platform. This is actually very cool. You know, in business there's always been this conundrum, build versus buy. When you need custom software, do you go out and you buy an off the shelf piece of software that sort of fits, sort of does the job, but something everybody in your, you know, area is using, but maybe you can make it work or do you do as we did, to our dismay, build your own at great expense, great loss of resource and you know, you know, honestly. And we spent more money maintaining the darn thing than we did created in the first place. Our sales system, it's a good system. It works. We're glad we have it. But it was build versus buy. That's always been a tough one. Well, now there's a third way. Thanks to Outsystems. Outsystems creates custom software using low code plus AI. Now there's a match that really works. Organizations all over the world are creating custom apps, AI agents on the Outsystems platform. And there's a lot of reasons for it because Outsystems is all about outcomes. They're very focused on giving you an app that changes how you do things, makes it better. Helping teams quickly deploy apps. And now AI agents as well and delivering results. And they have the success stories. Go to the website, you'll see. They helped a top US bank deploy an app for customers to open new accounts on any device. So it's mobile and desktop. It delivered 75% faster onboarding time. They helped one of the largest brewers in the world, the one with the green bottles, you know how they are, deploy a solution to automate tasks to clear bottlenecks, which delivered a savings of 1 million development hours. How much would be a million? How much do you pay a developer now? Multiply that by a million. That's a lot of money. They even helped a global insurer accelerate development of a portal and app for their employees. So this was a intranet app which delivered a 360 degree view of customers and a great way for insurance agents to grow policy sales. They did it all without systems. Outsystems platform is truly a game changer for development teams with AI powered low code. This is, you know, of course, I should have known. This is the way to do it. Teams can build custom future proof applications because you can always adapt them, right? They could build AI agents as well. And they could do this as fast as buying an app. But the great thing about Outsystems is it's a platform so you get built in. Table stakes, starting point, fully automated architecture, securities built right in. All the integrations with all the tools you use, built right in. You get data flows, you get permissions, you get all this stuff that you want, right? And that's, and that's the starting point with Outsystems, it's so easy to create your own purpose built apps and agents. There really is no longer a need to consider off the shelf software solutions again. And please trust me, do not start from scratch writing your own either. You need Outsystems. OutSystems, the number one AI powered low code development platform. Learn more at outSystems.com TWIT. That's outSystems. TWIT. Twit. We thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly. All right, back to little Paulie Thurat and Ricardo Campbello and mobile gaming. We're going to do kind of a gaming on gaming here, little gaming wave.

[C]

I know that Epic Games and Tim Sweeney are controversy in some circles, but I think we all they're jumping up and down right now. Dead of thanks one huge against Google. Google appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. It was not interested.

[B]

That was the case where the judge in the regional area said, you guys need to settle this.

[C]

Yeah. He said, listen, you don't want me to rule in this case, you should talk. You're going to talk to a mediator. And he did. Nothing happened. He's like, all right, well here we go. Nope, went bad. So the thing that's most amazing about this honestly is that after the fact they settled. So Google actually no, it's even better. They extended this thing out more years. They applied it worldwide. Epic is like, they're a great partner again. Thank you. And now Fortnite's back in the Google Play store in the United States. Like they're just getting along great. It took five years of billions of dollars of legal battles, but Google finally saw the common sense that I've been trying to ask these companies that were so terrible to just sort of understand and learn from Microsoft. Like, you know, if you fight this thing, you might get an outcome you don't like. But if you work towards settling it and work with these regulators in particular, you can at least have a say in your future.

[B]

You don't want case law around this. It eliminates your choices.

[C]

Yeah. So Apple did better against Epic until they did what Apple does, which is belligerently not do anything that's required of them under the law. And the judge dropped the hammer on this company back in, I don't know when it was July or mid year, I don't remember. It was the most incredible legal thing I've ever read in my life. She was like, all right, I'm just taking everything away. You're not going to be able to get any fees, you're not going to look. She's like, we're just going to give them everything they wanted and we're going to apply it to the whole market. So like, good job Apple. So they appealed that and they lost. So there's this one thing that I think people have widely misunderstood is that Google or Apple was trying to charge a 27% fee on purchases that were made outside of its App Store, which is like insanity. And they were saying, the panel of judges that issued this ruling said, you know, Apple should be able to recoup something when their intellectual property is used. And, and the judge can think about that, that she can ask the two companies to do it, or we can just say what we think is fair. It's going to be closer to zero than it is to 27, I can tell you that. But if you listen to Tim Sweeney, his thing is like they can never do what they're doing. It's not what you think it is. It's more like maybe per app there's a $1,000 to $2,000 fee because there are human beings involved. It's a one time thing. It's not like a per app thing. It's like if the purchase occurs outside the App Store, Apple doesn't get anything. Like that's the way it's supposed to be. So Apple could have charged 10%, that's all I'm saying. And no one would have said a word. This never would have happened, you know, and they just, it's greedy. So I think that's beautiful. So there's that, I guess that's technically gaming related. The Xbox December update came out yesterday. It's a small one in the sense that there's only two updates. And I was gonna say, yeah, neither are directly related to the console at all, but, but they're both pretty good ones. So the Xbox mobile app, so the app for Android, iPhone or iPad added the ability to buy apps or games rather back early in the year because of the various legal issues around the world that these companies have had. But now they've added a store tab directly to it. So it's making it a lot easier and nice. The other big one, and this is that Bluetooth LE thing I was talking about earlier. If you have an Xbox wireless headset, you have a firmware update to install and it's going to lower latency, better battery life, super wideband stereo, voice broadcast audio capabilities, like really, really good stuff. And specifically on a Windows 11 PC. So whatever, it's good. Makes sense it would be a small update at this time of year. Microsoft announced no new games. No, this is like a system update right in January, Microsoft's going to have another Xbox developed direct event. This is where mostly third parties, but not all third parties come and show off whatever games are coming in the future. This is one of those vague ones because they're like. Well, we don't really have any specific games. There's a lot of stuff, though. Of course there's a lot of stuff. Playground games will be part of it. These are the guys who do one of the fours, I think the 4 is Horizon games, I think. But remember Halo Campaign Evolved? Is that the right name? Yeah. And there's also like a new kind of origin story kind of a thing for Gears of War that are both coming out next year, too. Those are historically any of the biggest Xbox games, our biggest Xbox studio game, Microsoft Studio games. So I would imagine they're going to be part of it. So once we get past the holidays, we'll see when this happens. Do we have a date on this one? I don't think we do, no. Just January. So not a lot of details yet, but there's stuff to look forward to after the holidays. And, man, I almost didn't write about this because I know just by writing it I'm going to manifest that it never happens. But supposedly. Well, we have been getting rumors about A Half Life 3 Finally. Right. 20 years. Literally 20 years later. 21. Whatever. Years later. Now the rumor is it's going to launch with the Steam machine, which is that little kind of consolidated PC type thing they announced about a month and a half ago.

[B]

Gabe Cube.

[C]

Gabe Cube. The problems here are many. One is that because the cost of RAM has been going up, this thing was already going to be more expensive than people kind of wanted. Yeah. So it might be delayed. And what this game needs is another delay. But I guess if you're talking 21 or 22 years, what's the difference?

[B]

Yeah, what's the difference? Just wait.

[C]

What's the difference is I literally would drop everything I'm doing to play this game all the way through.

[B]

And this is the brilliant thing about if you actually want to make a new console come out on the market and actually have a splash. Yeah. Oddly enough, you need an exclusive title. And if that exclusive title was a new Half Life game, you might just pull it off.

[A]

Can't get better than that.

[B]

But you'll ruin it if you overprice the machine and over, you know, and. Or strip it down or.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

People would pay almost anything for. I know, Half Life three. I think.

[C]

I feel like I'd pay a thousand bucks to Play this game right now, just. I could just have it right now. I'd do it.

[A]

So like the assets and like, like the code was just kind of like frozen in amber somewhere and.

[C]

Well, I hope not. Right. I hope it's not a 2004 era Half Life 2 engine game. And I don't think it will be.

[A]

I mean, but I mean it's gotta. Some of it had to have been done 20 years ago. I don't know if they started, you know, and along comes.

[C]

There have been different, you know, pushes to make this happen, obviously.

[A]

Is it the same studio? Are they even alive? Are they around?

[B]

Oh yeah, no, the folks that work at Valve don't leave. It's an unbelievably great job, isn't it?

[A]

It's the same company.

[B]

That's right, same company.

[A]

So really this is their own in.

[B]

House and they, and they run a super flat organization where you pretty much decide what project you want to work on. So the reason the Half Life didn't come along is because they all moved to other projects that were making them more money.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It wasn't even more complicated than that. Right. Like that was the reality was that massive multiplayer games was just so much more money.

[C]

We've gotten a lot of things we didn't want and we didn't get this one thing we really want. And I find that to be more than vaguely upset.

[A]

It's really curious, like is it on floppy? Like the work they had done is.

[B]

Like big hard drives.

[C]

I mean, sitting.

[A]

On hard drives somewhere, keeping it up.

[C]

The portal games have kind of come and gone since then. Right. There's the Left for Dead games and you can see the, I got it, say DNA or whatever of the, you know, Alex, the Half Life VR game.

[B]

But they also had written themselves into a corner like this prospect that you were going to.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Go to the alien world and so forth.

[C]

You mean the prospect Nova.

[B]

They were in trouble story wise.

[A]

So here's my theory. They have all the. They have assets and they have a story and they have a storyline.

[C]

They're going to use AI to upsize it and then write the story.

[A]

They'll upsize it. They have an updated engine. I presume that. I mean the Half Life engine's gotten better and better and better.

[C]

Right.

[A]

So really they have an engine. It's really taking the existing engine and taking the old assets, somehow updating them, maybe finishing the story. They must.

[C]

That's fine with me. What you've just described is something I would pay money for. That would be Great.

[B]

And we're also not talking about Half Life 2 episode 3, which never came.

[C]

Right. We're talking about a Half Life, which also is a. Come on. These are games you'd have to really think about this. Like, who have you. Which brand have you seen live the most? Where it's kind of hard to remember, but Half Life and Half Life two and then the add ons like Blue Origin and then this like Black Mesa, that kind of modernization for most of the portal. Portal games. I played all of these things through so many times. So many times. And obviously at this point, the original Half Life doesn't live up graphically, but as a story, at least the first. There are three that you were referencing that.

[A]

This is. Paul, I love it. That you republished from 2004, your original Half Life 2 review. You republished it in 2018, seven years ago.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

So you've been living in hope.

[C]

These are, these games were just fundamental. I mean, they're, you know.

[A]

Oh, they were absolutely, absolutely.

[C]

Oh my God. But you know, Half Life two, I mean that, you know that you're not really there, but you can make.

[A]

You did this when the orange box came out. That's why this is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[C]

But it's. It can look a lot better than this. Like Black Mesa looks better than this. As does the, you know, they did the remastering, I think think this past year. Right.

[A]

So you spend $500 million, get artists in, just create new assets.

[B]

You've got all the art will update, redone two ways about it.

[C]

Half Life is like Star Wars. I owned it in every format available every time. And Half Life, the world moves on. So PC, we go to Xbox 360. Yep, Xbox, absolutely. They do the remastered version. Black. I'm playing this game again.

[A]

Beatles album ever.

[C]

Same thing.

[A]

I'm going to buy The Pink Floyd. 50th anniversary.

[C]

I wish you were here. Like the Anthology 4 comes out, you're like, thank you. There's nothing new on here. I don't care. It's 18 hours long. I'm listening to all of this.

[B]

The only other game I ever found as replayable as Half Life 2 was fallout new Vegas. Interesting. And actually a lot of those Fallout games, well, they're New Vegas because there was so many ways to end that game. Like they feel kindred.

[A]

They feel like kindred spirits to the original Half Life too. I mean they're very much the next thing.

[C]

They actually don't hold up quite as well. But the first three Halo games, the single player campaigns were Other games I had played many, many times, again and again. But I think the problem is once you get into really good multiplayer type things, at least for me, the single player didn't, you know, because it could be anything at any time. You know, even though you're playing the same levels over and over again, like the. The circumstances are going to be a little different every time. Whereas if you play through Half Life 2 today, there aren't five different outcomes. Right. Like you're going to play through Half Life 2. It's not like on Rails, but it's also a story. Right. It's a. You know, it's. Whatever it is, it's a story. It's that one. To me, the Half Life 2, especially to me, really holds up. But.

[A]

Oh, well, I hope you're right. I mean, you have good reason for believing this.

[C]

No. Other than.

[A]

Well, no, it would be a brilliant marketing move. I mean, it would sell those steambots.

[C]

Sorry I didn't write. I didn't pull this out of thin air. There's a game journalist who has. Sources have told them this is happening. They'd given them very specific dates for the release, but it's been pushed back. And he says, you know, I'm glad I didn't say anything about the dates. Not just because I would have been like wrong, but because he thinks this was a phishing thing on Val's part. They were trying to find out who was leaking information. I mean, obviously this is a big deal, but I, you know, again, why wouldn't they just announce it right now? You announced the box. It's going to come with this game. Are you kidding me?

[A]

Because they don't.

[C]

You could take pre orders right now, sight unseen, you know.

[B]

Yep. I think I'd even order one. One?

[C]

Yeah. And I'm buy one of these things.

[B]

Just to play Master Race and I'd still. Game's too good.

[A]

During COVID I bought a big PC just to play Valheim and it saved my life. During COVID Hundreds of hours. Yeah. So a really good game. It's worth it. Think of how.

[C]

I mean that type of game, like per hour. What's the. Is there like an Assassin's Creed game or just like a. I don't know what it is like a dun. Like what holds up like the type of game you just walk around, it's just. It's just, you know, like Minecraft. It's just stuff like everywhere, like you just keep walking and there's new stuff like. Like you'll never. You don't Ever hit the edge of the world? You know, it just keeps going. Like, what's the best of those games?

[B]

Like, yeah, I think Assassin's Creed Odyssey was like that. Where I remember one point I just was ignoring the game. I literally followed an old woman who would walk to the market, buy the stuff to make bread, go back, live.

[C]

Her life, and you're like, yep, it's just a spawn.

[A]

It's like traveling through history, traveling through time.

[C]

Yeah, that's great.

[A]

I did that too. Yeah. World of Warcraft never. You never get tired of that.

[B]

Yeah, well, those guys work really hard to keep the story moving, too. Right. Like, they keep making new games.

[C]

Inside of World of Warcraft is Activision, Right? This is the same.

[B]

Yeah. This Blizzard, right?

[C]

This is the Blizzard. Oh, I'm sorry. Blizzard. Okay, never mind.

[A]

It's all the same now, buddy.

[B]

It's all the same. Microsoft, all the way down.

[A]

Microsoft now. All righty.

[B]

If they want that C machine to work, this is how you do it. This is the title.

[A]

Well, you know, Gabe knows that. You know, he knows that.

[B]

Gabe's no fool, man. And I don't know why he wants.

[A]

It's really whether it's doable. All it is is whether it's doable.

[B]

I just don't understand why that hardware.

[C]

Is not a thing that makes sense to buy.

[A]

No. Whether Half Life 3 is doable, whether they can actually do it.

[B]

Well, have they got a story that's worthy? Because that's a tough franchise to step into.

[A]

Yeah. You wouldn't want to put out a dud.

[B]

Well, it's like the Wachowskis trying to deal with making another Matrix film. Like it was, essentially.

[C]

Until they blew it all in the first one, and it was like, yeah.

[A]

There was nothing left.

[C]

I'm happy Gilmore 2. Nailed it. I mean. Yeah. I don't know.

[A]

You know, I'd never seen Happy Gilmore, so I thought I watched that first. Yeah. But I couldn't bring myself.

[C]

Then you watch them back to back.

[A]

Another one.

[C]

Yeah, there is, but it's.

[A]

One was enough. I was satisfied.

[C]

I always confused his movies. It's the one with the Bob Barker, and he's like. He attacks him on the golf course. It must be because it was the golf course.

[A]

That's Happy Gilmore.

[C]

Yeah. Oh, my God, it's the best. Also, the Steve Buscemi character. He calls to apologize for being a jerk in high school. He's like, oh, I didn't. Never thought anything about it. Don't worry about it. And then he hangs up and he has this list that says people to kill and he crosses that guy's name up. This is so excellent. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen. It's just beautiful.

[A]

Well, I guarantee you somebody who is working On Half Life 3 is listening right now and kind of.

[C]

They're just chuckling to themselves.

[A]

Yeah. So message me on signal. Nobody will know. Don't use your work phone. Leo laporte.

[C]

I'll give you my credit card number right now. I'm not asking for a gift. I want to.

[A]

I will tug your ear if we're on set.

[C]

Yes, exactly.

[A]

Give us just a clue, a hint, a little something. We will take a break and come back with the back of the book in just a little bit. You're watching Windows Weekly, last episode of last official. Now this isn't really the last episode, but the last News episode of 2016.

[C]

We're really having a trouble describing this situation. You know, it's the. Well, I feel like we should.

[A]

It's the penultimate episode of 2020, but we've recorded it.

[C]

The ultimate.

[A]

We did it. Out of order.

[B]

This is.

[A]

This is actually. This is Abbey Road. This is.

[C]

Yes, this is. This is. Thank you. This is our Abbey.

[A]

This is our Happy road.

[C]

That's exactly that. Now we have figured out that's how.

[A]

We do the show.

[C]

That's exactly it. This is my Maxwell Silver Hammer. Yep. I knew I'd get there.

[A]

Our show today is brought to you by Cashfly, not only our sponsor, but literally, literally, quite literally brought to you by Cashfly because they're our content delivery network and they have been practically since day one on Twitch. For over 20 years, CashFly has held a track record for high performing, ultra reliable content Delivery serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. And we know how good they are because we've been using Cashfly for almost, I think all of that time. 18 years, 17 years. We love their lag free video loading, their hyper fast downloads, their friction free site interactions. I am approaching approached practically weekly by other CDNs saying, hey, we can give you a deal. And I just say, no. I got Cash Fly. I got Cash Fly. Join companies like Adobe, Microsoft, lg, the NFL and many more that rely on Cash Fly. You know, most CDN providers kind of hold you back, you know, you can only do what they let you do with Cash Fly, you get a tailored solution and perf. I, I will vouch for this. Performance obsessed partners. So your CDN becomes your competitive advant. Cashfly's proof is in The Petabytes events stream smoothly to millions of concurrent users worldwide. Online games start 70% faster. They scale instantly. 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. You can vouch for that. Verify that by going to our website, press the play button on our video. Boom, boom. And we, and that's important because we know if you get there, you know this. You press the play button and you have to wait at more than a second or two, that's it, you're gone. Podcasts like ours reach global audiences at record speed at any scale we deliver. I think it's two petabytes a month. It's more than a petabyte a month of data on Cash Fly without a hitch. Cashfly delivers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs and allows you to shield your site content in their cloud, ensuring a 100% cache hit ratio. And I love this because this, they did this for us, they'll do it for you. Never pay for service overlap again with flexible month to month billing for as long as you need it. We didn't know anything. We had no idea, you know, when the most downloads would happen, when we need the most bandwidth, the least, all of that. So they, they were flexible with us for as long as we needed until we could figure that out. And then you get discounts for fixed terms. Once you're happy, it's not just us, you can design your own contract. When you switch to Cashfly Cash Fly, it's like gaining an extension of your team, the best engineers. When your entire business model depends on delivering massive content like ours, you don't want to go it alone. And with Cashfly, you can count on personalized help anytime from a tenured expert who gets it. Engineer to engineer here 24 7. Learn how you can get your first month [e-mail] TWiT that's C-A-H-E F L Y.com TWiT Cash Fly. Thank you, Cash Fly. Now the moment you've all been waiting for. The back of the book.

[C]

Well, since this is our ultimate slash penultimate Abbey Road episode, yes, I thought I would kind of think about the like tip and App of the Year. The app one maybe is iffy, but Tip of the year is unfortunately. I just talked about this last week, but it's definitely this deinsurdify Windows 11 stuff. So whether it's tiny 11 builder, if you're doing a clean install, win 11 debloat after the fact and then the combination of Rufus MsEdge Direct and Explorer Patcher just to. To get rid of all the other stupid stuff going on in Windows. And between these things, this works. Now there's a long term question I'm getting there where there's the possibility and maybe even the likelihood that some future version of Windows or some future feature update to Windows will reverse some of this stuff. Right. And so the idea, I probably talked about this a year ago, it's been a long time. But I've been thinking for a long time about creating my own like sort of tweaking utility and I've taken some steps toward it. But the key feature of this thing would be that you could either have it running in the background, but more likely you would just run it maybe on first, you know, every time you boot the computer and it would examine your configuration and compare it to the one you configured through the app. And if it wasn't correct, you could tell them a. But you could also just fix it. Right. And so I kind of want to do that. I'm surprised no one really does that. The closest we have is win 11 DeBloat has the ability to export the configuration changes made so you can import them and then reapply them, which is okay, but I would like to not bother like if the system configuration hasn't changed, just leave it alone. But anyway, this stuff makes a big difference so I'll keep looking at things like this. But to me this was a big deal so there's no reason to accept the defaults in Windows 11 I guess is what I'm trying to say. And then this is a real recent one. It's game too. It's. Maybe this is a little unfair, but Fortnite, in addition to Epic, getting Fortnite back into the App Store, getting it back into the Google Play Store, like I said, it's available on Windows 11 on ARM. And I have to say there's something about this game I actually really like. So I'm trying Battlefield. It's not quite the same as Call of Duty. Call of Duty has jumped the shark in some ways. Fortnite is a little cartoonish looking, but you get in and out of these games really quick. It's not as cartoonish as is. I still don't have Beavis and Butthead running around or the Chucky doll thing. And you know, like, you know, like, like, like that's in Call of Duty. Like they've, they've really, they've they've done weird things to it. There is, you know, Fortnite has some weird stuff.

[A]

I think they did those weird things because of Fortnite though. I mean, that's the irony of it.

[C]

But they have the, you know, the dancing stuff and. No, it's, it's what I like about it is how first of all, much smaller game, but it's. It's good action, it's similar gameplay.

[A]

Have you referred to pubg? Because it's really. That's what happened is Pubg did that Battle Royale in Fortnite. We should do that.

[C]

I'm spend more time with Pubg and also with Warzone, by the way, which I have not played recently. This is the one, the Battle Royale that comes with Call of Duty. So. So I feel like there might be something in there because for me I'm probably not going to spend a lot of time playing like the games I play normally in the new Call of Duty. I just don't like it and I'm tired of it and I got to try something slightly different. So yeah, it could be Warzone, might be Pubg. Like I said, I did install that on a couple of computers. But the thing I like about Fortnite is it's the smallest of the games. It's the quickest to install, the quickest to get in and out. It plays great and it plays really well in Windows and Arms. So even if that's what I have, I can still have this game. Like whereas I cannot play Battlefield, PUBG or Call of Duty on a non reasonably high end modern x64 computer. So it's very good. Yeah, I'm surprised to say. So what's that dance call where they do the thing? They shake their.

[A]

Yeah, the.

[C]

I'm a little behind. I feel like this was big about 10 years ago.

[A]

Yeah, you were a little Baha'. I.

[C]

So. But remember this thing's been banned and blocked everywhere and you know, so it's making a comeback or whatever. It's. It's got to be the top three games of all time or it's a great game. Current games even. Like it's still really big.

[B]

Huge. Huge.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

It wasn't flossing, it was the one from the Fresh Prince.

[C]

Yeah, flossing. Flossing is close enough.

[A]

Flossing is one of them.

[C]

Yeah, but this is like a long time because like this was not like three or four years ago. This could have been 10 or more years ago. I don't remember.

[A]

Let's put it this way, there are adults who played this as kids.

[C]

Yeah, thanks. I didn't feel old enough already. Yeah, sure. Of course. My kid thinks the world was in black and white one time and then we had a Wizard of Oz moment where everything turned the color, everything changed.

[A]

Amazing.

[C]

It wasn't quite like that.

[A]

Richard Campbell Run as Radio One of.

[B]

My last regular shows of the year as well, because the last two are a little more playful. I find on the holiday season people want to goof around, but that is not this show. This is Michelle Bustamante, who's one of the best security people I know, but much more on the architectural side. She paints a really great picture of how to think about how Zero Trust has evolved and what you've really got to approach as a CISO or as a company leader to think about security in a contemporary way because the bad guys are only getting better. And so this was an intense conversation about dealing with modern authentication, thinking through the cybersecurity frameworks from NIST and other related and just like how the cloud helps, how it endangers, you know, how do you get all these things in place and actually end up with something fairly maintainable for better or worse? In my beginning of the 2026, what's going to be like to be assisted min and the biggest topic is security because the exploits are still vast. And so this move to where the cloud has forced us to think zero trust. And that's really beneficial because along the way we've come up with deeper and more significant security policies. And Michelle's just one of those great thinkers in the space. So it was a face to face conversation. We were at a conference together and just got to talk for a while and I hope folks value it it.

[A]

Michelle Bustamante I think Zero Trust is a fascinating subject.

[B]

So huge.

[A]

I will be listening to show 1015 for Run as [e-mail] now. Have a look, have a lock. Have a look. Today it's time for some brown liquor.

[B]

So I picked Tasmania. Yeah, neat. This is a Tasmanian whiskey. We've talked Tasmanian before, a few times. Starward, hellier, you know, we've had a few, but. And I kind of felt bad because Lark Lark is the original Tasmanian whiskey. It's a bit mythological how original it actually is. Like this man, Bill Lark, who's still around today, although he's largely retired these days, his company's not his own anymore. Supposedly put, you know, Tasmanian whiskey on the, on the, on the map and it's not entirely true. Like all mythologies, it comes from more Complicated things than this. We've talked about Tasmania before. You know, they, they named for Abel Tasman who was a Dutch explorer, went through there in the 1600s although he didn't name it after him. He named it after the governor of the Dutch East Indies whose name was Diemensland. And so it was long for a long time and even the British called it Van Diemen's Land. And I told a little bit about the William Bly story as well. When Bly was a navy man, he was always a navy man but when he was actually doing surveying he surveyed Tasmania in 1792 and then when he became the governor of New South Wales he was. That was the only coup that ever happened in Australia because Bly was that kind of guy. And at one point he actually went to Tasmania for a couple of years waiting on his ship, trying to find a way to get his governorship back before he finally went to England in 1810. The original town more or less for, for Tasmania's Hobart Town in the southeast in Sullivan's Cove, which is actually the name of one of the whiskeys there. And of course this is back when it was a colony operated by prisoners. So there were 19 crimes that could get you sent to Australia and this was one of the places there. But being the southernmost piece of land in Australia, it has very good weather for growing barley and all the other ingredients to make good stuff. In fact it even has its own peat. And so they of course were making whiskey there and every other kind of alcohol you do as as well as beer it's also safe to drink because we don't actually understand water Walla quality. And a governor Lachlan Macquarie, this is the same guy refused to help Bly back in the time, at the time of the coup in 1822, says well they're making everybody's distilling here anyway without any regulation so we might as well tax it. So he sets up a permission system, a licensing system and the first legal distillery in in Tasmania is in 1822, which is a couple of years even before like Glenn Livid started it up because the excise tax in Scot is until 1823. So shortly there are dozens of licensed distilleries in and around Hobart. This eventually Van Diemen's land becomes independent from New south Wales in 1825. And a few years further on the next governor in charge, a guy named Sir John Franklin has a wife whose name is Lady Jane. And in 1839 she famously says I would prefer barley to be fed to pigs than be used to turn men into swine. And convinces her husband to. Yeah, brilliant. It's brilliant. To outlaw the distilling of spirits. And so there is literally a full prohibition on making any kind of spirit on the isle of Tasmania from 1839 for quite some time. Okay, there was still Van Diemen's land. It doesn't become officially Tasmanian until 1856. That rule will change a few decades on. In 1860, they start allowing whiskey production in there again. And it'll continue to scale up into the 1900s. The primary act of control is 1901. It's called the Distillation Act. And one of the rules that it had in the subsequently changed was that the minimum size of a still was 2700 liters, which is not huge in commercial standards, but it's big enough that it makes all kinds of home distilling a illegal right. You would never have a still that big. That's, that's, you know, even too big for a garage. It's massive. By the 1930s, the British distillers get heavily involved in making whiskey in and around Australia. And Australia has protectionist policies in place, which means importing whiskey gets really expensive. So this is how the British distillers get involved is they start doing blended whiskies in Australia specifically for the Australian market. But because there's no competition, because the imported whiskey is way too pricey, the whiskey is pretty bad. Like it's, it's a. It's cheap blended whiskey and it's kind of a mockery of whiskey for the most part. So that by 30 years on or so in the 1960s, when protectionist tariffs finally get lifted and imported whiskey gets a little more reasonably priced, nobody buys Australian Whiskey. And by 1980, literally there is no whiskey being produced in Australia at all. And that gets us close to the sort of famous story of Bill Lark that while fishing with his father in law in 1992, he sort of wonders why nobody makes single malt whiskey in Tasmania. And he finds out about the 1901 restrictions. And he had been dabbling in making spirits himself. And he had a 20 liter still, which is far smaller than a 2,700 liter still will. And so he goes to the government to basically have the rule change. Now he wasn't the only one. And again, this is where you get into this sort of mythological story. A few years earlier, there was another distillery called the Darwin Distillery, very small scale in 1989 that made a deal with the government to get a grant around Barley production in Tasmania. Tasmania had their own strain of barley called Franklin barley. And so they were starting to distill that into whiskey even though they weren't licensed for large scale production. But it was those folks that with Bill Clark went to the government and said, hey, can we get rid of this restriction for 2700 liters so they can do small scale production. It really kicks off the craft whiskey production in Tasmania as a whole. Now part of their challenge here is the banks just don't like the distilling business. It's basically impossible to get loans. And so all these little distilleries essentially bootstrap. They start at very small scale, just what they can afford to pay for. Maybe they get a little bit of investment in. And so the whiskey business in Tasmania is really small scale. And Bill and Lynn Clark sort of earned their reputation as the godparents of the Tasmanian whiskey business because anybody who starts one, they're there to help. Help including working with Sullivan's Cove and a bunch of the other distilleries there while they're making their own whiskey as well. And again in tiny batches. I saw a photograph of the distillery in 2006 and every. It's truly rustic whiskey making. They're winning awards in the by the late 90s. But small stills, open ferments. They wanted to make smoky whiskeys, but they didn't use peat to dry their malt. They did that through the brewery. So they would actually after the malt, then smoke it with peat. All their cuttings done by hand. No big controls over any of that. They're only aging in hundred liter barrels, tiny little casks, quarter casks essentially. And so typical production for distilleries including Lark at that time is in the hundreds of liters per year. Not barely even thousands of liters. It's just really small. By 2007, the families directly involved. Bill's daughter Christie is taking over general manager, will then become the master distiller and basically run the place. Which is good because by 2010, while traveling in Scotland, because Bill Clark had made all these relationships with these other distilleries, Bill suffers a stroke. He survives and actually recovers. But the writing sort of the wall on the wall at that point, that he needs to step back, he can't push himself so hard anymore. By 2012, there's about eight different distilleries in whiskey in Tasmania making Whiskey. And in 2013, Bill and Lynn sell off 75% of the company to a group of undisclosed investors. This seems to be a Common thing in Australia. Like they. It's all sort of quiet. Including the dollar amount, it was somewhere between one and five million dollars. Bill stays on. He's the brand ambassador, but he's not directly involved in production anymore. There's other folks involved in that, but they also figure out that because it's been such a small operation, even though he's been going for the better part of 20 years, he has about a thousand hundred liter barrels resting and it's just not a lot of whiskey. By 2014, they're making 17,000 liters a year. That's it, right? Like that's more than. That's less than what many Scottish distillers make in a day. You know, big distilleries make millions of liters, and here he was making 17,000. So they don't even have a lot to scale up with. But something important happens in 2014, and that is Sullivan's Cove, one of the other Tasmanian distilleries. Their French oak edition, which was finished in a wine barrel, wins world's best single malt at the World Whiskey Awards. So while in general it was perceived that Australian whiskey was terrible, suddenly this is phenomenal whiskey. And like the eyes are on Tasmania. And that also brings the money in a big way. And a group called Montech International starts acquiring shares of Lark from any investor they can lay their hands on and starts putting money into Lark. They scale up the operations a bit, put an 1800 liters wash still in a 600 liter spirit still. That's bigger, right? And then recognizing they just don't have enough whiskey from Lark himself, they acquire, with Bill's assistance, another distillery called Overeem Casey. Overeem and Bill Lark were friends, and it was about time that Casey wanted to step away from whiskey anyway. So it was an opportunity basically to get Overeem in there. That gives them more capacity. So they try and build things up. Montec in 2015 renames themselves the Australian Whiskey Holder because they recognize they got to keep doing more acquisitions, but they also start to take far more control. In fact, daughter Christy, who's now married Christie Booth Clark Lark is, quote, made redundant. Of course, her response to that is within a year she'll start her own distillery in Hobart called Killara, which is still going to this day. Things get really ugly in 2016 for this group, for AWH, where they've been acquiring other distilleries that are in distress, that many of them have not, not done things properly. And so they're angry investors and there's missing money like they kind of get them into a big scrape and so that by 2019 there's almost nobody of the original Lark people involved with Awh. There are a bunch of serious fraud investigations on. It's like 10 to 20 million dollars missing. And it leads to a big battle at the board level and new leadership comes and takes control and starts to try and make things right, get investors properly compensated, sort things out, bring other money in. They also rename the company back to Lark Distilling. So sort of focus on their, their origins a bit more. The Overeem Distillery actually goes back to the Overeem family. Casey's daughter takes it over, but they still are battling with quantity and. And so having now invested or taken control of a bunch of different distilleries or having relationships with them, including Nant and so Sullins Cove and so forth. It leads to this particular whiskey or this line anyway, what they call Symphony. So Symphony is actually as much as Bill Clark founded Lark on the basis of why isn't there single malt whiskey in Australia? This is a blend and it's a blend of Tasmanian whiskies. And they started these in 2020. They've made a bunch of different versions and the label color changes each year. This is the gray label table and it's a blend of a bunch of different Tasmanian whiskies. The belief is that this particular version is made from Bothwell, Nant and Overeem. Each are aged about five to six years. Some are finished in bourbon casks, some in sherry casks, some import casks. The 2020 editions of these have gotten really precious and can sell for more than a thousand dollars. This particular one I picked up at a little liquor store not far from the apartment we were renting when we were in Coolangata for 160 Australian for a 500 mil bottle, which is pretty pricey. That's about 100 US for, you know, a bottle. It's that like half a third smaller. Well, normally they're 750s. Right. So we're about a third down.

[C]

This should be.

[B]

It would make sense that at a 750 this be $150 US.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I have not tasted it, but this is award winning. This is literally one for Australia's best blended malt in 2025.

[A]

So he's tasting it now, ladies and gentlemen, the first time.

[B]

First taste, yes. Well, okay, so the nose is super gentle.

[C]

Right.

[B]

There's not a lot of alcohol smell. This is only 40%. It's quite low for a whiskey in general. Got A little bit of heat in it, but fruity. It's interesting. It's almost complicated. Like, there's too many flavors in there. They don't talk about how much of this is just grain spirit, but this is considered a blended malt, so there may not be any grain in this at all. This might be all purely single malts put together. So this is good. It's tasty, Right. It's an interesting whiskey. It's expensive.

[C]

It's.

[B]

For what it is, right? Quite, quite expensive. But that's pretty common with Australian whiskeys. One of the problems that Australian whiskeys have is that they're actually size taxes are very high, and for small producers, that's extremely difficult. Right. Like we talk about, in some cases, a 750 has a $30 excise tax on it, so they pretty much have to be in the hundreds of dollars. So that even makes sense where typically in America, a bourbon excise tax is like five bucks, so they're spending a lot on that. And although now, since about 2016, the Australian government has done refunds for small producers up to a certain amount to try and reduce that tax burden, but they're still trying to restructure all of this. So as much as this is an interesting whiskey and it is definitely a blend, it's kind of gotten away from the origin story, but it's about all that's left of Lark distilling. This. This original vision that Bill Lark has had is kind of gone. You know, it's no longer Lark Distillery. It is the House of Lark. And what it is is a relationship with all these Tasmanian distilleries, including their own, to compose their own types of whiskey. If you're going to really pursue a single malt, you might want to look at Sullivan's Cove or Hellier or, you know, a couple of the others that are there as well. Lark is trying to play the Godfather game to some disgrace, but with. With a different entity that's maybe trying to be a diageo, but hasn't gone as far as that.

[A]

Oh, I thought you were talking about make me an offer I can't refuse.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean, Bill Lark is without a doubt, he's the first person from the Southern hemisphere to be put into the Whiskey hall of Fame in Scotland.

[A]

Oh, that's interesting.

[B]

And by everybody's measure, a nice man. Nice, but maybe not a businessman. And so his business kind of got away from him, and, you know, for his own needs, he had to move away. And the folks that took it over have put it into an interesting situation. Maybe they try to right the ship. But this is an interesting whiskey, and it's a taste of Tasmania while not being what you'd consider a classic whiskey of any kind.

[A]

Very good. Tasmanian Symphony number one.

[C]

There you go.

[B]

For 20, 25, the gray bot. The Grady label version.

[A]

The Gray Label.

[B]

So, yeah, I think that'll probably get drank over Christmas. You know, it's a beautiful bottle anyway. It's a gorgeous bottle, isn't it, deliberately, the flask look.

[A]

Yeah, I like that.

[B]

A nice aesthetic. But I always worry about aesthetics because that means maybe the product inside is not as good.

[A]

They spent all the money on the glass.

[B]

They spent some money on the glass.

[A]

That explains why my Louis XIV was so expensive.

[B]

Okay, well, there's also a threshold when you spend. When the cognac's that good and it's a cut crystal bottle, you're going to pay a bundle.

[A]

I saved the Baccarat bottle. I'll be put in cheap coats where you remember that.

[B]

Remember that event 20 I had out of Moldova, which I don't know that I go there today. Like, that's. That was maybe $100 for what would have been a $2,000 bottle of cognac, because they just make good product and they don't spend that money.

[A]

And you put that in the Louis XIV flat bottle.

[B]

Yeah. And there you are. Right. And that, to me is the fun of this, is that often we find great things made with people with far less pretend. And I would argue this is the most pretentious Tasmanian whiskey you could possibly imagine for a place that otherwise is completely unpretentious. House of Lark. Like, where are you that you think that's a good idea?

[A]

I love Tassie. You know, it's funny. They're on roughly the same latitude as we are, and they feel very much like Northern California in some ways. And they have kind of that nice, relaxed, relaxed feel. I felt right at home there. I really enjoyed it.

[B]

Oh, yeah. It's fantastic.

[A]

Yeah. Well, thank you, sir. Mr. Richard Campbell, native New Zealander, blessing us now with his presence in Northern America. He is out of British Columbia, where he is at Mad park for the holiday season. Paul Thurrott is in beautiful Pennsylvania, and he's very happy about it. You call this your Beavis and Butthead moment?

[C]

And I was. I couldn't get that thing over my head. And my daughter was like, oh, my God, I've never seen you look this sad. My son just walked over and hugged me. I was like, I don't Like, I can't continue. I can't do this.

[A]

He bought a child's poncho and his head is too big. Paul thurat [e-mail] you'll find his books at leanpub.com Richard Campbell [e-mail] that's where you'll find his podcast, Runners Radio and.net Rocks. And they join us. Normally, if this weren't Abbey Road, they'd be joining us every Wednesday at 11:00am Pacific Time.

[C]

Solo stuff, man. This. We're not done yet.

[A]

The outtakes are so good. 1900 UTC. You can watch us live in the club Twit Discord.

[C]

We'd love to. To play his own songs. Can you believe it?

[A]

He keeps having Lisa come in.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. Sitting over there in the corner like a weirdo. What's with the chick?

[A]

What was I. Now it's all gone out of my head. Oh, yeah. If you're in the club, please watch us in the Discord. Otherwise, YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn or Kick. But that's only if you want to watch live after the fact. You can download shows and listen at your convenience. We have audio and video at our website, Twitter, TV, WW. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. And of course you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get it automatically the minute it's available. I believe that concludes the penultimate episode of the year, the last one we're going to be recording on next week. Again, we've got a very, very special Christmas Eve. No, no, we got nothing very special Christmas Eve because we won't be here the following week. We will have our New Year's Eve special episode and then we will be back live.

[C]

If I knew New Year's Eve, I would. Just one little baby diaper thing and, you know, instead.

[A]

I liked your Santa beard. It was something. It was festive.

[B]

It was a look.

[A]

There was a look.

[B]

Look.

[C]

It was warm.

[A]

So again, no show the 24th, special show New Year's Eve, the 31st, and then we'll be back doing this January 7th. Will you still be in Mad park with your kid?

[B]

I will be in Mexico.

[A]

Yeah. You know how to. You know how to live, man.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Paul, will you be in Makunji or will you be going back?

[C]

Yeah, I think we fly to Mexico that Friday. Okay, I remember. And then we'll actually. We're going to see him and.

[B]

Yeah, and then they're coming down Acapulco as well, so you'll get the next one. Will be the two of us together drinking tequila because that never went wrong ever.

[A]

Nice.

[C]

Well.

[B]

We get a little time in Mexico City together, but I'll get back in time to. To do a show from Med park before London.

[C]

I'll just be in Mexico the whole time. I'm not going anywhere. So that's going to be the. That.

[A]

Well, we look forward to all of the future episodes and we look forward to all of your have. Having a great holiday. We really appreciate your. Your help, your support. You're listening. It makes a big difference to us. We love our club members in the discord. Thank you for being here. Richard.

[C]

You.

[A]

You flew 200,000 kilometers in the. In the year.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. 200 days on the road, you could.

[A]

Have flown to the moon.

[B]

Yeah. A few times over 20 cities or 20 country. 60 cities. Wow.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

That's amazing. In one year. That's a. That's remarkable. Well, stay home for a little bit then.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Thank you, everybody. We appreciate you being here. Have a wonderful holiday. If we don't see you before the new year, we'll be right back here on January 7th with a new live episode on Windows Weekly.

[C]

Take care.