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Windows Weekly 970: Token Kill!
02:33:12
What Version 26H1's Scoped Release Implies
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- [00:00]
A
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat's here. Actually, he's in Mexico City. Richard Campbell's back home in Madeira Park. Paul says he's really happy about 26H1. We'll find out why. We'll also talk about the Dueling AI Agents and the Xbox Excellence Awards. And Paul announces a new book. All of that coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.
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B
This twins.
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A
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 970, recorded Wednesday, February 11, 2026. Token kill. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello all you winners.
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B
Hello all you dozers.
- [00:54]
A
Hello, Paul Thurat joining us from his palatial estate in Mexico City, Roma Norte. Hello, Plo.
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B
Hello.
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A
Hello. How are you today, Paul?
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B
I'm pretty good.
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A
All right, you feeling good?
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B
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Just.
- [01:13]
A
Lisa says I should ask more personal questions in life.
- [01:16]
B
I see, I see. I felt personal until you said that.
- [01:19]
A
But, you know, that's Richard Campbell. He's back home in Madeira Park. Beautiful British Columbia. Out in the boathouse.
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C
Yeah. And I've. I gotta say something off the top because I know there's a bunch of listener in British Columbia. There's a little town on the east side of B.C. called Tumblr Ridge. Like 2500 people. It's like mining town. And they've yesterday had the worst mass shooting in Canada in a decade. Ten people, including the shooter are dead, several in hospital in critical condition. It's terrible and we're all devastated. This is not something that happens around here. At least of all a little town where everybody knows everybody. So wearing the red today in solidarity.
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B
Okay.
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A
Okay. For Tumblr Ridge.
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C
Tumblr Ridge.
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A
At a school. Of course.
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C
Of course.
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A
So sorry that it's you. I don't think there have been a lot of those kinds of incidents in Canada.
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C
No, no, there were four shooting. There were four mass shooting incidents in Canada last year total. That. Which all are horrible, but, you know.
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A
But in a town of 2,000.
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C
Yeah. It's unbelievable.
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B
It's.
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A
It's like everybody will know somebody.
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C
Everybody knows. Yeah. And so no names. None of that's necessary. Just. We're with you.
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A
Yeah. Deepest sympathy.
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C
Yeah.
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A
Okay. Sorry I have to begin on a sad note, but this. Such is the world, isn't it?
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B
Yeah.
- [02:53]
A
All right, Moment of.
- [02:55]
B
Well, thanks for killing the buzz there.
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A
Well, Paul, you're never Mr. Cheerful, so it should just fit right in.
- [03:01]
B
I get bad news for all of you. I have really good news.
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A
No good Very bad patch Tuesday, didn't they?
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B
No, that would, that's immaterial. Okay. Plus that was last month.
- [03:17]
A
No, no, there was, there were. How many zero days were the patched yesterday?
- [03:21]
B
Well, they were patched. That's not a problem.
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A
Oh, that's good solution.
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C
Of course that's good news. Yeah.
- [03:25]
B
Let me give you the Family Circus version of that cartoon. That's good news, Leo. We fix problems, you know.
- [03:33]
A
Oh, what's the bad news then, Mr. Sarat?
- [03:35]
B
I don't have bad news. I only have good news. That's what I'm saying. I, and I have to, I don't. I can't remember a time on this podcast that was like this. I mean, maybe, I don't know, going back to Windows 7 or something. I don't know, it's been a while. Well, you know, Windows 10, when it first came out was kind of a good news. Right. Return to the desktop, get rid of the touch first nonsense. That was pretty good. No, but this is really good news. Right. And the reason this is good news is because we've been suffering under what I would call an avalanche of bad news with Windows through both Microsoft ignoring the product or just maliciously insurtifying it. Right. You know, Windows 8 was kind of a minor push in that direction in the sense that, yes, I know most people didn't like the new full screen ui, but that's not insureification, that's just bad ui. I mean it was, you know, whatever, but. And they reversed it. But you know, Windows 10 really escalated it. Windows 11 escalated it again. Last week we talked about this vague idea that Microsoft had that they were going to improve the quality of Windows. Right. There's a quote from Pavan Davaluri who said that we've heard the feedback from the community of passionate customers and Windows insiders. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people.
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A
They even pointed a full time quality czar.
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B
He didn't. Satya Nadella did. See, these things are all intertwined, right? The separately. Yes. Satya Nadella revealed in an email to employees, which was published publicly, that he has two new direct reports. One of them has been at the company for several or a couple of years at least. He was at Amazon for many years. I've already forgotten his name. Jeez, I'm terrible at this. Mr. Charlie Bell. Sorry. Most recently running a lot of the security efforts. Yeah, yeah. But now in charge of engineering quality. And they hired back a woman who had been at Microsoft for many years and was at Google for Several years and she is now executive vice president of security. So both these people are reporting directly to Satya Nadella. And you know, this is one of those examples of it's easy to talk, you know, a good game about what you're doing, but you can. This is, you know, when Satya Nadella comes out and says, hey, we're going to focus on security, it's like, yeah, but you're really focusing on AI, aren't you? You know, I mean, aren't you?
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C
But, but then to have IT report to him rather than report to Bavan like that just seems like.
- [06:17]
B
Well, it's not. This is company wide. Right. It's not just Windows. Not just Windows. Yeah, it's not just Windows. So that's interesting. And then there's this stuff that is public. You know, we've, I talked about some of this last week. There are these features in Windows that are not glossy UI superficial things, but are in fact kind of deep foundational technologies that improve the security or reliability of the product. You know, quick machine recovery, smart app control, et cetera, et cetera. There's a bunch of that stuff, right. So that's been kind of ongoing. This is like the two halves of Windows and probably of Microsoft too, but where you have like the half that's sort of insuredifying the UI with all this superfluous nonsense that nobody wants. And then you have people doing actual engineering work and making some gains. Right. Which is something. There was a period of time there where I felt like all the adults had left this organization because all the opportunity and advancement you could get at Microsoft was elsewhere. Cloud computing for a long time, Azure, et cetera. And then of course more recently the AI stuff. And so it's seeing them. There's the reorg that pavan did within Windows, bringing server and client back together for the first time. So in charge of like the core engineering part of Windows. Interesting. You know, and we'll see how that goes. And then there's been these little things that I've noticed, right. Like the changes to that automatic folder backup feature in OneDrive.
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C
Right.
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B
Which is absolutely a step forward. It's. It's not perfect. You know, there are issues, like I think I discussed those last week, but that has been. That was the key in certification in Windows 11 that caused me to look elsewhere. Right. Not for a different OS in that case, but for a different cloud storage service. So I used Google Cloud for a couple years, Google Drive, and then more recently last year I got two Synology NASA. So I'VE been using Synology Drive instead. But that problem to me was so bad that I was like, I can't use this anymore. Like this is freaking me out. And reversing that is very interesting. So that's what we had last week, now this week, and it's only Wednesday, right? A couple of very interesting announcements. The first one, this one's vague, admittedly, but Microsoft announced two initiatives that it says are designed to help restore trust in Windows, meaning user trust in Windows. Both are using. There's a lot of language here, but it's like consent first approaches to making app and AI agent behavior transparent to make decisions reversible and make access limited to clear approved capabilities. This isn't in my post, but one of the ways they described this in their own announcement was that and again, this is very vague, but basically kind of emulate the security model you see on phones where if any app wants to access your microphone or your, you know, whatever it might be or your photos or something, you have to explicitly give consent. And then there's a UI in the Settings app or wherever where you can go and revoke permissions or, you know, provide permissions or whatever it is. I do know, and I think we all know from decades of using Windows and, or any desktop operating system. Of course you can think back to like when they introduced User Account Control and Longhorn originally and what became Windows Vista, you know, met with some resistance, right There is the newer version of that, which is the Windows hello based authentication, which on the face of things should be fantastic, but they really bog it down with performance issues. And then you have to explicitly click on a okay button or whatever it says to get through it. Like it, it recognizes you and says all right, you're all set. You're like, I'm not all set. There's a dialogue in the middle of the screen. So they've made that little ponderous. And so I suspect that what they're talking about here is going to introduce that kind of UI as well. You think about how phones work. Like, so there might be some pushback here, but a couple. Let me. I'll describe what these two things are, but I also want to talk about what I think this actually means. And then the next announcement kind of cements that, I guess, if that makes sense. So the, the Windows baseline security mode is a runtime integrity safeguards, right? So this is the secure by default type thing. Only properly signed apps, services and drivers are going to be allowed by default, right users. And if you're in it if you're in a managed environment, IT admins, et cetera, will be able to override those safeguards and you could do it on an app by app basis. And which is what you're going to need to do. Yeah, yep. And I actually think that this is the thing that Microsoft has almost never done, which is it's the right thing. Right. So if you think back to something like Windows 10s back when that was a thing. Right. We have S mode still today. The big problem for me at the time was in S Mode you could only run store apps and back. You know, this is 10 plus years ago, but 10 years ago that was kind of a non starter. The store wasn't, didn't have a lot of high quality apps. The most common app that people would want to run that wasn't in the store was a web browser, you know, Chrome or whatever else. And who'd want that? Everyone, it turns out. But, and you know, whatever. We make bad decisions, but whatever. It doesn't matter. I mean whatever. That's what people choose. And the case I made at the time was you need to have an exception list. Right. Like I want Windows 10 S mode or S mode, whatever you want to call it on all the time, but I also want to be able to run the 1, 2, 3, whatever, never apps that I want and maybe have that operate outside of S mode because it's important, it's just too important. This thing is not a computer to me if I don't have those apps. And they just never did it. And I don't know why to this day frankly, but they will do it for this. And there you go. So this, that to me is Microsoft learning something. So that's good.
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C
So what ended up happening was you'd hit the one thing you had to have and boom, you're out of S. Right? Yeah.
- [12:18]
B
You just left.
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C
They made it impossible.
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B
Yep. So now there's no more S mode. So. And that's the thing. Like you there, there, there are and were benefits to S Mode.
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C
You know the main thing here is if you have to give permission for the one app, it means no matter what else gets introduced, if it's not properly certificated, like authorized, it's not going to run. Like that's what gives you your protection is what comes next, not what you, you knew you were doing in the first place.
- [12:43]
B
Yeah, and, and look the, as far as like web browsers go, I mean there are a lot of other OSN web browser level protections built in to, you know, scan downloads in real time and. And look at sites and look, you know, use heuristics to figure out if it's a malicious website, whatever. But I. I never understood this. It's something they didn't do, but they're doing it this time. So it's like, okay, good, that's smart. That, to me, that's smart. And then there's user transparency and consent. And this is when. This is the. This is also like the phone. So in other words, when this is the part where an app needs to access some resource that might be sensitive, like a file or the file system, the camera, the microphone, et cetera, or an app just is sitting there. You know, we've all done this. You install an app and it installs this other thing on the side. You know, like, McAfee's kind of famous for this or whatever. But prevent those little side installs from occurring as well. By default, it will prompt you and say, hey, this thing's trying to do this. Is this what you want? And I think for a lot of people, a lot of the time the answer is going to be no, that's not what you want.
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C
Yeah, I always. I'm concerned when you send up prompts like that that the user doesn't know the answer to. Yes, it's doing this thing. If you say, no, whatever you wanted isn't going to happen.
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B
Well, assuming it's what you. To me, the point of this is, it's not because you did something that you want. It's because the app you installed is doing something else. And it's like, actually, I don't necessarily want that. Yes. I mean, if you install like a. A camera app, you're going to want to give it access to the camera. Right.
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C
If you don't, it won't work. Right. And by the same token, if it says, hey, I need this other driver here, the prompt's going to come up and go, it's getting this drive. Are you okay with that? And you say, no, well, that app's probably over.
- [14:21]
B
Well. So, okay, this is a very high level of. I don't know what the UI is going to look like. Right. So we'll see. These things are coming down the road. That's part of. That's a big part of the discussion.
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C
Yeah, no, I'm excited about it. At the assistant minimum is like, thank goodness. This is what I always wanted was we are fully locked down except for these two exceptions.
- [14:41]
B
Right, Right. The other part that's tied to this. This is even more vague or bigger is what they're describing as a higher level of transparency for our higher level of transparency standards that will apply to both apps and AI agents. And, and this is, you know, Microsoft is very fond of saying that AI agents are apps. And the way that AI agents themselves visually in the UI of Windows will be very much like an app. Right. There'll be a shortcut in the taskbar, it will have like a jump list or a pop up and it will do notifications, etc. You can interact with it. So yeah, that makes sense on some level. And the end of this conversation eventually, in about 45 minutes, hopefully not, but we'll actually kind of get back to this point because I do think that AI, and specifically agentic AI might be a big part of why this is happening. But the way they describe how this thing's going to be rolled out, because this is not something that's happening like in March. Right. If you are familiar with the calendar and you know that I don't mean the calendar in general or the Mayan calendar, but rather the Microsoft schedule, you know that in October ish, every year Microsoft releases a new feature update for Windows. And the last few years this has been the 25H2, 24H2, 23H2, et cetera. They talk about how these things will be rolled out through what they're calling a phased approach. I hate that phrase because that's controlled feature release, CFR and whatever. But in partnership with developers, enterprises, ecosystem partners, more details are coming as well as discussions about the time frame. And this will be an upcoming communications like blogs and what they call dedicated feedback channels, which to me is like, means businesses and developers, not, you know, consumers. But that's okay. So when I hear that I think, okay, well we're clearly talking about October at the earliest. Right. And we're clearly talking about what we now would think of as 26H2.
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C
Right, right.
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B
Or given how big this is, maybe this is finally. We keep talking like second year in a row, probably a third year. It's like, it's just like a one followed by a two. But maybe this will be called Windows 12. I, I will say it doesn't matter what it's called, but I just in a sense of framing it because this is a big change.
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C
Yes.
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B
And it makes sense that maybe this would be something that would be in a new OS version. Right. It doesn't mean they won't bring number kind of change. I think so. And that's where I left it at the end of that announcement. Right. So I wrote about it. I think that might have been two days ago, I don't remember. But yesterday, out of nowhere, I don't think anyone was asking questions about this. But it turns out that this, meaning 26H1 is quite a bit different than what we thought it was. And that's fascinating to me. And it's tied to all this reliability, quality, security stuff. So out of nowhere a random program manager who did not identify herself by name, which irritates me, but her name is Aria, Carly, regular on my show. Okay, nice. She wrote a post explaining what 26H1 was. Now if you're familiar with Windows 11 and if you're familiar with what happened two years ago with 24H2, you might think you understand exactly what 26H1 is. And it is nothing like that. Maybe not. Maybe nothing is a strong term. It's a little bit like that in the sense that it will ship in this case only on new Qualcomm Snapdragon hardware.
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C
Wow.
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B
However. Right. So just. I should step back for a second. Two years ago, Microsoft in May announced Copilot Plus PCs at that time running for only on Snapdragon X based chips which were brand new at that point. Those computers, the first wave shipped that June, so about a month later. And then in the Insider program throughout the summer and then later in stable as I'll call it in, starting in September, October, you could get 24H2 on x86 or x64 based computers running intel or AMD chips. Right. And that's been the situation since so early release for the, the products, you know, that were shipping mid year and then. And they kept working on it by the way, there were additions and changes. And then October, we'll call it, they now they released it for everyone.
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C
Right.
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B
And so then we went forward with 24H2 and we entered 252025 and we eventually started testing 25H2 that released in October for everybody. And we thought, well okay, this is a one off. Microsoft admitted they were working on something called 26H1. It seemed pretty clear that this was going to be based on the new Snapdragon X2 generation of chips which Qualcomm announced what last September and promised new computers running these chips in the first half of the year. We were hoping it wasn't going to be June, but closer to January maybe, we didn't know. Now we have a clue, by the way, it's going to be earlier. And so we thought okay, fine. And then not to confuse matters even Further. But this is my brain in action. I'm sorry. At some point, late last year, early this year actually, I don't remember. It doesn't matter. Microsoft moved the Canary channel, which today has done absolutely jack nothing, to 26H1 testing. And then they stopped aligning briefly the beta and dev channel builds, which were both on 25H2. Sorry. Eventually we're both on 25H2 and then they did a new build number stream for the dev channel. So I was like, okay, this is going to be 26H1. It's going to be.
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C
Right.
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B
It doesn't have to be, as it turns out. So as of today, you could install Canary and you could if you wanted and run essentially what's a pre Release version of 26H1? It's not going to help you. You're running on an X64 computer, probably, or a first gen Snapdragon X. It's functionally going to be the same as. Well, it's going to be a little behind, it's the Canary channel, but eventually it will functionally be the same as what you see elsewhere, meaning dev beta, stable, whatever. All right, so now you got to hold on to your hats a little bit because this is going to get weird. So 26H1 is what Microsoft is calling a scoped release. It's designed only for PCs running select new silicon. And by select new silicon they mean literally and specifically the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 series of computers. They're going to ship probably in March, I think is the time frame for that. It looks like March, by the way, is when Mobile World Congress is. I'll just throw that out there. It seems like an obvious time to announce this stuff, but they haven't said that. But it seems given that they felt the need to announce this, this is not something for June. It's going to be sooner, you'd hope. Okay, so we have 26H1 only for Snapdragon X2. Cool. But obviously it will be updated to 26H2 later in the year, like X64 computers. No, it will not be. So if you're running a computer today that is running 24H2 or 25H2, these are the two supported versions of Windows 11. You cannot upgrade to 26H1 *, because you can technically in the Windows Insider program. But they're not going to release that to stable. No one's going to get that out in the world. If you are on 24H2 or 25H2 when October rolls around, we're going to have a 26H2. You will get that. You will not get it if you're on 26H1. So if March or whatever time frame comes you buy an X2 based computer, you will have 26H1. October comes around, 26H2 comes out. You're not getting it, but it's bizarre.
- [22:42]
C
Right? You think they'll align them back in.
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B
27H1? Like, well, what. This is what they're saying. And this is why I said the dreaded Windows 12 phrase earlier. Those on 26H1 will eventually have a path to update in a future Windows release. The future Windows release? Yep. So they're not calling it Windows 12, but look, and by the way, I.
- [23:07]
C
Should. What other feature Windows release could there be?
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B
Right? I mean, maybe they have a different name, I don't know. But it's. It's not going to be 26H2. That's interesting. The reason for this is that. Let me see if I can find the exact language on this one because it's weird. Windows 1126H1 is based on a different Windows core is the way they'd set it, wrote it than 24 and 25H2 and soon 26H2, it's a different core. That's interesting because let me see if I can get this right. 24H2 also had a different core than its predecessors. It was a big deal. Too.
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C
Much. Yeah. We considered 24H2 like a new version of Windows.
- [23:47]
B
Actually. And it really.
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C
Was. And I even got Aria to say that on Run Ass that it's like basically this was a full.
- [23:53]
B
Osmo. There is a post somewhere. I'm not going to get the language. Read it. It was a strange term, but it was a. Oh man, I wish I could get this language right. They said it was like a full reinstall, you know, because they've literally changed the foundational parts of it. So 25H2EKB enable them impact. It's easy because it's based on the same. The same code base which is great for compatibility, etc. But 26H2, no, sorry, 26H1 and whatever comes next is this new thing.
- [24:25]
C
Now.
- [24:26]
B
Right? Let me pull this together hopefully into something that makes sense. Microsoft just announced and remember this has been in the works for many months. Probably that they're going to work to make everything they do. But let's talk about Windows here. More reliable and more secure. We have the specific security and reliable variability features. They've already added to Windows and some that are still coming, like administrative protection, etc. They just announced a new Windows baseline security mode and user transparency and consent. And they said in that post that. Let me find it. No, no, no, no. I can't find the exact language, but the inference, the way they described this was this is going to be a different version of Windows. And I wrote that, I said, my guess is that what we're looking at this is before they announced this 26H1 thing. We're either looking at a Windows 11 version, 26H2 deliverable, or perhaps even a Windows 12. Given that if you go back and read that post that Microsoft wrote about Windows baseline security mode and user transparency and consent, they never use the term Windows 11, they just use the term Windows, right? They very specifically are not naming the version. So this Windows baseline security mode and user transparency consent, I believe will be part of this next thing. The thing that's 26H1, which probably won't either have this stuff or we'll just have early versions of it. And then when they ship whatever the update to that is, we'll call it Windows 12 for now, that will have that. That's the target for that stuff. Here's the interesting bit. This is all pretty interesting, I think, but another interesting thing here is the. And I forget now, but I want to say 23H2 probably, certainly by the time we got into 24H2, Microsoft did this interesting thing, which was a very sly way of undercutting enterprises that wanted to stay on the same version of Windows and never upgrade, which was they made every version of Windows 11 functionally identical, right? So even though 24H2 had a different foundation, so to speak, or core, meaning like kernel and everything around the kernel, like the driver layers and all the stuff that makes the foundation of the os, if you looking at it and running it on a computer side by side with one running 23H2, aside from the fact that features roll at different times and we deal with that nonsense, they're the same features, right? And that continues forward. So 23H2 goes out of support. Now we have 25H2, 24H2, 25H2, same features now, same foundation as well. And now we get 26h one different foundation, same features, at least backwards, you know, to what we see on the earlier versions. We'll see if this stuff makes its way across everything and then there'll be a 26h2 same thing. They very. They explicitly say this. It's going to be same features. So in many ways, yeah, it doesn't matter what version of Windows 11 you're using from a kind of a features perspective. Although we'll see if there's a dividing line here with this baseline security and user transparency and consent stuff that's not clear because it's very vague and it's still coming in the future. You know, if you think back to when Windows 11 was still an ongoing concern, as Windows 11 comes out and they add features to Windows 11 that in many ways are unique to that operating system, in time, those things many times made their way to Windows 10. So it's possible we'll see either all of or a subset of this new functionality make its way to 24, 25H2. But then again, by the time this stuff happens, it's possible those things will be out of support anyway. But 26h2 I guess, would still be supported. So that's, that's. I'm just kind of speculating, it's kind of hard to.
- [28:09]
C
Say. So, fascinating difference here, right, between arm and the.
- [28:14]
B
X86s. Well, so that's the other bit of it. So this thing is launching only on Snapdragon X2, right. But that doesn't mean it's only going to be on Snapdragon X2 forever. Right. And whatever this next version of Windows is, in the same way that eventually the copilot plus PC functionality came to x80 x64, I would imagine, you know, it may not literally be 26H1 because versions don't matter. Right. But certainly if it's not 26H2, it will be Windows 12 or whatever we're calling that thing that will run on all computers.
- [28:48]
C
Right?
- [28:48]
B
Yeah. The question here is if you think about, well, Windows 11. Right. So one of the controversies when it launched was the. What seemed at the time and was at the time kind of arbitrary hardware requirements. Right. Secure boot, TPM 2.0. Yeah, I'm missing something. And then, you know, whatever else was. And then the Copilot Plus PC starts in mid 2024 and that's when the. It really goes up. Right. So we have 16 gigs of RAM as a minimum compared to 4, which is ridiculous on normal Windows 11, the MPU that's. I think it had to be 40 plus tops. Windows, hello.
- [29:27]
C
Ess.
- [29:27]
B
Right. Which is available on non copilot plus PCs, but is a requirement of this platform. And I've often wondered if Copilot plus PC wasn't going to form the basis for a new. Well, it is literally right now like a new level of hardware requirement, but maybe a new level of hardware requirements for Windows generally like that it might be slightly updated, like maybe by the time we get to 26H1, slash Windows 12. Right. Maybe it's going to be 16 gigs of RAM, it's going to be TPM 2.0 or Microsoft Pluton, whatever. And maybe the, you know, the dispute, you know, disk might go up, whatever. But maybe the MPU requirement goes up to like 80 tops. Right. Because I think that's what X2 has. So the current versions of Copilot plus PCs in the market right now don't meet some requirement that we don't know about. So they're not going to get 26H1. So they're going to communicate more, we'll learn more, but they will get 26H2. I mean, there's going to, I have to assume there's always going to be an upgrade path, you know. Well, not.
- [30:28]
C
Always. And it's not in Microsoft's best interest to run two lines of Windows. That's a lot of money for.
- [30:33]
B
Them. It's amazing that.
- [30:36]
C
Yeah. And so.
- [30:37]
B
Forth. I mean, look, the good news here is that functionally it doesn't matter what computer you have basically. I mean there's, there's a, a difference between Home and Pro. There's a difference between Copilot, non Copilot plus PC. But, but, but functionally it's the same thing. So if you sit down in front of a computer, okay, maybe you don't have Windows, hello ess. Maybe you don't have some of the, you know, coplilot plus PC features and paint or something, it's whatever. But it's Window. It's the same, it's the same BASIC app. Same.
- [31:04]
C
Basic. Yeah. And most of the time it's actually the same chunk of code, just features turned.
- [31:08]
A
Off.
- [31:08]
B
Right.
- [31:09]
C
Yeah. You can, yeah, you can literally change your license on a Windows Machine and you don't reinstall anything. It's just new things.
- [31:15]
B
Appear. That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah. So. These things have all happened to me. It dates well back in 2025 and maybe even before then because the Windows Resiliency initiative was announced, I believe in November 2024. 2025 is when we got a lot of the real world features that are part of that initiative. This is the Quick Machine Recovery, et cetera, et cetera. The patch Tuesday, we'll talk about in a moment, that just went out yesterday includes the improvement to Smart App Control where you can just toggle it on and off on the fly, which is something you could not do before easily. So they've been doing that kind of work. But to me, the first light at the end of this tunnel was in late December, which I discussed last week, where I'm resetting computers, I'm bringing up new computers, and I'm seeing a different behavior in OneDrive with regards to automatic folder backup. And, you know, that was a problem that I've been dealing with for two plus years. Like I said, it was so bad I stopped using OneDrive. I couldn't stand it. It was making me crazy. That's good. This is a, this is a little bit of a reversal, if you will, on, you know, this insurification that's been occurring so naturally. You have to wonder, why is this happening? Like, why what, what triggered this? You know, and one of the things that Cory Doctorow says, Card doctor, being the person who invented the term insertification, has said is, you know, it's not possible as an individual. He's writing for People Raiser. When he talks about insertification, he's talking about, you know, Netflix and Facebook and, you know, Google and the services we use as people, right? Like individuals, consumers. You know, it's not possible to vote with your pocketbook or your wallet, right? Meaning you could say, look, I'm tired of this crap that's going on with Netflix. I'm not using Netflix anymore. I'm going to subscribe to something else or just whatever, watch videos, and that's great. But you know what? Netflix doesn't care. There's no class action version of this that's going to impact this company at all. That's true with Windows as well, right? So when I complain about OneDrive folder backup or forced telemetry or the crap we're in the start menu, I'm just, all I'm doing is yelling at a wave coming at.
- [33:38]
C
Me. You're shutting the.
- [33:39]
B
Void. No one cares. Yeah, yeah. And there is no number of us, meaning enthusiasts or people actually still care about Windows to any degree who could ever collectively get together and have Microsoft list. They do not care. And they. And look, I don't like it, but I get it. You know, we're not the gut, you know, we're not the ongoing concern. But there is an ongoing concern. Actually, there are two. So the first one is antitrust, right? And this is Cory Doctorow's ultimate solution to insertification. He's like, look, we need antitrust to reign these companies in, and we are Seeing that now. Right. Microsoft was semi immune to this for several years when in the EU and the US too, actually. They were primarily going after the bigger abusers, companies like Apple and Google especially, but also, you know, Meta and I guess Amazon to some degree, but Meta, I would say those three. And then the teams thing happened, right, with, you know, the Slack lawsuit, which has just gone on and on and on, came to a head and the EU started looking at Microsoft again and determined that they were abusing their dominance in office productivity software to force teams down people's throats to harm the competition, which is, you know, okay, I mean, it makes some sense. Yeah, yeah, we took a couple years to figure that one out. But now if you actually, they did it everywhere. So you could, as a company buy Microsoft 365 and not get teams if that's what you want. Save a couple bucks a month or something. And so that happened. But that also means that antitrust regulators around the world are now honed in on Microsoft.
- [35:07]
C
Too. It's back on the.
- [35:08]
B
Radar. Yeah. Microsoft, you may Recall, just announced 1 billion Windows 11 users. 1 billion is a. That's a big number. That's an antitrust number. It's possible, and we might just not know about this yet. It's possible that antitrust regulators have begun the first feelers about Windows, like, hey, this is an audience. You're abusing this to some degree, which I think logically they probably are. But the second audience that matters, or the second factor is what I would call the Fortune 500, their biggest business customers. Not the mom and pop guy with three employees or me with one employee or whatever, but rather the big one, the ones with tens of thousands of seats. Right, right. As an individual, Richard knows more about this than anybody. But as an individual, the one thing you may not realize or may not be obvious is that Microsoft gives controls in the form of policies and tools that allow it and admins and enterprises and managed environments to control the experience that users see and which apps they get and how things work, et cetera. And this is all for all the right reasons. You want to protect corporate data. Maybe you don't want people mixing and matching personal and corporate data on their laptops that you've given them or handed them, whatever. Whatever it might be. So this has been. They've been doing this for a long.
- [36:28]
C
Time. They're really cost alone, my friend. Controlling a number of versions of Adobe Reader in your organization. Money every.
- [36:35]
B
Day. Right. So there's a whole world of support for this scenario. Right. And It's a big world. It's not my world anymore, thank God, but it's, you know, so if you look at like I. Last year sometime, I think I, or probably a year or so ago, I wrote something called the Windows 11 certification checklist. And if you go down the list of things that people may or may not consider to be in certification, Windows 11, five or seven of them, none of them apply to businesses. Right. All of the concerns I have or you may have as an individual, businesses can get around. Right. The asterisks being. Eventually, yes, you're going to have to update PCs to newer versions or to whatever updates. But they don't have to do it immediately. They don't get as long as they used to, which I'm sure they don't like, but they don't have to do it immediately like consumers basically do. But that's just a kind of a minor issue. So I don't know this for a fact, but I do know that Microsoft heavily markets Microsoft 365. I should say I don't know for a fact that these are the companies that complained and that's why this is happening, but I do know for a fact that they are marketing Microsoft 365 copilot very heavily to these businesses. They're offering deep, deep discounts. Now, this is something that's been revealed. Yeah. So if the retail cost of Microsoft 365 copilot, sorry, is $30 per month per user if you're a big enough enterprise, tens of thousands of seats, whatever, whatever versions of Microsoft 365, they're offering half off, 75% off anything to get you to use this product. Right. To help pay for all the work that went into this. Very few have accepted the software. Right. When they did their earnings a week and a half ago, whatever. Or almost two weeks ago. I guess one of the things they revealed, I'm not even sure why they said this was 15. Was it 15? Yeah. 15 million paying Microsoft 365 copilot seats compared to 450 million for all of Microsoft 365. It's less than.
- [38:35]
C
3.5%. Yeah, but in the AI space, 15 million is still a big.
- [38:39]
B
Number. It's not a bad number, but I suspect I could be wrong. But anthropic cloud and OpenAI chat GPT, I bet they have, if not as many, almost as many and combined as more. And the trend is obviously going in one direction. There has been a lot of pushback on Microsoft 365 copilot or just.
- [39:01]
C
Let'S call it Copilot and Anthropic. Latest shot of the bow makes it very obvious those guys have been going in the wrong.
- [39:08]
B
Direction. Yeah. So what he's referring to is these essentially agents that run inside of apps like PowerPoint and Excel and allow you to interact with the data within in ways that it's very.
- [39:19]
C
Sophisticated. And we're built in.
- [39:22]
B
Weeks. Yeah, Microsoft is working on that.
- [39:26]
C
By the way, for.
- [39:27]
B
Years. Copilot. Yep. You can look at the Microsoft 365 roadmap. You can see they want to do.
- [39:31]
C
It. I presume we're jumping ahead here, that this is in the AI section, so we'll talk about.
- [39:36]
B
It. Oh no, I actually didn't add anything about that. So go on.
- [39:39]
C
Okay. Well, it just. To me it read like Conway's Law, like they. This is an issue of organization. That the problem when you. It just sort of hit me when I saw what Anthropica pulled off in no time with Excel. This is people from outside of Excel saying what do I need Excel to do? And building the product we.
- [39:55]
B
Need.
- [39:55]
C
Right. As opposed to people inside Excel who own their features and are all trying to do their features. Like arguably the people least qualified to make a great LLM for Excel are the guys making features in Excel.
- [40:07]
B
Which is ironic and weird right.
- [40:09]
A
Now. I better talk to Lou Mareska about this because he's the guy in charge of Copilot for Excel. So we have somebody who actually might know. Well, I'll ask.
- [40:18]
C
Lou.
- [40:19]
B
Okay. Yeah, well, but the Microsoft has what I historically has had what I would call a very top heavy kind of infrastructure based approach to everything. If you think about something like Loop, which is been kind of left aside because of this AI push all of a sudden, this was a fairly dramatic attempt to over time replace these classic Office documents, which in many ways from Microsoft's perspective have been usurped by open standards and open document format and the complaints from regulators and competitors and everything and do something different. But you have this thing called notion that is basically what Loop is. But it works great and it's, you know, simple. Ish. I mean, simple compared to like Microsoft heavy, heavily engineered product or platform, you know, it's such a top heavy long term approach to solving a problem. And it's possible this is overly simplistic, but that what Richard said is exactly right. You know, these people from outside of Excel or whatever the products are like, look, this is what we need. Let's make that thing. Whereas the guys inside of Office or Whatever they're calling it now look at it like okay, this thing has 11,000 commands. We need to support all of them. And, and that's, you know, because that's how they think. And this smaller, faster moving company is moving faster to deliver the core features that people need. I'm sure they'll improve it over time. You know, they'll add different things but both sides will. But this is, you know, this is maybe an example where the size of Microsoft is working against it a little.
- [41:52]
C
Bit. It makes me, you know, going Back to the 2, to Charlie Bell and the now the woman whose names jumped out of my.
- [41:59]
B
Head. Yeah.
- [41:59]
C
Exactly. New EVPs reporting directly.
- [42:01]
B
To.
- [42:02]
C
Yep. Satya. It reminds me, Satya is now the engineering CEO because Judson is the commercial.
- [42:07]
B
CEO. Exactly.
- [42:08]
C
Exactly. Like is he building up this cross cutting team that goes across the whole organization that works on the engineering problems they have starting with quality and.
- [42:19]
B
Security, which is where everything like this should start by the way. But 100% I wasn't going to go in this direction but I will say I've been critical slash confused of Satya Nadella's giving up responsibilities to others. And it's like what's he doing now? Is he blogging or whatever. But I suppose you could draw a parallel here between what he's doing and what Gates did at one point by saying look, I'm not going to be CEO anymore. I'm gonna chief software architect. I'm gonna go hands on. We're doing.net now. We're doing whatever, whatever the initiatives were at the time. But he was like a big, he was like involved personally and maybe from Satya Nadella who you know was more to me more of a engineer than a business.
- [43:02]
C
Person. I guess that's.
- [43:03]
B
True. Been CEO of Microsoft for 10 years. I guess he's also a businessman but, but it is in his heart or you know, at his.
- [43:10]
C
Core. Well we've also always had this sense that he's trying to be Bill.
- [43:15]
B
Not bomber and so now he's.
- [43:18]
C
Doing. Being more engineering is a good idea if that's what you.
- [43:21]
B
Want. Right. With regards to the comment that over overly generalized comment that I made earlier, I'll make another one which is that just again this is super high level but if you're a business and you're paying per seat per. Well yeah, per se, per month for whatever of Microsoft 365 and whatever you get around that and whatever else you're paying Microsoft, whatever it might be and whatever the reason, I mean we can Kind of quibble over who is driving this push. But you are going to get these AI agenic AI capabilities that are going to interact with Office essentially. Right. So your knowledge workers as we used to call them, are going to now have these AI capabilities. Capabilities. Yeah. It's a lot easier to get it from Microsoft. Right. Like it's. Again, I'm over. I'm overly simplifying. But it's. It's one check to one company. That's not how it's paid. But just bear with me rather than eight checks to other companies. So I. So what one of the problems when you kind of build your own infrastructure, so to speak, if you pick all these kind of big middles, little tech companies and whatever, you know, I want to use Slack because I feel like that's the best over there and I want to use this thing over here because I think it's the best over there. A lot of complexity to this. Right. And actually when you add it all up, there's a lot of added cost. Cost.
- [44:41]
C
Too.
- [44:42]
B
Yeah. How bad does Microsoft 365 Copilot have to be when Microsoft is offering incredible discounts that companies are still choosing cloud or chat, GPT or even Gemini. Right. Yeah. Like people aren't just ambivalent about Copilot, they seem to hate it. And I'm not judging it per.
- [45:04]
C
Se. Well, I think Microsoft's done their classic thing and called everything a copilot, which means you always remember the worst ones.
- [45:10]
B
One. Right. There you go. That's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. That's funny. A lot of redundancy too, you know. Etc. So yeah, for, for a company to decide as a. As a just a matter of course that we're going to start paying another company to improve productivity service we're already paying for. Yeah. Is astonishing. And I think that these things combine. So again to. Oh, and I should say too, I mentioned businesses by and large are not influenced or affected by the insertification that we as individuals see in Windows.
- [45:48]
C
11.
- [45:49]
B
Right. Or to a smaller degree maybe in Microsoft 365 as well. But whatever. However, the one thing they do see is all the reliability problems with updates. Right. So in addition to Microsoft jamming AI down their throats, which most seem to not want, they also just issued two emergency fixes for one cumulative update in January. That's insane. This is really bad.
- [46:15]
C
Timing. Should be a giant red flag and I suspect it is internally. Like they're just like holy cow, what is going.
- [46:22]
B
On. Yes. And this audience is big Enough to get Microsoft's ear. Microsoft will pay attention to those people. Because the thing is, Windows hasn't been the center of Microsoft's strategy and world or whatever for decades. Decades. The first of those two decades, I would say it was part of it. Today, it's not. Almost none of it. But the thing you need to remember is that Windows generates several billion dollars in revenues every single quarter. And it's done so despite Microsoft's best attempts to make it the crappiest thing imaginable. And the reason is at least two thirds of those customers. And we could measure that by users or by dollars. It's probably worse. It's probably a bigger chunk by dollar. Are these Fortune 500 very large organizations, when you have these kinds of problems, when you have the push that they don't want for AI, when you have reliability problems all over the place, after you force them to upgrade more often than they want, those people will be heard by Microsoft. And we are living in an era where we think, look, most of what we do with personal computing has already moved to mobile. The one thing we have left, which I think is a great thing, by the way, is just what I would call kind of traditional productivity productivity scenarios. So this is office productivity stuff like Office. Right. It's professional creator activities where you might be using like a DaVinci resolve or Adobe Premiere or whatever it is to make videos and do that kind of thing. These are important customers, really important customers. They are, I think, 2/3 to 3/4 of the several billions of dollars that this business generates every quarter. This business that Microsoft has either ignored or made worse. Actively made worse. Right. If that disappears or declines, they can't afford this AI bill.
- [48:22]
C
Anymore. No, you know, I'm with you. I would throw one more layer on top of that, too, because you're. Now we're talking about how the government of France is getting rid of Microsoft technology across the board. And that's a geopolitical conversation based on the.
- [48:33]
B
Current. That's.
- [48:35]
C
Right. States of government going on right now. And it's not so much that that's a huge number of seats. It's that as you start to have examples of significant organizations building a stack that doesn't involve Microsoft and showing.
- [48:48]
B
Their effectiveness can work for anybody. That's.
- [48:51]
A
Right. That's. Can I interrupt just briefly so we.
- [48:53]
B
Can. Yeah, you.
- [48:54]
A
Bet. Get a commercial in. And we will continue with this fascinating conversation. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. I should point out, by the way, stage three of Insuredification does involve extracting every penny from.
- [49:09]
B
Businesses. Yeah, but those are all consider those are consumer services.
- [49:12]
A
Right? Oh.
- [49:13]
B
Okay. In other words, like Microsoft's business customers are not like advertisers on Facebook. They're literally paying them every month for direct product or.
- [49:24]
A
Service. Harder to.
- [49:25]
C
Squeeze. It's a different in large IT we think about platform changes in 4 to 5 year increments like you just can't otherwise. That's why you tend to skip a Windows version when they were coming every other year or so because. Because you are only going to do it when you do a hardware.
- [49:40]
A
Refresh. Yeah, makes sense. We Richard's going too I think are going to Orlando. And this episode brought to you by our sponsor Threat Locker, who's sponsoring that big zero trust world that we're all going to be going to in just a little bit. Let me tell you first about what Threat Locker is. Threat Locker is zero trust. Done right, done affordably, done easily. For you, zero trust takes the simplest way to describe it is it takes a proactive, deny by default approach to everything. You can't assume that just because somebody's in your network that they're one of us, that they're safe, that they're. You can't let them do anything they want. Modern attacks love hiding inside endpoints. You know, your employee takes a laptop home, it gets infected, they bring it back. Now they're inside the network and so is the bad guy. Attacker controlled virtual machines, sandboxed environments, VM based malware. And by the way, these are all techniques lately they're being widely used. They evade any traditional antivirus software. It just doesn't see it, but they don't stop. ThreatLocker ThreatLocker Zero Trust prevents VM based attacks before they can even launch. They can't do it. Critical vulnerabilities in everyday tools your employees use. Even seemingly harmless apps can also be a gateway for attackers. Threatlocker. Recently they did a paper on how 7 zip, which many of us use, right? How that symbolic link extraction bug, we've talked about it before, enabled arbitrary code execution when administrators or service accounts extracted a malicious zip. You don't know it's malicious ahead of time. Security leaders, you got to take note. Threat Locker's application control, not only, you know, you give some permissions to 7zip, of course, but it will deny, for instance, unapproved binaries. That's what you needed, right? And ring fencing limits what allowed apps can access. So it's very specific. Permissions with Threat Locker, even approved tools cannot become attack vectors. ThreatLocker works across all industries. Give you great US based support and they're there 24. 7 because malware can strike anytime. ThreatLocker supports Mac environments as well as Windows. You get comprehensive visibility and control which is great for compliance. And look who trusts Threat Locker. Companies that can't afford to be down for even one minute. JetBlue uses threat Heathrow Airport uses Threat Locker the Indianapolis Colts the Port of Vancouver Threat Locker consistently receives high honors and industry recognition. G2 high performer and best support for enterprise Summer 20 peers spot ranked number one in application control. GetApps best functionality and features award in 2025 I can go on and on. With ThreatLocker. You get unprecedented protection quickly, easily and cost effectively. That's ThreatLocker. Visit threatlocker.com twit get a free 30 day trial. You can learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance@threatlocker.com twit Steve Gibson and I Richard's coming out too. Are all going to to Zero Trust World. And for a limited time you can go to Zero Trust World too. Use the code ZTWIT26. You'll save $200 off the registration for Zero Trust World 2026. Get access to all sessions. You get hands on hacking labs. You get meals. You get an after party. The most interactive hands on cyber security learning event of the year March 4th through the 6th in Orlando, Florida. If you're going use our code please. ZTW Twit 260 Trust World Twit 26 for the year. Right. Make sure you come to Steve Gibson's presentation. It's the last presentation of day one. We thank ThreatLocker so much for their support. ThreatLocker.com TWIT Richard, we're getting a podcast studio for you so you can do Windows weekly from there which will be.
- [53:44]
C
Fun. Talk a couple of run ads as.
- [53:46]
B
Well. I'm there.
- [53:46]
A
Too. I bet you.
- [53:47]
C
Are. One of them.
- [53:48]
A
Books. It's a great.
- [53:49]
C
Place. Smart people at that.
- [53:50]
A
Show.
- [53:51]
C
Yeah. Don't you don't miss out the opportunity to get face to face with clever folks. Have some good.
- [53:55]
A
Conversations. All right. Let's. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt your.
- [53:59]
C
Conversation. You hit that timing right on.
- [54:01]
A
There. Okay. We got.
- [54:02]
B
Everything. This was. Yeah. Yeah. Just. Just to reiterate, I. I don't remember the last time I felt this good about Windows.
- [54:10]
A
It's.
- [54:11]
B
Yeah. There's a lot of quality inside. It's been so long. I mean Windows has been a second class citizen at Microsoft for so long, I forget what this feels like. But, but there's deep engineering work occurring that will improve the quality of the product and the security. They're adding specific security, I would say, features across the board. They've been doing this pretty much for the past year or so. There's this new silicon coming not just from Qualcomm, but from intel and AMD as well, which may or may not enable specific new features we don't know about yet. There's some vagueness to this, but something good is happening. Like, I don't even. It's so unfamiliar of a feeling. I don't know how to react to it. It's like, is this real? Like, is this like.
- [55:02]
A
It's. I like your graphic with the blue.
- [55:04]
B
Screens. Yeah. I mean, Microsoft, you know, Microsoft in their stupid way during the Windows 10 time frame, one of the many attempts at plain English which they thought would be better would literally put the phrase something happened on a computer that was rebooting because of a hardware fault or whatever the failure was. And it's like, guys, if the Mac, you know, the, remember the Mac bomb thing, you know, if that taught us anything. It's like people who are serious experiencing a horrible computer problem do not want cuteness. Yeah. They would want it to be fixed. And so that was misguided. But, but that's. Anyway, that's part of our, you know, we have a couple of phrases in the Windows world these days like a hard computer problem, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But something happened is, is one of them. And in this case something is happening and it's clearly positive. And like I said, it's. It's been a while. It's been a long time. I'm super.
- [56:03]
C
Excited. Windows went through intentional neglect. Right. Like, I think it was very much trying to convince Windows you are not. Not the center of the world.
- [56:11]
B
Anymore. Yep. Yeah. It was like a punishment, you know.
- [56:14]
C
Yeah. And. And now, now they've neglected it enough that it's genuinely suffering. It's harming the business. And so it's like, okay, time to put some focus and some, and some talent into the equation and see if we can make it the product it ought to be. You know, I keep thinking back to after Chalice's presentation at build in 23 and you and I having that conversation about the logical interface point for any work need should be the operating system. I don't care. Why are we talking about products? I need to achieve X at some point. Which makes sense at the os. And then various tools come into play to achieve the, your intended goal. Three years later, we're just nowhere near.
- [56:58]
B
It. I'm not going to remember the details of this, but we had a conversation on the show. This could have been a couple of years ago, but, but you know, it's like, are there any adults left here? I mean, there was a time you brought this up last week. You know, there was no one directly responsible for Windows. There was no one on the senior leadership team responsible for Windows. Yeah, it's like, does this product matter to anybody? And then all the horribleness, you know, it started with Windows 10, I mean, in a big way. And then, you know, with Windows as a service and the built in crapware, the advertising, you know, that everything we, everyone, you know, the telemetry, et cetera, continued got worse in Windows 11. They, you know, tightened the vise on things like using up, forcing the Microsoft account on users, et cetera. So it's, it's never seemed like it was ever going to get better. Right. Like, you don't make something worse and then make it worse and make it worse so you could make a little, you know, make it better later. Like it just didn't. Like, that doesn't typically happen. So this to me is a miracle is a strong word, but it's, this is not what I expected to.
- [58:04]
C
Say. It's almost a generational shift that, I mean, I do remember in those early times having drinks with certain senior folks and saying like, we are deliberately shaking this team up. I can't fire all these people. The cost of, you know, would be astronomical. So I have to make them.
- [58:24]
B
Uncomfortable.
- [58:26]
C
Okay. And I'm going to do it with quarterly updates to Windows 10. Not just making the team uncomfortable. You're making all of us.
- [58:32]
B
Uncomfortable. Like, yeah, it's like when, when parents fight, the kids are the ones who really lose, you know, and that's, yeah, that's what I felt like, is like a kid, you know, you even.
- [58:40]
C
Use that line, it's like nobody likes it when mommy and daddy are fighting, right? Like, yes, it. But we're past that now. And I think a lot of the folks that were going to go are gone. The ones that are stuck around are ready for something new and, and having new leadership and also having genuine pain. Like this is a crappy way to do this. But it is also what has happened. And now presumably we're changing gears and you know, the eye of Satch is upon them. I used to, yeah, I heard that line from the Gates point of view, it's like folks say, oh my.
- [59:14]
B
God.
- [59:14]
C
Yeah. You do not want Bill's direct attention. It's like the eye of Sauron stares down upon.
- [59:19]
B
You. Yeah. No one's, no one's like, yay, he knows who I.
- [59:22]
C
Am. You're like, no, no. It's like, oh, no.
- [59:25]
B
Right. You don't, you do not want.
- [59:26]
C
That.
- [59:27]
B
No. Yeah. So I, you know, like I said, I, I, I, I, maybe just to maybe drive the point home a little even harder is I don't see anything in any of this that is concerning. There are details we don't know about those two big initiatives. I mean, for sure that 100%, that, that's, that's something, but, you know, we'll see. And, and there's questions around the timing and what we call these things. And you know, I use Windows 12 as a easy shorthand, but whatever. I mean, this stuff will all become clearer over time. I feel like we're going to see these x2 based laptops sooner rather than later, which is fantastic. This seems good to me. Now look, this is the community. I mean, we're going to.
- [60:09]
C
Have to go wrong from.
- [60:12]
B
Here. They'll be complaining, right, if they raise the hardware requirements for Windows 12, you know, people are going to freak out, whatever. So we'll see, we'll see. We'll see what happens. You know, I want to, I don't know, I don't, I don't want to give them the benefit of the doubt, actually. I don't think they deserve that. But I, like I said though, I don't, there's nothing that was coyly worded in such a way that was concerning. I think things were vaguely worded because they just can't talk about it right now for whatever reason. I, you know, know, I'm sure this is going to be fairly complicated, but I, like I said, I'm so unfamiliar with this feeling, I'm doubting it, you know, but to me this looks good. So I, like I said, I haven't, I haven't been able to say that in a.
- [60:57]
C
While.
- [60:58]
B
Okay. I can't even remember. I don't, I forget. It's been.
- [61:01]
C
Long. They say it's been a decade.
- [61:02]
B
Easy. Easy. Yeah, yeah, more, More than a decade. Yeah, well, you know, minor things, like I said, like, like Windows 10 was kind of a nice rebound from Windows 8, but it did all, you know, but it, but the legacy there is mixed because of all the insertification that it brought with it as well.
- [61:17]
C
You know, well, that's part of the side effect of neglect is you don't have a senior person saying no to all these adjacent teams. And so, you know, the effort to play ball, you get all this insurtification from adjacent teams. Right. There's.
- [61:32]
B
Nobody. I also feel like a lot of this is just, there's no direct oversight upper level. Because the upper level executives, the people who are above, like Windows as an.
- [61:43]
C
Organization.
- [61:44]
B
Right. Have other concerns. Right. And for 10 years, ish. It was cloud computing in Azure for the past, what are we, three years.
- [61:53]
C
Now? 17 minutes. Yeah.
- [61:55]
B
Yeah. It's been all AI, all time. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, Windows was given specific directions about the types of things they needed to do, but the, the specifics of what they did were up to them. And I don't think there was, there were many good people left.
- [62:12]
C
Frankly. Yeah. You know, listen, if you're ambitious at Microsoft, being on the Windows team is not a thing to do. Right. For a long time it was cloud and now obviously sprinted over to AI like you're not even third or.
- [62:25]
B
Fourth. I did, I did make this observation probably at many points, but the one thing that is interesting about AI from the perspective of Windows is that Windows is an obvious place to put AI functionality. It's an operating system. You're seeing Google and Apple do the same thing with their operating systems. You're going to see it in. Well, you already have, but Obviously it's in Microsoft 365 as well because there are these productivity scenarios. But as far as things like orchestrating and where the actual models are going to live, et cetera, that's Windows. Like Windows. The little silver lining to the AI nonsense is that Windows didn't have a role to play in cloud computing at all other than manufactured nonsense. With AI, it's like, no, this has a central role to play. So if AI is actually very important to Microsoft, it behooves them to make sure Windows is as good as it can be because otherwise they're going to use a Mac or Linux.
- [63:18]
C
Or. Plus, it could be the ultimate gateway.
- [63:21]
B
Drug. Yeah.
- [63:23]
C
Right. Yeah, it really could be. It could be an also round. It could be the logical place for a billion users to start.
- [63:31]
B
Right. So anyway, there's my good news probably for the decade. We'll see. We'll watch a crumble in the.
- [63:37]
A
Weeks. Don't.
- [63:37]
C
Worry. No, your soul will be crushed in there in, in good time. Just give us a.
- [63:42]
B
Minute. Right. This is like the Grinch's heart was, you know, came back to life or whatever. When he saw the little.
- [63:49]
C
Kid. I don't.
- [63:49]
B
Know. You know, we'll see what happens and then. Okay, so moving on from that topic, but it's a big one. This is kind of snowballed in a way that I did not anticipate. It's pretty cool. Yesterday, like I said, was Patch Tuesday. We've already talked about these updates multiple times because this stuff was in the Insider program Dev beta. It made its way to the release preview channel last month. Probably it was part of the week D update that they shipped a couple of days late, two weeks ago, but now rolling out in what I call stable. Are those features. Right. And so again, I'm not going to beat this to death, but the Agent settings supports more languages. There's the cross device runtime. Sorry, resume improvements. So if you have an Android phone, that stuff works on more devices, there's a couple more features. The Windows MIDI services stuff that's not going to impact too many people. The smart app control improvement where you can now toggle it on and off like an actual feature. That's pretty cool. And then the Windows Enhanced Sign in security improvement. It has to be a supported fingerprint reader. I've never seen one. But you can at some point buy an external fingerprint sensor and use it with a desktop PC or a laptop or whatever and sign in and retain the Windows hello ESS advantages without having to give that up. So that's good. And maybe someday we'll have a facial recognition system. It's hard to say. But that stuff is rolling up now. So you should be able to get that. This is tied in a small way, I suppose, to all the engineering, reliability, security stuff. But Microsoft introduced Secure Boot in, he says, as a Canadian, for some reason in Windows 8. Right. And that's why we forget that, because as far as everyone's concerned, Windows 8 was that terrible full screen interface touch first.
- [65:46]
C
Etc. Touch me. Actually click.
- [65:49]
B
Me. Yeah. But there were a lot of really good technical improvements in that release. You know, File Explorer got dramatically faster, you know, et cetera. But there were desktop improvements. Secure Boot requires a certificate. It's stored in their. Your PC's firmware. What we used to call the BIOS. It's actually like the. What do you call it? UEFE or UF EU E U F I E U F I. Right. UFI, whatever. If you bought a computer in 2025, almost guaranteed. If you bought a computer probably the second half of 2024, you already have the latest new generations or secure boot certificates. You're all set. If you have an older computer and it's still supported by Windows 11, you will be getting a firmware update sometime this next, I don't know, a couple months I think before. I think this switchover is happening in June to ensure that you're up to date with this new generation of certificates. The current gen, previous gen I guess, are expiring in June so they have to be refreshed. Secure boot obviously is important unless you like Linux, I guess, in which case it becomes a problem depending on which distribution you're using. But it protects your computer at boot time, right, because there are vulnerabilities that can try to attack the machine while you're building before you get into Windows. And that's what that's for. So Microsoft has worked with PC makers, et cetera. So this is something that will happen. So if you have like a, you know, an older Surface or an older PC of whatever kind, you're going to be getting a firmware update. So have fun. We all like those.
- [67:25]
C
Updates. One of the major providers is change servers and things like it's, it's really going to be very breaking. If you've got an old machine that you've left off through this year, year, next year when you turn it on, you're going to be really.
- [67:39]
B
Sad. I guess the, I mean according to Microsoft, this would be interesting to kind of see what this looks like in real world terms. But computers will still work, right? But you'll have a reduced level of security protection. I think specifically around the boot time protections. I feel like boot time vulnerabilities are similar to the notion that like text messages are easily intercepted and thus are not good to use for like 2fa. Like I think we all sort of understand this, but it's not clear to me that like this is actually widespread. Like I don't really know how big of a problem that is in the real world, but I can tell you man, your computer will complain mightily if you, if this isn't on or up to date. And by mightily, what I mean is you might find yourself having to type in a BitLocker Guid which you'll have to get from wherever that's stored. If you're an individual, it's going to be up in one in OneDrive and that's a lot of fun. I do that a lot.
- [68:41]
C
It's. That's a, it's a tight. Yeah, it's. Typing in those goods is a gas. Oh, it's the.
- [68:46]
B
Best. You know, I feel like so Easy to get easier system for this, but there isn't. So when those, when those packs.
- [68:54]
C
Start rolling out, I'm just going to dig around and say, what's some old machine that I'm likely to turn off on again and just light them all up and let them go through their patch twitches. I mean, I don't have the problem you have where you have boxes the bloody.
- [69:04]
B
Things. But I, I have typed in a 25. I believe it's 25 character bitlocker good. At least 10 times since we got to Mexico a month ago. Yeah, yeah, it's.
- [69:13]
C
Good. It does, it does make me. I still have a stack of machines from a couple of friends who, who send them to me after they're done with them to distribute to kids who. Computers. Like, I really gotta get those things out the.
- [69:25]
B
Door.
- [69:25]
C
Yeah. Before the.
- [69:26]
B
Summer. That's a, that can be a.
- [69:27]
C
Blocker, you know, add them to a machine.
- [69:31]
B
That. Just a little problem.
- [69:32]
C
Yeah. So it's definitely an incentive to not take any more. Make sure I get rid of all the ones I.
- [69:37]
A
Got.
- [69:38]
B
Yeah. I need a. There's gotta be a list. There's. There's probably a known good list of like Linux distributions that can work if secure Boot just stays on, but most of them cannot. And that means you have to go into the BIOS and turn it off, which is a huge problem. And then you think boots and you have to type in the. You know, and then you're in Linux. You're like, all right, I don't want to use this anymore. Got to go back to Windows. Yeah, good luck. Yeah, it's just, it's, it's a, it's fun. It's. I don't, I don't recommend this for the faint of heart, but it's, you know, it's something that's going to.
- [70:10]
C
Keep happening every few years, Right. Until they smooth this process out. This is the first time. Time for Secure Brute having a complete certificate replacement, so. Right.
- [70:19]
B
Right. Yeah. And you get the feeling like they probably put this off as long as they could, you know, like, we don't want to do this. We have to do this. We don't want to do this. We have to do it. Okay. We're.
- [70:28]
C
Gonna. Yeah. Well. And plus there's so much pressure to make all these certificates shorter.
- [70:33]
B
Lifespans. Right. Which.
- [70:36]
C
Will. Because.
- [70:36]
B
Of. Right.
- [70:37]
C
Right. Because of other.
- [70:38]
B
Hijacking. Well, hopefully going forward you're running, you know, Windows in this case and obviously you can trigger a firmware update from Windows Update and the thing Reboots. And it's a lot of fun, you know, if you want to ever hear how loud your fan can get in your computer, this is a good way to do.
- [70:52]
C
It. This is the way. Yeah. Everything turns up to maximum when you're in a BIOS.
- [70:55]
B
Update. Oh, yeah.
- [70:56]
C
Sure. Yep.
- [70:57]
B
Yeah. It's like the smallest chip in the world. Apparently. It requires a 250 watt power supply to get it. It's crazy. But, okay, this one just happened today, and I don't understand this. Microsoft. Microsoft announced three improvements to Windows Store for developers. So I almost skipped right over it, but the third of the three was something called Store cli, meaning Microsoft Store Command Line Interface. So if you open a terminal window right now in Windows 11 and type store, you will see this UI. It's bizarre. It's mostly exactly what Winget is already the Windows Package Manager, right. So you probably know you could bring up a terminal window, type winget Search Brave, and it will tell you what you can do with Brave. And I think in Brave's case, Brave is a good example of an app where you could install it from their web repository, essentially the winget repository, or from the store. And if you install it from the store, there's a product id, which is an alphanumeric code, which is probably. It looks like 15 characters. Ish. So it's not, you know, you can't look at the number and understand what it is, but you can search and find out what it is, and you can install that way. And so. So, you know, I use scripts to bulk install all the apps that I want. And most of them. Well, yeah, at this point, over 50% come from the store, but there's that. You can also use it. Like I said, you can install, you can update. Right. There's a command, you know, when get upgrade or update, dash, dash, all, dash, dash, silent, will update everything that needs to be updated. And that's kind of cool because it works across both repositories. So you've installed apps from the web, you've installed from the Store. It will. And just update all of them, basically. I mean, there are exceptions, but basically works pretty good. So what's the point of this thing? I have to be honest. I don't know. It may be AI, to be honest, because part of the thing that's unique about this thing, it does the things that winget does, right? So you can search for an app, you can install an app, you can update an app. There's a specific command to update all apps, right. It's a different syntax than Winget, but whatever, it works well actually it doesn't work similarly. It happens in the background. But it, you know, all intents, the one thing that is unique is what I'm going to call like browsing. So it has this specific syntax. You can type in store space, browse apps and then some other term. There's a list of these and like so for example, top dash free. Well, in actually a pretty nice for text formatted thing will give you the list of apps that are the top downloaded apps that are free at this moment in the store. So presumably if you did this tomorrow, it might be a little bit.
- [73:36]
C
Different.
- [73:37]
B
Right? And so looking at it when I did it, it's like WhatsApp, Spotify, iTunes, iTunes. Jesus. Discord chat, GPT, Windows scan. Hilarious. That's a Windows 8 tool, by the way. We don't have a scan. We don't have a modern scan app in Windows because whatever, you get the idea. But so why like why like why, why do this? Like I said, I think I'm guessing right now. Not a lot of evidence here, but I think this browsing bit speaks a little bit to why you would want AI to be able to control this. Right? AI could control Winget very easily. It's a command line utility. But sure. This is when you ask it something like, hey, I would like a free app app that is a Photoshop alternative, you know, and it could say, okay, here's the list that are available in the store. And because it would use this in the back, you know, it'd be controlling this in the background. So I, I'm gonna guess and say that's why. But I. But why not just update Winget? Because Winget also works.
- [74:33]
C
With. Well, Winget could have a flag for store only, right? Yeah, because you know, there's folks that are very nervous about Winget because it is so broad reaching where if everything's in the store, you're putting some good parameters around.
- [74:46]
B
It. Okay, this one is a little confusing to me. It's.
- [74:50]
C
Cool. We just did a net Rockset episode middle of January with Shmule Engelard who works on the Store team and he was talking about the advantages of packaging up your apps to be deployed through.
- [75:00]
B
Store. Listen, full stop, very general but very strong advice. You install apps on Windows, get the store version first if it's there. If it's not, then you.
- [75:11]
C
Go. The big thing when you tell a store CLI update, you know you're only getting updates from store. That's.
- [75:16]
B
Right.
- [75:17]
C
Yep. When you use winget for updating apps, it uses whatever that app uses for an updater, which could be.
- [75:22]
B
Anything. Yeah, so the, the asterisks here is that Microsoft has loosened the controls on the store enough that you as an app developer could put your app in the store. It doesn't have any of the background licensing stuff, which is always very liberal in Austin system. And like Affinity did this when, when Affinity 2 was the thing at the time, Affinity photo 2 designer and whatever the other one was called, you could get it from the store. Actually that name. No, I'm sorry, that's not true. This is an example of an exception. So you would get it from the store, but when you downloaded the app from the store you would then have to sign into your Affinity account in the app. Like you weren't getting the licensing from the store, you were getting it, you get it directly from Affinity. So the only benefit in that case of getting it from the store is you have maybe one source for apps and it's like whatever, it doesn't hurt you. But the updating is not in this case it doesn't have to come from the store. Right. I mean probably most of them or a lot of them do come from the store. That's what I want. But I think in Affinity's case, and I don't think the new version's even in the store, but at least in version 2 I believe the updates just, it was as if you got it from the web. Right. So there's a little bit of confusion there. But the. I don't see how this changes anything. I don't know. It's very interesting to me. I suppose one thing I maybe should try to look into is if you use winget to update an app like that where the updates actually come from the web and then use the Store app to update and download that app, does that change it? I don't know, it just happened today. But I'm a little bit confused by this. So we'll see. It's prettier looking than Winget if that matters to me. It has nice, more nicely formatted.
- [76:59]
C
Output. Know version of Windows, right? I remember.
- [77:03]
B
NT31. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean like when I went back to college in the early 90s, like I, I used to have to format reports from like Dbase3+ or something. And yeah, you know, it was text based so you could draw like lines around like and make a box around text and stuff and it would, you know, like this kind of formatting was very important. If you do anything with command lines in whatever environment. I mean you'll see some that are kind of fun. They have rainbow colors and you know, text based graphics and stuff. And the store, when. If you just type in store, you'll see that the store CLI logo is text based graphics in kind of a rainbow pattern. So you can do fun stuff. By the way, I didn't intend. I never even thought to talk about this or write about this. But last weekend I used Edit, which is the Microsoft command line editor, text editor to write an entire article, a really long article. And I loved it. Like, like, I love it. Like it is literally like an Ms. Dos, you know, text editor. Like you would get with like maybe like a programming, you know, like Turbo C or Microsoft's. Whatever the Microsoft. Whatever it's called Microsoft Quick Quick See or whatever it was called back in the day. It's awesome. Like, and it runs in a terminal window. So as you resize that window or you can use like control minus to make the text bigger. Just auto wrap, you know, corrects itself. It's honestly, it's pretty awesome. Like.
- [78:38]
A
It'S. I love tuis. I'm so glad too EAS are.
- [78:40]
B
Happening. Yeah. The only thing it doesn't do, which unless I'm missing something, is you can't right click on a file in File Explorer and say open with edit it. That's the one thing I.
- [78:49]
A
Love. Terminal limitation. Some terminals you can click with your mouse. Kitty.
- [78:54]
B
Ghost. Oh no, it supports inside the terminal. The mouse works fine. What I mean is like you're in the. You're in the gui, you see the icon for the file. I can't right click it and say open in that thing. I have to open Terminal and then File.
- [79:06]
A
Open. You know, they should like coded it with Claude and it would be able.
- [79:09]
B
To. I think they coded it in.
- [79:10]
A
Rust. Yeah, Rust has a great Ratatouille is its TUI interface. All of my two. I do a lot of tuis with Claude and I always Ratatouille Rest. I bet you that's vibe.
- [79:23]
B
Coded. I. Yeah, maybe it's. By the way, it's a nice. It's a nice editor. Yeah. Okay. And then the other, the final direct Windows story is I want to say yesterday or at least this week they released new insider builds to dev and beta channels. They're both on different streams or builds. I don't know what you call this build number strand. I don't know, I'm not sure what the term is. But they're technically both on 25H2 and they both get the same features. There's Nothing major. Emoji 16.0. So a couple of new little graphics and then some small improvements to camera control. So if you go into settings, there's basic and advanced controls for cameras. And if your camera supports pan and or tilt, those will be made available in the UI in the Settings app. I know. Super exciting. And that's it. There you.
- [80:19]
A
Go. Well, there you go. I'd like to talk to you. There was an ad that says. I remember in the. I said, I'd like to talk to you about impotence. I don't know. I can't remember what it.
- [80:33]
B
Was. It happens to everyone. It's not your fault. Well, it's just probably your.
- [80:39]
A
Fault. But I'd like to talk to you about your mattress. This portion of Windows Weekly brought to you by my mattress. It's talking right.
- [80:49]
B
Now. Helix.
- [80:49]
A
Sleep. I love my Helix mattress. You will too. By the way, have you gone to the website or are you getting ready for the. You know, up here in the northern hemisphere, it's getting a little chilly. If you're living in Boston, it's freezing. I imagine Makunji's not much better. Are you spending more time indoors? You're probably spending more time in bed. I know I do. With the covers pulled up and my electric blanket on high. It's a great time to invest in a new mattress. Seriously, you spend more than a third of your life lying on that thing, sitting on that thing, cuddling with your pets, reading a great book. So stay comfortable with your Helix mattress. No more night sweats, no back pain, no motion transfer. Don't settle for a mattress made overseas with low quality and questionable materials. Many of them are ship it on a container ship. Six months later, it smells like bunker fuel. Rest assured, that's not true of your Helix mattress. No, in fact, it's pretty cool. They make it on ought to order. So it's assembled, packaged and shipped from their Arizona, beautiful Arizona facility within days of your placing your order. It couldn't be fresher. And you open it up and man, you smell the fresh desert air. You should do what we did. We realized. I've read it somewhere. After eight to 10 years, you should get a new mattress. They wear out. You kind of forget that, but they do. It starts to sag a little. Starts with motion transfer and all sorts of stuff. So. So we went, we looked around and looked at reviews. Found Helix. Man, the reviews are incredible. Did the Helix Sleep quiz too. That matches you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences. We like a firm mattress, you might like a soft one so you get to say what you want plus how you sleep, whether you're side sleeper, stomach sleeper, back sleeper, that kind of thing. They have that. They literally can tune it in to that and it works. In a Wesper sleep study, Helix measured the sleep performance of participants after, after switching from their old mattress to a Helix mattress. And here's what they found. And I would say this is anecdotally, this has been my experience. Exactly 82% of the participants saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle. That's the most important one, the one that for health, clears your brain of those, you know, whatever that is, the waste that gets in up there. Participants also on average achieved 25 more minutes of deep sleep per night. That's a huge improvement. Let me just see what my deep sleep was last night on my Helix mattress. Oh, my sleep was great. Yeah, 28 minutes. Okay. That for me is you don't do that much deep sleep at night. Some nights I get as much as an hour and I have to say on my Helix and I that those days I feel great. I'm happy with half an hour. That's even great. Participants on average achieve 39 more minutes minutes of overall sleep per night. Actually, you know, I have just exported all my sleep data. I should put Claude on it for the last six years and I just, I will look, I will show you the graph. I bet you you can pinpoint where I got my Helix sleep. Suddenly sleep gets better and better time and time again. Helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand. Like I said, the reviews are amazing. Forbes, take a look. Are wired and everywhere. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door with free shipping in the US that's nice and you can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The Happy with Helix guarantee provides a risk free customer first experience ensuring you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. But I gotta tell you, you're not getting, I'm not sending my back. Love our helix. Go to helixsleep.comwindows right now for 27% off sitewide. It's their President's Day sale Best of Web and it's exclusively for listeners of Windows Weekly. That's helixsleep.comwindows for 27% off the President's Day Sale Best of Web. This offer ends February 25th. Please make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know when we sent you. And if you're listening after the sale ends, no Fear. Check them out. Great deals always@helixsleep.com Windows helixsleep.com Windows back to Windows Weekly with Paul and.
- [85:20]
B
Richard. Hello Paul. We talked about Microsoft earnings last.
- [85:25]
C
Week. We.
- [85:26]
B
Did. It feels like it was a million years ago. It's so funny at that time based Microsoft, Microsoft is not predicting like at least not yet. Last year, remember they said they were going to spend at least $80 billion on infrastructure. In the fiscal year they spent it was 85 ish. The numbers this year have gone up 35 ish billion each quarter predicting somewhere 140, 150 billion if things don't change right after the show or I think right as the show is ending. Google slash Alphabet announced their earnings and they're doing great, they're doing fine. But one of the things they said is we're going to spend 175 to 185 billion this fiscal year on AI capex, AI infrastructure. And then Amazon announced earnings. They're like yeah, we're going to spend $200 billion this year. It's like guys, what the frick? I don't know what's going on here. So we get Microsoft probably 150 billion plus. You get Google up to 185 billion billion and now Amazon's, you know, 200 billion and then you add in meta and whatever else and I think the number of total committed by big tech is like $650 billion is somewhere in there. And yeah, I guess we haven't.
- [86:39]
C
Learned the money they have in the bank anymore. This is. Now we're going to start boring. We only need to build more.
- [86:45]
B
Data. I'm not going to write about this but one thing that happened since then is Google raised, I don't know, 20 something billion dollars. I think they do it in a stock sale or something like they're leveraging. They're going to borrow this money essentially so is Microsoft. But they already are by the way, a lot of borrowing here. And this is like these big tech companies becoming more lower margin, higher cost like hardware assets and real estate assets. They're becoming very different companies. I mean even though when they the face of things you're like, well the transition from cloud computing to AI is pretty obvious, you know, but no, the, the costs are.
- [87:28]
C
Astronomical. And well the transition cloud was the thing, right? Like you went from a zero cost to distribute products, software to owning land and concrete and.
- [87:40]
B
Buildings. I know, it's.
- [87:41]
C
Crazy. Power systems and now Microsoft's moving.
- [87:44]
B
Into three three Mile Island. I mean it's all kinds of weird stuff going on. You know, it's just.
- [87:48]
C
Bizarre. So there's that they're funding Constellation restarting Reactor.
- [87:55]
B
One. Now I, you know, I keep having to say this because it's true, but you know, I'm not a financial expert but I am fascinated to see that finally Wall street is pushing back. So the analysts on the call. I listened to the Apple call now since last year, I listened to the Microsoft call live when it happened. I've not listened to Alphabet, Google. I read, I read the transcript actually of the CEO statement anyway on Google. But Amazon, no, I don't even know if there is a call but, but analysts are like, please explain to me how this is going to make sense ever. And there's no, there's not really a good explanation in my mind. But everyone else is doing it I think is the rationale. It's kind of hard to.
- [88:38]
C
Say. Yeah, no, it definitely seems like a group thinking. And again, I think there's this whole dynamic between these three, specifically between Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, to who's going to own the cloud going forward. The three of them now have such an advantage over the rest of the world. They're just racing each.
- [88:56]
B
Other. I wish I could remember the number, but Apple's spending on Capex. They're the only company of the top five big tech that went down year over year and. But I'm gonna, this is off the top of my head, this could be wrong, but I believe their number and remember Microsoft was like 37 somewhere in there. 37 billion. Their number for the last quarter was like 2 or something, maybe 12. It was some smallish number, but it was less than, way less than anyone else and had gone down year over year. It's amazing. They're going to be in good shape, I think. And then just some smaller companies, I'm just throwing up because they're kind of within our sphere of interest a little bit. Qualcomm 12.25 billion in revenues at.
- [89:42]
C
5% is going to come from. Right, like this is what we're excited about.
- [89:47]
B
Yep. Those guys are gearing up to deliver AI data center chips as well, by the way. So that's not happened yet, but they're working on that. And they're the one thing they have in common with a lot of the big tech companies. Amazon, I believe, Alphabet, I think even Apple, although that sounds impossible, but definitely Microsoft saw a lot of value disappear the second they announced their earnings. That also happened with Qualcomm, unfortunately, because memory prices are going to impact them of Course and their prediction for the quarter we're currently in was below expectations. And so they suffered a small thing.
- [90:27]
C
There. Being up 5% was not enough.
- [90:29]
B
Enough? No, no. I mean I, you know, Google. Well, I don't, I don't see it here. I don't, I didn't write it down But Google was up 18, Amazon was up double digit percent. Microsoft was up double of them. Saw a major value fall apart right there and then. Spotify is a small company, but, well, you know, small compared to these companies. I, I'm just throwing this in here because profitable, you know, in Spotify's case, you got to really read between the lines on that one. But they are profitable. They have over 750 million monthly average users now. Now 290 million of them are paying premium subscribers. Right. The rest are ad supported. But still like that's like, that's a big number. That's a big number. That's a Windows number. That's like an Apple platform number. That's pretty good. And those customers, well, they get paid by those customers in some way every month, but in a very good way for the premium. So 290 million of those guys are paying. I don't know what the base price of Spotify is. Right. It's got to be close to 12 bucks or 15 bucks or.
- [91:33]
C
Whatever. And there's this whole conversation going on about AI generated music inside of Spotify.
- [91:37]
B
Right. That.
- [91:38]
C
Yeah. You know, the number of times I turn, I ask Spotify for to play something and then it just continues on and if you're not paying close attention, like it's well off the playlist. What doing are you, you playing.
- [91:49]
B
Now? Yeah, it's I, I. There are particular bars and restaurants in Mexico City that are playing. Playing what is clearly it's like remake radio. So it's like a song, you know, but not the version, you know, by the band that made it, you know, that kind of thing. And it's like, did you, is this cheaper or something? Like what is this? It's kind of.
- [92:09]
C
Weird. Like there's at least lots of chill versions of Pink.
- [92:12]
B
Floyd. Exactly. They're always chill. Like that's part of it. They're chill versions like, and it's like okay, the cool vibes of, you know.
- [92:20]
C
Whatever. Far away from that just being 100%.
- [92:23]
B
Synthetic. I, depending on what you listen to, it could be happening right now, you.
- [92:27]
C
Know. Yeah, that's not then, you know, not Spotify pays artists much anyway. It's like now, now they won't anything.
- [92:36]
B
On. I'M gonna find out. The guy with the obo is actually like a guy with a laptop and it's like an AI thing, don't it? That would be.
- [92:42]
A
Great.
- [92:42]
B
Great. Because if it's not, I'm going to beat him to death with that.
- [92:45]
C
Instrument. It's.
- [92:47]
B
Oboe.
- [92:47]
C
Gbt. Stop hurting.
- [92:48]
A
Me. I don't pay for.
- [92:51]
B
It. It's.
- [92:52]
C
Okay. Yeah, I.
- [92:52]
B
Know. That's the problem. Okay, so this literally happened. This happened like on the same day at the same time, basically. So Anthropic announced, we thought it was gonna be Sonnet 5, but it was Cloud Opus 4.6. Okay. Which is an, an agenic AI model for coding specifically. But remember, this was also the basis of their cowork product and now this thing is being used for that kind of thing more and more often. Right. So it's also like a productivity thing. This is when they updated their or released or whatever, their Excel and PowerPoint agents or whatever. Right. But in the time it took me to write that article, OpenAI announced and I swear they must have come out like at the same.
- [93:40]
A
Time. 20.
- [93:40]
B
Minutes. Excuse.
- [93:41]
A
Me. They were that.
- [93:42]
B
Close. Yeah. Minutes. They had to admit chat or something called GPT 5.3 Codex. So Codex is their AI coding model. And guess what? It's also really good at these productivity things. Like it's exactly the same thing. So this is no big surprise. I mean, we've seen this with Microsoft too. I mean, all the major AI guys, it seems like, like anytime any of them does anything that's of significance, the others like to trip over each other, do exactly the same thing. It was just kind of comical how this just happened like, you know, just like simultaneously almost. It was really funny. Not to me because I had to keep writing, but, you know, it was okay. And then probably last month, I think it was OpenAI revealed that their free and go tiers, they were going to start to introduce ads because, you know, that's what's going to make AI make sense financially. And then as promised, that started appearing, I think, I don't know if it's us only, but it might be us only, but you're starting to see it. So you have to be an adult. You have to be logged in. They promise this stuff's not going to appear anywhere near sensitive topics, things like health, mental health, politics, et cetera. They also promise this will not impact the quality of the result. In other words, the anthropic claim or, or fear mongering maybe is that by having ads in the product, they will be holding to the advertisers and thus might tailor the responses to them in the same way that you might see like a sponsored result in Google Search or in any app store by the way. Right. Like including Apples. But they say they're not going to do that and I trust them. They're not robots or anything. So that's fine. I don't know. And then DuckDuckGo has a private anonymous AI called Duck AI and they just added real time AI boys chat to that product, which is works as you would expect. You have to opt into it and of course you can opt out. And there's a little caveat here because, you know, like Proton would do, they try to do everything in the most private way possible, but they're also channeling your request to say OpenAI, I think is the big one that they use. And they, they do say, look there. We don't know of a way yet that this is working, but we've done this web browser thing long enough to know how this does happen, which is it's possible that OpenAI could fingerprint you based on the interactions you have with it. Like that. There'll be these commonalities and they'll figure out eventually that you are one person and they won't know who you are. They don't have your IP address or anything like that. But the other aspect of this is you're giving them your voice. Right. And so you have to opt in. The part of the problem is your voice is semi unique. Right. They can use that to help fingerprint you as well. They're trying to be as open about that as possible. I'm hoping, Richard, that you have information about this one because yesterday the. NET team released the first preview of. NET 11. This will be another November release. This is a standard term support version. The last one, remember, was long term.
- [96:51]
C
Support. Long term is three.
- [96:54]
B
Years. Three years versus two, I think 18 months. Okay. They describe it as major enhancements. I went through every single page of the updates. I didn't see a single major.
- [97:09]
C
Enhancement. So that's a.
- [97:11]
B
Stretch. Yeah. So I was hoping you do you. I don't. I mean obviously performance you're messing.
- [97:17]
C
With on the Async system is important long term, but.
- [97:22]
B
I. And that's in the runtime or the.
- [97:23]
C
Libraries.
- [97:25]
B
Yeah.
- [97:25]
C
And. And that's actually been gestating for quite a while. There's been a rethink of ASING going on for some time. So the fact that they're going to try and start to surface it in 11 is kind of a big deal because you know, it's one of those realities when you know you're going to ship a version every year is that often there are features that are left dark that are that. That sit out. There are still in testing and so forth before they actually show up for anybody to see. I mean, you know what, it's also preview one. These things may not make it.
- [97:52]
B
Okay. I thought you were going to say there could be more coming. Okay, so. And there could be more.
- [97:57]
C
Coming. But yeah, there easily could be. Yeah.
- [97:59]
B
Yeah. You know, core language stuff. C C, F sharp. I don't see too much major there. Yeah. The things I care about which would be WPF primarily and then maybe Windows Forms and maybe Maui very minor or non existent. I think in Windows Forms case actually there's nothing there there. I don't know. So anyway, they announced this and.
- [98:22]
C
There'S a lot going on on Maui at the moment that you. I don't think they're ready to show what they're working on yet. So it'll probably be later in the year before some of those bits start to appear. Maui's finally starting to grow.
- [98:34]
B
Up. The one thing I saw. Let me see if I can find this. Yeah, I don't know. There was one thing in here I was like, wait, what is this? But I don't see it. I'm sorry. Well, whatever. There'll be further previews and betas and.
- [98:50]
C
Rcs. Don't expect too much on preview one bits.
- [98:53]
B
Going. I feel like each release of. Net should in some way be a response to pain points that never got fixed or maybe were introduced by the previous version, et.
- [99:04]
C
Cetera. Well, in lots of stuff. Often the first things you see in a preview, one of the things that got cut out of the previous version that at some point in the development cycle when they were getting close to release candidate is like, we're not making this off. You can go, yeah. Oh, one thing before we move on too. Anthropic's fast mode, which I, I don't think got to mention because I, I just like the. I like Anthropic's confidence. They're not just making stuff. It's like saying, hey, we know this is so valuable to you that if you're willing to pay double, we'll put you at the front of the.
- [99:35]
B
Queue. Yeah. This is why they're not. They didn't get the Siri contract. Right. Right. They were so confident that they were like, you're gonna have to pay for this. And Apple's like, yeah, we don't pay for.
- [99:45]
C
Stuff. Yeah, that's what happens.
- [99:47]
B
Right?
- [99:48]
C
Yeah.
- [99:49]
A
Yeah. But there are two features in 4.6 that are documented but not turned on. One is that fast mode, although they encourage you to do it because you spend tokens. Like I think it's. I think it's six times the.
- [100:00]
C
Spending.
- [100:01]
B
Yeah. So it's, it's a, you know, you're getting dark.
- [100:05]
A
Pattern. The other thing that's interesting. Interesting. They said it's not smarter, it's just.
- [100:08]
B
Faster. Just faster. You know what, here's my advice. Just wait a second. You know, just wait. Yeah. You'll be.
- [100:15]
A
Okay. And then the other thing that's. These are both research previews that they've added. Is. And I think even very maybe more interesting and possibly more costly is the ability to spawn agents. So what you will now do is you'll have one Claude code that's running a bunch of sub Claude codes, each running.
- [100:33]
C
Independently.
- [100:34]
A
Yeah. At doing different parts of the task. And that's what they used to that do that C.
- [100:38]
B
Compile. That's like a. That's like a. A video game where like you get like a multi kill. It's like token.
- [100:45]
C
Kill. Token.
- [100:46]
B
Kill. Now you're using tokens.
- [100:48]
C
Exponentially.
- [100:49]
B
Wow. You're like, oh, I'm out of money. What happened?
- [100:53]
C
Yeah. How did that.
- [100:54]
A
Happen? Oh, don't worry, we can auto charge you if you. If you.
- [100:56]
B
Want. Yeah.
- [100:58]
A
Exactly.
- [100:58]
B
Right. You gave us our credit. You gave credit card number, you.
- [101:00]
A
Idiot. I have.
- [101:02]
C
That. This also feels like, hey, I'm. I can see the end of the bubble coming here and I need to be able to show revenue. So I'm trying some things to make some.
- [101:10]
B
Reven. This is what I. This is what I missed.
- [101:11]
A
From. That's what's interesting is companies aren't doing this. Racker 10 did the same thing. They had 40 agents running at once, I think through the C code. The two weeks of C code more what Anthropic was.
- [101:21]
B
Chasing. Oh, this is the guys that made the new C compiler, right? The Anthropic.
- [101:25]
A
Yeah. With four, six. This was a test of four, six. And I think they only spawned up five or six sub agents to do this. What they were really testing is how long can this run without going crazy, without.
- [101:36]
B
Hallucinating.
- [101:37]
A
Right. And it ramps up until it.
- [101:38]
B
Says, I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that. Your compiler is going to kill.
- [101:43]
C
You now, you know, and back to that whole. The Excel and PowerPoint agents is. They built those things so quickly, like you can see they're using their own tools and they're starting to accelerate. Well that the promise of these tools starting to come.
- [101:58]
A
Around. I'm going to talk about this on intelligent machines. I have a long tweet I'm going to read. But what it's pretty clear they're doing is at least anthropic and probably OpenAI is they're focusing on the coding tools first because once they get that self improving then you can do writing, graphics, anything else you.
- [102:18]
B
Want. It is interesting that coding, everyone working on this stuff basically is a coder. So they write this thing that benefits them but also benefits external developers. But it's fascinating in a way that these Codex type tools lean themselves into like productivity scenarios. Like they, they this. I don't think that they created this expecting that. Like.
- [102:40]
A
I. Well, what happened for both certainly for Anthropic and a little bit so much, not so much but a little bit for OpenAI is they have a comma, these codecs and code are command line and they wanted to open it up to. To people who weren't comfortable on the command line. So they created Cowork, Anthropics, Claude Cowork and the Codex app by the way, only on the Mac for some.
- [103:03]
B
Reason. Well, that's very common with these.
- [103:05]
A
AIs because the, because of the security.
- [103:09]
B
Profile. I was going to say it's because that's what they use, you know, like I don't know, that's what it feels like. Microsoft and Open, they had this major partnership where they were the only big partners. Now that's different. But they were still shipping on Mac.
- [103:22]
C
First.
- [103:22]
B
Right? That always felt a little.
- [103:23]
A
Weird. I don't know if they're shipping on Mac first or only because what they said is if you launch Claude Codex, Alex Jones was talking about this two weeks ago. It launches a virtual machine. It's actually slow, you.
- [103:34]
B
Watch. By the way, this may be related to that stuff we talked about at the top of the show. These two big initiatives where Microsoft wants to make Windows more secure and more reliable. Maybe, maybe it is tied to this AI agent stuff I did without knowing this particular detail, sort of tie it to that in my brain. Like I felt like AI essentially or especially agency. I was the, maybe the impetus for that, those efforts.
- [104:02]
A
Right? Yeah, could well be. I mean that's the few I would. I mean that's my contention that that's the.
- [104:07]
B
Future. So yeah, we're going to find out a year from now. Like everything we talked about today is really related to this like.
- [104:12]
A
The.
- [104:13]
B
Yeah. Why is there a store CLI AI agents. You know, like I. You could.
- [104:17]
A
Almost. But that TUI that you were talking about, probably agentically coded. It's really easy and simple and fast to write tui and I think people are getting more and more comfortable.
- [104:28]
B
Frankly. It's so awesome though. Like, I love it. I love it.
- [104:32]
A
Yeah. I, I all. I'm mostly. I haven't written a GUI yet with cloud code. It's all been either command line or, or a tui, which is a fascinating. I. Yeah, it's a, it's a. It's a really nice way to work and it's. And it's very fast. I re. I wrote and a lot of people have done this. I'm not the only one a RSS reader.
- [104:55]
B
Because.
- [104:55]
A
Yeah. A big part of my.
- [104:56]
B
Job. Well, it's. This is the canonical AI you know, vibe coding. You know, example now.
- [105:02]
A
Right. Look how fast this is. You know, I don't need. And there's no. I'm not. I have a mouse, but I don't need a mouse. I hit return. Oh, I haven't entered the key here. But if I want to bookmark it, I can have a quick bookmark or I can actually just save it with a. Benito said. Why do you type your bookmark in? Oh, you're right. So I made it. If you hit a space bar, it automatically bookmarks it. I mean there's it and it's super fast because I don't need, I don't want to.
- [105:28]
B
Master. I mean just looking for this is literally read.
- [105:31]
A
It. Pure.
- [105:31]
B
Information.
- [105:32]
C
Yeah.
- [105:32]
B
Yep. It's fascinating that this kind of old school.
- [105:35]
A
Cli. It's back, baby is.
- [105:37]
B
Back. And you know, look, if this was in like Linux or something like. Yeah, I know, I get it. Like, you know, but this is like happening in Windows into the Mac. I mean, you know, I know the Mac is at a terminal forever, but I mean, but like major work occurring at that level.
- [105:50]
A
Is. It's very.
- [105:51]
B
Interesting. It's very.
- [105:52]
C
Weird. The GUI ain't what it used to.
- [105:54]
A
Be. Yeah, well, what the GUI was training wheels, I think to get people used to the whole notion. Same thing with having a folder icon for files and stuff. And I think some of us don't need the training wheels. We're more interested in productivity and.
- [106:09]
B
Speed. Efficiency essentially. Right. I mean it's just interestingly a.
- [106:14]
A
Lot of coders are turning their back on IDEs now because that's slowing them.
- [106:20]
B
Down. I'm just going to memorize like Ms. Build, you know, whatever they call the parameters or whatever. I was like, okay, I mean you can, I mean you can do it. It like.
- [106:29]
A
It'S. I, you know, I still use Emacs, but I'm much less interested in IDE than I used to be a lot of times. Because you're not written code anymore. You're, you're writing.
- [106:38]
B
Prompts. Yeah. You're describing what you want and. Yeah, yeah.
- [106:41]
A
Yep. Let's take a little break, come back. We have more to talk about, including the vaunted Xbox segment. And yes, it's another PowerPoint. We're going on another tour. I'm excited with Risky. Well, he spent some time in Scotland and he has some things to, some stories to tell. But first, a word from our sponsor and a great sponsor. This is for this particular show. Trusted Tech. If you're using Microsoft 365, there's a pretty safe bet that you're paying for licenses you don't need or conversely missing ones you do.
- [107:20]
B
Need.
- [107:20]
A
Need. It's kind of a complicated thicket and it's going to get worse because in July, and this is not news, but Microsoft's going to implement a significant price increase for M365 and with it a lot more nuance. You need some help. Well, Trusted Tech is here. They help businesses of all sizes get the most out of their Microsoft investment by making sure their M365 environment is well supported and aligned with how the business actually operates. Things change too, you know. You may have been been perfect two years ago, but now you're doing more than you need to or less. Microsoft licensing very complicated. The options vary widely. Trusted Text Team helps organizations understand what they have, what they need and how to make the most of what they're paying for. And then of course the other side of Trusted Text business is they also provide support. But I wanted to talk about licensing because we've talked about the support before, I wanted to kind of focus on the licensing. If you want to make sure you're getting, getting M365 done right. TrustedTech is offering a free Microsoft 365 licensing consultation. You just go to TrustedTech Team WindowsWeekly365 TrustedTech Team WindowsWeekly 365 and get a clear data backed view of your current licenses, optimization opportunities and next steps. You know who loves Trusted Tech? Kevin Turner. You know him of course, former Microsoft Chief Operating Officer. Here's the quote. He was talking to Trusted Tech. He said you have an incredible customer reputation and you have to earn that every single day. The relentless focus you guys have on taking care of customers gives them value and differentiates you in the marketplace. He's talking about Trusted Tech. Trusted Tech also, as I said, can elevate the Microsoft support experience with its certified support services used by some of the best and the biggest. And they save 32 to 52% compared to the average Microsoft Unified support agreement. Whether you're looking to fine tune your Microsoft365 licensing or improve the way your organization receives proactive Microsoft support or both, Trusted Tech offers free consultations to help you understand your options. Go to TrustedTech TM WindowsWeekly365 and submit a form to get in contact with trusted Tech's Microsoft licensing engineers. TrustedTech Team Windows Weekly3.6 5 We thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. Now back to Paul and Richard. And time to talk about.
- [110:03]
B
Xbox. Yeah, mostly about non Xbox gaming, I guess. There's one Xbox story we didn't even cover because it seems kind of whatever. But Microsoft today announced the results. I guess the recipients of their second annual Xbox Excellence Awards. So the 2025 rendition across four categories. So ratings in the store, Player engagement. This is hours per play, I guess in the first six weeks of release. Daily active users and units sold. And I would, you know, Arc Raiders, interestingly, number one in daily active users and units sold. Player engagement number one was Borderlands 4. And this one blows my mind because I played this game and I know it's not true, but store rating, Black Op, Call of Duty, Black Ops 7, which is possibly the most frustrating game from a reliability perspective I've ever played. And yes, I played Daikatana. So I don't know what's going on. It's kind of, you know, I don't know what to say, but okay, that's.
- [111:12]
A
Fine. Did you like.
- [111:14]
C
Daikatana? Well, in between the crashes.
- [111:19]
B
Yeah. I mean, so is it a good game in the sense that it like was Quake Graphics where it was raining all the time for the first two hours? I, I mean it was okay, you know, there was a lot of, I, I, I appreciate what they were trying to.
- [111:31]
C
Do. Awfully arty.
- [111:33]
B
Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's, there were problems. I think that's the way to say.
- [111:38]
A
It. This was, was it Carmack or.
- [111:40]
B
Romero? This was.
- [111:40]
A
Romero.
- [111:41]
B
Romero's. This was what was called. He left it and started next. Software. No, what was it called? What was this company called? Jesus, I can't.
- [111:52]
A
Remember. It was a good book. I read that book that you.
- [111:54]
B
Recommended. Yep. Jeez, I don't remember. It doesn't matter. Anyway, they.
- [111:58]
A
Yeah. What was it called? Legions of Doom.
- [112:00]
B
I. No.
- [112:01]
C
What. Oh, the.
- [112:01]
B
Book. A Master To.
- [112:02]
A
Do. Masters to.
- [112:03]
B
Do. Yeah.
- [112:04]
C
Yeah. The audiobook is Romero.
- [112:06]
B
Games. Right. I thought I. No, I thought they had a. No, there was a name and now it's. It became Romero Games. Who put up t.
- [112:14]
A
Jesus. I'm looking it up on.
- [112:16]
B
Wikipedia. I know. Please, it's killing me. I can't think of this.
- [112:19]
A
Like, Ion.
- [112:23]
B
Storm. Ion Storm. Thank.
- [112:25]
C
You.
- [112:25]
B
Okay. Yeah, there was an iron Storm. All right.
- [112:28]
C
But. Okay, you've made a ton of money making games, so now you're going to make the mother of all games. Unlimited budget, and you find out you have a limit in your.
- [112:38]
A
Budget. It turns out 40,000.
- [112:41]
B
Copies. Yeah, it didn't do good. Didn't do good. Wasn't a good game. But like I said, you know, and plus, you know, they suffered from that typical game engine problem where they finally got this thing together to a point where they could ship it. And then it had come up with like, the Quake 2 engine. They were like, guys, like, what are you doing? And there was a big argument about you, oh, no, you have to pay for this again. Like you paid for the first one. You have to pay. You know, so it was a whole thing. I don't know. I don't know. It's just weird. Anyway, that came and went and by the way, you know, Romero Games was one of the studios who's working on a game for the Xbox or Microsoft Game Studio, and that Microsoft canceled it, whatever it was. Also didn't cover this. And interestingly tied to what we just said, ID software turns 35 this year.
- [113:32]
A
Wow. Oh.
- [113:33]
B
My. They did some early PC games, obviously, but to me, the beginning of this was really Castle Wolfenstein 3D. And that was something. The reason I could tell there was something special happening there without knowing anything about it was that I had an Amiga 500 at the time. It was awesome for games. My wife had a 286 based IBM PS1. You know, the thing you bought in Sears, because, you know, that's what it was. This thing had no memory, no graphic. It had four levels of gray. That was the, you know, black, white and two grays. Like, that was all the colors. But I downloaded this game and you could play it on that computer wonderfully. Other than the fact that it wasn't colored, but. But it was, you know, four grays, whatever. It ran unbelievably well. And look, eventually people who Program games to Amigas, figured out how to do that kind of first person thing. But by that point the Amiga had imploded. Didn't matter. But that was like an eye. That was eye opening. And then of course they did Doom and Doom 2. Unbelievable. And then Quake, which we just talked about, and Quake, what was the Quake World? And then quake two and quake three arena and on and on we go. But yeah, 35 years. Okay. Sony also did their financial quarterly release. Their biggest business, by the way, is game and network services. That's PlayStation. That. Revenues in that business actually declined 4.1% year over year because of lower hardware sales. And so they sold, I think it was 8 million units of PlayStation 5 in the quarter, down from 9.5 million the year ago. But they have now sold, I think it's 92. Is it in here? Yeah, 92 million. That's a lot of machines. Yeah, I feel like PlayStation 4 ended up somewhere in the 120 range. And I know PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were in the 88 million range, somewhere in there. 85, 88, something like that. So, so this is pretty good. And I'm pretty sure like Xbox Series X and S, I think they've sold 17 or 18 of those. So you know they're close. Yeah, Yep. But they're doing great with monthly average users. Their software sales are up, you know, et cetera, PlayStation now all that stuff's going great. So they're doing good. Valve, I think we all sort of expected. I don't know why they announced this when they announced this, but remember back I think it was December, they announced the Steam machine and also that headset thing, the Steam frame. And this is basically a PC in a box running Linux. Well, running Steam OS and pricing to be revealed. And then we've been suffering from this memory price gouging problem. Yada yada yada, like current gen and next gen Xbox and PlayStation hardware, like console hardware. It's running a custom AMD, in this case Zen 4 CPU, which is kind of interesting. I'm kind of curious to see this thing. But now they delayed it. They never announced a release date, so it's like they've delayed something. They never said when it was.
- [116:43]
C
Coming, you know, but it's not their fault. The supply chain is so messed up right now. It's not easy to build.
- [116:49]
B
Anything. I just don't know why they even announced this. Like I, I wonder.
- [116:53]
C
Why. I don't.
- [116:54]
B
Know. Well, whatever they're, they're kind of.
- [116:55]
C
I think they've been promising some test units. Oh, okay.
- [117:00]
A
So imagine you have to get to the game publishers.
- [117:04]
B
Early.
- [117:04]
C
Yeah. Yeah, I bet you did. They just got the price tag for the thousand units they're going to need for the initial round. We should.
- [117:12]
B
Wait. Can we just BM this or something? Yeah, and I didn't write about this. This could have been a tip, I guess. But Epic Games is having a winter sale right now, so if you were waiting on some particular game, you might want to just check. See, because for example, one game I've been meaning to is the remake of Silent Hill 2. Somehow this game is normally. I don't know if it's 69 or 59, but it's expensive.
- [117:37]
C
Still. It's an old.
- [117:38]
B
Game. I know. And it's half off right now. So I.
- [117:41]
C
Bought. I.
- [117:41]
B
Did. I bought that one. But GTA 5 enhanced, if you're waiting for the next GTA, also 50 off. Battlefield 6 is only off about 35. But Red Dead Redemption 2 is 75 off. So it's only 15.
- [117:55]
C
Bucks. Apparently they're gonna make a TV.
- [117:56]
B
Series. Series. They should. They could be the next. What was that show called? The. The HBO show? No, the. The Old west one.
- [118:06]
A
Deadwood. What a great.
- [118:08]
B
Show. Yeah. Fantastic show. Anyway, Yep. Check that out. You know, obviously all the big. All the stores have the sales over the holidays, but it's kind of interesting. Like beginning of February, they're having a sale. So it's worth checking out, like if you're a PC gamer, just. Just, you know, if there's some game you weren't sure or didn't buy or whatever. Like, I should have bought that Silent Hill game back in December, and I didn't. And then I was like, I'm not paying 60 or 70 bucks for this thing. But it was half off, so that's good.
- [118:36]
A
Good. Well, you know what? We're ready to go to the back of the book in just a moment. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurot and Richard Campbell. Paul's got a new book in the works. We're going to find out about that. Richard Been traveling and we're gonna find out about that in just a little bit. But first, a word from our sponsor, Cashfly. Really more than a sponsor. This show is brought to you quite literally by Cashfly, our content delivery network. TWiT runs on CashFly because our global tech savvy audience. That's you. Deserves no less than the best when you're pushing petabytes of video and audio every month to every corner of the world. Good enough. CDN just don't make it. Cashflow's 20 years of peak performance speaks for itself. 158% faster than other major CDNs. Well known CDNs and that's for rich media delivery. They have sub second video start times across devices. That's important to us. 100% cash hit ratio. 100% availability over the last 12 months. Not. Not four nines, five nines, no nines at all. 100% that's amazing. Games load 70% faster with zero lag spikes. All of that stuff that means a lot to us and we have an audience all over the world which I cherish, I love. And Cashfly's global points of presence. Their pops include in country infrastructure for hard to reach markets so you don't have to explain to stakeholders why half your users are experiencing degraded performance. In the unlikely event that you do need support, you can immediately speak with engineers who understand your unique challenges. 24. 7 Access to tenured experts who can troubleshoot at your level. Design your own contract when you're ready to commit. No surprise charges, no overlap fees, just peak performance on your terms. Learn how you can get your first month free@cashfly.com twit. You've heard me say it for years. Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by cash fly at C-A C-H-E-F-L-Y.com TWIT. Thank you cash Fly. Now to the back of the book. And speaking of books, Paul's gonna write another.
- [120:51]
B
One. We'll say I do like the concept of degrading.
- [120:55]
A
Services. I know, I meant, I didn't mean degrading. It's like.
- [120:59]
B
Degraded. Why must you degrade me? I pay for you. That's good. Yeah. So I've been working on obviously like a 25H2 version of Windows 11 Field Guide. The problem with that book is it's humongous. Like it's way too big. So part of the effort there is just figuring out a way to communicate this information in a more concise way. But I think we just came up somehow just. Of course it did. Because you know, I had mentioned a week or two ago some. This notion of, you know, when you think about, about people like me who support really the people who use Windows but support Windows essentially how the focus has changed over the years. Like in the beginning, you know, it was about finding the secrets that you know that were like, you know, and eventually there's no secrets and it's like, well, helping people be more efficient. Or you know, know about like maybe obscure features they wouldn't otherwise find out about. Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But it seems like in recent years the focus has shifted a lot to what we would now call like the insertification stuff and how to, you know, I added chapters like in the beginning. It's like how to configure this thing. As soon as you get out of the out of box experience, you're at the desktop. Like what you should do right away because a lot of bad things might happen if you're not careful. Or how to correctly configure things like, you know, OneDrive folder backup or Edge, you know, Edge, whether you're going to use it or not, you know. And it kind of occurred to me that maybe there's a small subset of this book that I could do that originally I thought of as like a field, like a mini field guide or, or whatever you want to call it. I'm just going to, I think I'm just going to call it the insuredify Windows 11. I have published the first preview, I guess you'll call it, of the first two chapters. Not chronological, not the first two chapters as they'll appear in the book, just the first two I wrote to the site. So I've got one on Microsoft Edge, one on OneDrive. I've written most of what will be a setup chapter, I guess, if that makes sense. So that will be available soon as well. And I'm hoping to get this thing done by the end of February if I can. Like I'm trying to do like a monthly kind of focus thing. So this is like my February focus, kind of get this thing cranked out. So there you go. The one. By the way, because I talked about this last week, I mentioned how if you bring up a new or recent or just reset computer and now you have the latest version of Windows. So it's 25H2, but it's also a 25H2, like the January version or whatever, whatever the latest is in the, that you update to, I guess February. Now they changed the behavior for OneDrive and as of last week I had done this across multiple machines multiple times. And I figured out that with rare exception, as soon as OneDrive comes up, the little icon appears. Remember, it's a line through it, it's updating and then it disappears and comes back. If you click it right, then go into Settings and go to backup. You can it actually, this is a little info bar and you can actually turn off OneDrive folder backup from ever happening and it seems to never come on. And I was pretty excited about that. But of course this leads to a related question, which is like, how long could you wait? You know? So I've spent the week since testing that. And if you, if you're familiar with how OneDrive works, when you bring up a new computer or reset computer, it analyzes the files you have in OneDrive and it processes them because it has to display the stubs for those files in File Explorer. And that process takes some amount of time depending on how much storage you have. So I'm using almost 900 gigabytes of storage, so I don't remember the. Net number of files. I guess it doesn't matter. It takes OneDrive 30 minutes to, in my case, to process that. Now if you have less, I would imagine that's going to happen more quickly, right? So. So I got to figure out a way to artificially have 500 gigabytes of storage in OneDrive somewhere. But I'll get to that eventually. You have at least that amount of time to do this. So on multiple computers, once it finishes processing, it will turn on folder backup within five minutes, let's say. So however long it takes, plus a couple of minutes, you have that much time, I recommend doing it immediately. So that's 100 of the.1 of the things that will be in the book. And then because they don't really have much of an. Actually, I should. Maybe next week I'll write something up. Before next week I'll write about that edit thing, which I love. But if you do need the full Office kind of treatment. LibreOffice is actually fairly incredible. It's been around forever. Obviously it's free, it has all the major apps, it's mostly compatible with Office and some, you know, stuff there with the open slash, not really open file formats and yada yada yada, but. But if this is where you're at, like I've kind of moved on from full bloat Office suite thing personally. But if you need all the, you know, the word processor, the spreadsheet, the presentation package, etc, it's free, works everywhere, it's on Windows, Mac, Linux, supports 120 languages. There's no licensing issues of any kind. You can use it at home, you can use it at work, it doesn't matter, it'd be a night. You know, it's. It may not work for everyone, I get that. But this might be one way to wean yourself off of the, you know, you pay every month for the rest of your life kind of Thing that is modern office suite. So it's, it's, it's worth looking at. I don't have a presentation.
- [126:19]
C
Sadly. But look, if you're looking for an alternative, but you know they don't.
- [126:23]
A
Have a presentation manager in.
- [126:24]
B
That. No, I don't have a presentation. Oh, you do have a presentation.
- [126:26]
A
App.
- [126:27]
B
Okay. I probably should have used it to create a little presentation about Libra.
- [126:29]
A
Office. Richard has a.
- [126:30]
B
Presentation. That's what I.
- [126:32]
A
Hope. But I hear he used Loop.
- [126:34]
B
So. And I don't have a Google like news thing to write right now, so I'm actually going to pay attention to.
- [126:39]
A
This. Ladies and gentlemen, this would be a excellent point in the show to talk about Run as Radio with Richard.
- [126:47]
C
Campbell. Yeah, did a show with one of the DART members. This is the folks that are involved in security at Microsoft, Ron Orestia, who's been running a series series, used to be a premier field engineer. He's been writing a series about properly securing active directory, domain and certificate services around Entra and so forth. And so why do we care about this? Well, if you're running a domain infrastructure, you have security issues around this, primarily because it's the lateral move that black hats make. They fish a user, get into that machine and then they'll immediately lateral onto ad. If they can get out of the individual's credentials and onto a server credential now they can propagate software to sort of the second tier. And so locking this down properly is important. And all too often they're all minimum configuration. You've got it up enough to make it run and then you never touched it again. And normally a regular AD install wouldn't have its own certificate services, but you can set that up. And the usual reason you will is that you're using secured WI fi where devices have a certificate on them, they're allowed on the WI fi, otherwise you're on the guest WI fi. But if you haven't configured that properly, boy, that can really hijack everything. Right? This is how supply chain attacks happen because normally if you are running your own search services, you'll also use that to sign all of your code. And so now the hacker can get in there, modify code, have it sign with your own insert and propagate it onto your customers. And boy, that's a big old pile of lawsuits just waiting to happen. So Ron walks us through what it really takes if you're going to run this infrastructure to do it properly. Starting with the primary certificate holder is offline. That is literally a machine that is Never plugged into any network ever. It's only used to update the primary cert and to delegate to controlling servers from there. And once a year or so, probably every nine months, you have a signing party where you knew all the certs and so forth. It's a bit of a ritual, but it's also what keeps systems safe. And so we just sort of talk through the reality of what your responsibility is when you run certificate services like this and how to do it properly and where to get more information. And the guys, clearly the expert in the space, he. All his blog posts are well worth reading and he. He's fighting that fight every.
- [129:10]
A
Day. Very nice. Now time to put down your swords and pick up your shot glasses because time for a little.
- [129:25]
C
Tour. That's the Craig A Locky. That's where we stayed. So now, a week later last week I talked about my Saturday in Of Spite Scotland with my buddy David, and in the morning he picked me up from the hotel in Glasgow and then we went to. We drove for several hours to get to go to the Glendronach tour in the morning. And. And after that was done, we went and checked into the Craig Locky, which I've talked about before. And if you go to the second slide, you know, you'll see me. Have I've mentioned the sportsman's entrance to the Craigiellake? So it is a hotel, but this part of the. Of Scotland is very much for fishermen and hunters and so forth. So this is sportsman entrance. If you've got a brace of salmon or you've bagged yourself a. A stag, this is where you go to clean it and then it has direct access to the freezers to actually store it. So this is really a thing. Again, I've mentioned it, but I just wanted to show you that this was the reality of what we were.
- [130:29]
A
Doing. Yeah. Did you see any sportsman entering there or.
- [130:32]
C
Just. No, this is now we're off season, Right. And I've been there in January. It's nice, the hotel's open, it wasn't too busy, there was a few folks there. But it's also great time for the places that have tours all year round and many don't. You can usually get a tour this way. And so David wanted to see Glenn Duronak because it's in the midst of this change and I talked about the new master distiller and so for what was happening there. And I want you, if you remember from last week, that was a very conventional, normal tour. Right. That's what I'm used to. I've done a ton of them. In fact, it's exactly the tour I did at the Macallan in 2011, you know, back in the day. But since then, Macallen has built this new facility and so it was time to go see it. Now you can't get a tour. You have to go on an experience. And so, so just to sort of. I want to convey the level of pretense we're talking about here. You have to book in advance if you, you know, most distilleries, if you show up, if there's any room there you're allowed in. It's no big deal. But apparently McAllen. Nope. Don't you. Don't you book in advance online? It is complicated to do so. And normally like the tour we did at Glendronic that morning, I think was 25 pounds and includes a taste of four whiskeys. Right. So you spread. Spend an hour walking around seeing stuff, which I love. And then we tried a few of the whiskies. Thanks for playing. Now there are less expensive tours at the, at McAllen, but not very many of them. The one I booked was the Legends Tour. And the legends tour is £175 per person, which is really, really an outrageous amount of money for a.
- [132:10]
B
Tour.
- [132:10]
C
Her. Now, I've talked about Macallan before, so I don't. I don't know how to explain it all that much. We talked about Alexander Reed and he gets the license in 1824. And he's. And he talked about this place. I mentioned Easter Eikles, which if you fire up the third slide, I did get a good picture of the actual Easter Eichel's house, which is from the 1700s. There had been. Barley has been growing on that chunk of land literally since Neolithic times. And there are very clear records involving this structure and this estate from the 1500s, that house. And I took this picture myself in the dark. So this is the enhanced mode on the Pixel 9 is basically exactly as it looks since 1760. And by the way, this is exactly what's on the bottle of Macallan these days. On the next slide, I got a close up of the McAllen Macallan 12. And you'll see the little Easter Eichel's graphic at the top, which they only adopted in the 1980s. Like Macallan's brand is very carefully crafted. Edmonton knows exactly what they're doing and so they've, they've tailored to this look. But that's the building, it's the Oldest thing. It's only the. The only heritage structure anywhere on the place. So I've set the stage. We're at Craig Lockey. I have paid for this 175 pound tour. So they come and pick you up, which is nice because you don't want to drink and drive, right? Like that's one of the upsides of this. But what they pick you up in when you do this legends tour is the McAllen Wiener Mobile. It was a Bentley and when, I mean, it was a Bentley Bodega Bottega painted in Macallan.
- [133:54]
B
Red.
- [133:54]
C
Wow. And the door sillites, you know, when you open the door, normally have little, you know, Bentley logo on it. No, it said Macallan on the, on the.
- [134:02]
B
Ground. Very.
- [134:04]
C
Nice. And nice young lady with a heavy brogue got us into the vehicle and drove us. It's not very far to go. Macallan from Kaki. It's all right in the same area. And you know, the one thing you didn't need to coach us too much on was the distillery to, you know, the distillery itself. But this was this new facility and that's the entrance you're looking.
- [134:23]
A
At. There it is how green things are when it rains every, every single.
- [134:27]
C
Day. It rains all the time. So this is the new distillery facility and it is absolutely enormous. So when I did the tour back in 2011, which by the way, costs £15 included for samples, right. The old distillery was not a pretty distillery. It was not as good looking as Glendronic. It was sort of a hodgepodge bell. He was all over the place. And in 2012, like the year after I did that, they announced this new development they were.
- [134:52]
B
Doing. They.
- [134:52]
C
Spent. Spent a hundred forty million.
- [134:56]
A
Pounds.
- [134:56]
C
Wow. Building this new facility up on the ridge. And it took them six years. It finished in 2018. And if you again, look at that graphic, it's this sort of rolling green roof. It's absolutely massive. It's a 12, 300 square meters. That's three acres. And this is the approach to it. That black box at the end there, those are the doors. Course, it's all this stress, this truss structure. It's like 1800 beams, 2700 wooden roof panels with the green roof growing on top of it. The peak of those domes are 90ft high. And the dome itself is like 600ft long. And there's four of.
- [135:38]
A
Them. And it looks like you could put cows up there and to.
- [135:41]
C
Graze. You probably could, but you know, they might mess with the smell of the whiskey. So this is Quite a long stroll up there and there's not a lot of people around. Getting is offseason. It's not. The weather is not nice. There were a few people in, in the facility and they were absolutely expecting you. They, you know, we'd come in by the Bentley, for crying out loud.
- [136:00]
A
Wow. You didn't get a picture of the.
- [136:02]
C
Bentley? I did not take a picture of the Bentley, no. And, and to be honest, I'm all. I missed a lot of photos here because we're just a bit.
- [136:08]
B
Overwhelmed.
- [136:09]
C
Yeah. This is a long way from a normal whiskey tour. Right. Like this is just like kind of the height of pretense. Like unbelievable what we were looking at. And when you get inside, it's absolutely massive inside. The display wall covered in bottles. These video sequences running all the time. There was a check in area where they took our coats and so on. And we met our guide and then she took us on upstairs and showed us a model of the actual distillery. So this, each of these domes has a collection of the mash tons and processing and then four wash stills and eight spirit stills. And if you remember from previous times, I've talked to Macallan, I've talked about Macallan so many times. They have the smallest spirit stills in the industry. They're tiny little things and they're sort of famously.
- [136:58]
B
Small.
- [136:58]
C
Right. It's a 4,000 liter stills. They actually put them on the 10 pound Scottish note at one point back in the 90s. And so they have a ton of these things and there's. They initially said they built two of the pods right away because they're producing something like 15 million liters a year. Year. And there is a third pod that was being held in reserve, but they've already started dissembling it now. So clearly their production is only increasing. Also within this facility is a, a restaurant built by the Roca brothers. The Roka brothers built the restaurant called Le Cellar Decadroco, which has twice now been rewarded the best restaurant in the world. And so they've now got a restaurant on the facility which has a nine course tasting menu with whiskey and wine pairings. But only 24 seats. You have to book two years in advance and it wasn't open this time of year.
- [137:45]
A
Anyway. So we, we, we're so.
- [137:47]
B
Upscale. Wow.
- [137:48]
C
It's. It's madness. So. But after seeing the pod, the next thing we did was actually walk around the stills and, and you could just get a sense of how vast all of this actually.
- [137:59]
B
Was.
- [137:59]
C
Wow. So, you know, you've Seen the model. Now, here's the actual thing. And by the way, all of These are running three shifts a day, 24 hours. They are cranking out the whiskey because they sell it. They are making an absolute fortune at their level of production, and they store 200,000 barrels on site, plus the more in other locations. So the scale of this place is almost indescribable, and it almost didn't seem real. You thought it was. Was a play piece and went, no, this is a working distillery. And they built this sort of metal tier level where we can walk around everything. All the operations are going on below you, so you can be right in the action normally. And these stills are running hot. Like, you don't want to touch.
- [138:43]
B
Them. They're.
- [138:43]
C
Not. They're not safe. But unlike the tour, Glenn, the contrast in the tour was very interesting because Glenn Dronach was. It was just the two of us, just like it was in Macallan with a tour guide and this tour guideline. Very quickly, quickly. We know a lot about whiskey. We're asking very specific questions. So she's not explaining the basics to us. We're digging into more history and details, so forth. This, the lady here at McAllen was very nice, but she could not, just could not divert from her script. So I got to learn what a washback was, which was very exciting for me. And so we were patient with her, like, eventually and took the pictures we wanted to do. And then we finally got over to the tasting area, which was that. That loungy. You know, typically a tasting area is a. Is a small wooden room with a big table and. And a bunch of glasses and so forth. And there are a couple of tables like that at.
- [139:33]
A
At.
- [139:33]
C
At. But there we were sitting in a lounger because it's just the two of us. There was a couple other couples around. There was not many people around. And we had four whiskies to taste. The first is on the screen. Now, this is a classic Macallan 12, which is incredibly hard to find these days. They're just. They're really rare. You want to know how rare they are? Are. Even Macallan's out of them. The picture I didn't take of this bottle was the backside, because it's actually the Russian edition of Macallan 12, and the back label is all in.
- [139:58]
A
Cyrillic.
- [139:59]
C
Wow. Because that's all Macallan has. They're so short on whiskey. The problem, the only reason they have that is they're not allowed to ship it to Russia. Second whiskey we tasted was the 21 color edition. I've already made fun of the color edition. They call these the travel versions. Is the stuff you find at duty free shops and of course on cruise ships. And the decay, you know, the 12 is. Is beautiful in its own classical way. If you can find ones true sherry cast. This is the seasoned sherry seasoned oak style which I just don't think has as much time in the barrel. So even though it's a 21, it's. It's got its own issues. Did not impress. Third up was this special non age statement they call the rare cask blouse back. Yeah, I, you know. Utterly unmemorable. Huh. Which brings us to the fourth one which is the showstopper unexpected. We did not know what whiskeys we were going to taste. Friends. This is a bottle of McAllen's Reflection M. This is a 6,000 pound bottle of whiskey. Normally I would never try this whiskey. You've heard me tell the story before. Like you don't. Don't taste 6,000 pound bottles of whiskey because there's no good outcomes. A shot is 500 pounds, right? So either you're gonna spend 500 pounds on a shot and hate it and then you blew 500 pounds or you're gonna love it. You're gonna get a divorce because you need a 6,000pound bottle of whiskey that is Lalique.
- [141:25]
A
Crystal. It's a beautiful.
- [141:27]
C
Bottle. It has a different stopper when it's sealed and you have the crystal stopper in there because it's. This whiskey is otherworldly. I couldn't even call it whiskey. I don't know what I drank. It was profound and, and at that same time, like just kind of shocking. Like yeah, okay, I get it now. I know why you're charging £6,000 for that. I still don't want.
- [141:52]
A
One. Like, how would you describe it? What is.
- [141:54]
C
It? Tastes like literally otherworldly balls. I mean, you know, what do you expect from a spay? This sort of rich, caramelly smooth, you know, unbelievable flavors of wood. Like. And that's exactly what you got again, it's got no age statement on it. You don't even know what's in the bottle. Right. I don't even know if it's a.
- [142:14]
A
Whiskey. It's just if it were inexpensive or less expensive, would you drink.
- [142:19]
C
It? I would get one. So you could all try it. Right. You know what? It wasn't, it wasn't what I was looking for in a.
- [142:25]
A
Whiskey.
- [142:25]
C
Interesting. Right? Like I kind of have a set of expectations now what I like to drink, what I feel like. And I never feel like that. Right. Like I. I don't even know what to say. It was just staggering. And by the way, suddenly the £175 for a tour. I.
- [142:40]
A
Know. What a.
- [142:41]
C
Deal. Bargain. I know.
- [142:43]
B
Right? What a.
- [142:44]
C
Deal. Which is. Yeah. Get an outrageous amount to spend on a tour for what lasted an hour and was completely scripted to tour this enormous cathedral to. How much whiskey do we have to sell to build 140. 40 million dollar building. Right. But yeah, and then we, we. The tour wasn't quite done. We went into the. What they call the heart of spirit room which is in this little private area. I don't know that we was. It was just quiet enough that they let us do this. And so in the, in the next slide there was. There's a wall of like years of whiskey. And it reminds me like there's no, there's no 1926 there because there was a 1926 edition of these that went for two and a half. Half million pounds. Like crazy, you know, crazy expensive whiskey. But in the middle of the room is a display. And it took me. It's hard. It looked like a piece of art. But what that actually is is a brace for a bottle. That's that blue red thing at the top is sort of.
- [143:41]
A
Circular.
- [143:41]
C
Yeah. Called time and space. That is the oldest whiskey in the.
- [143:47]
B
World.
- [143:48]
C
Oh. Oh, that is. That is an 84 year old bottle of.
- [143:51]
B
Whiskey.
- [143:51]
C
Wow. From a. From a barreling from 1940. It is, oddly enough, not for sale and no tastings. So we just got to stare at it with this structure around it. This. Again, I thought. We thought it was a piece of art, but no, it was a stand for a bottle of whiskey in the middle of this room. In.
- [144:13]
A
This. Do you think they believe they break it out for special occasions? I mean really, you know, if.
- [144:18]
C
You go on their website for, for the reflection as well. Like if you go to. The reflection is not for sale. If you go. I included the link of the show notes. There's a click there. There's a link there to click on called for inquiries. If you write all of these whiskeys, that's what it is. Yeah. It's not on the shops, it's not for sale. It's. If you would like to inquire, you may. You know, we often talk about the experience of, of going to distillery because I'm very much, very much a person who likes the craftsmanship of making whiskey. And you know, one thing I didn't see While that facility was running full bore. Any craftsman at all? Any workers of any.
- [145:02]
B
Kind?
- [145:02]
C
Huh? You know, it was. It was running full bore, but it looks almost automated. It seemed. Often I go into a distillery and I come back liking the product more. That did not happen this.
- [145:15]
A
Time.
- [145:17]
C
Interesting. I was just shocked at the. At the scope of the place that, like, this is what happens when you have this much money and. And what you end up making as a consequence. There was another couple there that were buying a lot of whiskey that were English and they were lovely people. We partied with them that night. That dog party and all of that insanity. I think I talked about last time. Or did I talk about.
- [145:42]
A
It? Maybe I didn't. I don't remember.
- [145:44]
C
It. I. I'll tell you in a sec. But they were buying whiskey for friends and for a wedding and things like that. They spent a tremendous amount of money. I just don't know if they got things that were really that good for what they.
- [145:55]
A
Were. I thought Macallan was a pretty good.
- [145:59]
C
Whiskey. You know, then it's. The line.
- [146:02]
B
Is. It used to.
- [146:03]
C
Be. It used to be a definitive whiskey. Remember when I got that bottle of 18 as a gift and I did it on the show and I said, like, I haven't bought one of these in ages. It costs a bundle. It's twice. And literally what I said was, for this, for the price of this bottle, you could get two Glentronic 18s, which are also sherry casks and equally easily as good. Like, you're just paying a lot for the name. But also their popularity has gotten to the point now where they can't make enough product. And. And they're running around the clock trying to do it. And they're coming up with all these other strategies to keep people having the McAllen name in their hand one way or the other. There's, you know, what you won't find anywhere in Scotland in a local pub, somebody drinking Macallan. A local won't drink it. No. It's way too much money. No need. Right. Why would you. It doesn't mean it's bad, just that it's. They're so deeply down. And this is the Edrington.
- [146:54]
B
Group.
- [146:55]
C
Right. And Edgerton is not just McAllen, but also Highland park, which makes excellent whiskey as well. And Famous Grout Grouse. Right. Which. Famous Grouse is a blend that's mostly neutral spirit with a little bit of Macallan and. And Highland park in.
- [147:12]
A
It. Right.
- [147:12]
C
Interesting. And they've done such a good branding job with. With Famous Grouse like even I have been pulled into came to appreciate that. But yeah, though they're in a crazy spot and it's not entirely a fault. Like I said, it's unbelievable amount of money money. And in this current market where we have, you know, where first class tickets on airlines are always sold out because there's a, there's a wealthy class that don't care what stuff costs. McAllen is catering to them. If you make the inquiry, like I'm sure there's a way to get those things and they have very high price tours if you want to go down those things. Like I get what they're doing in meantime not able to supply the regular folks. So we, we finished the tour and thanked them all very much. We did not buy anything thing unlike in Glendronic where we did come home with a bottle and we took the. The Bentley back to the Craig Aki and then we had a very.
- [148:05]
A
Nice dinner and they're making too much whiskey. Is.
- [148:09]
C
That. Yeah, I think that's exactly it. They're just so big and so much money. You know, we talk about this in the startup industry where if you raise that much money, it kind of not can't help make bad decisions. You know, Uber gets 60 billion in investment and can't not make a good. Make a good decision at that point. It's too much money. Like I feel like McAllen's in that same place they built this cathedral.
- [148:29]
A
And it's just same thing with wine up here in the wine.
- [148:33]
C
Country. Yeah, look what.
- [148:34]
A
Happened. Yeah, right.
- [148:35]
C
Exactly. I've been. That's what I said to David at the time. It's like I've been to the Opus 1 Cathedral. I know what happened when they won that award. Right. And they, and they tripled their price and then dumped it into building that.
- [148:45]
A
Facility.
- [148:46]
C
Right. You know, it, it gave me the sense of this is not for.
- [148:50]
B
Me. Right.
- [148:52]
C
Right. Like just anyway, you know what happened that night that was lovely? Like it's Scotland. There's a dog under every.
- [148:59]
B
Table.
- [149:00]
A
Right. That's why it's called the dog.
- [149:02]
C
Party. Yeah, yeah. That's why we had a dog party. So we at dinner, we had David's dog Zach, named after my old Karen. Zach, who I missed terribly. My new puppy, Josephine. Lily is sitting at my feet right now, actually. She's being very good kid. It's only a year old. There were a couple other couples at dinner and they also had dogs. And so we all went up to the Qu, which is the whiskey bar. I've talked about before, in, in the Craig. This is all wooden floor, wooden ceiling, you know, pot belly stove, windows on the spay and all the whiskey ever. So we all piled up there and we brought all the dogs and they, there was a couple of British bullies that there was a couple of whippets who were appalled the whole time.
- [149:44]
B
And it was just a.
- [149:44]
A
Rock. Quiet, shivering.
- [149:46]
C
Constantly. Just pure joyful chaos while we drank excellent whiskey and laughed at brain. It was a kind of evening party after dinner after a long day. Also drinking whiskey where everybody hugged everybody at the end of the night and then we all said hi at breakfast the next morning because you know, go for Scottish breakfast afterwards. Yeah, it was a blast. And when a great whiskey tour day. But yeah, I just come away from Macallan going, there's a reason I have been buying these bottles lately. Like I don't recognize that company anymore. I don't even know what to say. There's I, I like digging down into the woods. Like they are just the most mainstream of mainstream super brand and. And I'll buy something.
- [150:31]
A
Else. Mr. Richard Campbell. You see, the true connoisseur seeks the surprise. The little, the special, the small ones, the unique ones, not the, not the ones everybody else is.
- [150:45]
C
Drinking. And that's why that's a Yogi Barrel line, right? Nobody goes there.
- [150:49]
A
Anymore. It's too busy, it's too.
- [150:50]
C
Popular. Nobody goes there.
- [150:52]
A
Anymore. Rich is@runasradio.com that's where you'll find his runners radio, podcast and net rocks the show he does with Carl Franklin. And where are you going next? You're.
- [151:04]
C
Peripatetic. Oh, next try. I'm coming with you. We're going to Orlando for oh.
- [151:10]
A
World. That's three weeks off. Yeah, that's gonna be a lot of.
- [151:13]
C
Fun. So it's a long time, but that's about the threshold I'm allowed to be home for.
- [151:16]
A
Anyway. Yeah, well, have a nice three weeks in that park. Thanks to Paul Thurat. He's the author of of course the field guide to windows11@leanpub.com Windows everywhere and soon de and shittify Windows. Also of course you can find his blog@therot.com, his news site. What am I saying? Blog. That's diminutive. It's a Windows news site. Everything you'd ever want to know about Microsoft. Thank you, Paul. Together, the dynamic duo of Windows coverage comes by here every Wednesday at 11 Pacific 14 East Coast Time 19. You can watch us live on YouTube. TikTok. No, we don't do TikTok anymore. It was too hard. Too hard. YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. Of course club members can watch in the club Twitt.
- [152:12]
B
Disco. Someday I'll be a TikTok.
- [152:15]
A
Star. TikTok will be the real.
- [152:17]
B
Deal. Today is not that.
- [152:18]
A
Day. Not that day, not that day. Paul after the fact on demand versions of the show available at TWiT TV www.you can also find us on YouTube. That's the video there. And of course a great way to share clips with friends and family. You see a click a link right there on the Windows Weekly page. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client, get it automatically the minute it's available, audio or video. And if you do that, leave us a nice review. Those reviews help more than you know. They're a great way to spread the word about the best darn window show in the world. Thank you, Paul. Thank you Richard. Have a wonderful week and we will see you right here next Wednesday on Windows Weekly. By.
- [153:00]
B
Dozers. At the UPS Store we know being a small business owner means holiday time is still go time, still get those orders, ship time, and still re up on stamps and supplies time. That's why this upcoming holiday, while others close up shop, we'll be open and happy to help you keep being unstoppable. Come into your local store today. Most locations are independently owned product services. Pricing and hours of operation may vary. See center for details. The UPS Store Be.