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Windows Weekly 992: Gassy Jack
02:32:12
Largest Patch Tuesday in Microsoft History!
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- [00:00]
Paul Thurrott
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul's here, Richard's here. And so as patch Tuesday yesterday with a record number. We'll actually ask Fable to tell us a little bit more about those patches. Some new stuff on the docket for the Insider program and the Big Apple OpenAI breach. That and a whole lot more coming up on Windows Weekly. This episode is brought to you by Black Hat usa. If you listen to this show, you go deep on the technical detail. Well, so does Black Hat. For nearly three decades it's been where the security industry's most rigorous research gets presented and pressure tested. More than 100 hands on trainings taught by practitioners who actually deployed in live environments, not lecturers reading from slides. And hundreds of peer reviewed briefings that go well past the overview into the real work across the four areas defining security right now. AI and autonomous threats, cyber conflict, systemic resilience and identity. This year, Black Hat's briefings pass includes all keynotes and main stage access plus business hall entry. You also get breakfast, lunch, Arsenal live tool demos, on demand session access and admission to the midnight in the war room screening. Black Hat takes place from August 1st to the 6th in Las Vegas. If you want the depth this show gets into in person with the people doing the work, this is the room. And we'll be there too. Prices rise on July 17th, so book before then. Use the code TWIT for $200 off your briefings pass@blackhat.com us26 that's B L A C K H A T.com us-26 podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWIT. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 992. Recorded Wednesday, July 15, 2026. Gassy Jack. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello winners. Hello dozers. This is the show. We talk Windows, Microsoft and all that jazz. The day after a record breaking patch Tuesday, I give you the fully exhausted Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. It's a good thing we don't have to heft those patches manually. We can apply them automatically. Paul@therot.com Richard Campbell at Runas. I'm sorry.net no Runasradio. You know what? It's on the mug. Run as radio.
- [02:48]
Richard Campbell
There it is right there.
- [02:48]
Leo Laporte
All those things.
- [02:49]
Paul Thurrott
It's on the mug. Good to see you both, gentlemen. Richard is at home in beautiful Adira Park, British Columbia, where nothing really happens. The loons.
- [03:05]
Richard Campbell
It's the loons.
- [03:07]
Paul Thurrott
And Paul is in Makunji, Pennsylvania.
- [03:09]
Leo Laporte
Where everything happens.
- [03:11]
Paul Thurrott
It's all happening. Something tells me it's all happening in Makunji.
- [03:16]
Leo Laporte
Makunji City of the future.
- [03:20]
Richard Campbell
So we spent a chunk of the afternoon watching the Eagles fish yesterday. So.
- [03:24]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, exactly. As one does.
- [03:27]
Leo Laporte
And we spent a bunch of the afternoon watching Eagles in preseason football play. So it's the same.
- [03:31]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, yeah, there's eagles everywhere. So let's talk about this massive Patch Tuesday. It came out during security now, and I think I bowled Steve over with the numbers. Wow.
- [03:45]
Richard Campbell
Wow.
- [03:46]
Leo Laporte
It's crazy, right? So. Well, I mean, yeah, he thinks it's because of AI.
- [03:51]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [03:51]
Richard Campbell
He thinks it is M Dash in action.
- [03:54]
Leo Laporte
No. Microsoft has acknowledged this. Yeah. It's weird to me when they make these announcements about Patch Tuesday. They don't just talk about. They should have a post with this immediately. I think this is the time to talk about this because it's a good thing. But yeah, when we learned a few months back that Microsoft was using this EM Dash, it's really, I guess, a harness of AI models. But whatever it is to find bugs in their software, we knew that the. The number of things fixed in each Patch Tuesday over the next forever months, I don't know, we'll see. Would go up dramatically. And they have. Right. But like so much in life, on a different topic, I was mentioning how knowing something and then experiencing it are often two different things. Like, you can prepare yourself for having a baby for nine months and read books and watch videos and do whatever you do, and then you have the baby. It's in your hands. You get to walk out of the hospital with it and it's entirely. It's just. It doesn't matter.
- [04:49]
Paul Thurrott
Good analogy. For anybody who's ever been a parent, it is such a good analogy.
- [04:52]
Leo Laporte
Like you. You can. You could be as. I read all the books. Yep.
- [04:56]
Paul Thurrott
Took all the classes.
- [04:57]
Leo Laporte
Doesn't matter. Doesn't.
- [04:58]
Paul Thurrott
Doesn't matter.
- [04:58]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [04:59]
Leo Laporte
Yep. Is the size of a baby squirrel and it's in your hands and you have to take it home. And it's not. You're not going to be prepared for that. Right. So knowing that we were going to see, you know, major increases in the number of bugs fixed is one thing, but then actually seeing it happening is like, yikes. So I can't remember the number last month, but probably 100 and something somewhere in the hundred.
- [05:21]
Richard Campbell
I thought it was 300, but yeah.
- [05:23]
Leo Laporte
Okay. Well, someone's saying it's a 3x increase over last month, this month, so I don't remember. But 200 depending on who you talk to because I've seen different numbers. They either fixed 570 security flaws or 622. That was the register and others said
- [05:38]
Paul Thurrott
that one Google fixed so many.
- [05:41]
Leo Laporte
I was going to say this does not include 468 chromium flaws which apply to edge.
- [05:46]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [05:47]
Leo Laporte
And yeah, you know, obviously historic and record breaking number of.
- [05:52]
Richard Campbell
Have you looked at any of these, these zero days, these vulnerabilities?
- [05:55]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I didn't break it down, but yeah, There was several zero days. I think it was 57ish kind of critical security fixes, you know, whatever the numbers.
- [06:03]
Richard Campbell
But like keys to the castle, you will have CIS control of this machine.
- [06:08]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, remote code exploits, we call them.
- [06:11]
Richard Campbell
Well, and that exploit has been in there for 20 years.
- [06:15]
Leo Laporte
I suppose from Microsoft's perspective, who knows, maybe they'll start doing this a little more explicitly. But maybe they want to wait a week to give it time. They just want to get the patch out, have it be applied everywhere and then start talking about it. Maybe I'm just trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. But I would promote this. I would really talk about this. But right now we're just hearing about it from third parties. So when Microsoft announces this, there was no indication the release notes for this never said, hey, by the way, yikes. Like, you know, it was just like, you know, just kind of a rote listing of like, here's what we're doing. It's like, okay, so yeah, that's, you know, that's good, right? Like I said, you know, I think this is good.
- [06:52]
Richard Campbell
But it's the perspective that the bad guys would have these same tools and they would find these exploits and utilize them. So while the good guys have an edge, let's close those doors.
- [07:04]
Paul Thurrott
It's a good. I think it's a good thing to emphasize because sometimes I think Microsoft doesn't want to talk about saying, well, a patch means there was a flaw. There's. But all software has patches flaws and this is good. The more you fix, the better software made of patches. It's a patchwork quote. It's a GP254 elevation of privilege. This is from Bleeping Computer 254 elevation of privilege vulnerabilities, 17 security feature bypass, 145 remote code execution, 102 information disclosure 35 denial of service and 16 spoofing vulnerabilities. But the key ones were the 59 were critical, 48 remote quote execution, nine elevated privilege, one security bypass and one spoofing critical means. Well, they're bad. They're serious criticals. Not all of them are critical.
- [07:56]
Leo Laporte
Guess what? We're rebooting your computer. It doesn't matter what the schedule is.
- [07:58]
Paul Thurrott
Right. And three were zero days. And that means that they are being actively exploited.
- [08:04]
Leo Laporte
They're actively being exploited. That's right.
- [08:06]
Richard Campbell
That's.
- [08:06]
Leo Laporte
You know, if this was 20 to 25 years ago, there would be an Apple keynote where they would make fun of Microsoft for this. But you know what? I'm guessing these days people are going to shut the heck.
- [08:15]
Paul Thurrott
They're in the same throat.
- [08:16]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what I mean. Like everyone. Anyone who makes a throw rocks. Nope. No one is going to. No one's going to make fun of anyone for this.
- [08:23]
Richard Campbell
Here's the question. Is this number going to keep going up month over month? When does it go back?
- [08:28]
Paul Thurrott
Okay, so that's. I was going to bring this up because this is what Steve was talking about yesterday, which I thought was interesting. He said, and he thinks it'll happen within a year. There's going to be a soar and then plateau. Plateau and then a dip. And he says within a year you'll have very few vulnerabilities to fix. That would be really good news.
- [08:47]
Leo Laporte
I like the positivity of that. I hope he's right. I mean, it's like anything else. Like we talk about, you know, Xbox sales, you know, falling, like, when does that plateau? Or, you know, PC sales going up or down, when does that plateau? Like, what's the natural end game for this thing? I mean, I don't know. There's one train of thought where you could make the argument that because AI is always escalating and they'll always be looking for new ways to find things, that there is some form of plateau that's much higher than the average was before, but maybe lower than these first several months because obviously this is going to be the big time to find things. I don't know.
- [09:23]
Richard Campbell
I wonder if this is the peak.
- [09:25]
Leo Laporte
Well, yeah, every month we're going to wonder this. Right? But I bet. You know what? I bet not honestly.
- [09:31]
Paul Thurrott
It's like that time I ate an edible.
- [09:34]
Leo Laporte
That one time.
- [09:35]
Paul Thurrott
That one time.
- [09:36]
Leo Laporte
Yep. By mistake.
- [09:37]
Richard Campbell
How am I going to be?
- [09:39]
Paul Thurrott
We. So I. I don't use and I haven't used in years.
- [09:44]
Leo Laporte
You know, no one is judging you either way.
- [09:45]
Paul Thurrott
When it was made legal in California, Lisa and I went to. We thought, oh, this will be interesting. We'll go to a store and we bought a chocolate bar and I ate just the smallest square, just A single square. Because I hadn't, you know, and I kept saying, Elisa, I'm peeking, right. She said no, no, no, it's kind of like that. But here's the reason Steve, he fixed. He believes.
- [10:14]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [10:15]
Paul Thurrott
That this, there is a. There's a finite number of flaws that will eventually be.
- [10:20]
Leo Laporte
See that I disagree with. I think there is an infinite number of flaws in software. And I mean. Well, you know, look, that part of this though is we don't know what they're looking at. Do you think they're literally throwing this at the 100% of the code base at one time and running? I mean, that's a good question. When Firefox started doing this, they went through. I believe, I don't remember, but I think they did something related to the JavaScript engine or whatever and they found some big chunk of bugs there and then they kind of moved on from there. I mean what we might be seeing is a semi methodical pass through and then they'll keep doing it. But what would be the areas where, you know, most or the most dangerous vulnerabilities could exist and then, you know, I don't know. I mean, like I said, they're not really talking about that or about this too much at all. In a second we'll talk about what they have said. But like I would like to see this get to the point where each month when they fix these bugs, whatever the numbers are, they kind of just talk through it. You know, I think that would really add to their credibility.
- [11:21]
Richard Campbell
I can see when that. I can sort of anticipate when that would happen.
- [11:25]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [11:25]
Richard Campbell
Sooner or later we're going to find a fix that's a breaking fix.
- [11:29]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. That people explanation will be. Yeah, okay.
- [11:34]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. And you better have a conversation when that comes along.
- [11:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. In other words. Yeah. We're doing the firewall thing again. So this is going to break some stuff.
- [11:43]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. That's when you're going to need to talk. And I wonder if they know that. And so they're literally keeping their powder dry. I don't want to flood the zone. I don't want to, you know, I don't want people to get complacent here. I want to wait till we really have a problem because we know there's one out there and we need people to help out.
- [12:03]
Leo Laporte
The timing on this is interesting because one of the things we'll talk about in a second is that they're allowing people to extend the amount of time where they don't have to install updates and reboot their PCs more than ever before in the modern era. Windows 10, Windows 11. And now we're finding more bugs than ever. And it's like, actually, you can play with the calendar all you want, but we really need to reboot that computer.
- [12:31]
Richard Campbell
Sorry.
- [12:32]
Leo Laporte
So, whatever. It's all good. Like I said, I don't know. This is not the type of thing I would bet money on because I don't think anyone really knows. But, I mean, I just don't have, I don't have, I don't think we don't have any insight into what's happening internally. So I am.
- [12:50]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. We don't know how much of the system they've already explored and they shouldn't tell us because that's good info for the black hats.
- [12:56]
Leo Laporte
Right?
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Richard Campbell
You know?
- [12:57]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's right. That's the line. Yeah. You're walking a line here. And not you, I mean, Microsoft.
- [13:03]
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
- [13:04]
Leo Laporte
So look, they're doing it. I mean, you know, I, that's good. I, I just.
- [13:11]
Richard Campbell
No, I, I, I'm with you. This actually feels like good news, and it's so strange. We're uncomfortable with it.
- [13:19]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [13:20]
Paul Thurrott
Yes.
- [13:21]
Leo Laporte
Yes. Yeah.
- [13:23]
Paul Thurrott
So what makes you uncomfortable? Is it the thought that maybe it's an infinite pool of horrible bugs?
- [13:30]
Richard Campbell
You know, it's that moment where you realize you were walking along the edge of a cliff, you just didn't know it.
- [13:34]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [13:35]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [13:35]
Paul Thurrott
Or the ice is very thin on
- [13:37]
Richard Campbell
this part of the lake.
- [13:38]
Leo Laporte
And I've seen Damian Oman, too, and I know how this ends. Yeah, Right. It is scary in a way, but it would be excellent. Whether it's next month or six months, whatever the timeframe, if this thing did kind of peak and come down and not because they're not doing it as much. I mean, if anything, they would be doing it more and with greater efficacy, but. Meaning we actually got on top of this like that. That itself would be an incredible accomplishment, I mean, given the size of the code bases we're talking about here. Because it's not just Windows. Right. It's, you know, all the Microsoft 365 stuff, the Azure stuff, whatever. But, you know, this is. There's a whole body of code to go through here.
- [14:21]
Richard Campbell
We don't know how much they've touched. Right. And we don't know. But again, it's like these all look like it was just software fixes and we're good to go. None of them were, oh, we have to redesign entra, you know, like that. There's strategies that don't work here. Somebody mentioned the Ars Technica post on Secure Butte and sort of acknowledging that Secure Butte has never really been secure, it was always circumventable. And so the question is like, do you just have to put a fully the switches in place? And yeah, okay, now it's secure or is it misdesigned?
- [14:54]
Leo Laporte
Interesting. I mean, yeah, I'm not a security expert, but there's this whole world of what they call offline security issues where the computer could be tampered with between boots. And as the system comes up, what are the integrity checks you do to make sure that the image is what it was before and did something happen, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I feel like in something like that, I mean, because PC makers are so different, Lenovo in particular does a really good job with that kind of stuff, but other PC makers work on it as well in addition to whatever Microsoft does in Windows, which is always one of the weird things too.
- [15:32]
Richard Campbell
Think about how we got into the situation with things like UAC back in the day where it's like, hey, we just need to de escalate here and that might break things. So I got to put up a prompt like that at least would be an interruption of workflow as opposed to, oh, we need you guys to reconstitute all of these accounts or log them in and change them or, you know.
- [15:51]
Leo Laporte
So that's an interesting example because UAC was, I guess, a Vista debut. So we first saw it in 2004,
- [16:00]
Richard Campbell
five, whatever year, and it blended in so well with all the other good Vista news.
- [16:05]
Leo Laporte
Yes, but like anything horrible in your life, you get used to it over time and it just becomes part of your existence. But one of the things that they've done, which they don't really talk about is. And because it's sporadic, but every once in a while there'll be some like, action or thing that you might do in Windows that previously required an elevated privileges. You had to do a UAC prompt, whatever, which they're starting, you know, not starting. They've been overtime looking where they can to get those individual tasks out of that group when possible. Right. That, you know, like extend the amount of capabilities that a standard user account could do without damaging the system, et cetera. So anyway, through some combination of factors, UAC is not as annoying as it was, but that's why they have the new Windows to low, which is even more annoying. So they figured out a way to make that really terrible. But yeah, anyway, security is. Security is not an endpoint, you know, pardon the term. No, it's a journey.
- [17:05]
Richard Campbell
And you're right, there will always be more because there's always going to be new code introduced. But presumably they will run it through the evaluator before they ship it and get those patches done before we ever see it. I mean, we'll see.
- [17:16]
Leo Laporte
We don't know. Ebbs and flows. Microsoft always talks about some kind of security first development strategy and I. Yeah, okay, but the Secure Feature initiative perhaps being the latest example. Yeah, but over on.
- [17:30]
Richard Campbell
Net rocks we're talking about these kinds of security testings as part of the CI CD pipeline to start picking up more. But it's all very new. Like everyone's still struggling with what's the right way to go about this stuff.
- [17:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, and that too will change. I mean, that's the thing. There'll be best practices for now and then six months, a year later those things are going to shift as a. Changes and whatever. But anyway, look, I know this is a big number, but whatever that number is, there seems to be some debate there, but several times it's also poking
- [17:59]
Richard Campbell
back through decades worth of code.
- [18:02]
Leo Laporte
I hope there's some kind of. Well, some percentage of the people who wrote the code for these issues are long gone and that percentage are still there. I hope there's some kind of an email thread or however they do it where it's like, Bob, seriously buffer over on.
- [18:18]
Paul Thurrott
But you know, you might want to look at the bugs in line 43.
- [18:23]
Leo Laporte
I don't know if you knew it was 2026 and we don't do buffer overflow anymore. But yes, you managed to do it somehow. So you know.
- [18:31]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I think that Steve's theory is that there'll be fewer codes and bugs introduced. So eventually you get all the bugs that or legacy bugs and then you write code.
- [18:41]
Leo Laporte
My entire life, the first time I found out about a computer being a thing and knowing that you could as an individual write software, make your own apps or games, whatever. I, I've said this many times. I've held on to this belief that software is just zeros and ones. It could be perfect. It should be perfect. It is never perfect. Yeah, it is.
- [18:59]
Paul Thurrott
Bizarre language.
- [19:00]
Leo Laporte
So he's as close as literally zero and ones. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, it's incredible. So I Look for all the. This, we're going to be debating AI for the rest of our lives probably at this rate. But you know, there's the good and the bad and I. This is. This to me is still this. I don't mean to say it makes it all worthwhile. Because that's a tough one. But this is to me the greatest use case for this. And it's the thing, you know, we see this with the platform makers. Apple's doing this, Microsoft's doing this. And Windows, like taking a step back from just the relentless forward push for new improvements and evolution and whatever and just like fixing things, you know, like actually making it work correctly is awesome. It's just awesome. So, yes, good, bad, indifferent, whatever. But this stuff to me is just excellent. So anyway, okay, so there is this. This is a been an interesting year because what are we in the seventh month? I would say four of those months that patch Tuesdays have been light on new features. The three that have been big have been changes related to this pain points thing that Devon Pavolori talked about way back in, I don't know, February or whatever. And we've seen over time improvements to some of the Windows update stuff recently. This is coming up later, but Windows Search is coming. Start Taskbar widgets. There's all these things. But one of the big questions is, okay, I'm super excited to be doing this work. When are we actually going to see some of this stuff? Right? This goes back to the thing I wanted to do last year where I wanted to do like a new feature Tracker for Windows 11, which I found to be impossible. And I have to say the way they've changed the inside of program makes it even more difficult. I want to tie this into the book so that as things change on whatever monthly basis that I can update the book to reflect those changes. So that's never going to work. But that's my idea. This month is one of the more interesting ones because I would say there are, I guess I'll call it three major features that are important. So we talked about probably all of these because they've gone through the insider program, but now they're unstable.
- [21:08]
Paul Thurrott
So hold on just a second before you. That's a good tease. Let me do it. AD and then I'm looking ahead.
- [21:17]
Leo Laporte
Fine, run the business. I don't care.
- [21:19]
Paul Thurrott
The show is going to be a little heavy at the end.
- [21:23]
Leo Laporte
A little heavy at the end. That's some foreshadowing right there. Yeah. An hour and 15 minutes of actual content.
- [21:33]
Paul Thurrott
I want to get the ad in
- [21:34]
Leo Laporte
now
- [21:36]
Paul Thurrott
before it gets a little leaden. No, we have a great whiskey bit coming up and I just, I don't want. I'd hate to interrupt the whiskey bit. So let's, let's talk about sleeping right now. What do you say? I'VE been looking at my sleep scores lately. I've been paying attention and they're going up and up and I think I could blame our sponsor. It's all your fault. Helix Sleep. Love you guys. A great day like today starts with a great night's rest, right? So why are you putting up with that cruddy old mattress of yours? You know you're supposed to replace your mattress every six to 10 years. We finally did last year and we did a lot of research. We came up with the best and we are so glad we did. The Helix Sleep. If you're tired of waking up with back pain because your bed's like a U or struggling with motion transfer, you know, the dog jumps on the bed and you think there's an earthquake, it's time to upgrade to a Helix mattress. This is one I recommend. Unlike mass produced alternatives, every Helix mattress is hand assembled expertly in Arizona and then shipped from Arizona to your door within days of your order. They make it to order and I think that makes a huge difference. Get ready to transform your sleep. One of the things we did right away was we took the Helix Sleep quiz, which helps you find your perfect mattress based on your preferences. Firm, soft, that kind of thing, or how you sleep on your stomach, on your back. We took the quiz and we found the perfect match. You will too, based on your unique needs and it really works. But don't, you don't have to just take my word for it. Helix did a Wesper sleep study. They measured participants sleep performance after switching, as we did, from their old mattress to a Helix mattress. And here's what they found. And by the way, this does in fact exactly match my experience. 82% of participants saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle. This is the most important one. This is the one where this spinal cerebral spinal fluid comes and cleans out all that gunk that's in your brain. You need this. This is vital. And it's only maybe an hour a night, but boy, that hour makes a big difference. Participants on average achieve 25 more minutes of deep sleep every single night. And I am up now to the highest level of deep sleep I've ever had. It's amazing. Participants also on average achieve 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. That means you wake up feeling ready to go. You feel great. Time and time again, Helix Sleep has been named the most awarded mattress brand. It was tested and reviewed by all the biggies and they all love it. Companies like Wired and Forbes. Helix, as I said, delivers the mattress right to your door. It's free shipping, by the way, in the US and you can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges they have. They call it their Happy with Helix guarantee. It provides a risk free customer first experience, ensuring you're completely satisfied with your new Mattress. Go to helixsleep.comwindows for 27% off site wide during their 4th of July sale extended the Best of Web offer helixsleep.comwindows 27% off sitewide exclusively for listeners of Windows Weekly. In fact, make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. Now the offer has been extended to August 2, so don't delay if you're listening after the sale ends. You should still check them out. I would suggest getting there now. Helixsleep.com Windows we thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly and I personally, I personally thank them for a great night's sleep. Back to speaking of sleep, the latest nice in the Windows Insider.
- [25:36]
Leo Laporte
I do sleep poorly, Leo. Thank you for bringing that up, Paul.
- [25:40]
Paul Thurrott
I'm telling you, Alzheimer's, we all have to do our best to fight it. Get that cerebral spinal fluid flowing. I'm sure Richard's done a talk on it at one point or another.
- [25:49]
Richard Campbell
I talk about it in the context of the space station because that's one of the issues for anyone in free fall is the fluid builds up in your head to the point where it presses against your eyes and bends them. Every astronaut carries multiple pairs of glasses because it's going to.
- [26:05]
Paul Thurrott
Because there's prescriptions change as they're in
- [26:07]
Richard Campbell
space, because their eyes change shape.
- [26:09]
Paul Thurrott
Is glaucoma a problem?
- [26:11]
Richard Campbell
No, no.
- [26:12]
Leo Laporte
Do some of them actually get better vision? No, because that would be amazing.
- [26:16]
Richard Campbell
That would be awesome.
- [26:17]
Paul Thurrott
Paul wants to sign up just like
- [26:19]
Leo Laporte
to shoot yourself out of space to fix your eyes, you know, that would
- [26:22]
Paul Thurrott
be cool, wouldn't it?
- [26:24]
Richard Campbell
Ask why they're all puffy faced. Is that cerebral spinal fluid?
- [26:28]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, that's interesting.
- [26:29]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, it's one of the things that doesn't function.
- [26:31]
Paul Thurrott
All right.
- [26:32]
Leo Laporte
Yes. So patch Tuesday for Windows 11, I would say three major features. Right. So point in time Restore. I think we talked about all these really. But this is the modern replacement for System Restore, which is still in there.
- [26:48]
Paul Thurrott
I thought they were going to kill System Restore.
- [26:50]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, everyone did, but everyone thought they were killing the control panel too. But you know, something never go away. Just kind of there. So maybe they will in time. I feel like this thing needs to become a little more, I don't know, customizable on a granular level. But for right now, it's just automatic. It's once a day. There's a max size and number that you can store. So it's never going to be more than three or four, maybe five days at most. But it performs that function that System Restore does. And. But you have to run it from the Windows recovery environment if you actually want to restore it. So it's not. It's not 100% ideal, but it is more modern and it incorporates more data, including your apps and settings and personal files. So it's not just about driver rollback or whatever. And we'll see what happens to the rest of your computer. And we'll see. So it's out. It's out now. It seems to work fine for what it is, but it is, you know, a modern replacement for something that's been in windows for probably 25 years, I would think. And then the. Yeah, the widgets one is just as classic to me because for the past, I don't know, five years, ish or whatever you've asked me like, you know, how would you configure widgets exactly the way they're doing it now? You know, go in and turn off all of the notifications, turn off the news feed thing, which is terrible. Stop showing little things on the taskbar unless it's just like a weather display. They're doing that now by default, so Nice. Right. And in a month or two, and actually later in the show we'll talk about. They're making similar changes to Search as well, but this is out in stable now, so nice. The one thing I don't know, and I think I mentioned this before, is if you have an existing computer, maybe you've configured widgets already the way you want it, is it going to change your configuration? So it's this new quieter thing I'm guessing know, but I need to experience this across more computers to be sure. But that's good. And then the Windows update improvements are something I thought was actually already out. But the primary change here is if you go into Windows Update in the Settings app, you can. There's always been a way to pause updates for some number of days. And there was a dropdown before that was, you know. No, that's not true. There was just this. I think it was like pause it for one week and then you could click it again. It was like 14 days, 21 days, 28, that kind of thing. And now what you get is a calendar control and you can pause it for up to 35 days. And you can keep doing that as much as you want. So you wouldn't do it every day, but if you did it today, 35 days, nice. And then you waited a week and you clicked it again. You go 35 days out from that date. Like you can just keep extending it. Now, a patch Tuesday like the one we saw today, I'm guessing they would actually force this on you. It's some day one or some zero day fixes, et cetera. So there's always going to be provisions for that kind of thing.
- [29:37]
Richard Campbell
But there are also everything you've delayed up till that point all comes crashing down on you, right?
- [29:44]
Leo Laporte
So depending on how you have Windows Update configured, because you could do things like install preview updates, you can have it install software, other Microsoft software. So things like NET updates. Well, actually NET updates would be in there, but Visual Studio updates will go in their office updates, whatever else. They're lining these things up to have the same basic milestones. So that instead of you getting into a situation where maybe you have two reboots a month or maybe even more, if you do reboot and you just stick to the normal schedule, it should be one reboot and it will be the same day every month. So a little bit more predictable and transparent, et cetera. So that's good. And then the rest of this is fairly minor. And again, we've talked about all this screen tint feature, which is kind of just a color overlay. I'm not sure about that one. But some magnifier zoom control improvements, the Bluetooth connectivity stuff, we've already talked about a bunch. Voice access typing improvements, not the feature I want in touchpads, but you can customize the size of the right click zone now by, you know, when you right click or like press and hold or do two finger, whatever, however you do it on your touchpad. What I want is the opposite. I want the entire touchpad to be used for right click every time. And that makes me crazy. I think I yell at my computer up to a dozen times a day for this exact issue. Like it makes me insane. And I don't.
- [31:06]
Richard Campbell
But is it listening? Is it really listening?
- [31:08]
Leo Laporte
No, it's not. It absolutely is not. So that's irritating. And then if you have a 26H1 based computer, which means you have a Snapdragon X2 computer, you are getting the point in time restore feature, right? So they're starting to line those up a little bit better. But for the most part, that release is still, I would call it, I say month behind is the way to look at that. Okay, so that's cool. As far as Microsoft discussing this before, I think it was before Patch Tuesday, Pavan Davalori wrote a post detailing how Windows is using M Dash, which the way they describe it is a multimodal agenic scanning harness. I love AI terms, by the way. It uses multiple AI models, including third party models. Right. So they're starting to talk about this a little bit. Some of this is in house, of course, to identify security issues before they go out to the public, in addition to the ones they're fixing, the ones that have probably been there forever in many cases. Not a lot of details there actually. And I think this ties into what Richard was saying earlier. You don't want to provide the bad actors with too much information that they could use against you. Right. But in the current environment where AI is being used to discover vulnerabilities in software and potentially take advantage of that, you know, Microsoft and other platform makers are working to try to promote that.
- [32:40]
Richard Campbell
The Windows code base is so large that in order for the Windows code base to get to GitHub, they had to submit to the Git library, a mechanism for storing very large source code files.
- [32:53]
Leo Laporte
I was, I thought you were going to say they had to physically deliver a disk of some kind because transferring this over the network would have been, you know, in violation of every terms of service that anyone has.
- [33:04]
Paul Thurrott
How big is it?
- [33:07]
Richard Campbell
It's hundreds of gigs. Yeah, but the, the.
- [33:10]
Leo Laporte
It's like my movie library, really.
- [33:13]
Richard Campbell
Don't point em dash at the whole code base and go find the vulnerability because it'll never come back.
- [33:19]
Leo Laporte
Plus the planet drives to a halt, you know.
- [33:21]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point.
- [33:23]
Leo Laporte
That's what I mean. I think a lot of this. Well, you have to look at the interdependencies as well. But I do feel like the first pass or passes is individual code blocks
- [33:32]
Richard Campbell
or however those go after the kernel go after the most exploitables like. Which means you're still making an assessment bit by bit, right?
- [33:40]
Leo Laporte
Yep. Well, as you clear things out. Sorry.
- [33:43]
Paul Thurrott
Some vulnerabilities are chained.
- [33:45]
Leo Laporte
So if that's what I was going to. Exactly. That's the interdependency thing. You know, there are, there's going to be a code module over here that hasn't been touched in 10 years, but there's a newer one over here and they interact and where's the problem? And sometimes when you fix an issue over here, it either causes one over here or suddenly you see something over here because now that thing's working properly, so to speak or whatever.
- [34:05]
Richard Campbell
Right?
- [34:07]
Leo Laporte
I'm sure it's a mess again. Look, I just have a stupid book. Just updating my book is a nightmare. The fact that this thing, which is exponentially bigger and more complex.
- [34:18]
Richard Campbell
Well, back to the, you know, the original story here of the 600 fixes over what surface area of windows?
- [34:25]
Leo Laporte
That's the thing, right? We don't know.
- [34:27]
Paul Thurrott
Well, can you tell if you look at them? I mean, is it. Maybe it's not. You know what I'm going to ask my age.
- [34:33]
Leo Laporte
I think you might be able to get some detail out of it that way.
- [34:36]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. What region of Windows are they?
- [34:41]
Leo Laporte
What region of Windows? Yeah, yes. Yeah, the Nether region.
- [34:46]
Paul Thurrott
Only Microsoft would know though because they're the ones kind of know what the chunks are. I mean we can surmise, but they
- [34:53]
Leo Laporte
know where the libraries live, they know where the bodies are buried.
- [34:57]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, but you can also imagine just to make a forest pass through the entire code base is probably going to be many different iterations. Many different.
- [35:05]
Paul Thurrott
Well, yeah, I mean even yesterday I asked Chad GBT to look at my health records and it said I can't do that. There's too many.
- [35:13]
Richard Campbell
You've been alive too long.
- [35:14]
Paul Thurrott
There's so much.
- [35:15]
Leo Laporte
I'm not saying you have looked endemic.
- [35:18]
Paul Thurrott
I'm gonna have to chunk it up because I just can't, I can't. I don't have enough memory to do all of it.
- [35:24]
Leo Laporte
He said inappropriate thing to say during a health conversation.
- [35:27]
Paul Thurrott
There are thousands. Well, the reason is I imported all of my Apple health records for the last 15 years or something to even
- [35:34]
Leo Laporte
do something like that, that's crazy.
- [35:36]
Paul Thurrott
It said literally there's, there's, you know, 10,000 Apple Health records in here, so I think it made a SQLite database.
- [35:43]
Leo Laporte
Just. We're actually going to need you to get a full blown SQL Server license for this one, Leo.
- [35:49]
Paul Thurrott
So imagine, I mean that's just my health records. Imagine what Windows, the Windows code base must look like to it. You just can't get it all in context so it just can't work on it all at once.
- [35:59]
Leo Laporte
Not to mention just the various technologies they must have used over time. I'm sure there are giant code bases in C&C etc. But there have got to be also giant code bases and other things. Whatever was modern framework at the time. Plus I mean depending on the platform, I'm sure there's a lot of assembly in there still right from just performance reasons et CETERA I mean, I can't even. I don't know. It's kind of scary, but. Okay. So I assume you're going to work on that, Leo, because I actually do want to. I'm kind of curious what it has to say about where I have.
- [36:34]
Paul Thurrott
It's done.
- [36:34]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it's done already?
- [36:35]
Richard Campbell
Yes. Okay.
- [36:36]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, yeah. What do we got yesterday? Yeah. You want to know what my health is?
- [36:40]
Leo Laporte
No, not your health. I'm sorry. I meant the. Like, where the. Sorry.
- [36:43]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, oh, oh, oh. You meant. Oh, yeah. Let me. You really want me to do that? I could do that.
- [36:47]
Leo Laporte
I mean, I think it might be worth. Kind of interesting just to see what it says.
- [36:50]
Paul Thurrott
Who should I ask? Should I ask Fable? Should I ask Saul? Should I ask them Croc? I have them. All right, I'll ask Fable. Fable's not doing anything right now. It's been working very hard over the last.
- [37:07]
Leo Laporte
Oh, and by the way, I found the most of them, so. Screw Microsoft stuff.
- [37:12]
Paul Thurrott
Fable is, we think, Mythos, with some limits on it.
- [37:15]
Richard Campbell
I think Anthropics basically said that.
- [37:17]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [37:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [37:18]
Paul Thurrott
So it would be the one. All right.
- [37:20]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. If you don't mind. I mean, you know, it's not. Now that you said that, it's in my head, I'm kind of curious. That's a good use of AI, I think.
- [37:27]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [37:27]
Leo Laporte
Well, let's exactly analyze this like this. It seems like a good. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I'm curious. I'm just curious what it says. So, again, you know, this came up earlier, but when you think back to the Pain Points Memo or whatever that was the blog post from Pavan Davlori. It didn't touch on all the big and certification stuff in Windows, but major improvements across some of the major surfaces, as Microsoft would call them, that users interact with every day. Right. So start Taskbar Widgets. Search like Windows Search. I just mentioned that the way they are now configuring widgets is the way that I've recommended it. What they're about to do for Windows Search is likewise similar to the way the recommendations I made and things I do on my own computers. Because Windows Search, which is the thing, there's a million ways to get to this. It's Access points or Legion. You bring up Start, and you just start typing. That's Windows Search, right. If you have the Search box on your taskbar, you can type in that little box. And that's Windows Search.
- [38:29]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [38:29]
Leo Laporte
You can just windows key +s bring up windows Search. You can just bring it up directly. Right. There are elements of Windows Search in the File Explorer, actually in Settings now as well. And Windows Search is this kind of multi headed hydra where as you type you can filter the results by things like apps, documents, settings, et cetera. And it searches the web by default, it searches your OneDrive by default. It does these things that I think in many people's cases either is not wanted or definitely not what they expected. Right. I think most people when they're searching from within Windows using UI in Windows are searching for files, you know, documents. They might be searching for settings, I guess definitely, you know, could, because we're used to it, searching for apps. Right. This is the main way to run apps, but they've insertified this thing.
- [39:21]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [39:22]
Leo Laporte
And one of the things that is not addressed, and this goes to my original point from three, five months ago, whatever that was when I talked about this. A lot of fixes, it's good. But if you do click on a web search link or web link or whatever, it's going to open in Microsoft Edge.
- [39:38]
Paul Thurrott
Right?
- [39:38]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [39:39]
Leo Laporte
Even if you've made Chrome or whatever the browser you default, they're not changing that. That's not in this list of fixes. Right. And to me that's the biggest problem here. There are third party tools that you can use to fix that, but they're not addressing that. What they are doing is make. And this is something we're seeing actually in Microsoft Edge. They're doing this as well. We're seeing this throughout the Microsoft kind of client ecosystem, kind of decluttering the ui, cleaning it up, making it more what you would expect. Right. So they're not going to. Well, there have been controls for a long time to turn off certain things like search highlights, which is terrible or has been terrible, which is just a series of attempts to get you to click on something else. When you're in the middle of doing something, which is super distracting, that you bring up the Start menu, you're trying to find some Windows utility. So you type in Windows and then over on the right there's this thing, it's like, hey, it's like Otter day. Do you want to find out more about otters? And you're like, yeah. And then you click on it. And then like five hours later Edge opens and you're like, I didn't even know the thing was still in my computer. And then you forget what you were doing. Right. I mean, to me it's like the most ridiculous, you know, but it's all about getting you in front of Microsoft's online services and advertising and tracking you
- [40:54]
Richard Campbell
and being able to count you as a monthly active user.
- [40:56]
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
- [40:57]
Leo Laporte
And so they're just toning that stuff down. I think it's great. I mean, there's some layout changes, you know, just to make it look clear, etc. Etc. They. They've taken some, I would say some promotional material out of web results, but again, you're clicking on this thing, you. It's going to go to Edge. It just is. It makes me crazy. So this is one. Given the way things have gone, I would say with Starch Taskbar now, widgets and Windows Update. I'm guessing, and I have to guess, and this is the problem that we're going to see these improvements in stable before the next major feature update in October.
- [41:29]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [41:29]
Leo Laporte
I think this is a 26 sorry, 25H2, 26H1 kind of deliverable, but they don't really talk about that too much. There was one exception to that, by the way, and I don't think it's even in the notes. Yeah, I don't remember what I just saw. A. Oh, crap, I'm forgetting now. But there was a recent. It was in a tech community post. So they were talking about something in Windows and this is something for 26H2. And it was like, oh, look at you guys, like actually explaining when something's going to happen. But everything they're doing right now through the Insider program. Let me think about it. You know what it was? It was something tied to Windows Backup for Business, which is being renamed to, I think, Windows Backup and Restore. Right. So this is a 26H2 deliverable. It's not in the notes, but anyway, this thing, like I said, it's good. It doesn't address my biggest concerns. This is fairly typical. They've done other things and some of this has already occurred in Windows where they're improving the, I would call it reliability and performance of search just throughout the system. Meaning that if you go to the Findbox and File Explorer or use Window Search directly, whatever it is, and you start typing, it actually finds things that you're looking for quicker or at all, by the way, which is actually a huge problem. File Explorer or there used to be a problem in Windows Search. I'll just try this now because this has always drove me crazy. You start typing and if you left off the first letter by mistake or just didn't catch it, it would never find that thing. So if you typed like oat pad without the N, you know, two months ago, eight Months ago, two years ago. Like, yeah, that doesn't exist.
- [43:04]
Richard Campbell
If you live off the first letter, you got nothing, you get nothing.
- [43:07]
Leo Laporte
So by the way, that works now. So you can type out pad. I'm not saying you should, but I mean, you know, that would work.
- [43:11]
Paul Thurrott
Like that's actually why I have type all the time. That it's, it's sees through.
- [43:16]
Leo Laporte
And that is, that's how it should. I mean that's the, that's how technology should work, right? It should.
- [43:22]
Richard Campbell
I just type autocad and it worked.
- [43:25]
Paul Thurrott
There is the other side to that though. Steve was talking about this yesterday in security now that if an AI is building something for you and it doesn't know the name of a library, it can hallucinate a name. And hackers have figured out that it tends to hallucinate along certain lines. So They've created malicious GitHub repos with those names. So there may be for instance, an oat pad GitHub repo.
- [43:49]
Leo Laporte
So this is the AI version of like a malicious URL that's sort of like Microsoft. Exactly, Microsoft.com both with a one or something.
- [43:58]
Paul Thurrott
Exactly, yeah, same idea.
- [44:00]
Leo Laporte
Interesting.
- [44:02]
Paul Thurrott
So yeah, you don't want it to make up stuff, but at the same time you do want it to kind of understand what you meant, not what you said.
- [44:08]
Leo Laporte
The big one for me, like this is like because I look at this all the time because I have to write about it, right? So a year ago, I'll call it maybe two years ago, but certainly somewhere in that time frame. If you like a brand new Windows install, if you type C A L, the first result would be camera and not calculator, which is cal. And you're like, what? So if you hit enter because you would just knee jerk hit enter, you're like cal enter. And then it runs camera and you're like, why am I looking at myself? Now you have trained this thing that this is the thing you're looking for when you type cal. So you actually have to subvert it after that by correctly choosing the right app. And then it will, you know, kind of learn again. That doesn't happen anymore. Yeah, it was so, I mean like that's how stupid Windows Search was. Like Windows Search was actually really bad. So, you know, between the back end stuff, which I think mostly has already occurred, and then the changes they're making to the UI here, you know, we're not getting 100% there. It's still edge and all that stuff. But there's some big, big improvements. So if you're in the insider program, this is in. The way they describe this makes it impossible to know for sure, but it's in the experimental channel. I think there are 11 experimental channels. I have trouble counting, but I don't actually know.
- [45:22]
Richard Campbell
You know, I'm so excited to see the plethora of insider stuff happen again because I thought we consolidated for a minute there, and I was shocked, shocked.
- [45:29]
Leo Laporte
And you're like, oh, look at these guys. You're like, nah, that doesn't. Yeah. So this one I've not seen yet. I gotta. I'm gonna have to. I'm leaving soon, too. I gotta figure this out. But it is a controlled feature rollout because, yeah, we're never gonna solve that problem. It should be a feature flag. So if you. If you're familiar with the new insider program, you can go in and say, no, I actually want this thing. I assume it's in there. I haven't seen it yet. So we'll see. We'll see what happens. But that's good. It's good. So I'm trying to think if there's anything major. They actually said that they haven't at least started testing any insider program. And I could be wrong, but I think. I think this is the last big one.
- [46:03]
Paul Thurrott
Wow.
- [46:04]
Leo Laporte
You know, and then we'll see what they have, you know, planned for 26H2, I guess, after this.
- [46:08]
Paul Thurrott
But I believe it's a big one. What did he say it is July.
- [46:11]
Leo Laporte
That's the big one, Elizabeth.
- [46:12]
Paul Thurrott
It's a big one, Elizabeth.
- [46:14]
Leo Laporte
Yep.
- [46:14]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [46:15]
Leo Laporte
And might have been the greatest show ever made. So thank you for putting that in my head.
- [46:24]
Richard Campbell
Nice.
- [46:27]
Leo Laporte
What was I going to say? Oh, yeah. So. Yeah, so they're, you know, fixing these things in windows. This is 26. Sorry, 25H2. 20. Like I said, 26. I guess 24H2 as well. And then as we head into the fall, we'll have this feature update, and I suspect we're going to have kind of around 2. There's at least one big thing, and that would be the start menu where they actually updated the start menu last year in kind of a major way. And then they are in the process. I don't think it's stable yet. Maybe it is where they've updated it as well, again as part of the pain point thing. But then there's a bigger one coming in 26H2, and that's going to be the full update, so to speak. So this is a pretty primary UI to be screwing around with so much. But they're actually doing it. And part of that I know it's kind of exciting in some ways. So good for them, I guess. Okay. All right, what else do we got? Oh, and then in hardware news in the show, notes linked to something hilariously wrong. Yep, sorry.
- [47:28]
Paul Thurrott
There have been AI do that.
- [47:30]
Leo Laporte
No, that's Paul, not Control V. Inc. Correctly.
- [47:34]
Paul Thurrott
I want a Paul AI.
- [47:36]
Leo Laporte
No, you don't. The one that never stops hallucinating. So back in, I don't know, two months ago, probably May, Microsoft announced the latest surface for business PCs. Right. With intel processors, the Core Altar 3. Right. Which is a good set of processors, honestly. Panth Lake. Right. So if I'm remembering this correctly, it was a. I don't remember if there were two sizes each, but there were at least one Surface Pro, probably a 13 point whatever inch, and then two Surface laptops because they have 13.8 or 13.58, whatever that is in 15 inch. Right. But running on Intel. And then a month later, they announced new versions of the Surface PCs for consumers with Snapdragon X2, which is the Qualcomm processor. So you get a choice of plus or Elite processor tiers, different things, whatever. Prices obviously went up pretty dramatically. And I think in that case we actually had two models of each. So there's two versions of Surface Pro, if I'm not mistaken. I could be. And then there are two versions of Surface Laptop, different sizes.
- [48:39]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [48:40]
Leo Laporte
One of the things they said at the announcement for those is that at some point in the year they were going to introduce cheaper 8 gig configurations because of the component crisis. And I didn't expect to see that happen until kind of the end of the year, frankly, second half of the year sometime, but actually not that long after they did release. They didn't say anything about it, but they just added 8 gig configurations for the consumer products. So yesterday, I think it was, or two days ago, maybe they announced more Surface for business PCs, but with Snapdragon X2. So there are 13.8 and 15 inch configurations for Surface Laptop, 13 inch only for Surface Pro, different generation numbers, et cetera. But basically they're expensive, I think is the way to say it. I mean, on both sides, the cheapest configuration is $1,650. Like, yikes. There are no eight gig configurations. Although you never know. That could happen. They didn't say that this time at least you could spend as much as. What's the Most expensive one? Yeah, 12 core Snapdragon X2 Elite with 64 gigs of RAM and a terabyte of storage on Surface Pro. 3700 bucks.
- [49:52]
Richard Campbell
There you go.
- [49:53]
Leo Laporte
And I'm pretty sure that doesn't include the keyboard. It's like.
- [49:58]
Richard Campbell
Because there is that 128 gig version floating around there somewhere, but not that anybody actually has one. Right. The Black laptop.
- [50:05]
Leo Laporte
Right, right, right.
- [50:06]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [50:07]
Leo Laporte
This is kind of squirrely because, like the Surface Laptop 15 for business, the new version on X2 with an elite processor, the highest end configuration, unless I'm missing something, I, I believe looking at it was 32 gigs of RAM and 1 terabyte of SSD for $3,000.
- [50:23]
Richard Campbell
So I mean, I looked at it on the Canadian site and they had a 64 gig 2 terabyte version.
- [50:29]
Leo Laporte
Okay, I could have missed it. Yeah, they're expensive. And look, I mean, this is the component crisis I wrote. I think this morning I published something I had been writing called, you know, this is the absolutely worst time in history to buy anything. You know, if you need it, you need it.
- [50:43]
Richard Campbell
I wish it was an exaggeration. I really do.
- [50:46]
Leo Laporte
I didn't want to write that. You know, but you can just look at like, I looked at pixel because there's been a lot of leaks. So we can look at like what the pixel prices were a year ago, what they are today, like how they've changed. So they're more expensive in many cases, especially the base configs are coming with less ram, which is really weird.
- [51:02]
Richard Campbell
Oh, I know what it was. The silver one was only 32. The black one was available in 64.
- [51:08]
Leo Laporte
And I'm like, what's that about? So that's two years ago when I bought my seventh gen Surface laptop, which is the first, you know, Snapdragon X processors. That's, that's, that's why I have a black one, because it was the only way. In my case, it was 32 gigs of RAM and a terabyte of storage. But I could not get that in the, whatever, the platinum, whatever that color is, which is what I wanted, right? Because I knew that if I got this dark black laptop, which is anodized, anodized aluminum, I would just scratch the edges and the silver would shine through. And that's exactly what happened. You know, you want one that's like this? Let's make it as close as possible, the actual color. So if I scratch it or whatever, rub it with my wrists, you know, a bunch, it will just, you know, won't look terrible.
- [51:51]
Paul Thurrott
Right?
- [51:52]
Leo Laporte
But this is, you know, Microsoft is, you know, they're not a big PC maker. They don't have this infinite. Every. Every color you want in every configuration you want is not a thing. So that might be. Excuse me. Why I didn't see the.
- [52:06]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [52:06]
Richard Campbell
And it's funny how you have to keep twiddling with the configuration.
- [52:11]
Leo Laporte
Well, if you hit a color before color changes. Your choice. Exactly. Which is.
- [52:15]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [52:15]
Leo Laporte
So I think I must have left it on the base color, whatever the platinum color.
- [52:21]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [52:21]
Leo Laporte
Anyway, terrible time to buy a laptop,
- [52:23]
Richard Campbell
but yeah, if you can buying a machine right now, you should.
- [52:27]
Leo Laporte
You are in good shape. If you can say no and just live with what you got, you're. This is a good time for that. I mean, look, you need it or you don't. If you do need it, I mean, you can justify any of these, you know, purchases if you had to. And now you're going to use this thing for several years, maybe even a $3,000 surface. Something makes sense. I don't know. But right.
- [52:45]
Richard Campbell
The green only comes in 16. You have to get the fun colors.
- [52:49]
Leo Laporte
That. Right, exactly. So two years ago, the light blue one was a cool color and I was like, oh man, that's. I'm going to get one of those. No, I'm not. You know, I think it was the same problem was 16 gig only it's like, no, I need more than 16 gig. I needed it.
- [53:00]
Paul Thurrott
Then Apple invented this. I think like this.
- [53:04]
Leo Laporte
But Apple. Well, honestly, Dell invented this. But remember Dell always had this like configurator thing. Like they. This. They have had this for 30 years. But when Apple, you know, Apple did the thing Apple does, which is they do a really good like they eventually they used to have just models. Right. But then they did. You can configure anything on a Mac or whatever product. Like you're not. There's no version of you go to buy an iPhone and it's in whatever color choices and you can't get it in every storage configuration like they, they give you. You know what I mean? Like you have all the choices.
- [53:33]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [53:34]
Leo Laporte
This is one thing Microsoft just doesn't get. Well. It doesn't do well. Yeah, it doesn't do at all actually.
- [53:39]
Paul Thurrott
Is it just an excuse like, okay, no, this is.
- [53:42]
Leo Laporte
They don't have the volume to justify it. They don't paying to have whatever. However they fabricate these things, they would end up with a bunch of stock because they'd have to buy some minimum and no one would want those configurations.
- [53:55]
Richard Campbell
The US site is showing 64 gig 15 inch Ultras with a terabyte of storage, but only in black, but only
- [54:05]
Leo Laporte
right and how much?
- [54:06]
Richard Campbell
37 for 37? Yeah, yeah.
- [54:09]
Leo Laporte
Okay. That matches Surface Pro.
- [54:11]
Richard Campbell
The Canadian site I just went and checked, doesn't have any 64s anymore. They disappeared.
- [54:15]
Paul Thurrott
Oh yeah.
- [54:16]
Richard Campbell
I mean it won't even show it as out of stock. It just does not show up.
- [54:19]
Leo Laporte
This is like finding the, the Willy Wonka pass in the chocolate bar. It could happen.
- [54:25]
Richard Campbell
But they also show 24s because, you know, why would you want a mutant memory configuration?
- [54:30]
Leo Laporte
Hey, I think 24 and 48 are going to become pretty big. Yeah, you know, you know, there's going to be a bunch of that kind of stuff. I didn't have this in the notes because this is what I was just publishing when we started the show. But the latest ThinkPad X1 carbon, which is not a snapdragon, it's Panther Lake, you know, ultra core, ultra three, whatever. Terrific. Right? So this is like less than 2.2 pounds. It's a 14 inch screen. It's like, it's incred, you know, it's magically light. You know, the performance is amazing. The reliability is really good. Everything's really good. The thing that's most interesting about it is they've taken like this sustainability to some new level at least for like a top tier PC maker. Right. So there's this list of recycled materials which is longer than I've ever seen in any laptop, which is whatever. But the amount of things you can replace yourself as a user, like as the customer is off the charts as well. So there are things like the SSD, which is on an M2 thing, the communication card, another M2 thing, the battery, whatever components. But you can replace the individual USB ports on this thing. Right, which is like a framework style option. I've never seen that in a mainstream laptop. But the RAM is soldered on. It's like, guys, come on man, you gotta, you gotta figure out ram, like codims, whatever they're called, we gotta, we gotta move to a world where I could buy some 16 gig RAM computer today, or God help you, an 8 gig RAM computer with the understanding that in a year or whatever timeframe, hopefully when prices go down to their sales or whatever it is, that I could upgrade that thing. Right?
- [56:04]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [56:06]
Leo Laporte
You know, and if you, one of the sides that kind of related to this with the Steam machine is you also get into a single channel, dual channel problem with RAM. So if you somehow, if you have like two possible slots for RAM and only one is filled, it's running at like 2/3 the speed. Yeah, you have to have both Slots to get the full speed. And I believe the base configuration on Steam machine software, submissive. Now that one you can upgrade, it's a desktop computer. But. But if you get the base configuration, whatever that is, probably eight gigs, I don't remember. But you're going to have like. It's not just the rent, the amount of RAM that's the problem. It's the speed of the ram.
- [56:41]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [56:42]
Leo Laporte
So.
- [56:43]
Richard Campbell
Well, and that's the other thing they're not defining in here at all. Right. And I don't think anybody wants to know, like, what's the speed of the RAM you're putting.
- [56:51]
Leo Laporte
Nobody wants to think about this, but it's okay because typically you never had to worry about it. No.
- [56:56]
Richard Campbell
Because you'd always be the fastest rhyme and that would run properly.
- [56:59]
Leo Laporte
You know, you don't think about this, but now you have to think about this. So I don't think you're building up
- [57:04]
Richard Campbell
my list of why not to buy right now.
- [57:07]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's a. It's a solid list. It's a. It's a lucky.
- [57:12]
Paul Thurrott
You know, because we bought before this happened.
- [57:15]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [57:16]
Paul Thurrott
Before it happened. Right.
- [57:17]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [57:17]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [57:17]
Paul Thurrott
So we. I got 128gigs of RAM and I'm.
- [57:20]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, this might be. I. Look, I have.
- [57:22]
Paul Thurrott
Grateful.
- [57:22]
Leo Laporte
I've run into a thing with like phones is a problem, especially computers can be a problem. But I have to. I don't have to, but I do review these things and it's like if I have to buy a device, it's like I had years where I've taken passes on certain things. Like I'm like, I'm just not going to do it this year. And I'm looking at whatever they're going to release for iPhone in September, whatever they're going to release for Pixel in August. And I'm like, this might be naked.
- [57:46]
Richard Campbell
You just kept.
- [57:47]
Paul Thurrott
I am going to make a prediction. I made this yesterday on Mac. Very quickly, this will be the year people do not upgrade their iPhones because Apple's already.
- [57:54]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Pixel for an 11, I think I'm not gonna. Yeah, I was definitely all in for an X2, having missed the X and I don't think so.
- [58:02]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [58:02]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So Pixel's weird because I was just looking at this. Now we'll see what actually happens when they release it. But there were different RAM and storage configurations across all these products, but they still had 128 gig configurations last year, which I think is terrible. Those are going away at least. So there's 256, but the base configuration, I think on every phone except for maybe the Pro XL is going from 16 down to 12 or if maybe it was already at 12 depending on the phone. And then you have to upgrade probably
- [58:31]
Paul Thurrott
enough for a phone though, really.
- [58:32]
Leo Laporte
Probably. But it's just that the problem is last year you would have gotten 16, right? So when you're buying like a Pixel, like for all the pros and cons, one of the big problems is the Tensor processor is kind of garbage. Like it's not really an awesome processor. So you know that there's not going to be a like a big year over year bump there. So it's possible, I think we're going to see this where like the base config on a Pixel Pro that whatever, 11 pro might fall short of what it was a year ago, you know. And by the way, those year old phones, they're all on sale right now like for up to $300 off per configuration. Yeah, I'm just, you know, I'm not saying like, I don't mean this is a bit of advice per se, but maybe, you know.
- [59:11]
Paul Thurrott
Hey, Fable's back with analysis.
- [59:14]
Leo Laporte
What does this say?
- [59:15]
Richard Campbell
I don't know.
- [59:15]
Paul Thurrott
You know, this is interesting. I don't know how close this is to what we wanted it said. I pulled the raw CVRF data behind that release note page from Microsoft's API. I gave it the Microsoft release note page and sliced it up. Yesterday's drop is a big one. Duh.
- [59:31]
Leo Laporte
Does it come up with a Number?
- [59:33]
Paul Thurrott
It counted 1150 CVEs in the release note. 622 are Microsoft's own. The other 528 are third parties riding along via Azure Linux and Chromium Node Tar curl.
- [59:48]
Leo Laporte
Okay, that makes sense.
- [59:49]
Paul Thurrott
So there's stuff that's in Windows but isn't.
- [59:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, whatever. Yeah. No, that. That actually maps to the numbers we were talking about.
- [59:55]
Paul Thurrott
It had three actively exploited zero days. We'd already mentioned that. But here's the patterns. This is what we wanted to know. Is there like where memory safety is still the whole ball game? The CWE distribution is brutal. 142 use after freeze 117 heap overflows 6t out of bound RET. These are all human mistakes, right?
- [60:14]
Leo Laporte
Oh, of course.
- [60:15]
Paul Thurrott
Race conditions? I wouldn't necessarily say so.
- [60:17]
Leo Laporte
I would say also like kind of language compiler choice too, right? I mean, listen, if you're using C,
- [60:24]
Paul Thurrott
you're going to have this.
- [60:25]
Leo Laporte
One of the key learnings here. I bet. Mark Russinovich, whoever is looking at this is going to Be like if we move to Rust, we would solve like eight.
- [60:34]
Paul Thurrott
Fable said 70% of the classified bugs are classic C C memory corruption in kernel mode and driver code. So that's the first thing it is.
- [60:44]
Leo Laporte
Kernel mode. Yeah. This is ring zero stuff.
- [60:47]
Richard Campbell
And that's where you would want to point the tool at first. Everything running in ring zero.
- [60:51]
Leo Laporte
Exactly. And that's what you know, that was per the conversation we had earlier. It's like if you're looking at the code base, like where do you start? You start there. The most vulnerable part, the most important part.
- [61:01]
Paul Thurrott
Privilege escalation. A lot of it. They say that's what attackers need from Windows bugs. The step from user to system file systems are Getting fuzzed hard NTFs there were 21 refs, 12 cloud files, mini filter brokering file system.
- [61:19]
Leo Laporte
Can't imagine refs is a big uptick.
- [61:22]
Paul Thurrott
58 CVEs in storage and file system drivers.
- [61:25]
Leo Laporte
Wow.
- [61:25]
Paul Thurrott
A huge Office document parsing cluster 104.
- [61:30]
Leo Laporte
Cluster is the right word for the Office by the way.
- [61:33]
Paul Thurrott
I won't give you the second part of that out. 104 CVEs in office, Excel board, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Exchange.
- [61:40]
Leo Laporte
Okay, so it pulled out Office stuff too.
- [61:42]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Excel alone has 34 server side network services took a beating. This sounds like a sports night. Server side network services took a beating. Multiple critical RCEs and DHCP server 4/exclamation mark. I love it. You know Fable has some personality. DNS, TP, RMcast, multicast wormable class bugs and unauthenticated network listenings listeners. If you run Windows server infrastructure this is the patch first tier. Yeah, the AI attack surface is now a regular category so Copilot, Azure, OpenAI, GitHub, Copilot VS Code Mostly Cloud side and auto remediated. That's nice. The one line story Microsoft is patching the same two structural problems. It always patches memory, unsafe code and the user to system escalation path.
- [62:39]
Leo Laporte
Just a lot more of it. Yep.
- [62:41]
Paul Thurrott
While the in the wild action has moved upstack to identity infrastructure, SharePoint, ADFS, Entra and add CS.
- [62:48]
Leo Laporte
I bet the AI part which you know you cloud based so it's instantly remediated meaning you they fix it once in the cloud everyone doesn't have to install that patch, right?
- [62:57]
Richard Campbell
Yep.
- [62:57]
Paul Thurrott
It sets for a show summary because it knows we're doing Windows Weekly Somehow Patch SharePoint and ADFS Today, Dhcp, DNS servers this week and everything else on the normal cadence.
- [63:09]
Leo Laporte
Here's a script you can use to uninstall all of the useless crap on your Windows 11 computer.
- [63:17]
Paul Thurrott
I just want to point out when I read this, the notion that this is spicy autocorrect goes right out the window. I mean, this feels insightful. Am I wrong?
- [63:27]
Leo Laporte
Leo? EAA doesn't create anything. I don't know how we have to keep telling you this. Yeah, no, no, I think that's incredible. You know, I. This is good information. Like this is. It's good that it's doing this. I like decision makers at Microsoft, like people, you know, whoever's in charge of this stuff, this is good for them, to help them kind of focus on the most important trends that we're starting to see. Because we're looking at a month of data here essentially or whatever, one thing. But they probably have several months. Well, they have forever really. But they can kind of compare this month over month and they're going to see trends like that. And the memory safe stuff being number one does not surprise me in the slightest.
- [64:11]
Paul Thurrott
That's exactly what you expect, right?
- [64:12]
Leo Laporte
It goes back to that exact, like conversation around Rust and it's like, oh, they're never going to redo the Windows kernel in Rust. And it's like, I bet they're doing it right now. I bet they're doing it well.
- [64:24]
Paul Thurrott
Especially that's the thing an AI is very good at is translating from one language to another.
- [64:28]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. And when you say patch, like did you just mean replace that code base with one that isn't got the flaw in it that happens to be in a different language?
- [64:36]
Paul Thurrott
Maybe rewrite. You know what? That's what I'm in the process of doing. We have an old ad sales system we've been using limping along for 14 years. Mostly MySQL and mostly MySQL queries. And I'm rewriting it in Go. And the nice thing is it gets all the business logic from the MySQL database schema from the queries, and it's easy for it to translate that in.
- [64:59]
Leo Laporte
Go is a language. GO came out at Google. Right. Is this somehow related to. This is not related to Flutter in any way. Is it the same?
- [65:06]
Paul Thurrott
It knows I like go. I could easily have done this in Rust or some other.
- [65:11]
Leo Laporte
But what was the impetus for go?
- [65:14]
Richard Campbell
Oh, why did they Cloud first language.
- [65:16]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. It's also a. Concurrency is very good. It's multi thread.
- [65:19]
Richard Campbell
So it's all about scalability, immutability, like just that mindset of you living in the cloud. There's going to be lots of everything. What do we Do.
- [65:26]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, and it's super fast. And one of the things I wanted was Lisa was complaining was how slow it was because the database is big if you include every ad we've sold over the last 20 years. So she wanted speed. So go is a good choice for that. Plus it is run. It's going to run in the cloud, it's going to run on Azure. In fact, it is right now. We put it up on Azure for testing, so took it a week only because I was being really super cautious. I was. I could have probably one shot at it, but I said, no, I'm going to.
- [65:54]
Leo Laporte
I want you to get the phone rings, Some guy from Azure is like, hey, stop it.
- [65:59]
Paul Thurrott
Actually, you know, here's a really. We're running it on a cheap Azure instance, running on ARM because it was easy for it to.
- [66:07]
Leo Laporte
I mean now when you say running on arm, it's almost certainly those Microsoft, whatever, the Maya processor, whatever those are, because those are all ARM based data
- [66:13]
Paul Thurrott
center processors and it's fairly cheap. It's a small instance, but it can write it in arm. It doesn't care. It can compile the arm. So, you know, and I don't know if we're using MySQL I think we're using PostgreSQL, but I'm not sure. So I should check. But. Okay, this is the good and bad of doing this is I don't know what it's doing.
- [66:35]
Richard Campbell
Let's just do it fast.
- [66:37]
Paul Thurrott
We're doing what we call BDD behavioral testing.
- [66:41]
Richard Campbell
Right. Does it look.
- [66:43]
Paul Thurrott
It's saying things like have Lisa look at the spreadsheet. Do the numbers look right? If they do, we need a little
- [66:49]
Leo Laporte
more guidance than that. Like we went to our accountant today because, you know, we do taxes later, whatever, because we're away.
- [66:56]
Paul Thurrott
But.
- [66:57]
Leo Laporte
But Stephanie said to this guy, like, where did this number came from? This is you, right? Like you made this up or whatever.
- [67:03]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, good question.
- [67:03]
Leo Laporte
Yep. And she's like, I don't understand where this came from. And he's like looking at it right now. Neither do I. I was like, all
- [67:11]
Paul Thurrott
right, that's confidence inspiring.
- [67:12]
Leo Laporte
Shipping it. It's fine.
- [67:14]
Paul Thurrott
Let's just send it to the irs, see what they say.
- [67:16]
Leo Laporte
They'll just.
- [67:17]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, just see what kind of possibly wrong. You're watching Windows Weekly. We're glad you're here. Every Wednesday with Mr. Paul Thurat and Mr. Richard Campbell and the latest Windows news Whiskey is coming up. I know you're all waiting for that with bated breath, but you know Maybe we should talk about since we've started already, AI.
- [67:38]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I never know week to week where we're going to go with the AI, but this has been a fun week. So if there's anything better than two gigantic companies going at it, I have yet to know what that is. But. But in a kind of a replay of the we're going thermonuclear on Google thing from whenever that was 20 years ago, whatever, 15 something years ago, whatever. Apple sued OpenAI also IO Products, the Jony I've company that OpenAI owns now, and two former employees, which really does little to describe how important these people were to Apple. OpenAI partnered with Apple, but two years ago, right. And I think to this day, if you use an iPhone or an Apple device and you're using Siri, whether it's the old crappy Siri or the new one, that's actually by the way, pretty good. We'll get to this in the Settings app is configure it so that you can hand off things that Siri can't handle to OpenAI. ChatGPT and only ChatGPT. Right now, the number of things that Siri can't handle is approximately all of them. So if you configure that, you can opt in to not send them any of your information or you can log into your account if you're an idiot. Although I guess you would get higher usage numbers, whatever it is. And the point of this was an Apple side to help with an AI thing that was not working and on OpenAI side to get traffic and potentially paying customers. There was a rumor, I don't want to say two months ago where OpenAI was apparently unhappy with the results they were getting from Apple usage and a rumor that they were going to sue Apple because of this and try to get out of this partnership. They're not going to have any problem getting out of it now because Apple sued them. OpenAI has poached over 400 former Apple employees, including some major executives, one of whom by the way, has been at the company for over 25 years. He is as senior or was as senior in leadership as you could pretty much be without us ever having seen him on a stage. Right. And this is like astonishing. And there's been like a systematic campaign on OpenAI's part to bring people in from Apple to have them bring prototypes of Apple devices that haven't been made yet, or blueprints or whatever, whatever they can steal out of there and use that as during the interview process as incentive for OpenAI to hire them. Now, look, these companies are all terrible. I get it. I'm actually not 100% sure what the legality is here. In other words, if the employee has an agreement with Apple that they've signed a legal agreement that they're never going to do something like this and they do it. Yeah, that's probably illegal. But on OpenAI side, just enticing them to do that, I don't know. I'm actually not sure. Like, is that actually a legal problem? I mean, it's the Apple guy breaking the law there. I don't know. It doesn't.
- [70:38]
Richard Campbell
I mean, a company in, you know, creating a circumstance for someone to break a law is definitely liable as well.
- [70:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [70:45]
Richard Campbell
I'm going to ask the question, like, why are these Apple guys going for it? Like, what are they?
- [70:49]
Leo Laporte
Money. A buttload of money. So that's the thing. So, you know, one thing that Apple and Microsoft historically kind of had and or have had in common or whatever, is that from just a pay package perspective, the base pay is not all that great. It's just kind of industry average or even below whatever. In both cases, I think you get into stock options and things and it might pay off over a long period of time, which makes these longtime hires, them leaving. Actually, it was 24 years. Sorry. But in one case, they have to be backing up the money truck. Right. I mean, that's why in the sense that everyone has.
- [71:25]
Richard Campbell
Another interesting side of the AI hype bubble.
- [71:28]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [71:28]
Richard Campbell
Is these companies have too much money.
- [71:30]
Leo Laporte
Yep. And zero morals. So, you know, you're an Apple guy. You've been there for. It doesn't matter. Two years, 24 years, who cares? Whatever it is. And OpenAI is like, hey, we'd like to hire you. And you're like, yeah, I don't know. And they're like, we're going to give you a lot of money. It's like, yeah, I don't really care. And they're like, actually, we're going to give you like, millions and millions of dollars. You're like, I'm listening. And you know, then you get into that kind of weird conversation. Right. But the thing that is so beautiful about this, I don't know which is stupider. So the Apple claim is that they reached out to OpenAI in February to raise concerns about all these practices and never heard back. Okay.
- [72:08]
Paul Thurrott
You saw what happened.
- [72:09]
Leo Laporte
OpenAI's response is beautiful. They said you reached out to one of our employees who has a name similar to the person you thought you were reaching out to. And you sent that email to the wrong person.
- [72:19]
Paul Thurrott
They sent it to Chang, not Wang.
- [72:22]
Leo Laporte
Here's the thing. I'm sorry, have you as anyone. Look, I think all three of us have been involved in some situation where it's, I don't know, some kind of illegal thing or a money thing or whatever it is. When those people are trying to reach you, they do not stop. You don't get one email and then we're done. So the notion that Apple emailed one time and then was like, oh, they ignored us. Screw them. I mean these companies, they're not some random supplier. They have connections at the upper level. Most levels of both companies, like it's kind of, that's kind of incredible.
- [73:00]
Richard Campbell
I suspect that Tim's got Sam's phone number. I'm just guessing.
- [73:03]
Leo Laporte
I can't imagine that. Well, not anymore. But I mean I, yeah, they had them texting all the time, right?
- [73:08]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [73:09]
Leo Laporte
And I think the, and then OpenAI was like, I mean we did reply like okay, what are you kids or something? What is this? So I, I don't know what comes out of this. I. Given the secret nature of both these companies, it would behoove them to settle this. Like I need, I, this doesn't, nobody wants this to go.
- [73:30]
Richard Campbell
At some point a judge is going to go, what are you people doing?
- [73:33]
Leo Laporte
It's insanity.
- [73:34]
Richard Campbell
And again, they haven't responded, responded well to that advice before. And I'm speaking specifically of Apple.
- [73:39]
Leo Laporte
Yep, that's absolutely true. Yep. Yeah, this is in the notes because it's not really, you know, on point for anything but sometime this summer Google in the United States is going to allow multiple, any number of third party stores through Google Play because of that thing with Epic. And Apple is going to fight that tooth and nail until there is no Apple left. Like they just, if they ever are forced to do that, which they have been in certain regions or countries like in Brazil for example, they just do it there. Google's just like, all right, we lost. Apple does not accept this.
- [74:17]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, where is their Brad Smith? Where is that rational legal mind that goes, these are stupid fights. Right?
- [74:24]
Paul Thurrott
Weirdly, the Apple attorney wasn't an in house attorney, it was some outside guy.
- [74:30]
Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, I. The whole thing to me is so ludicrous. The fact that they've named like lawyers and they talk about specific communications. Like I said, there's no way that Tim Cook did not reach out to Sam Altman about this. There's no way like Sam Altman like the notion like well maybe he didn't know. You're like really, really.
- [74:51]
Paul Thurrott
Well, all of this, the future is, will be revealed.
- [74:56]
Leo Laporte
I mean the real or it gets settled and it will never be revealed. Which I think would be the better outcome here frankly. But not for me. I would love to see this.
- [75:05]
Paul Thurrott
There's two questions about this. We've talked a lot about it on MacBreak weekly. But one question is what is Apple's intent here? Is it to stop opening up from releasing advice?
- [75:14]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, so the thing we just mentioned is tied to this I believe, which
- [75:18]
Paul Thurrott
is because remember they bought Jony Ives company. That's how they got Tang Tan and they spent $6.2 billion for it. So.
- [75:27]
Leo Laporte
Right. So look, Microsoft did this historically, you know, think about pen computing in the 1990s it actually was called go. Right, go was the name of the company back then. Bill Gates finds out about this, customers are asking about it and they're like oh no, we're doing the same thing. Yeah, we got a 10. Just saying that is you can push it back and you know, you just get. And they did something garbagey but whatever. Eventually we had tablet PC but that didn't happen until like 10 years later. So Apple's stalling tactics with antitrust regulators and governments is designed to ensure that they keep collecting these ill gotten gains from app store fees for as long as possible because this is a huge revenue stream. If they can prevent a competitor from entering the market and potentially disrupting it with some kind of a new device, that might be the end of the iPhone. You never know. It makes sense to do that. Microsoft did this to Netscape, right? They went to federal antitrust court over this. So yeah, this is a known good tactic. Both companies technically, I guess have a lot of money, but Apple has real money and they will and can fight this as long as they have to just to put this stuff off. Now oddly, OpenAI has also said. I don't, I believe this was, I mean it was just reported. They, they have. Because we need one of these and it makes sense. But they could release a, their first smart device or at least announce it by the end of the year and then release it early next year. And the goal is to prevent that from happening. Not that what they, they're talking about like a smart speaker essentially, which sounds ridiculous to me, but yeah, whatever, but, but I think there's some few. Look, something eventually will disrupt smartphones. It may be some implantable things, it might be some combination of smart wearables, whatever they're rings and glasses we don't know. But it could come from an AI company. Right. And they did buy Johnny. I was kind of a known good quantity, so we'll see. I just. I don't know. Look, Apple, when Steve Jobs is still around, threatened to go thermonuclear on Google. Apple, then they sued Samsung and did okay there, but they never really went after Google. And then they had this incredible partnership where I believe this year Google probably pays Apple $25 billion or more for search placement. Yeah, Thermonuclear. It's going to be one of the biggest partnerships in technology. Right. And now they're partnering with Gemini on Siri. So, yes, I mean, like, whatever, I guess we'll see.
- [78:06]
Paul Thurrott
I don't know.
- [78:07]
Leo Laporte
I don't think we're going to learn as much as we want to. Tied to the Release of GPT 5.6, which is the latest frontier model or whatever from OpenAI, which by the way, releases new products every day. They're maddening. They released a new version of ChatGPT, which I think points to this future of. We're starting to hear this term, like super app. Microsoft has used this term. Right. There were rumors that Microsoft was working on a super app that would combine, you know, Copilot and the Cowork and whatever other features they have in there into one thing, which would be a Copilot, which by the way, to give them a little bit of credit, is something that's been thrown out as a possible. Like maybe this becomes the Windows user interface. Like instead of going to start, we go to Copilot and you type things in and it does the right thing. Right. Like that actually makes some sense. Satya Nadella, three years ago, two and a half years ago, said that he saw Copilot as the new Start menu. Right. He might have not been speaking vaguely. He might have been specifically kind of Previewing this idea. ChatGPT, or rather OpenAI is doing that with ChatGPT. So they have had codecs for a while, like Anthropic. They were using their codecs in their case for productivity as well as programming. A week ago or whenever it was announced, something called Work, which is basically Codex, but just for productivity. So they actually have a new offering or product, whatever you want to call it, and they had this thing, I think it was the only Mac, I think it was just on the Mac, and I don't think that ever changed. But sometime late last year, they announced their Atlas AI web browser, which they're now getting rid of. So the new version of ChatGPT incorporates all those things I just said. So it's got an in app web browser based on Alice, a chat, you know, chatgpt in the chat functionality we all know and love or whatever work, which is new. Codex, right. And this is the super app. They're not describing it, but the rumors were they were doing this. And this is all those pieces. It is what Microsoft has said they are doing as well. And that makes sense. They know what, you know, OpenAI was going to do. And the thing that's changing is that, you know, we think of these things, or I do anyways, like chatbots. Like you get a chatbot and there's a sidebar and then you go over here and there are options over here that would in their case would be things like work and Codex and whatever else. And Microsoft, you know, they have projects and whatever different things that are over there, whatever the options are. But the primary interface is this chat box, right? And that's what's shifting here. Like this is becoming the ui, if you will. Like this app is not chat. Chat now is in the sidebar. It's this other stuff, you know, and you know, when you think about it, like we're going to have this kind of natural language conversation with these things. There's, you know, these companies are starting to kind of rethink what it means and what it looks like to interact with the AI. It's like, well, how are people solving problems? How are people getting work done? How are they getting from question to answer? Whatever it might be, chatting is still part of it. This is going to be a chat box. I mean, probably forever, but they're doing that work. And that's, I know, it's kind of interesting. So this is kind of a space to watch the other one, in keeping with my, you know, my observations so many times is like any major AI company that announces any feature, whatever it is, so it could be code or Codex or work or cowork or whatever the names of these things are in different AIs. If one of those companies announces something within 24 hours, at least one of the other competitors will announce the same thing and God help them. Anthropic. Less than 24 hours after this announcement was like, we have an in app web browser too. It's like, of course you do, of course you do. You know, like, do you see these
- [81:43]
Richard Campbell
as the Stevie Batiste outside app model?
- [81:49]
Leo Laporte
Yes, but the, the, the differentiator though. And I guess it's just the thing like you come at it From a certain point of view. So you don't really kind of see this future when you talk about things like side by side apps, like the outside app, right? Which is a copilot model, right. You're like, okay, I get that I'm using this computer. This is the. It could be Windows, it could be a Mac, could be a phone. Doesn't matter what it is. Whatever I'm doing, this thing is over here on the side like, hey, buddy. And can help you out. Like, neat.
- [82:17]
Richard Campbell
That's the B side model. I think that's the original. I want to.
- [82:20]
Leo Laporte
And then you're like, okay, but we're going to evolve the software. You're like, yep, got it. So. And the Microsoft Office apps are classic example because you'll have a sidebar, because that makes sense. We'll add that first. We can do this. Okay, here we are in the same. You don't have to switch context. We have all these terms for this. But ideally this thing adapt or is evolved to the point where AI is integral to the way it works internally. Or maybe we have new apps, whatever. But the AI is inside. It's not like a little side thing. It's an auto model.
- [82:48]
Richard Campbell
It's the inside model.
- [82:49]
Leo Laporte
The inside model. But when you hear about AI, I guess outside or. Yeah, the third model, we're still thinking in terms of the thing we're already doing, right? So in this case, Windows. So we're like, all right, we have Windows and I guess we could have, you know, we have agents, we're going to have agents on the taskbar and those agents are going to go off and run autonomous tasks and then do it simultaneously, et cetera, et cetera. But you still have the same basic usage model. Like the part of the transition there is that it's making it work within the thing, you know and understand. So agents work like apps and they put up banner notifications if they need you. And it makes sense within this thing that we know. But if you're anthropic or OpenAI or any company that's not Microsoft, Google or Apple, you don't necessarily think about it this way. You have to get your stuff where people are now. That's why we have browser extensions and apps on platforms and whatever you have to integrate with everything that you need to integrate with. So we have those backend things like mcp, et cetera. But this to me is looking at the next thing, which is still, I guess, outside. But it's also like, do we actually need Windows anymore? Do we need we would joke maybe two weeks ago, because this goes so fast, some future day you'll have an iPhone and it just boots into ChatGPT and that's your interface and hahaha. But that's really kind of what they're talking about, right?
- [84:11]
Richard Campbell
That's what the outside model was really about, is, hey, I need a proxy for the. Whatever work. I just declare what work I need to do.
- [84:17]
Leo Laporte
You can't just go to it immediately, right? You have to. All the work we've seen integrating with apps on Android, whatever Apple Systems and Windows, integrating with backend services, which is fairly straightforward, whatever those things are, that has to happen because the world of work is occurring or whatever it is, we use apps and services. And that's what it is. It has to work.
- [84:37]
Richard Campbell
Also how people think about the workflow too, right? Like right when the cloud first came along, we wanted virtual machines because that was what we understood. If you brought us serverless at the beginning, which people tried to do, people didn't know what to do. Not that it was perfect.
- [84:51]
Leo Laporte
That's a good example actually, because I bring this up from time to time. But when they first announced Windows Azure, it was originally called, I didn't understand what they were doing. I didn't get this. I was like, so this is when the server running.
- [85:00]
Paul Thurrott
Pronounce it no.
- [85:01]
Leo Laporte
Right?
- [85:02]
Richard Campbell
No.
- [85:02]
Leo Laporte
I mean, I just didn't. I really struggled with it. And that's where your experience, which is usually your advantage, can work to your disadvantage because the world is changing and you're not ready for it. You're used to this thing. So again, this is baby steps for right now, but they're very clearly working toward this. Let's make a simple example, and I'm just making this up, but You're a Microsoft 365 customer. You have access to Word, Excel, whatever else, and you can access it on your computer, in your phone, whatever. One of the things you could do right now is use any of these AIs and go to it and say, look, I have this backend data source, whatever it is, I want to make a nice chart, which maybe you might have done in Excel previously. You just ask it to do, just does it. It's beautiful. You can talk to it and change it and whatever. Did it use Excel? I don't know. You don't know. But at some point you're going to have this conversation with yourself or maybe with the money people at your company, and it's going to be like, why are we paying for Microsoft 300? I believe that this thing could just do this and I don't need to pay for that thing. And the thing you pay for becomes the AI, not the Microsoft 365. You know, a simple example.
- [86:13]
Paul Thurrott
But you saw that what OpenAI is planning is just a speaker. Their first product is just.
- [86:20]
Leo Laporte
Which sounds. Which sounds stupid, right?
- [86:22]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, maybe not.
- [86:23]
Leo Laporte
No, I mean, on first blush, you're
- [86:25]
Paul Thurrott
like, oh, great, it's China. It's just a little ball.
- [86:29]
Leo Laporte
Do not put that in front of my camera. You just didn't put a virus in my house.
- [86:32]
Richard Campbell
What are you doing?
- [86:34]
Paul Thurrott
It connects.
- [86:35]
Richard Campbell
Comrade Xi likes your citizenship score doing fine.
- [86:39]
Paul Thurrott
It's got a little tinny, by the way.
- [86:41]
Leo Laporte
That's the next interesting. You said deep sea, right? That's the next big disruption in the space. Because when this comes down to money, we're actually charging customers for usage. And China's like, hey, we got lots of power. We can do this for one tenth the price.
- [86:57]
Richard Campbell
Great. Articles already saying, what's the price per million token?
- [87:02]
Leo Laporte
No. And the NASDAQ is.
- [87:04]
Paul Thurrott
So let me give you an example. So fable is $10 for a million tokens in and $50 for a million tokens out. That's the answers. The results. Deep Seek is, I think it's 14 cents for a million tokens in and $50.
- [87:18]
Leo Laporte
So let's say Leo tokens out. You're a patriotic American and you're like, you know what? Screw that. Those guys stole from American companies. I hate it. I'm not doing that. Here's the problem. Yeah, so did OpenAI and Anthropic. They all stole. You're going to get up about the stealing from thieves? Are you kidding me? I'm sorry, but in the sense that everyone has their price, if this goes from being unaffordable to anyone can afford it, I don't think anyone's going to question what country this thing's coming from.
- [87:50]
Paul Thurrott
I'll give you a great example. I asked my AI, okay, all the tokens I used, all the work I did last month, and by the way, I'm doing 10, 10 times more this month. But all the work I did in June, if I'd been doing that with, with Fable, with a top end model from Anthropic, how much would have cost? It said $5,771 in one month. I said, if I use Deep Seek, how much would it have cost? 117 bucks.
- [88:15]
Leo Laporte
They're like, actually, we would have cut you a check.
- [88:17]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, we'll pay you.
- [88:19]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [88:20]
Paul Thurrott
Admittedly, China may have an Agenda with
- [88:24]
Leo Laporte
all that, by the way. Agenda. There is a company in our country called intel, you might have heard of it. They used to be great. Actually, I'm not sure they were ever great. But whatever, they were great. They're a terrible company. They can't do anything right. But because they are backed by the US Government now we're starting to hear they're getting deals with companies to do stuff, supposedly, and no one's ever actually done anything yet. But whatever. The United States government is artificially holding this company up to keep it or make it more successful. It's certainly been successful in Wall Street. This is the complaint we have against China. I'm sorry, but we're just doing exactly the same thing. What are we defending here? So look, I don't know. At the end of the day, I think we just want to get the job done.
- [89:09]
Richard Campbell
If you're going to be exploited, be exploited by your own government, they're less likely to turn off all your stuff.
- [89:13]
Leo Laporte
I kind of like the government on being extreme exploited by. To be further away, you know, actually.
- [89:18]
Richard Campbell
But I mean, you think about the push against Huawei when 5G was being deployed and the British did the analysis on their software and said, we can't tell what they're doing here. This software is so obfuscated. And basically the Western world said, okay, we're not going to use Huawei 5G gear because we just don't know what's going to happen.
- [89:36]
Leo Laporte
Yep, yep. So I, I, look, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not defending China. I don't mean it like that. I hope this was taken with the proper comedic approach or whatever, but I think AI is going to be very disruptive. So we see that. Like I said, keeping it to the topic we started with, you're seeing the super app kind of idea kind of evolve. And when you're a platform maker, whether you're Microsoft with Windows or Apple with whatever they have, or Google, this is, these are companies are all involved in AI to some degree and great degree in many cases. But this is disruption. When you're Apple, you have a history of, in their case, disrupting themselves. Right. They did the iPhone because they didn't want the iPhone or the iPad, sorry, ipod, to be destroyed by some other company. So there's a certain amount of bravery to that for sure.
- [90:28]
Richard Campbell
That's a rare exception. Most companies, Google.
- [90:31]
Leo Laporte
No, I know, that's what I mean. Usually they're coming. Comes from outside, right?
- [90:33]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [90:34]
Leo Laporte
And Apple is not going to bet a thousand on this. I mean, it's possible. This is why they're going after Open AI. They see the potential disruption here and to stall that as long as possible is what makes sense.
- [90:47]
Paul Thurrott
They may also really be pissed off.
- [90:49]
Leo Laporte
Oh, they're clearly. Clearly. The language in that thing is amazing.
- [90:54]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [90:54]
Leo Laporte
The Apple lawsuit is classic.
- [90:57]
Paul Thurrott
That's great.
- [90:57]
Leo Laporte
It's like, I can find this thing. It's like coordinated pattern of misconduct. And OpenAI's recent. I'm sorry. Nascent hardware business rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core. Which is a nice term from an Apple by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets. Sure.
- [91:20]
Richard Campbell
Wow. I mean, by the difference between this case and the Elon Sam case, like they both seem like.
- [91:27]
Paul Thurrott
Or thrown out by the way.
- [91:29]
Leo Laporte
Or the many decades of various cases involving big tech companies that are poaching employees from each other that have been occurring since the beginning of this industry. And sometimes it flares up in a big way. Steve Jobs used to get involved in that stuff personally. He didn't want certain companies stealing from him.
- [91:46]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. He had a deal with. I can't remember, was it Microsoft or Intel that. I won't put your employees if you.
- [91:52]
Leo Laporte
It might have been Google, actually. It was Google.
- [91:54]
Paul Thurrott
You're right.
- [91:54]
Leo Laporte
I think it was Google. And that's illegal. You can't. That's.
- [91:57]
Paul Thurrott
You can't.
- [91:58]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [91:58]
Leo Laporte
You can't actually. Yeah, you can't do that. So the. The opposite of that is we're just gonna poach 400 of your employees. It's unbelievable.
- [92:08]
Paul Thurrott
It's just a fascinating. It's good to be crazy.
- [92:10]
Leo Laporte
It just couldn't. Couldn't happen to a better company.
- [92:13]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [92:13]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So it's great.
- [92:14]
Paul Thurrott
Anyway, it also plays into people's kind of general sense that Sam Altman is a little weaselly and squirrel.
- [92:21]
Leo Laporte
A little Weasley. Look, I. I will. The only thing that Sam Altman has in common with any of the people running any of the big tech companies now or in the past is that he is an absolutely terrible human being. Yeah, I. He is. He fits right into this.
- [92:36]
Paul Thurrott
But so let's face it, so was Steve Jobs.
- [92:38]
Leo Laporte
And that's what I mean.
- [92:39]
Paul Thurrott
So was Bill Gates.
- [92:40]
Leo Laporte
No, not to some degree. To every degree. You kidding me?
- [92:42]
Richard Campbell
The big difference here is he hasn't made a wildly successful product.
- [92:46]
Paul Thurrott
True.
- [92:48]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Well, I. I mean, you spent a
- [92:50]
Richard Campbell
whole lot of other kinds of money.
- [92:52]
Paul Thurrott
I actually don't know if I'd agree with that. I think.
- [92:54]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, right. So.
- [92:56]
Richard Campbell
Well, successful being actually could pay for making Money.
- [92:59]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah.
- [92:59]
Paul Thurrott
Well, he's.
- [93:00]
Leo Laporte
He's no Elizabeth Holmes. He's not faking it.
- [93:03]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [93:03]
Leo Laporte
You know, I mean, product. Yeah, he does. You know, people use it. I mean, I'm not saying it's like a good business model per se, but I mean, it's, you know, it definitely works. So it's not like he's faking blood tests or whatever, but. But give them time because they'll eventually expand into that market too. They're just terrible. So they're all terrible. Maybe that's the central point. Don't ever forget it. Because it's like, don't over romanticize any of these companies. They're all terrible. And then just real quick, Apple just the other day released the public betas of their OS 27 releases. So I've been using these things since the first developer betas. And I'd say Siri, which is a laughing stock and deservedly so and still has its like, just stupid stuff. Like, I literally.
- [93:50]
Richard Campbell
Stop.
- [93:51]
Leo Laporte
He just came once. Would you shut up? So after I wrote about Siri, I was working one day and it said something like, this drives me crazy. Everyone talks about how awesome the Apple ecosystem. Everything works together, right? So on my iPhone, actually, it happened just. It just happened again when we were starting the show. So on my iPhone, I. If it's a potentially spam call or whatever, they're starting to do a slightly better job about just not showing me that. Like, it will still pop up as a notification, but it's a silent notification and it doesn't like appear in the main screen of the phone or messages app. Like, it's just. It kind of hides it and it's like, okay, it's not as good as Google. Google does an awesome job of that stuff, but it's better than it was. So if you're in the Apple world and you see this, you're like, oh, nice. They've done a really good job. But every time one of those things comes in, my Apple watch is like burpees. I look down and it says the phone number. And it's like, this is like over my phone. And the phone's like, oh, this is potentially probably spam. Why are you telling me about it on my wrist? Like, it's ridiculous. The weirdest one of all, though, is just the other day, I was just sitting there working, typing. My watch burbles and then it starts talking. It's never done this. Siri is talking. Don't wake up. Is talking out of my watch and it says, I don't remember the name. It says something like, Matthew, somebody has left a very long message. Would you like me to read it? And I, I'm like, what? And so I assumed it maybe was like an email or something. So I look at my phone, it's a spam message and I had to go into the spam view to see it and there he is. Matthew's in there. Let's look at it now. It's crazy. And it's just like, you know, you qualify for $329,000 in like business loans from. Did you. And, and why would you tell me.
- [95:31]
Richard Campbell
So you made it all the way to the watch.
- [95:33]
Leo Laporte
There are still problems. But I will say this. So if you, I'm not saying if you're an Apple person, like you should install these things necessarily, but if you have been kind of angsty about Siri and how terrible it is, which you should be this new one, the way it works, I like the way it looks. You could do the chatbot app thing and you can ask questions like the types of things people use AI for today typically. Right. Maybe a travel itinerary thing being the kind of canonical example these days. It's pretty good and it does. Nice presentation. It will read it to you. It's like a beautiful looking report. Yeah, it's using I guess Gemini in the back end or whatever it's doing, who cares? But it took them years but I think it looks like they're going to kind of get there. So I'm kind of surprised. So they were doing flowers for Algernon for a while there, but now it's, you know, it's getting there. And for whatever it's worth, I mean honestly, day to day, like to me the biggest single thing on a phone for AI is the visual intelligence stuff, as Apple calls it. But every phone has some version of this where you point the camera at something, it tells you what it is. And if it's a product, it tells you how to buy it. If it's a building or a monument, it tells you the history of it. And you know what it, you know, that stuff is awesome. Like that's a really cool thing to have on your person when you're out in the world. And actually that's something Apple has been doing pretty good for the past couple years.
- [96:56]
Paul Thurrott
You know, it's interesting because it turns out to be a really easy thing to do. A small purpose built model can do that very well. I have a Quinn, a Chinese Quinn
- [97:05]
Leo Laporte
model that does visualize. You're all in On China man, I'm all in.
- [97:10]
Paul Thurrott
I tell you, they're inside everything I got. Well actually they're inside everything.
- [97:13]
Leo Laporte
You got one of those little Chairman Mao hats on you just like.
- [97:16]
Richard Campbell
But you get back to the reality here is as he's probably, you know, there's this cult going on that believes if we keep making it bigger, just like science fiction tells us, that it'll mysteriously turn into a self aware piece of super intelligence. Meantime, the engineers are like what's the smallest lowest cost working unit that can do something useful?
- [97:36]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [97:36]
Paul Thurrott
Prism ML is a good example. They've figured out how to get a good model down small enough to run on a few megabyte gigabytes of ram. In fact that's this Chinese model. This, it's an analyzing all the input from my cameras, you know, I have all the security cameras and it just analyzes it and it's, it's, it's like a couple of gigabytes and it's really good. It says a woman in a brown hat and yellow shorts is walking down the right street with a package and a baby. And it's, it's surprisingly good. That's. Those things are not as hard to do as that whole general purpose.
- [98:10]
Leo Laporte
But there's, they can be, they can be very used, very useful though, right?
- [98:14]
Paul Thurrott
Like I think yes, it's not practical. It uses a lot of energy.
- [98:17]
Leo Laporte
No, I mean just the like general use stuff. Like those are nice. Like they're fine. I still, you know, Google is probably better than anyone at this but you know, if you're like I can't see a screen on a phone anyway but you some photo on a phone, that's
- [98:31]
Paul Thurrott
a very good use for it.
- [98:32]
Leo Laporte
I want to get rid of this person in the photo and we can replace them with a smudge mark. Is that okay? And you're like no, like you know, like you kind of to want, want, you know what I mean? Like you want it to be a little better than that. But I mean I feel like that will get there eventually. I don't know.
- [98:44]
Paul Thurrott
They're moving hard and I think that that is really one very interesting direction is these small purpose built models.
- [98:50]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah.
- [98:50]
Leo Laporte
We're going to see a ton of. We already, the truth is we already do. Right. And it will only grow.
- [98:55]
Paul Thurrott
It's driven by the desire to get them onto devices.
- [98:59]
Richard Campbell
Right?
- [98:59]
Leo Laporte
Yep, yep. And not, not get the cloud cost happening.
- [99:04]
Paul Thurrott
Right. And then the costs and the energy data centers.
- [99:08]
Richard Campbell
I've had some good conversations with folks leading software projects thinking we're going to end up with a dedicated LLM in each app for doing modifications. That app, it's constrained by the architecture of the application, which is good for
- [99:20]
Leo Laporte
that app actually, in the way you're using it, because that's what you want, you know, you don't want it to be like, I found a random web result that might apply to what you. It's like, no, I want you to.
- [99:29]
Paul Thurrott
Exactly.
- [99:29]
Richard Campbell
Let me convert all this code to rust while we're at it. Right, yeah.
- [99:32]
Paul Thurrott
Steve's been saying what you're going to get is small. For instance, coding models that they're really good at writing. Go. Yes. That's what they do.
- [99:41]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [99:41]
Paul Thurrott
You know, one of the questions Lisa had for this new ad sales system is, well, what happens if you're on the air and it's broken? Who's going to fix it? And I think I'm going to build a little purpose built AI model into a little chat bot in the corner that she can say, hey, something's not working or hey, you know, and it's, yeah, what did this company buy in the ads last month?
- [100:01]
Leo Laporte
So that kind of thing, if you pay attention, and you guys do, but to anyone listening, if you, if you pay attention to what's going on with like clis this year, it's kind of incredible. So there's like an Android CLI for Android development. There's a window, I don't remember the names anymore, but the CLI is for Windows. And the point of this is not, it's not because there's literally a single model that is for that language and framework, whatever, but you can ground it in just that and that, that gets you there and that solves some real problems because its ability to grab information from everywhere is wonderful on some level, but it's also the problem. Everything you guys just said is like you're talking about an app where I want it to be grounded in the app and that's it. You don't get to see outside of this thing. There are ways to corral AI today to do that, but I do think purpose driven models that are, are relatively small in size and specific to that use case. We're going to be swimming in these things. And by the way, before anyone freaks out too much about that, every one of our devices already works this way to some degree with all these background processes and things. Every computer system of whatever kind has apps that we see, but they also have all these apps that run in the background essentially that you don't even know about. And it's going to be that kind of thing and it's the new background processes or whatever, but I think it's. I don't know. There's no way this, this is going to exponentially increase. It's insane.
- [101:22]
Paul Thurrott
One of the fun experiments I do is comparing these expensive cloud based models with a local model. I'm running a local model that is a kind of distilled version of the Chinese model, Quinn. It's called Ornith and it's small and it's running on my machine. It's not good. It doesn't go out to the cloud. And for probably 90% of the stuff I do, it's plenty.
- [101:45]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [101:46]
Paul Thurrott
So if I'm going to analyze the Microsoft code base and tell you what bugs they've solved that I would use Fable for, but for a lot of
- [101:53]
Leo Laporte
other things that I do, maybe in six months you won't. It's interesting. I feel like we talk about this a lot, but at some point there's that orchestration thing where the 90%. Yep. But then you have whatever rules where if it can't, like, it's like we already have them. They're agent writers. We have an. Unlike I just mentioned the iPhone, you will hand off the chat GPT. Right, Exactly. That's a stupid, unsophisticated version of this. But it's. That's essentially what it is. Like you, you can say, look, maybe you have to prompt me if it's going to cost money or whatever it is, but at some point, if we're online and we can access that model, you can't do whatever that last 10% is, go up and make that happen.
- [102:32]
Paul Thurrott
I'm going to rename this show Intelligent Machines and then give Paris and Jeff Windows Weekly because you guys, you're good. By the way, the chat room is saying I should call this little window in the Twitter ad sales thing, Bob. I don't know why.
- [102:46]
Leo Laporte
Clippy.
- [102:47]
Paul Thurrott
Clippy.
- [102:50]
Leo Laporte
It looks like you're trying to.
- [102:52]
Paul Thurrott
It looks like you're trying to sell ads. Can I help?
- [102:54]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah. Yes.
- [102:55]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [102:56]
Richard Campbell
Yep.
- [102:56]
Leo Laporte
My ad sales are up 110%. Thanks.
- [103:00]
Paul Thurrott
If I could figure out a way to do an AI podcast sales agent, I would, believe me.
- [103:06]
Richard Campbell
Goodness.
- [103:06]
Leo Laporte
I am pretty sure you could actually change the world. Yep.
- [103:10]
Paul Thurrott
What do you think, Richard? You do all your own.
- [103:13]
Richard Campbell
Sign me up? I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [103:15]
Leo Laporte
This is what. Look, I mean, we're making fun of it, but really, at the end of the day, it saves you money, saves you time. You're telling me you wouldn't want that thing. I mean.
- [103:23]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [103:24]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. When I started the rewrite, and I think I've kind of. Of won her over because we, we. I ran through it a little bit and she said, oh, okay.
- [103:34]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, right.
- [103:35]
Paul Thurrott
And now, now she's making me videos of the old system and saying, this is what I liked. This is. I'd get rid of this because we're. Right now we're changing the user interface to match.
- [103:44]
Leo Laporte
She doesn't know it, but she's vibe coding it.
- [103:46]
Paul Thurrott
She's our. Yeah, don't tell me.
- [103:47]
Leo Laporte
I know. I'm not. I'm just, you know, that's exactly what she's doing. But this is that moment we all have. All will have at some point. Because even the biggest doubters, the haters, whatever, there will be. Look, even the people who hate AI, we keep talking about these bug things. I mean, come on. I don't care how much you hate this stuff. You have to agree, this is great.
- [104:06]
Paul Thurrott
Well, and somebody's written, I think it's called Nobili or something, a kind of headless Excel for Mac that can read and write Excel, but you don't use. It's for an agent. So one of the things Lisa does is output all the sales into an Excel spreadsheet. Well, guess what? That's trivial.
- [104:29]
Leo Laporte
This is what I was talking about earlier. In other words, you might not care, but maybe you do care because you're paying for it. You don't care if it's actually using Excel in the back end. If it's not, that means you don't have to pay for Excel, meaning you don't pay for Microsoft 365, which means you're saving 100 bucks a month or
- [104:41]
Paul Thurrott
whatever it is it does, all the formulas it understands. I mean, it's. I mean, it's practically Excels. It's very close.
- [104:47]
Leo Laporte
Yep. And whatever output format you want, like, even, like the, the dumb version of this, like 10 years ago, 20 years ago, would have been, I work for, I write books, I have to publish. You know, I have to go through a publisher. They have to take. It has to be Doc format. You have to use Microsoft Word. And if you're a real idiot, you could be like, well, I'm going to use LibreOffice or some other thing, and then I'll output it to Word Document format at the end. The modern version of that is. You don't even think about the tool, but it does output it to docx or whatever it is at the other end, and it's Perfect. So who cares? You know, like, it doesn't matter what you use to get there. And that's. I think that what AI is going to change or is changing literally right now. So I don't want to talk about Spotify, but I just want to mention I hate Spotify so much. And now I can tell it that I hate it because it has AI built into it, because God knows why. Because everything has to be conversation, everything
- [105:35]
Richard Campbell
else has to have.
- [105:36]
Leo Laporte
Because what I want to do when I'm listening to music is talk. But you know what? It's okay. I get it. Like, everything's going to do this. So they've had AI playlist. I think there's an AI DJ up speaking, which last thing I want to hear when I'm listening to music is DJ talking, but which YouTube is starting to do. And YouTube music is starting to do in their playlist, which I hate so much. But you can. You can start talking to this thing. So you can. You know, I'm sure it's going to go in this direction where it's like, I really like, you know, Van Halen or something play. You know, these are things we already kind of do. Right.
- [106:10]
Richard Campbell
Like, this is what Spotify already does. You play a song that you really like, it follows up with songs you think you're going to like.
- [106:17]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So but now you can do it explicitly, I guess, or something. I'm not going to do it. Spotify was one of those things.
- [106:23]
Richard Campbell
They just had to answer the question of the board. What are you doing about it?
- [106:25]
Paul Thurrott
Exactly. That's.
- [106:26]
Leo Laporte
You nailed it. What would you say your job is here?
- [106:32]
Paul Thurrott
I'll tell you what my job is here. It's to say you're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. We do this show every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. And you can actually watch it live. We stream it into the club Twit, discord, but also YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. And if you're here at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC, watch it live with, chat with us live as we're doing it. And actually, Richard and Paul both go into the Discord chat. So when Richard gets bored, he starts chatting with the people or poking me.
- [107:10]
Richard Campbell
Poking you with stuff. On.
- [107:12]
Paul Thurrott
We go with the show because, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, it's time for the vaunted, the revered, the beloved Xbox segment.
- [107:23]
Leo Laporte
And that introduction is longer than the section.
- [107:28]
Richard Campbell
But the music is especially appropriate.
- [107:30]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Some weeks it's big. And last week was, you know, our date with Destiny, or however you wanted to describe it.
- [107:37]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [107:38]
Leo Laporte
This week it's been pretty quiet. That makes sense. I think there's, like, kind of a lull. I actually went up to the Xbox Wire site, just be like, did I miss something? Like, what's happening? Nothing.
- [107:46]
Paul Thurrott
You think this would be a good time to try to buy a house in Seattle? I'm thinking there might be some vacancies.
- [107:50]
Leo Laporte
Yikes.
- [107:51]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [107:52]
Leo Laporte
Too soon, man.
- [107:54]
Richard Campbell
Sorry.
- [107:54]
Leo Laporte
I don't recommend that.
- [107:55]
Richard Campbell
You think they just let go of all the people who know how to post on the newsfeed? That might be it.
- [107:59]
Paul Thurrott
Is it quiet suddenly?
- [108:01]
Leo Laporte
Very.
- [108:02]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, interesting.
- [108:03]
Leo Laporte
That's interesting.
- [108:04]
Paul Thurrott
Maybe they did.
- [108:08]
Leo Laporte
Sorry, I don't know where to go with this. So we talked last week, I guess, about some of the studios that are leaving. Some of them are going with their original team and going to be independent. Some of them are going with as yet unnamed other companies. Some of them are still looking for a home. Right. One of the ones that's sticking around, but suffered had pretty dramatic layoffs as Obsidian. And I don't understand why this is news, per se, but they've been directed to make a new Fallout game.
- [108:41]
Richard Campbell
With the success of the show, you would think they would have been on it immediately.
- [108:45]
Leo Laporte
Yep. You would think we would be swimming in Fallout content, that there would be new Fallout games on PC, console, mobile, you know, whatever. So what were these guys doing? I don't know. I mean. Yep. So we'll see what happens. I mean, they have. They have games, you know, they have avowed, I think the outer. Was it called the Other Worlds, I think, and some other things. But, you know, when you look at Microsoft, well, Xbox, sorry, today, which is, you know, Microsoft Gaming, essentially, other different studios you have. And you were to make a list of the top five, 10, whatever. You can say whatever you want, whatever game or franchise I mean, followed is right there. This should be job. I mean, this should be just something they're doing.
- [109:26]
Richard Campbell
But Fallout 76 was a disaster.
- [109:31]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Why, though? Like.
- [109:33]
Richard Campbell
Like, it's just wildly buggy. It just was nowhere near the comparable story.
- [109:38]
Leo Laporte
How old is that game, though? Like, when did that come out? I feel like that was 18. Geez. Yeah.
- [109:44]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [109:44]
Leo Laporte
I feel like this needs to be. Look, nobody wants the yearly Call of Duty model for anybody, including the people play Call of Duty, but I feel like there needs to be a more regular cadence for these games, or at least for whatever, if they support them with DLC or whatever. It Might be.
- [110:00]
Richard Campbell
Well, yeah, I think what they're really missing, they're missing the visionary that paints the larger picture of that universe so that you can pick places to tell stories. We've done some Nevada, we've done some New England, we've done D.C. was 76.
- [110:14]
Leo Laporte
The Boston one or New England one, or was it.
- [110:18]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I think it's the New England. Well, four was really the New England one.
- [110:22]
Leo Laporte
Okay. Yeah, I don't remember. I don't know.
- [110:26]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [110:26]
Leo Laporte
Yep. Maybe AI could play that role. He says to the. In the influx of tomatoes coming toward him. I don't know. Anyway, that's all I got for X Y. There was really nothing. Yeah. Last week was terrible. So this week is like.
- [110:42]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. And I'm sorry, I shouldn't have made light of this. That's a, a terrible thing for everybody who's laid off. And only was thinking of it because I literally saw an article from the Seattle news organization saying how everybody was leaving Seattle because it was getting.
- [110:58]
Leo Laporte
They're all heading to Silicon Valley, baby, where everything. Oh, wait, yeah, yeah. You know, they could pull a commoner, bring everyone to Pennsylvania. That'd be great.
- [111:08]
Paul Thurrott
Maybe this is a good opportunity. I've seen this in the past where cities say, you know, we want to be the next Silicon Valley.
- [111:14]
Leo Laporte
Oh, 100%. Yeah, there's, there's a bunch of places like that, I'm sure.
- [111:17]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [111:17]
Leo Laporte
Nashville is a. We were just there. So I just happened to see this. It's a big place for startups, you know. Yeah, sure. And if you can stand like a thousand percent humidity, it's a great choice.
- [111:26]
Paul Thurrott
Many years ago, probably like 30 years ago, going to Nassau in the Bahamas and they said, just like we were speaking, we were where the pirates went to hide their booty. We want to be where the we
- [111:40]
Leo Laporte
hide our intellectual property.
- [111:42]
Paul Thurrott
Go to hide their intellectual property or
- [111:44]
Leo Laporte
at least our revenues.
- [111:45]
Paul Thurrott
You know, they were installing like undersea cables so they would have high speed Internet. I mean, they really wanted to be a date, they said a data haven. I don't know. That was a long time.
- [111:55]
Leo Laporte
This is like, we need it. So, you know, there's a book called like the Millionaire Next Door and it's about personal finance. We need a book called like the Billionaire Next Door and it's about why you have such crazy high speed Internet in your stupid town. You know, like that doesn't make any sense. And it's like, yeah, there's a guy over here who lives at a castle. I don't know. Our Internet is awesome. There's a bunch of places like that.
- [112:14]
Paul Thurrott
It could be a shirt book that says simply, you don't have a billionaire next door. They bought up all the property around them.
- [112:19]
Leo Laporte
They bought the block. Exactly. They put in a moat and a
- [112:22]
Richard Campbell
wall the next city over.
- [112:24]
Leo Laporte
Yep. You're going to need a trebuchet to get through that.
- [112:27]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [112:28]
Paul Thurrott
The billionaire in the next city over.
- [112:29]
Richard Campbell
That's more like it.
- [112:30]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [112:32]
Paul Thurrott
This is Windows Weekly and it is brought to you by not only those fine sponsors, singular, but by the many, many of you who are in Club Twitter. And we are so grateful to all of the Club Twit members. They make this all possible. Lisa started it during the pandemic. Remember that? I think that happened a few years ago. I've blanked it out now. But we were very concerned at the time that we would need the support of people who listen to the shows to stay alive. And she started the club and I'm glad she did because it has made all the difference. About 30% of our operating expenses are paid by club members. Without you, we would have to cut way back on the shows, on the personnel. And I don't want to. I don't want to do that. We've already done that. I don't want to do any more of that. So if you like the shows you hear here, if you want us to continue, if you want the benefits of membership in the club, you get things like ad free versions of all the shows. And all those ad free versions, by the way, have chapter markers so you can skip around if you want. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a party. I guess that's the best way to describe it. It is a lot of fun. We have creative, smart, interesting people in there who do all sorts of things. Like Joe here. Joe is. He doesn't do this with AI. He does this with Photoshop.
- [113:57]
Leo Laporte
He takes old with AI, but it's actual intelligence.
- [114:00]
Paul Thurrott
Actual intelligence. He takes old ads. This looks like an old Commodore. What is that? Is that a C64? I don't know what that is.
- [114:08]
Richard Campbell
That's a 64.
- [114:09]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, C64 ads.
- [114:11]
Leo Laporte
It looks like you're absconding with something there, I think.
- [114:15]
Paul Thurrott
Is this the one where they had a mime? Because he's wearing white gloves. Anyway, that's funny. He's adding a printer. Anyway,
- [114:25]
Leo Laporte
they stole a printer from someone else and he's leaving it.
- [114:27]
Paul Thurrott
Yes, tiptoeing in silently. But Joe is what part of what makes this wonderful club Discord so much fun? To hang out in. I just love it. So if you want to join the club, just go to Twit tv Club Twit. There's all the information you need there about joining. Ten bucks a month. There's. I think there's still a two week free trial. There's family memberships. If you have multiple members in the family who want to be members, there's corporate memberships too. We'd love it if your company took advantage of that. And, and just know that besides the benefits, you're really helping us stay on the air. And I think if you believe in independent journalism covering technology, we're not owned by any big company. We have, you know, operate without fear of favor. Just like Paul@Tharat.com, just like Richard is RunnersRadio.com I think it's really important, support independent podcasting, independent blogging, because it makes a huge difference. We think it's very important. And if you can Support TWiT, TWiT TV Club TWiT. Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is time for what we call the back of the book. We'll kick things off with Paul Thurat's tip of the week.
- [115:41]
Leo Laporte
Paul. Yeah. So Tony Redmond comes up once a year now at least because he does a new rev of his book, which is incredible. And by his book, I mean it's an incredible group effort and is now multiple books because Tony has so much to teach me about breaking up content. Because this is a problem I've been having too. So what used to be called Office 365 for IT Pros has now finally been renamed to Microsoft 365 for IT Pros. This is the 2027 edition. You can buy this book at Gumroad. And there are sub books or other books that go along with it too. Right. So they split it off where there's a. What is the thing? There's a purview book for IT pros.
- [116:22]
Paul Thurrott
Right?
- [116:22]
Leo Laporte
Power platform. And also automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell. So they pulled it out of the main book to keep the main book manageable because the main book is over a thousand page lines. Big book. So Tony is the editor. And then this reads like a who's who if who is to work with, like Paul Robichaux's lead officer, author. Sorry, Brian Desmond's in there. He's a great guy and a bunch of other people. So as a Windows Weekly listener, you can get. What is the deal? I think it's 20% off. 20%, yeah, yeah. So if you use the code Windows Weekly 27 capital W. In both cases, you can get 20% off the book if you buy it directly from Gumroad and then you got the year of support, you know, for whatever updates.
- [117:06]
Richard Campbell
Which is to say you get updates as Microsoft keeps. Keeps on changing every.
- [117:10]
Leo Laporte
Every month. Yeah, yeah. This covers the whole game. Yep. Yeah, well, like Microsoft, I. Look, I took you take on Windows, you know, like this is a big topic. What would be a bigger topic? I don't know. How about Microsoft 365, you know, astonishing.
- [117:24]
Richard Campbell
And Tony's put together a team that just works on it constantly. It's amazing.
- [117:29]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, exactly. So anyway, great guys that I know, the ones I know, you know, there's a great group of guys. Tony's fantastic.
- [117:36]
Richard Campbell
He's a regular on run as to just every so often I need my
- [117:41]
Leo Laporte
Exchange fix and then in the app, the app pick. So I've been working on a series which doesn't seem to lend itself well to app picks per se. But this is the friction thing, like adding friction to some technology interactions. Right. So I removed a bunch of subscriptions. I saved like $100 a month. I've written some articles about alternatives for reading as opposed to say, just buying books from Kindle or Audible or whatever. I've written some about music. There'll be actually more there. Movies and TV shows, et cetera. So it's kind of a whole thing. But in the process of going through this and trying to think through strategies for different things, because different types of content are different. Like a movie or a TV show or a book is like this, where oftentimes you just have the one time and you're done. Right. And so buying that thing at full price and owning it doesn't always make sense. Like, you know, a lot of people like, like us and people listening here, the types that like to collect things, they want to have a bookshelf full of whatever it is, CDs or books or whatever. And if it's electronic, you want to like, you squirrel away all this stuff. I probably have over a thousand Kindle books in my library. I have close to a thousand Audible books. I have close to a thousand movies from Apple, which is stupid. So I'm trying to rein that stuff in. And music is different, though. Music is the one where, especially if you're trying to find new music, keeping a music subscription service makes a lot of sense. It's super easy to. To test something and say, oh, I like the song, but I'm looking so bizarre. It just feels like, it's something from 30 years ago, but I'm trying to figure out locally owned. I'm going to call it MP3, but a lot of it's flac, but just local music. What does this look like? What could this look like? And I have to say I found this app. It's not great looking, but it's awesome for correcting all of the metadata problems that we always have with these files. You know, correct album art in the thumbnail for the file as well as, like, in whatever application using the playback. It's called Music Be. It is free. It's actually fairly fantastic. Like, the way it works. I haven't thought about this type of thing in such a long time. And, you know, I think one of the daunting things about if you're going to buy music and, you know, store it locally, put it on NAS or however you're doing it, and you have to get it to devices. A whole story there. And this may. I'm sure this will come up again, but you want to get it right before you put it anywhere and then start using it. So this is a great way to make that happen. This is just minor, but two, three, whatever. Weeks ago, Vivaldi 8 came out. There was a huge update. 8.1 is out now, and it is not a huge update. And this is a good example of this company doesn't care about AI. And they're like, look, but we're just meeting your needs. This month we're focusing on refinement, but also just fixing bugs and quality and everything. It's like, we don't have a lot to say about it. It's just better than it's ever been. And God love them, I love to see this kind of thing everywhere. So if you are interested in Vivaldi or just an alternative web browser, you definitely take a look at that. And then, Richard, you now have 50 straight minutes, my friend.
- [120:48]
Paul Thurrott
I will mention coming up in 50 minutes. So you got lots of time for whiskey. We are going to cover the big Mozilla announcement a couple hours ago on the state of open source. So we have the CTO of the Mozilla foundation joining us to talk about the state of open source. So that should be very interesting. But that means there's a lot of Runway for you, Mr. Richard Campbell, starting with Run As Radio.
- [121:15]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Bringing back one of my favorites. Sammy Laho is a security professional out of Finland who scares the snot out of me on a regular basis, as
- [121:25]
Paul Thurrott
any good security pro should.
- [121:27]
Richard Campbell
He's the he, some of the stories, if you go back and listen to the catalog of run ads with Sammy, it's things like he helped fight an exploit for the healthcare system in Finland where he was both, you know, the prosecutor to find this guy and also one of the victims because his own data had been stolen by this guy.
- [121:44]
Paul Thurrott
Oh man.
- [121:45]
Richard Campbell
He, he was involved when the Ukraine war started off, separating companies that have offices both in Finland and in Russia. So doing the thing that, that, that active directory was never meant to do to actually split the two things apart, you know, crazy. And so I, I bumped into him at a conference recently and said, can we, you know, what do you want to dig into? And he said, well, I'm really looking at what's going on with M Dash and Mythos and like all of these vulnerabilities. And so we sat and chatted for a while and again, frightened the heck out of me.
- [122:17]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [122:17]
Richard Campbell
But you know, great conversation about where the vulnerabilities lie, what these tools are good at and what they aren't at and what the rest of us should do. You know, the big, big companies are doing things, but I'm talking to plenty of mid tier and smaller software providers who they all run risks of being exploited too. And so there's different tooling and other opportunities to just try and use these tools to get ahead of the exploits that are coming.
- [122:44]
Paul Thurrott
Nice. I want to get him on intelligent machines. That sounds really great conversation to have.
- [122:50]
Richard Campbell
And just, you know, this whole idea of you've got the CVE engine out there pulling up exploits like you as a person don't have time to read all of them, but you really ought to have an agent aimed at that so that you are evaluating your own software as quickly as they occur. You know, Sammy was also in another show, was the one who said, said stop testing the Windows updates, deploy them, then worry about the fallout because the time to exploit is so short.
- [123:17]
Paul Thurrott
Now, now, now for sure. Yeah, yeah.
- [123:19]
Richard Campbell
We just don't have the time.
- [123:20]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [123:21]
Richard Campbell
You know, that, that being said, over on the dev side, we've also come to realize, hey, you probably shouldn't take the updates of an open source library until they've been around for about 48 hours because black hats are pushing changes in and it takes time for the good guys to find them and remove them. So you know, don't be too quick there. But I have limits different.
- [123:44]
Paul Thurrott
All of my libraries that you can't use them for two weeks after. Yeah. Come out just because.
- [123:49]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. It's just amazing how that 48 hour window seems to be the thing you need.
- [123:53]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah.
- [123:54]
Richard Campbell
It was a weird time in security and so it's great to go back to the touchstones. Folks that have been fighting the fight for a long time and they're just rolling with the punches.
- [124:03]
Paul Thurrott
Love it. All right, I think it's time to talk whiskey talk. And you're back in Canada. Do you have a Canadian whiskey?
- [124:12]
Richard Campbell
I do indeed have a Canadian.
- [124:14]
Paul Thurrott
And look, what a pretty bottle. And look almost half gone.
- [124:18]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, oddly enough, yeah, I've had this one for a little while now.
- [124:21]
Paul Thurrott
Or half full, not half.
- [124:23]
Richard Campbell
You know, the folks that I went down and, and spent July 4th with came up and spent, spent the weekend with us. So we were drinking some Canadian and a bunch of other weird things because, you know, I have a bunch of weird things in my closet. But this particular one is my, is a B.C. so not Alberta, not Ontario. This is a real British Columbian whiskey called Sanctuary. And so this is my backyard. Right. We're in, we're. And you know, we're on the east side here. You've seen the view out the door, out the window there, across to the west side. Because these guys are in the southeastern end of Vancouver island on the Saanich peninsula, right in the city of Victoria. Now if we're really going to get our head around this, we got to go back away. So say 25,000 years ago, the period we call in this area the Fraser Glacier.
- [125:13]
Paul Thurrott
Oh my God, you weren't kidding.
- [125:14]
Richard Campbell
I wasn't kidding because this is what makes the shape of the ground and a lot of the culture that this whiskey ultimately comes to depend on. And as my, my geology friends have said, you know, the ground I'm on here is the rock that the ice couldn't crush, which is why it's so hard to build anything here and why we do have above ground wiring for everything. Like, what else can you do? So if you go back to 25,000 years, there was over a mile of ice here and there were mammoth and bison and muskox and the giant short faced bear. I don't know if there's any people, then we're not, we're not entirely convinced of that. A few thousand years later, about 22,000 years ago, there's a warming period and the ice melts back. The Saanich Inlet, which is where Victoria is, becomes a large glacial lake that eventually has an ice dam failure. And we have this in the geological history. And that burst creates this thing called the Colwood Delta, which is a source of a Lot of sand and gravel even today. And then it cools down again 16,000 years ago, and we get the glaciers back, but bigger than ever. These are the ones that push all the way into Puget Sound down to Seattle and Tacoma. And the weight of that ice is so great that what we would consider current currently consider sea level. This land was about 150ft further down. That rebound is massive. After the ice retreats again at about 14,000 years ago, it'll take 10,000 years for the land to sort of come all the way back up. Now, the reason that ice is such a big deal is it's actually what carves out the Salish Sea and the Puget Sound in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. So they're so very deep, right? That water, you know, we're only talking five kilometers over to Texada island, but the bottom, that's 200 plus meters down. So it's very deep water. And it's part of the character of this area. It's very fjordish. But also when that ice retreat happens about 14,000 years ago is when humans start to come down, the ones that we know of now and we know they come out of the north. So there's plenty of evidence to show that came across the Bering Bridge. When you get into archeology, that old, it's mostly down deep in the ground and it's old fire pits and things like that. So they're really just doing carbon measurements. There's not a lot of detail, not a lot of artifacts. Of course, also those. The people of that area very much lived on organic materials, right? Bone and stone and, and wood. And so there's just not a lot left. You gotta fast forward a bit more there. The courses land was incredibly prolific. As the ice all melts often, there's all the. This freshwater flooding. It makes a lot of grasslands. The bison move in, the megafauna are gone. And of course the humans come down. And the salmon always ran in this area and they just get larger and more plentiful as the rivers grow bigger. Now, as I am a buff of archaeology and I do love this part of the world, I've spent some time on this. So we talk when we talk about known archaeological eras, and these are not based on people per se, but more about the technologies. Right, like. Like what did their art look like? What kind of. What's the sophistication of the technology? So the earliest defined areas era is a time we call the Saint Mungo phase, which is like 3500 BC to 1500 and a lot of this comes from an area known as Locano beach which is right in Vancouver today, which on the other side is Salish Sea. But they were traveling all over this area and this is very much subsistence survivors on salmon, shellfish, she mammals. They do woodworking with and out of wood and bone and antler. Pretty straightforward stuff. And as that period a couple thousand years goes by, you get in what we know is the Larcano beach phase which is when the woodworking really evolves and they start to incorporate things that making bone chisels and, and using nephrite ads blades. So stronger, more complex materials, the construction gets larger. So they're starting to make big plank houses, canoe, larger canoes. There's also evidence of spear throwers. So these are pieces of wood essentially that you place on your arm to increase the throw on spears. You know, it's an amplifier of strength. You also see the mythic creature masks and sort of the mythologies and shamanism that emerges from there. The Marpol phase is the last defined phage and this bridges across from BCE to CE times, so 400 to 450 now going up into the Roman Roman periods. And that's where we have quite complex societies living around the Salishes. This is large plank houses, long duration habitation as evidenced by these midden piles, huge mounds of shells from people feasting and partying in different areas and so forth. Their woodworks are complex. They have more advanced tools all around. Harpoons, sophisticated spear points. They're wailing and you just. They're very successful people. And so. And there's many different cultures spread across all of this, all lands in here. So when we talk about Victoria per se, we're talking about the Lekawungan people which originally were on the east side of the peninsula. Today that area is known as Oak Bay. And there was estimated more than 10,000 residents by about 900 A.D. which is important. The town name is remembered, it's called Sechelton. But it was destroyed in a tsunami. In 930 A.D. there was a major earthquake and it kicked a five meter tsunami up and down the strait and destroyed a huge amounts of the homes and villages along this area, most of which never recovered. The land was fundamentally changed with this. A lot of it became marshy, literally textured the title marshes. And so the people that did survive moved inland. They moved to more sheltered waterways and things like that. And in the case of the, the Lekwungen people they moved into an area we now know as inner harbor of Victoria. So it's across the peninsula in a more sheltered area. Closer to the river is a little safer all around. There wouldn't be another event like that, a major earthquake according to the geological record until about 1700. But at that point, even though it had been 800 years, people still were staying away from the coastline. So the tsunamis just didn't have the same effect. And the largest state in place. And remember, this is all oral history matched to the geological record. So the evidence is pretty clear. So we don't get Europeans into this part of the world until 1774 when the Spanish make their way up here. This is Juan Perez and Bruno de Hecate. And they don't actually come in here per se. They're mostly up the outer coast, although they are. They come to the conclusion that that land mass, the Vancouver, what we now know is Vancouver island, they called Isla de Quadra after one of their commanders is an island. So they do the mapping, but they don't stay. The first evidence of a smallpox epidemic is in 1780, which did not come from the sea at all. It likely came through continental routes. It is completely devastating. 30 to 50% of the indigenous people living in this area died of that first smallpox epidemic. So you comparable to what happened to the Aztec and the Inca several hundred years earlier, just took longer to get here. The first real establishment in this part of the world by Europeans is 1789 with Fort Nootka. This is on the west coast of Vancouver island, again was called Isla de Quadrant, and it's really the first fort and there's not a whole lot left there. The full mapping of the Salishie doesn't come until 1792 when one George Vancouver. Yes, that Vancouver arrives in the Strait of Juan de Fuca in April of 1792 with the discovery in the Chatham. He had thought that the strait would just turn into a river. He did not expect an inland waterway. But when he finds out that it is there, he sends his people all over the place. A guy named Peter Puget heads south to map all the way down to Tacoma Olympia, which is why it's called the Puget Sound. He also encounters all the Salish peoples that are on the far more in the inside sea where it's much safer and so there's lots of trade to be done. Later that year in June, he does actually meet with Juan Francisco de la Bodega de Quadra in the Nootka Sound establishment on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It could have easily ended up being the beginning of a war between Spain and England. Remember, they're at the the farthest reaches of the empire. They're farthest away from everything, and they're more like each other than different. So they get along really well and decide let's not make a huge fuss about it. But they decide to let's name the island Quadra and Vancouver's island. And meantime he spends the rest of the year map fully mapping the Salish Sea proves that passage all the way around Vancouver island is navigation. And so Vancouver goes down in history and he's wildly famous. The the waves of disease continue to run through this area for the next few decades. Smallpox, measles, diphtheria, you name it. The next major colony or establishment is actually comes from the Americans. This is 1811. Fort Astoria is established in the Pacific Northwest. It's done by one John Jacob Astor. Do you recognize the name? So John Jacob Astor is the original American multimillionaire. He creates a company called. It's his great grandson John Jacob Astor iv that'll die on the Titanic some hundred years later. But he creates a company called the Pacific Fur Company and sends out two different routes to this location on the mouth of the Columbia River. He sends a ship called the Tonquin and also an overland expedition. They're supposed to arrive at the same time, but they don't. The Tonquin gets there well ahead and it has most of the supplies. So they construct this fort at the mouth of the Columbia River. This today would be Oregon. It's on the south side of the river called Fort Aster. And then because the overland expedition hasn't arrived, they decide to do some trading and the Tonquin heads north and ends up encountering a group of folks. They end up in the violent confrontation of and most of the crew is killed. And in a panic, one of the surviving clerks blows the ship up, leaving no survivors. By the time the overland expedition actually arrives at the fort, the ship is gone and won't be back. They're already starving because they took far longer to get there as they and then they planned. And so the establishment is basically crippled and begging for help right when The War of 1812 starts. And that doesn't go particularly well for the Americans. And the British burn the White House. And so most of the aspirations in the Far west die off for several decades. And so a rival company to Hudson's Bay called the Northwest Company actually convinces the US to sell them Fort Astoria, which they can't support anyway. They rename it Fort George and they're doing the operations in fur Trade and opportunities in the Pacific Northwest. That'll end in 1821 when Hudson's Bay Company, the wealthier larger company, buys out. The NWC emerges together. But they also recognize that being on the south side of the Columbia river with the Americans coming back isn't a good idea. So in 1825, they establish a new fort further inland on the Columbia river and on the north side and call it Fort Vancouver. Today there is still a town called Vancouver there across from Portland. Now this is part of Hudson's Bay company. It actually becomes the headquarters what they call the Columbia department, which is really Hudson's Bay is interested running all the way from California to Alaska and into the interior all along the west coast. And yes, this is why British Columbia is called British Columbia, because it was the British side of the Columbia River. Now, still recognizing that there's pressure being put on by the Americans to push further north, the HBC sets up another fort further north in 1827 called Fort Langley. This is up the Fraser River, A part of the system that Vancouver himself didn't particularly explore. They did out identify the mouth of it. It, it's further inland. It's right on the fur trade routes. It's at the point where the river gets very difficult to navigate. But otherwise it's a very large river. But it is all supported by Fort Vancouver. It's kind of the outpost in the original European settlement, or at least the British settlement in what is now known as British Columbia. Fast forward a few years in 1843, recognizing that the Americans are coming back strong 30 years after Fort Astoria. And they actually have this chant, 54, 40 or bust, like they want to push the, the line up that far north. And so they build another fort, Fort Victoria, on the southern end of Vancouver Island. It's also an HBC trading post. This finally gets all resolved in the 1846 Oregon Treaty, which draws the line between the British lands and the American lands along the 49th parallel. So that's where the Columbia river is now. Between the Columbia river and the 49th parallel comes Washington state.
- [138:42]
Paul Thurrott
We probably should mention as a kind of footnote that 54, 40 year bust was all about extending slavery into more territory.
- [138:51]
Richard Campbell
That too. I mean, there's a whole bunch of dynamics going on there. This is coming into the civil War. Like all of that play is happening at the same time.
- [138:59]
Paul Thurrott
British history, really. It is what's interesting. It's really formed Canada too. I mean, that formed the boundary for Canada.
- [139:06]
Richard Campbell
That line gets drawn with the British, and Canada's still Several decades away from actually forming. And part and parcel of this whole dynamic is his recognition that Vancouver island was more important in many ways to the mainland. So the colony of Vancouver island is actually established in 1849. This is when they finally dropped the name of Quadra and Vancouver's island to just Vancouver Island. In been like that for quite a few decades at that point because the Spanish haven't really been involved. Although in the 1850s they will name another large island, not as big as Vancouver island, but a big island in the inland water body, Quadra island, which is still called that today. I've been there. It's a nice place. The colony of British Columbia doesn't get formed until 1858. So almost 10 years later after the colony of Vancouver island. And that's really only defined because of the gold rush. When gold's discovered in the Yukon Territory and up the different riverways, including the Fraser, Americans start coming up en masse and they start wanting to change the rules and have it controlled by the US and so forth. And the Brits freak out. This is a long way away, you know, they're way out there. So in 1858 at Fort Langley to declare the colony British Columbia and that it is part of the British Empire. But then they also set up a different capital than Fort Langley. They use New Westminster as the capital. This is on the Fraser river but closer to the to the Salish Sea. And it's good land, good rivers, has all the features needed. So it's the capital of the Colony of British Columbia. And by 1866, just less than 10 years later, Colony of Vancouver island, the Colony of British Columbia actually merge. And when that happens, they manage through some finagling to actually make the unified capital Victoria rather than US menstruation. And then 1867 is Confederation of the of Canada. But British Columbia doesn't immediately join. They won't join until 1871. And of course a key part of British Columbia being part of the Dominion of Canada was the railway. And so the Canadian Pacific Railway is trying to push through the Rockies to actually get a railway all the way to the west coast into Pacific Ocean. Initially they pick a location at the end of what's called Barrard's Inlet. They call that they were going to call the area port, Port Moody, that it does exist today. And it was going to be the original termination of the trail line. But the owners of the rail line don't love the site so much. And so they actually look further down the coast to a logging area. Known as Granville, which also had a little bit of a town around it called Gastown after a guy named Gassy Jack, who was a saloon operator and riverboat operator.
- [141:43]
Paul Thurrott
And it's a lovely part of Vancouver.
- [141:45]
Richard Campbell
Yes, it is. But the. I bring up that point to say we don't get the city of Vancouver until 1886, much later in the equation of all of this, Victoria and us, all that have been around for decades. And at that point it's only about 1,000 people, mostly loggers, and within the first year burn the entire place down because they're using fire to clear the land and lose control of it. But there's so much money in the system now to get the railway up and running that within a year they've completely rebuilt. In fact, it's even bigger and more people have moved in. And the train actually makes it to Vancouver in 1887. And so that kind of sets the terrain for. If you think about how the civic Northwest works, remember, Vancouver's a newcomer. Victoria is one of the oldest locations still actually important and became the capital. And that's where Phillips Brewing and Malting sits. So in 2001, a guy named Matt Phillips, who had been working in the brewing business for quite a few years, decided he really wanted to make his own, including. He worked at a company called Whistler Brewing up in Whistler. And he really liked the beer culture in and around Victoria. So he sets up a brewery there. He's not the first. There's a bunch in the area. In fact, there's enough that the banks don't want to play. He can't get a loan, so he pretty much funds it himself. He has a degree in biology, so he sort of understands the chemistry of making beer. But he turns out to be really mechanically inclined and constructs his own equipment. In fact, builds his own bottling system. I found a video of him from like 2002 where he's literally hand sticking the labels on his beer bottles. He specifically focused on large format, like 650mil bottles, which we call bomber bottles in this part of the world. Although there's a glass shortage in the early 2000s as well. And he ends up buying a whole bunch of bottles out of Portland that were what we call stubbies, the little brown bottles, short necked, they're not very popular today. But his first product that sells decently is a thing called Phoenix Gold Lager. And from there his real hit becomes a product called Blue Buck Ale. In those big bomber bottles, he's successful enough that by 28 he moves into larger premises. And while he before he even moved, he managed to get a distilling license. So he always had an eye to making whiskey because he king and beer. But he didn't have the equipment, he didn't have the time. But he managed to acquire an old English pot still. They call the still Old George. It had been built in the 1920s and shipped into the Okanagan, which is in the interior, in the 1950s, where to spend about 20 years making cider. And then that operation shut down. The still was essentially abandoned. So by the time he finds it, it hasn't been used in several decades. It's in a state. So he gets it to his new facility where he has a space for it. But he doesn't have the equipment, skills or time to actually do anything with it. So it sits for a few years until he runs across a guy named Laurent Lafuente, who is an experienced distillery Swiss, and he's worked all over the world. And that guy cleans up the still and starts building out the equipment to put together the company. Now he wants to call it Philip Distilling, but there already is a Phillips distilling in Minnesota. So instead he calls it fermentorium. So in 2014, he forms fermentorium Distilling. And the first thing they do is make gin, which makes sense. It's a quick product to make. They make a local with local botanicals running it through the still they call Old George with a couple of passes. Although eventually they buy a German Mueller Brennae combination column pot still, which is really good at making gin. He also starts working closely with the local barley farms up and down Vancouver island and in the in the Peninsula as well enough that he recognizes buying local barley, the malting processes are somewhat limited. He wants to do more. So he sets up his own malt works. So in 2015, largely builds his own craft scale malting work. So shaker and cleaner system for getting the barley prepped, his own grain elevators and conveyors for the storage. They got six grain storage silos for finished malt and for barley steeping tanks, aeration systems, germination systems with the rotators to keep it the right temperature to grow out. And then the kilns to do the drying. And especially in the beer world, some toasting as well. You'll actually cook the malt for longer to add additional flavors to it. Because he's making a bunch of different kinds of beers, he's also now selling them the Matured Malta. Other companies and Then that actually gets him into doing some whiskey making as well. Now he already had been buying bourbon casks because he was doing bourbon finished beers. So he had a relationship with Heaven's Hill to buy their casks and getting the age their beer in it too. But now he starts to make whiskey and has a bunch of interesting storage locations, very typical rack houses, wooden racks on the sides. But he's doing mixed barrels. And that was where we get to this particular whiskey, which is their reserve edition. So they make three different no age statement sanctuary single malt whiskies. One's called Reserve, another one called Signature and a classic edition. And this is the reserve. So it's 100% BC barley. The yeast to use, and I'll notice this right away when I tasted it, is a London ale yeast. And coincidentally I know this. Just like today or yesterday we published the Carolus whiskey, the Belgian whiskey that had that ale flavor in it. Well, this one's got it too. That sort of that chewy kind of foamy ale flavor. Boy, this is good. Oh, let me tell you. So the way they distill it is they use that old pot still. Joel George. They do two pass and then six to eight years, but they split the addition up into three different sets of barrels. There's Heaven Hill bourbon barrels, but they've also got a relationship with twisted oak, the winery. And they use ex rose wine barrels as well as the Phillips beer stave US barrels, which is an imperial style. And then from that they combine together to make this whiskey.
- [147:53]
Leo Laporte
Wow.
- [147:54]
Richard Campbell
So the fruitiness of the wine comes through really clear. It's absolutely got some bourbon notes in it. It's like, it's, it's warming. This is about 46% or 42% and but it's got that Ailey kind of yeasty flavor to it, which I've just come to really admire as a cool way to make a whiskey for no age statement. They've really just done a great job of making a really interesting whiskey out of it. And so right away my friends tasted this. I'm like, that's neat whiskey. Like very interesting. Unfortunately only distributed in B.C. and Alberta in a 750 ML bottle for about $70. Oh, now that's $70 Canadian. So what is that, a buck 50American?
- [148:41]
Paul Thurrott
It's not much. Yeah, yeah.
- [148:43]
Richard Campbell
But yeah, you may have to come over to get it, but believe me,
- [148:45]
Paul Thurrott
the yeast will be great.
- [148:47]
Leo Laporte
You're no peso, that's all I'm saying.
- [148:50]
Richard Campbell
But I here I was thinking it was only the Belgians that were clever enough to use a, you know, interesting yeast and almost immediately I find a BC version of that. So I mean, good on them. They've been doing this for 25 years. They're starting to figure it out. They've only been making Whiskey for about 10 hope. I can't wait to see what a 10 or a 12 in this looks like. But they've definitely got a great dynamic going and an excellent product. Somebody asked on the how is it compared to Shelter Point? Both of them are good. I would drink either one in a second. I think Shelter Point goes much more traditional. These guys have done a clever yeast and a clever set of barrelings, and it's come through in the flavor really nicely.
- [149:31]
Paul Thurrott
Yum yum. Sanctuary Reserve Edition Single malt whiskey free from British Columbia and basic water.
- [149:40]
Richard Campbell
A quick 25,000 years of history just to make it easy.
- [149:43]
Paul Thurrott
I love it,
- [149:46]
Leo Laporte
but yes, water.
- [149:47]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [149:48]
Paul Thurrott
Richard, you did it again. Something weird from his closet. You can find all of these at Something weird from my closet.com, but actually, easiest thing is go to Twitt TV whiskey. The wonderful Kevin King, our producer and editor, has been working to catch up. He's still a few behind, but we have a lot of those.
- [150:06]
Richard Campbell
He's getting closer. I think we're down to like eight weeks behind.
- [150:10]
Paul Thurrott
We're very close.
- [150:11]
Richard Campbell
Carolus was not that long ago.
- [150:13]
Paul Thurrott
It's really good. Good job, good job. Truth TV Whiskey spelled with an e or without an e. We've got both, depending on if you're Irish or Scottish or Scots. Richard Campbell. You'll find it runasradio.com that's where his podcasts are, including dotnet, rocks and I can't wait to listen to that new one about security and AI. You'll also find him here every Wednesday for Windows Weekly, as will you find Paul Thurat. He is at theat.com his books are@leanpub.com but hey, here's a little tip. If you become a premium member@therot.com, you'll get all the books for free. That includes the field Guide to Windows 11, Windows Everywhere, and the new one, the Initiative Window, which is probably worth its weight in single malt whiskey, I would guess.
- [151:01]
Leo Laporte
Pretty lightweight whiskey, but yes.
- [151:04]
Paul Thurrott
What was that campaign slogan? 84 proof for fight. I think that was it. No, 84 proof.
- [151:11]
Richard Campbell
I think 54 is plenty strong, but
- [151:13]
Paul Thurrott
54 is just fine. We do Windows Weekly, as I mentioned, every Wednesday you can watch us live, but if you don't have access to, you know you're working or something like that. You can always go to the website Twit TV, WW. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. Great way to share the video. Everybody's got YouTube. You can share little clips even, or simply go to your favorite podcast client and subscribe. And you'll get it automatically the minute it's available, audio or video. And of course, your club members. You have a special URL just for you for the ad. Free versions of the show. Thank you so much for being here, Paul and Richard. Thanks to all our winners and even those of you who fell asleep. You dozers.
- [151:58]
Richard Campbell
You missed the whiskey bit.
- [152:01]
Paul Thurrott
We will see you. Bye Bye.