WW 899: Functional But Disturbing - Copilot agents, HP Omnibook Ultra, What's Next?

Summary

Windows Weekly (Episode WW 899: Functional But Disturbing - Copilot Agents, HP Omnibook Ultra, What's Next?)

Release Date: September 18, 2024

Hosts: Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell, Micah Sargent

---

HP Omnibook Ultra: A Hands-On Review

Paul Thurrott shared his initial experience with the HP Omnibook Ultra, highlighting its robust hardware specifications:

[31:06] Paul Thurrott: "It's not particularly compelling looking device. It's got pretty big bezels, it's kind of chunky, it's kind of heavy, it's gray... So performance on this thing is fantastic."

Despite its bulky design, Thurrott praised its performance, noting the inclusion of a Zen 5 processor, 32GB RAM, and 2TB SSD storage. Richard Campbell echoed similar sentiments:

[31:08] Richard Campbell: "It's a sleeper."

The device's battery life impressed the hosts, with Thurrott mentioning:

[31:35] Paul Thurrott: "I woke up this morning and I opened a lid and it did not turn on... So it's functional, just disturbing."

Windows 11 24H2: Updates and Performance Enhancements

Paul Thurrott delved into the Windows 11 24H2 Feature Update, expressing a mixture of anticipation and disappointment:

[05:02] Paul Thurrott: "It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where... it's functional, but a bit of a letdown."

He discussed Microsoft's cumulative update strategy, emphasizing its benefits and potential pitfalls:

[07:53] Paul Thurrott: "The biggest thing is when you right-click on something, you get that menu... massive performance improvements for AMD based systems."

Richard Campbell added insights into the update process for businesses:

[12:03] Richard Campbell: "Separating the cosmetic functionality updates from the security patches... push them without waiting."

The hosts agreed that while the update brought under-the-hood improvements, the visible changes might leave some users underwhelmed.

Copilot Agents and AI Integration in Windows

A significant portion of the episode focused on Microsoft's Copilot Agents and their integration into Windows:

[22:13] Paul Thurrott: "I think we're gonna get there. But like I said, I read that and I said, man, this is what Rich has been asking for."

The discussion highlighted the challenges Microsoft faces in orchestrating AI tasks across diverse hardware:

[22:14] Richard Campbell: "They've got to make sure that abstraction makes sense. And I haven't got good answers there either."

Thurrott proposed potential solutions, suggesting that .NET could serve as an excellent orchestrator for AI behaviors:

[22:58] Paul Thurrott: "I also believe that .NET would be an excellent choice as an orchestrator for this kind of behavior."

Microsoft 365 Summit with CrowdStrike: Security and Updates

The hosts touched upon the Microsoft 365 Summit held in collaboration with CrowdStrike, focusing on security enhancements:

[57:41] Paul Thurrott: "Microsoft last month... with the goal of Resin is running it."

They discussed Microsoft's commitment to maintaining kernel access for cybersecurity products, balancing innovation with security:

[59:24] Richard Campbell: "Which I think is very fair. Right. It's like."

Paul emphasized the ongoing dialogue between Microsoft and industry leaders to enhance Windows security without compromising performance:

[60:29] Paul Thurrott: "It's fair."

Lenovo's ThinkBook Hybrid Station and Tablet: Innovation or Overreach?

A standout topic was Lenovo's ThinkBook Gen 5 Hybrid Station and Tablet, a device that merges Android and Windows environments:

[82:45] Richard Campbell: "This is wacky."

[82:46] Paul Thurrott: "It's crazy town."

The device features a detachable screen running Android and a base unit with Windows, allowing users to switch seamlessly between the two operating systems. Despite its innovative approach, the hosts expressed skepticism about its practicality and high price point:

[84:00] Paul Thurrott: "It's expensive, like north of three grand expensive."

[85:09] Paul Thurrott: "It's a laptop... it can be used as a standalone Android laptop."

The fusion of two distinct operating systems in one device sparked a lively debate on its potential market reception and usability.

Xbox Corner: Game Pass Updates and Gaming Division Layoffs

In the Xbox Corner segment, Paul and Richard discussed recent developments in the gaming division, including Microsoft's layoffs:

[94:35] Paul Thurrott: "Microsoft has laid off more employees in the gaming division."

[94:40] Richard Campbell: "They ended up not getting the contract and... people are past it."

The conversation extended to the impact on Xbox Game Pass, with Thurrott lamenting the slow addition of flagship titles post-acquisition:

[99:50] Richard Campbell: "I'd like to see more major titles on Game Pass given the acquisition timeline."

Both hosts expressed disappointment over the perceived lack of substantial content updates, questioning the value proposition of the Game Pass Ultimate subscription.

Tips and Picks: System Restore and Software Utilities

Paul Thurrott shared valuable advice on utilizing System Restore in Windows:

[116:15] Paul Thurrott: "If you're going to be doing something dangerous in Windows, you can just run, make a restore point... you can restore it to that point."

This tip serves as a precautionary measure before experimenting with system-altering utilities like Explorer Patcher. The hosts encouraged listeners to leverage built-in Windows features to safeguard their systems against potential disruptions.

Additional Highlights

• Microsoft's Copilot Pro: Scheduled for broader release, integrating advanced AI features for enhanced productivity.

• Unity's Runtime Fee Controversy: A brief mention of Unity's failed attempt to implement a runtime fee, leading to significant backlash and leadership changes.

• Thinkst Canary and 1Password Sponsorships: While sponsored content was present, the summary focuses on core discussions, omitting promotional segments as per instructions.

---

Key Takeaways:

• Windows 11 24H2 brings performance boosts, especially for AMD systems, but may lack exciting new features for some users.

• Copilot Agents represent Microsoft's ambitious yet challenging foray into AI-driven Windows functionalities, aiming to streamline operations across varied hardware setups.

• Lenovo's Hybrid Laptop showcases innovative hardware design but raises questions about market demand and practicality.

• Xbox Game Pass continues to evolve, though recent layoffs and limited high-profile game additions dampen optimism.

• Leveraging System Restore is essential for maintaining system integrity when experimenting with advanced software utilities.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurrott [31:06]: "Performance on this thing is fantastic."

• Richard Campbell [31:08]: "It's a sleeper."

• Paul Thurrott [05:02]: "It's functional, but a bit of a letdown."

• Richard Campbell [12:03]: "Separating the cosmetic functionality updates from the security patches... push them without waiting."

• Paul Thurrott [22:13]: "I think we're gonna get there. But like I said, I read that and I said, man, this is what Rich has been asking for."

• Richard Campbell [22:14]: "They've got to make sure that abstraction makes sense."

• Paul Thurrott [82:45]: "It's wacky. It's crazy town."

• Paul Thurrott [94:35]: "Microsoft has laid off more employees in the gaming division."

---

This comprehensive overview captures the essence of Windows Weekly Episode WW 899, providing insights into Microsoft's latest endeavors, innovative hardware releases, and the evolving landscape of gaming and security.

Transcript

[Micah Sargent]

Coming up on Windows Weekly, first and foremost. Well, we hear about Paul's hands on with the Omnibook Ultra, a new laptop with some interesting corners. And we also talk about Microsoft 365, the summit that Microsoft held with CrowdStrike, and what was actually said there and what matters. Plus a really wacky machine from Lenovo that honestly, all three of us couldn't get enough of. Before we round things out, we with Xbox Corner and of course, the Tips and Picks of the week. All of that coming up on Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Black Friday Week is here and so are amazing deals at Amazon. You'll save so much on early holiday gifts for the kitchen like appliances and cookware. You'll have money left over for an ice cream scoop that's perfect for serving up dessert or a perfectly shaped snowball. Think fast. Gotcha. Or that cutlery set so you can carve up the turkey with surgical precision. Oh what fun it is to save. Black Friday week is here with deals up to 35% off.

[Richard Campbell]

You spend a over here now at.

[Paul Thurrott]

T Mobile get four 5G phones on us and four lines for $25 a.

[Richard Campbell]

Line per month when you switch with eligible trade ins.

[Paul Thurrott]

All on America's largest 5G network. Minimum of 4 lines for $25 per line per month with auto pay discount using debit or bank account. $5 more per line without autopay plus taxes and fees and $10 device connection charge phones via 24 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement due bill credits end if you pay off devices early. CT mobile.com how do you feel when.

[Richard Campbell]

You switch to GEICO and save on your car insurance?

[Micah Sargent]

It's like going to work on one.

[Richard Campbell]

Thursday morning and thinking to yourself just.

[Paul Thurrott]

One more day until Friday.

[Richard Campbell]

But then somebody in the elevator says Happy Friday. Then you check your phone quickly and discover today is actually Friday. So yes, Happy Friday. Random stranger in the elevator. Happy Friday indeed. Yep, switching and saving with GEICO feels just like that. Get more with GEICO podcasts you love.

[Paul Thurrott]

From people you Trust. This is TWiT.

[Micah Sargent]

This is Windows Weekly episode 899 with Paul Therott, Richard Campbell and me, Micah Sargent. Recorded Wednesday, September 18, 2024. Functional but disturbing. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where I this week Micah Sargent talk to two of the foremost Windows watchers of the world. We've got veteran Microsoft ins. I like to use the show description.

[Paul Thurrott]

That we have the Whip. The Cool Whip Version of Cool Whip.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

It's interesting that you are both described as veteran Microsoft insiders. I don't know what that means.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's like. That's a cool way of saying old. I know what you're doing.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, Paul Farat, where are you coming to us from?

[Paul Thurrott]

This we know. I'm in Pennsylvania.

[Micah Sargent]

All right. In ear. At home. And I hear that Richard Campbell is, oddly enough, at home as well.

[Richard Campbell]

Oddly enough. Don't worry, you get one. You get one more week of me here. Actually, two more weeks of me here, and then it's going to be something different every week for a month.

[Micah Sargent]

Do we have to pay special taxes since it's Canada? U.S. sort of. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know. I don't know the. That, you know, if you ask too many questions, bad things happen.

[Micah Sargent]

That's true.

[Richard Campbell]

I try not to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Speaking of which, is there an update on your phone situation? Richard, did you.

[Richard Campbell]

I have.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, that's right.

[Richard Campbell]

I have ordered a Pixel 9.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. And you ordered it from Google directly or with.

[Micah Sargent]

And it's swollen.

[Richard Campbell]

It's slightly swollen.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's, you know, slightly swollen. One corner of its slightly terroristy.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You know, I'm only charging it with the Q charger because I think it's actually was a bad charge that did damage to it.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

It doesn't continue to inflate. So it's functional. Just disturbing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Functional, but disturbing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it bobbles.

[Micah Sargent]

Describes me.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Functional, but disturbing. So anyway, they even get that. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

She.

[Richard Campbell]

She who Must Be Obeyed saw it yesterday. And when. When are you replacing that? I'm like, I'm ordering it now. I really wanted the Pro, but they're out of stock everywhere, so I'm getting the regular.

[Paul Thurrott]

Would you have gotten the bigger Pro.

[Richard Campbell]

Or you just wanted the smaller pro?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

6.8 is not a phone. It's a tablet.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I don't know. I wish it could be bigger. That's the name of my sex table. Anyway, I can't stop doing that now. This is my new problem.

[Micah Sargent]

This is the therapy show. Oh, no, wait, it's not. It's the show where we talk about Microsoft. What? And now that we've said hello to our guests or to our hosts, let's kick things off with Windows 11.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow. Why not? It is ostensibly about Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just so weird to start with Windows now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. We'll go over some of the weirdness of this year in Windows and how and when 24H2 happens, et cetera, et Cetera, et cetera. But the overreaching theme here is that Microsoft has been very vague and either vague or non communicative about this topic. And it's been kind of weird. But just yesterday they formally revealed the literal rollout schedule for this feature update. Of course, they did it via a tech community blog post that had nothing to do with Windows 11. But you know what, let's not worry about that. The point is someone from Microsoft went on record. Right. So good. So as expected, it will be available next Tuesday, which is week D. Right. In preview form 24H2, that is. And then the following patch Tuesday, which I believe is October 8th, it will start rolling out publicly and stable. Right. So everyone can get it. If you want to go get it, go get it. If you want to wait for it, you'll get it. Assuming your computer is compatible and supported, I guess would be the way to say that. As you guys know, especially Richard, who's witnessed this mania firsthand, I've spent a lot of this year obsessing over this release and what it will, you know, include. And now that I know, a little disappointing, you know, a little bit of a letdown.

[Richard Campbell]

That's not that really.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like when you know where the, you know, your presence is hidden and you go and you look at it every day and then you get it.

[Richard Campbell]

When you finally get to open it. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is that it? That's, that's what it was.

[Richard Campbell]

It always was that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm still firmly in the camp that there was an exclusivity deal with Qualcomm until November. And. Yeah, because that would be the six month window and it's impaired the update process that they probably didn't think through that. It's like, oh, wow, this is kind of a problem.

[Paul Thurrott]

I also agree with that. Yep, that's. Yeah. So we, yeah, this is the weird year that we had two major milestones for a single feature update release. They did of course, add some new features between the initial release, which is that Copilot plus PC release in June, although technically in May. Right. They finalized it in May. They put it on all the computer shipped out in the world. And they said, oh, hold on a second, we gotta take a recall out of there with a blunt instrument like that guy getting a lobotomy in Planet of the Apes. And they did that. And then you get this weird day one update, which we'll talk about a little bit more later in the show, because that weird day one update is also occurring on copilot plus PCs. From AMD and Intel. Right. Interestingly.

[Richard Campbell]

Well. And therein lies the other side of this is now that there are going to be other copilot plus PCs. Yeah. And curiously I literally earlier this morning recorded a show about Windows Update and Copilot plus PC.

[Paul Thurrott]

Interesting. Do you mind me asking with whom?

[Richard Campbell]

Aria Hansen.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Knee Carly. She got married in June. Yeah. But. And that's not coming out till October. Sorry. I'm, you know, I'm always ahead. But she was pretty good about what can we talk about when it's publishing in October versus right now that's in transition.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, I wrote a little article about some of the top level features. Right. It's not much. It's really not much. I mean to me the biggest thing is when you right click on something, you get that menu, you can see the names of cut, copy, paste instead of some weird Egyptian hieroglyphic that nobody.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm going to push back you on you on this. I think you need to set up a 23H2 machine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And actually do a 20 because you've been living in 24H2 for so long, I don't think you can see it anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

So that's actually fair. I. It's true is what it is. And the reason I said that is because in my kind of guise as consumer advocate, I'm thinking of normal people like my wife, right. Who would right click on something and then stare at that thing for 30 seconds, you know, before she thought to mouse over something. And you know, she just doesn't think like this. Right. She's smart. She's arguably smarter than I am. In fact, I'm. A lot of people tell me that fairly regularly. But she would not understand that interface. Does not understand that interface. So for people like my personal reaction.

[Richard Campbell]

To the context menu is I right click, I curse because I can't find anything and then go to the icons.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. I literally have now built in a right click curse into the system. Like, is this the UX intent? Like is this where you wanted to go? I swear at you constantly now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I do the same actions over and over again and I have the same bad results over and over again. Right. So the big one from the original Windows 11 was right click taskbar. Oh, there's no task manager. And then over time that was super easy. I eventually learned.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I know of other ways, right. You know, Windows key X you can see in the menu, whatever. And so I learned one of those, got used to it. And then they put it back because they're screwing with me. It's obvious that this is not 80% of windows UI development is screw with Paul. But I this summer have been working on that programming project with WPF which we'll discuss very briefly. I don't want to harp on this too too much, but because I have to switch constantly between dark and light mode to make sure it looks right in both places. Right. I actually wrote an app to just do that switch because it's like three levels deep and I'm, you know, it's like, why is this so why is that so hard? It's weird to me. Anyway, so there's a lot of. We deal with a lot as Windows users. I don't think that's too surprising. But. Yeah, but what I wanted to say was as far as things maybe they're not talking about yet or whatever. I think the biggest and best improvements in 24H2 are actually under the covers, right? Massive performance improvements for AMD based systems, especially those new Zen 5 machines. There's a new updating style which I'm sure that person talked about on your podcast and we can all hear about where cumulative updates. It's really funny, it has never occurred to me but when you hear the notion of cumulative updates, it sounds good, right? We used to have service packs and service packs were good too, but then when you go a couple years between service packs, that thing becomes humongous. And now we have these monthly cumulative updates. And so because they're cumulative, no matter if you skip three months and you install a new one, you don't have to install the previous three, you just get the one and it's really nice until they wait two years to update the DAM system and then the cumulative updates get humongous. So now they have this differential cumulative update which isn't the right name but. And you hear that and you go yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great, that's great. And I'm sure we'll find a problem on this and then 25H2 we'll fix that. Who knows. But it's this kind of never ending series.

[Richard Campbell]

But you are very much talking the consumer update process like biz side with WSUS and so forth. We approach it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah. Yep, yep, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And I mean one of the, one of the conversations we had was separating the sort of cosmetic functionality updates from the security patches where because often when I'm talking to admins they're like I need to tech support this thing. So I don't like it when the search Box moves like that costs me money and tickets. So they do spend more time evaluating that. Where now we're seeing very much when it comes to security patches. You shouldn't wait. You should just push them. The chances of them being problematic are low. Not zero, but low. But the risk.

[Paul Thurrott]

And now we're letting CrowdStrike handle that. So they're perfect. No worries there.

[Richard Campbell]

That might have come up in the conversation.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I bet. No, I like this decoupling of things, which. One big example is the decoupling of UWP functionality From specific Windows 10 versions at the time coming out with the Windows app SDK, you hear it and you say, yeah, right. I mean, it should always be like this. And just from an updating perspective, 100% what you just said. Yeah, we should. Those monthly security updates, those should just go out and then as an administrator, IT pro, whatever, you have some decision making to do. Unspecific feature changes.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Good. That's good.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's all good stuff. Exactly when. I'm sorry, I'm burning up the whole show because I have a very cool show for today. Just number one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, well, we'll talk about it again. This stuff's important. So, yeah. From a high level perspective, especially since 22, 23H2, 24H2 are functionally nearly identical or are identical in some cases. A lot of people I think are going to upgrade to this thing and be like, what's new?

[Richard Campbell]

But a lot of it's reminding me that the 22 was an OS update. 23 was a feature set.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like an Enable package.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. An enable package 24 is an OS update. I'm talking to the lady who builds it, so I'm not going to argue with her.

[Paul Thurrott]

Not equipped, I was going to say, based on how much time a brand new PC will sit there installing this thing. Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

But also I think was totally derailed by arm.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, sometimes, look, we debate this recall thing. We go back and forth on that. But whatever happened, happened. And they, they had to kind of reach into it and say, all right, we got to pull stuff out here. There's a bunch of leftover junk in the form of random registry keys that don't do anything, et cetera, et cetera. That's Windows, right? This is the mess. But I think the silver lining to that kind of thing is that Microsoft as an organization can look at this and say, look, we need to be able to do this kind of thing in a slightly more elegant fashion maybe. So perhaps we're going to see some.

[Richard Campbell]

Benefits from that feature flags by default, boys like you need it. You need to be able to shut it off and not be.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So you know, we'll all benefit in the end from that. That's good. Well, not you, not you as a Windows Home 11 home user, but most of us. Yeah. Okay, so there's that. Yeah, nothing, nothing huge going on there. I'm going to, I'm going to skip past the PC thing real quick just.

[Richard Campbell]

To talk about new hardware, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, well, because this just ties into what we were just talking about. So part of the confusion this year is that we have this Windows 11 feature update, right? Capital F, Capital U major version upgrade that has been delivered in two different milestones from a sort of mainstream perspective. The only way most people would get it back in June would be buying a Snapdragon xpc which Microsoft branded as a Copilot plus PC and added some several on device hardware accelerated NPU based AI functions, none of which were particularly compelling.

[Richard Campbell]

No, because the compelling one got pulled.

[Paul Thurrott]

The compelling one got pulled. It's surprising to me there wasn't more frankly. But yep, that's what we have. Nothing has changed since then there. We still don't have recall but now AMD Zen 5 chips are out, the Intel Lunar Lake stuff is out. Those PCs are starting to appear in the world. And one of the big questions we had all summer was like okay, but what will these things be called copilot plus PCs? Will they be just AI PCs that get copilot plus PC functionality because they meet some kind of a spec. So we got that clarity at IFA a couple weeks ago. They will be called copilot plus PCs. They are not getting those features immediately. They're going to get them in November like you said. Hilarious. So I can confirm and I knew this already, but now that I've gotten one as well. I saw this at the show. I think I told the story a couple of times. Someone at some place came over to me as I'm typing on a computer. So what you doing? You know, and. Oh, just nothing. What do you mean nothing? Me, I didn't even touch. What do you mean? Just looking to see what was going on there. So 24H2 on all those computers, none of the copilot plus PC features, those are coming later. And then I've gotten one sense. We'll talk about that in a second. But yes, you get that day one UBI update thing which you know, takes 15, 20, maybe more minutes.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Takes a while. Yeah, they give you kind of a Nice looking screen to kind of deal with while it's happening. But it's.

[Richard Campbell]

I got gigabit Ethernet and SSDs and you're still going to take 20 minutes. That's something.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but so in looking, I guess the way to kind of say this is that like we said earlier, everyone will have the ability to get 24H2 by the end of October that wants it or can get it. And then, you know, by the end of the year, I think we're all going to be on the same page. So if you have a capable PC, you'll have the Copilot plus PC stuff we should have hopefully recall in preview by that point. And I'm sure next year will be nothing like this year and will totally make sense.

[Richard Campbell]

Everything will be fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's going to be. Everything will be fine.

[Richard Campbell]

It's really going to be fine. I'll tell you, I'll put a stake in the ground here and say this workstation, this video workstation is due for a rebuild.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, well, There you go. 24H2 is the ideal time.

[Richard Campbell]

It's got some Gen 11 hardware in it. So my goal will be to build by hand, new chassis, a Copilot plus PC.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice. And do you know yet whether. Well, I guess you should wait and see how these things fall out.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm going to see what motherboard I can lay my hands on.

[Micah Sargent]

Are you doing this and are you putting it on video the whole way through? Where can people.

[Paul Thurrott]

He says suggestively like I want to.

[Micah Sargent]

I want to see every step of this.

[Richard Campbell]

I'll put the stake in this too. Then we will do it on Discord. We'll do it for the Twitter club.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, that's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

So I'll have this camera. I got the other camera pointed down.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh yes, you are speaking my language.

[Richard Campbell]

Because I'm very OCD about building machines. I've been building computers for 30 something years.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think when, when one is OCD, you just end the sentence at OCD. So you would say I am very OCD, period. And we just leave it.

[Richard Campbell]

And to be clear, I'm abusing the term rambling out. That's just. But you will watch me be very particular.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's like saying I can make fun of Polish people because I'm Polish. I can make fun of.

[Richard Campbell]

Are you?

[Paul Thurrott]

Because. No, but if I was, I could. And if. Okay, if I have ocd, I can make fun of ocd.

[Richard Campbell]

It's fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm just making fun of myself.

[Richard Campbell]

I like my machines last a long Time.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not pol. Thank God, right? No, I'm just kidding.

[Micah Sargent]

I gotta go.

[Richard Campbell]

You scared him. Must have done.

[Paul Thurrott]

But you're gonna do it. You're doing a desktop. So the choices you're gonna have are gonna be Arrow Lake on the intel side, which is the, you know, desktop, class H, whatever series chips. And then I. I can't remember the. The AMD Zen 5. It's like a. Probably an AI, I think, wanna say 9000 or something. AI 300 is the. The laptop. And then I can't remember the numbering for the desktop. But you'll have some choice there, so it'll be interesting to see where those fall.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Now that's the whole thing. Like, I have no idea when I'm going to do this. I know this machine should be rebuilt. You know, it's getting to about that point. School's going back in, so most likely I'm going to take all this old hardware and help a student who needs a machine build their own machine for those older parts. It's a great way to repurpose it. It makes me super happy. Yeah, we just replaced all the spinning, all the fans, power supply, all that stuff gets replaced. New drive in a new chassis. But the motherboard, chipset, processor, all that will stay together.

[Paul Thurrott]

I have to say, Richard, I wrote up an article, one in a series of articles. I could just title these things. Paul's AI confusion 2024. But the latest one, though, I went back to the original Microsoft announcements from May about Pilot PC just to see how the language went.

[Richard Campbell]

I told that blog post today.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, well, I thought it simpatico. Okay, interesting. So I was thinking of you when I wrote, I quoted this and I literally. I was looking forward to reading this to you now because I don't really remember this, but when they announced that Copilot PC was going to be Snapdragon X based for the first wave. Right. As they called it, they did say, in the future we will see devices based on these new AMD and Intel Silicon chips. Right. However, beyond that. This is the part that I blocked this. I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

You didn't block it out. It wasn't important.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it isn't. Well, when you hear it, you're going to say, okay, actually this is important because you've been kind of complaining about this thing yourself all year. In the future, we expect to see devices with this new AMD and Intel Silicon paired with powerful graphics cards like Nvidia GeForce RTX and AMD Radeon bringing copilot plus PC experiences to an even broader audiences, including advanced gamers and creators. Yeah, yeah. And this ties into this orchestrator thing that I've been talking about where I believe, I think that Microsoft has moved so quickly on AI that there are parts of the company that just can't keep up. And one of them is Windows, that it's Windows that should be able to handle that orchestration of where AI tasks are run. And it will dynamic. This is the hardware abstraction layer. What kind of hardware do we have? Oh, at mpu. Good. Those things work great on that. We'll use that. But if you don't have that, well, you have this honking GPU perhaps, or whatever it might be. We'll run them on that. And that maybe someday this will even extend to the hybrid AI stuff where obviously some tasks are just better done or only done in the cloud. Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I think we're gonna get there. But like I said, I read that and I said, man, this is. This is what Rich has been asking for. And interestingly, they mentioned it in the throwaway line at the bottom of a.

[Richard Campbell]

Blog post age ago. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

That no one was gonna see. And I. If I saw it, I forgot it. But there it is.

[Richard Campbell]

There it actually is. And I totally agree, like, that that's going to have to be the mix. The other part of this, as an old hardware driver guy too, is like, what's the odbc for the NPUs? Like, how. Who. What do I got to do to run these? And what if I have different chipsets? Like, they've got to make sure that abstraction makes sense. And I haven't got good answers there either. But it's. That's pretty down in the weeds for most folks.

[Paul Thurrott]

I also believe that. NET would be an excellent choice as an orchestrator for this kind of behavior.

[Richard Campbell]

This is what having a runtime does for you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So I'm kind of looking. Every time there's an announcement from that group, I look at it. Is there anything in there? Because they have their set of functionality.

[Richard Campbell]

They'Re doing nine and they've got their libraries like ML.

[Paul Thurrott]

Net.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Like, you got to tell me, ML automatically runs on an npu. Then the question is, how are you doing that? How do you invoke the hardware? You don't should run over here.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. That to me is an excellent function for the. NET runtime. I hope that that's how that works.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, if you look at it from a GPU perspective, it's been things like DirectX. Right. DirectX was a workaround for the fact that Windows didn't cope with it, although since Vista it has, which if I'm.

[Paul Thurrott]

Not mistaken, that work actually came out of DirectX. Right. So in kind of a virtual cycle type of thing. But yeah, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

It went through a few different phases.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So I'm not looking for straight lines, I'm just looking for destinations.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look, there's a whole thing going on here where Microsoft is trying to a raise its own profile because they're doing the AI stuff, they want to lower costs and. But one of the many strategies they have for that is get as much as they can off of the cloud. Unfortunately, the offerings they've put on the client so far haven't been particularly compelling. But there will be third party solutions in the form of creator apps like video editors, etc. That I think will benefit greatly. But yeah, I mean, eventually we're going to get past those kind of premium ultra thin laptops and that we don't call Ultrabooks anymore for some reason. Even though it's a great name.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

And we're going to have to start hitting these other form factors. And Christian Aman and the other guys at Qualcomm have alluded to this or even stated it explicitly, but here in that Microsoft quote, you can see the beginnings of this is the thing we've been talking about, which is AI PCs or copilot plus PCs will just be PCs and PCs broadly, not just one class of PC, but whatever types, including this Destiny.

[Richard Campbell]

This is the same push going back to the 2000s with getting GPUs, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

That everybody needs a GPU. We will emulate the GPU with a CPU, but it'll be horrible, you know, and now everybody has GPUs. Heck, they're on the mother.

[Paul Thurrott]

This was the. I mean aside from all the drama leading up to the release of Windows Vista and there were complaints about compatibility. I know. But the big thing and the drivers were catastrophe. Yep. Was this Aero basic UI that they would give you if you didn't have a graphics card, which a lot of people didn't at the time, that could handle aeroglass and eventually intel got there with their integrated graphics where it was just okay, but forced. You buy a new computer that made people upset. This is the cycle.

[Richard Campbell]

And here we are again.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, yep, same thing. So we'll get there. We'll get there. It's not going to help PC sales this year from all the indicators I've seen. But I don't know, I guess 1 2% growth is still growth.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm having this conversation with system mins right now where they're like I don't feel like I want to buy this generation of machines because I need to keep them for five years and maybe.

[Paul Thurrott]

The first gen isn't the time to buy in.

[Richard Campbell]

Not the one. Right. It's like should I stretch another year? Buy a lower end machine for this wave and then next year's wave maybe something better or write out, ride it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Out with, you know, Windows 10 extended support maybe. Or there's all, you know, there's different options I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah, no we, but reality is it's this time next year. Right. That we have to start talking about extended support. So everybody's planning right now what their orders are for next year.

[Paul Thurrott]

I hope they, I mean they have one year left if they're on 10. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But this is where you're literally this is the budget. Here's how we're allocating what we're going.

[Paul Thurrott]

To turn A lot of people believe this was going to be the year for that upgrade cycle.

[Richard Campbell]

Believe me, I'm still not convinced that that day doesn't slip again. Right. Like I'm really not.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. Yeah. I agree with you on the first gen of anything is a dicey proposition. If you bought into the first gen AI PC you would have gotten a meteor lake PC with a NPU that can only run some of Windows Studio effects and nothing else.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Said the guy with the Studio 2.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. We didn't know.

[Richard Campbell]

We didn't know. Spent a lot of money.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well this is part of the problem with how fast things have moved. I don't think Microsoft knew Microsoft made that computer. I don't think they've never been so far in the leading edge that they left people behind. They're usually on the other side of that. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, well, so face it, if I had way I bought I got the machine last October.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

If it would only be now really that I would be getting a different machine. I mean theory I could have ordered one in June but you know, that would have been a tough daily driver.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

So I'm not, I wasn't wrong that it was time to replace that machine. Like it's going to be fine but next year is going to be tricky.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Right. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. I, you know, AM or Yeah. Intel and AMD both have these slightly elevated top scores compared to Snapdragon. Snapdragon V2 is coming out and we'll see where everything goes. I don't anticipate and I pray to God we don't see, you know, next year. It's like top scores in the 60s or 70s, then goes up to 100. It's like we just, you know, can we just keep it here for a while?

[Richard Campbell]

I have heard noises that the, that the 40 number is going to stay for another couple of years. Yeah, that will be faster. But that the.

[Paul Thurrott]

But the actual spec will stay the same. That makes sense to me. I. To me, the only real question is whether there's a V2 spec or if we just move on, you know, and say, look, we don't even need this anymore. This is a PC, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, I think, I think we're a couple years from that yet that. That was the same when we were getting into GPUs.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. So it takes time to get into the pipeline to the point where every motherboard has it and then you have a better one if you need a better one. The same way every motherboard has a video card on it now, just not a great one. And if you want a great one, then you tie up a PCIe slot.

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. All right. Well, this took a long time. I mean, depending on where you were in life, you know, hardware accelerated graphics either meant, you know, quake in 1996. Maybe it meant Windows Vista a decade later. Right. Certainly by the time Windows 7 came out, that was just a common component. I mean, Windows 7 did of course have an Aero Basic mode as well. But I would say by that year, whatever, 2009, 2010, I think, that the shift had occurred. I mean, how long did the shift 32 bit to 64 bit take? Right. The first 64 bit version of Windows client probably came out in 2003, 4, something like that on XP. Yep. And then. Yep. And then Vista 7. 8, I almost said 9 and 10 were all 32 and 64. So it wasn't until Windows 11 in 2020. Right. 2021, whatever year that was, that we were only 64 bit. So there's your God, that's 20 years.

[Richard Campbell]

20 years. Yeah. Well, and you think back to you said hardware extraction layer, and I immediately thought to Alpha MIPS and PowerPC. Right. Which ended in 2000.

[Paul Thurrott]

It also ended in tears, but yeah. Yep. Yeah. I mean. Right. I mean, in the 90s were all about, well, what we now think of as alternate platforms. I guess it's possible any of them could have taken off. But yeah, that didn't happen. Okay. So I did get the first. My first review unit. It's a Zen 5 machine. So this is the HP OmniBook Ultra. So it kind of sits at the top of their consumer line for portables. It's not particularly compelling looking device. It's got pretty big bezels, it's kind of chunky, it's kind of heavy, it's gray. You know, it's not like a dragonfly type of thing that's going to call out and be like, oh, look at this thing. It's awesome looking.

[Richard Campbell]

It's like a muslin laptop. Right. You make your sample suit from.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, it's right. If you don't want to be noticed on the plane, there you go, you whip this thing up. But, but the thing is it does have this Zen 5 thing going on and a really high end chip as well. So 32 gigs of RAM, 2 terabytes of SSD storage.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's a sleeper.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. And actually I kind of respect that. Right. That's my kind of thing. So broad strokes, it's really good. I only got it, I guess technically yesterday. Right. So I don't have a lot of data and it's not fair for me to say this, but I'm going to. I woke up this morning and I opened a lid and it did not turn on, you know, so for example, it looks like the battery life is going to be very good. I don't know, I can't.

[Richard Campbell]

What's up with the corner cut though?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, so this is something that dates back to the Spectre X360s. Right. Which will be renamed. So the Next Gen Spectre X360 will be the machine under this. And so like an Omnibook X flip, I think it's the nomenclature now instead of x360. But the theory at the time was they had gone to a really sharp edged kind of design style which look good but could also be a little tough on the, you know, the wrists and stuff. And then someone at HP had the idea, you know, we've got these sharp corners in the back, why don't we chop them off? We could put a USB port there. Right, right. So there was a gen or two where the other side had had the power button and that side had one of the USB C ports. And that way it kind of slightly obviates one of the complaints when you have all the USB on one side, which is if you're right handed, that's where all the cables are coming off. So you're charging it and now you can't, you know, it's in the way so it gets it out of the way by angling it out the back. So I like that. But goofily, the other side, the one you can't kind of see right there, there's nothing there. It's, it's just an angle. It's like an angled, just chopped off the corner there. So I kind of wish that they had put a, something there like the power button there.

[Richard Campbell]

So when you go to reach for your USB key and grab it the wrong way, you sleep the machine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly. Right, right. So anyway, it's okay. But yeah, the performance on this thing is fantastic. And I am also concurrently looking at a. It's a meteor lake U series, which is garbage. And I did the same thing two mornings in a row but on the two different computers. I think the first one is still working on it and the AMD one was like bing, bing, bing, done. And it's like this big visual studio thing and it was like really nice. I've loaded up a bunch of games. Those all run fantastically. And so this is another, you know, this is an advance over that little laptop we talked about probably last month. As far as the graphical quality of it or performance, it's really good. So yeah, this is the double edged sword of the PC industry. We get all this choice and you can kind of optimize for what's most important to you. Based on Ryan Trout and others I talked to at IFA or ifa, whatever it's called, ifa, intel and AMD aren't going to have quite the efficiency battery life of Snapdragon. But they're going to be in the ballpark. But they are going to have the performance and they're going to have the compatibility, of course, the 100% compatibility.

[Richard Campbell]

So I'll leak another word from Aria, which she says she's running on a Snapdragon machine. He says, I went to work for a full eight hour day without my power bar, without my power supply and in teams almost the whole day.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And the battery made it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And that stuff's good because a lot of teams will run off the mpu. I bet for the video stuff at.

[Richard Campbell]

Least a lot of teams just runs in electron and sucks down the power. Nobody's noobs.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's true. It's better than it was still.

[Richard Campbell]

But you talk about meaningful thresholds. A meaningful threshold is I worked a day without my power brick.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah, that's a meaningful threshold.

[Paul Thurrott]

I agree 100%. Yep. Yeah, the, you know, it's still, you know, not quite MacBook Air territory. But in the ballpark, as I say now. Yeah, it's there. You know, we'll see with this one. I, I think it's going to be. It looks, I mean it's been a day. Right. Again, I can't really say. Does have Windows hello ess. This is the more advanced form of Windows hello required for recall. But also this emerging spec that sort of like TPM chips back when Longhorn and then Vista was happening were sort of, you know, unusual and they were that another thing that took a while to come in. But now all PCs have these things. We have secure boot, et cetera. Yeah. Something I think that's just going to transform the security landscape for the PC.

[Richard Campbell]

Well and I think it's one of the strengths of Windows arm. Like if I again in my MIN role talking to these guys is like, hey, you know how we have a wrestling match about TPM and all that? You know, you don't have a wrestling match on Pluton. You don't have a choice. They only come one way.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Although I don't know enough about this to speak intelligently to it. But intel, if you watch that presentation I referenced a bunch last time, talked about how they also put their own thing on there. So it's Pluton and Intel something something. And it's like guys, seriously. But I God love them. They're trying. I don't know. Yeah. But yeah, this is, you know, Microsoft's like, look, we're going to push this thing through. It got some pickup before this but now with Copilot PC it's a requirement and it's part of that broader Windows hello ess. The underlying security compliance stuff that I think is so important. So good. Anyway, so I'll check in again. We're going to Mexico in about two weeks with a stop in Dallas on the way. But this will be one of the computers I bring with me and we'll see. I have high hopes, but realistic expectations, I guess. We haven't actually talked about this one in a while but 2024 especially, but I would say even since the release of 23H2. So maybe from September last year on. So for one year now has possibly been the biggest year ever or biggest 12 month span ever for Microsoft deprecating features in Windows. And it's actually been a few months that we've seen anything major. It's certainly been a few months since I've written about it, but they just announced the other day a kind of a sweeping set of legacy DRM services which all date back to server. Serverlight, Windows 7.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

The classic Windows Media Player. Probably those Play for sure type services we would have had back in that era are all being deprecated then.

[Richard Campbell]

2009, 2010. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Some of this, I'm sure, is even earlier than that. Really. But yeah, I mean, so some of the stuff that's a little more well known, I guess, that's been deprecated, like the steps recorder, WordPad is one people often point to. But there's been some underlying stuff too. NTLM Direct Access, which dates back to Windows Server 2003 Part 2, or whatever that was called. Yeah, I think stuff like that has also been deprecated in the past year. And I like to see Microsoft be a little more aggressive on this stuff. This is something they've not always done particularly well. So that's nice to see. And then I just didn't know where to stick this, so to speak. Also the name of my. No, and I clicked. I guess I clicked on the wrong link there too, but I have the Wrong link. But Android 15 has been finalized. Google does quarterly feature drops on Pixel, so you'll see that, like I do. And then they release interim Android capabilities as well, on whatever basis. Right. And one of those is going to be this windowing capability in Android 15 post launch. So if you have a tablet, you'll be able to do what you can do now on Chrome os, which is determine whether an app is run full screen or windowed, and if it's windowed, whether it's snap side by side or if you can stretch it out and arbitrarily resize them. Android's a little bit the Wild west when it comes to that kind of capability, unfortunately. But because of folding devices, because of tablets, especially Pixel tablets, actually, Google's been trying to push this for the past few years and it's getting better. So it's not perfect, but they're starting to do more of that. So that's kind of interesting. This is kind of a. Because we have these capabilities in Windows that we probably think too much about. But you know, Mac, the latest version of macOS, just added a snap like capability. Chrome OS literally just added a snap like capability. Android is getting this windowing and basic side by side, not real snap, but basic side by side capability. That took a long time. I mean, this stuff has been in Windows since. I mean, some of it's Windows 8, even Windows 7, I think. And the good stuff didn't happen until probably Windows 11. We have snap groups and Snap layouts and all that stuff now. So it's still more sophisticated, but these competing platforms are starting to wake up, I guess, and get there. So that's happening.

[Richard Campbell]

It's cool, though. That's a good thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I think so. All right, that's it for Windows. Micah, where are we? Oh, my phone is.

[Micah Sargent]

It is time for us to take a quick break. My little shortcut buttons weren't working. I'm sitting. Mmm. And it was just typing M into the chat room. So I'm here now, and I want to tell you about BetterHelp, who are bringing you this episode of Windows Weekly. We were just talking about therapy. Let me ask you a question. What's something that you would love to learn? Is it gardening, maybe? Or a new language? Or maybe how to finally beat your best friend in bowling? Certainly for me, that's one of them. It seems like every time I roll that ball, it's just a random thing each time. Sometimes I do very well, sometimes I don't. Anyway, as an adult, the question is if you make time to learn new things as often as you'd like, or was that something that you lost in childhood? Kids are always learning and growing. They're like sponges. But as adults, sometimes we lose that. Curiosity Therapy can help you reconnect with that sense of wonder, because your back to school era can come at any age. I have in the past made use of online therapy. I've talked about that plenty on this show. That that is my means of getting therapy. And it's always been a very helpful thing. You know, going in person can sometimes mean getting stuck with a person who doesn't quite line up with what you're looking for. And being able to easily move on to a new provider that is better for you is. It's very freeing. And it makes the experience better because you are matched with someone who, as the kids say, matches your vibe. And I think that's one of the great benefits of something like BetterHelp. If you're thinking of starting therapy, why not give BetterHelp a try? It's entirely online. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. That's another big thing. You may have a 9 to 5 or an 8 to 8. Who knows? And so finding some time to actually meet with a therapist that's on your schedule is great, too. You fill out a brief questionnaire that'll get you matched with a licensed therapist, and you can switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Rediscover your curiosity with BetterHelp visit betterhelp.com windows today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H E L p.com all righty, we are back from the break and that means it is time to talk about Microsoft 365.

[Paul Thurrott]

We make New Year's resolutions. I have made an episode resolution that I'm going to correctly unmute myself every time we come out of the ad.

[Micah Sargent]

So so far so good.

[Paul Thurrott]

One for one, that's all I'm saying.

[Micah Sargent]

I'm very proud of you. You're sticking to those resolutions.

[Richard Campbell]

Pretty sure you were unmuted while you were pouring the water.

[Paul Thurrott]

God damn it. Well, I have to say, what's it going to happen? Hold on, hold on. I unmuted it early, realized I had done that, and then remuted and re unmuted. So.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, yeah, apologies. I can't. The stuff that happens during the ad, that was not part of the resolution.

[Micah Sargent]

That's fair. That wasn't your territory. That was on me.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look, I can only control so much here. Sorry. Richard, I'm hoping you know more about this than I do because I spent yesterday in a, well, I guess state of confusion is kind of my new thing. But Microsoft announced what they had referred to previously and I think maybe during the event as well, or virtual event as the wave two of Copilot innovation. Right before they went out with this, Slack showed up and said, hey, look.

[Richard Campbell]

At me, look at me.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, we have stuff too. And Slack, right? So Slack. Slack already has some basic AI capabilities. Slack has an app model similar to Microsoft Teams, probably not as sophisticated. I don't know or care, frankly. But there's something in there and I don't. Half an hour, I think, before the Microsoft thing went live.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're like, hey, we're going to have this new thing we're integrating with third parties. So it kind of sits somewhere between like a true Slack based app and then a first party AI service. But we're working with companies like Adobe and others to create what we're calling a term Microsoft had used for years and years until they came up with Copilot agents. Right, AI agents that will act on your behalf. And these things can work off of your company's data, they can work internally, et cetera, et cetera. You're like, okay, nice. And then Microsoft 30 minutes came out and said, hey, remember we used to call those things custom or. Yeah, custom GPTs or custom CO pilots. Yeah, we're going to call them agents again. Just kidding. So they're all agents. And honestly, in the same way that co pilot terms. Yeah, it's a pretty good term. It's, it's one. If you're in the Microsoft space agent bot. I guess these are, you know, kind of go back and forth a little bit, but it's, it feels familiar. I guess the two things that struck me about these announcements, these were, these were all for the business end. Right. So it's not really my purview per se, but a lot of this is going to come to Copilot Pro on the consumer side, et cetera, et cetera. Although they did strip away that custom GPT capability, remember that used to be there earlier this year. So lots of stuff. This is the ongoing theme with Microsoft and AI. It's like lots of stuff, but it also seems slightly less dramatic by which I mean you kind of go through the list of what they did and you're like, yeah, okay, like it, you know, like this just, you know, it's almost like they got the message from Apple and they were like, you know, maybe we need to be a little more pragmatic here, you know, so what do you.

[Richard Campbell]

I do? Coincidentally, last week I was running my Next Gen AI conference. So I had Eric Boyd, who's the CPP in charge of AI experience for Microsoft, as a keynote and he dug directly into that. In fact, he brought one of his senior engineers along and they were demonstrating some of these more advanced, what they called agenic systems.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm sorry, did you say hygienic?

[Richard Campbell]

Agenic.

[Paul Thurrott]

Agenic agents. Not eugenic.

[Richard Campbell]

No, not eugenic, which is a little tireless, but they use the term agency system.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean the funny thing is everybody I've talked to who's trying to get a GPT to deploy is effectively building this themselves because they're, because they're constantly struggling with quality prompts and quality responses. They are building a test harness around that so that they now evaluate the response to it again. And when I, when they walk through this whole experience, what they call maker checker patterns. Yeah, so what, what's happened with the shift in the tooling now is to sort of describe the policies of the company like, hey, we make equipment for warfare. So we're going to use these terms you would normally squash or that kind of stuff along with the idea of stimuli being not just a handwritten or typed in prompt, but might be an incoming email or some other event in the system kicking off one of these agentic systems that then does a generation cycle, checks it modifies it and iterates X many times the threshold.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, common app model really. I mean just applied to.

[Richard Campbell]

Not that weird at all. Except that it's. You're. What you're doing is you're coping with this non deterministic behavior of these machine learning models. Like I've done a bunch of shows on the right hand side, we're just talking with the old school machine learning folks who says you test, you test, you test, you test and then you deploy. Right. But it's this point of, we test to the point of consistency of reliability. We don't worry about testing once it's in the field. And this approach seems to admit that as long as you're using the software, it's self testing. Like it's, it's constantly reevaluating itself and running again so that it can tolerate ongoing change. So the keynote was an hour long like. But a lot of that was the preamble of here's how we, we positioned ourself and so forth. But really that last 10 minutes, which was all about the tuning of the prompts and managing jailbreaking and applying company policy so that now you can use this automated iterative method which, and I gotta think the person that was in the audience that's way down this path building their own just went, I wasted so much time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, this is the AI, is the grenade in the room. Because, because before, I don't know, February 2023, I guess that is how Microsoft used to talk about these things. It was ML, it was bots, it was, you know, and you would sit through keynotes at whatever event and say, yeah, okay. I mean, yeah, okay. And it wasn't particularly exciting, but they, you know, they, they came out really strong. Too strong maybe in some ways.

[Richard Campbell]

So no, and it speaks to the tooling. It's been significant. They've literally rethought the architecture. And so, so tooling has been rethought too. Product names have changed again.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know.

[Richard Campbell]

And so yeah, I was worried they.

[Paul Thurrott]

Were going to change the name of Copilot. Although I guess technically Microsoft 365 copilot, they've gone back to that original name, right?

[Richard Campbell]

It was a copilot for M365.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's just as silly. But it's funny though, if you look at the individual like just the Office apps, aside from Agent Builder, a way to create these experiences, right, which, whatever kind of a dev type capability. If you look at what they were adding to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, the classic whatever teams, Outlook Et cetera. You might be forgiven for wondering, was this already there? How is this new? All of them have these abilities to summarize everything. If you have meetings or emails. Yep, we're going to summarize that stuff. Copilot for Excel is generally available. If you go back to the beginning of copilot for Microsoft 365, which I guess technically was about a year, almost a year ago. Right. Seems like a million years ago. That was the one that wasn't kind of in stable yet, but now it is. And then, yeah, just across the main apps. The one that has always been the most compelling to me, the one that has always spoken to what I think of as like the personal Microsoft graph for individuals is the copilot in OneDrive. Right, right. The ability to have this thing assume it's going to take while like indexing a drive or something, examine the content in your OneDrive and then use that as the grounding for future prompts about whatever topic. Right. Because in my case, I have decades and decades of work archives in there. Everything I've written, books, you know, I often struggle to find my own content. Right. Whether it's on the web or in my own archives. And to me it would be really neat to. This is one I can't wait to see. So this is now available, but in the business end. So I got to figure this one out. But it does exactly what you want. Natural language prompt, summarize, find files. Yes, thank you. That's the one I'm excited about. But. But I don't know, the stuff that helps you write, the stuff that helps you make a PowerPoint presentation. I get it and I appreciate it. I think those kind of helper things are probably how this stuff is really going to be defined. But I'm looking for something a little more profound.

[Richard Campbell]

I'll give him this. He brought an engineer who coded on the fly. In fact, that was a theme across the keynotes. Well, what's the complaint with these AI technologies? All of this is smoke and mirrors. It isn't real.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

And so I think they're listening enough to go, no, we're. We're going to show you how we do it and what we're doing.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's something they lost at their developer show up through build, probably 22,005, I think, live coding demos on stage, you know, they became.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, because you can crash and burn too, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, I know, but that shows a certain confidence I love and that that audience loves.

[Richard Campbell]

And.

[Paul Thurrott]

And after that there was still Live parts to it. But they were really just copy and pasting like Plexod. And it was like, guys, come on.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know if you've ever been in backstage of a build or an ignite or tech. Ever since the famous Bill Gates blue screen, they've always had a mirror. So there's another person doing the same demo at the same time that can be cut over to instantly. And I've been there when they cut over like where the demo was imploding flip. And it was so quick. Unless you were watching for it, you wouldn't even know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's what makes those frickin keynotes so expensive. Like literally you're duplicating everything, duplicating all the staff. And then they're that heavily scripted, which is the opposite of real. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, yep.

[Richard Campbell]

But I also very conscious. I mean not my keynotes, but when you think about building night keynote, those things are for shareholders, they're not for customers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right. Well, yeah, right. New cycle driving, interest driving investors. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I think purely that's why they seem so bizarre because they're for shareholders.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is the big complaint about Apple. Like on their opening developer show they'll have like this consumer keynote and everyone's like, what are you doing? This is a developer show. And it's like, you know, who doesn't care about developers, Guys, investors. So you know, no offense, we'll have your developer keynote tomorrow or later today, whatever it is. But you know, we got to do the dog and pony.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's the thing is I like a day two keynote where you can, you know, have somebody doing a little code, admittedly with plenty of guardrails and in sessions I think you should fly without. It's fun. And heck, I hovering from failure is ten times more interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, I live for those moments. I once forgot to turn off my phone. My phone rang, I looked at it and I said, I'm sorry, I got to take this note. Like, you know, obviously I'm in the middle of giving a talk.

[Richard Campbell]

I was like two, two builds ago handsome and had a handheld mic for some reason and he was trying, and he was trying to type with one hand and Scott Guthrie walked out on stage, just took the mic from and held him and then looked at him and said, I'm trying to, I'm trying to provide value here.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love it.

[Richard Campbell]

And wreck the room. Like it's, it's what everybody remembers from that keynote now is that moment where, you know, the boss of all things shows up to hold the mic.

[Paul Thurrott]

Plus the fact that I just upstaged you is like, you know, frosting on the cake here. Hello.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, brilliant.

[Paul Thurrott]

Awesome. What people will remember from your talk was right. So that's in the Microsoft space. That's a win.

[Richard Campbell]

Especially when you're talking about a Scott Hanselman who's like everybody's favorite keynote or these days.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, just interesting because he's a character that certainly is. Speaking of him real quick, he has a podcast, Hansel Minutes and he has an interview with a guy from Qualcomm about the ARM hardware and all that stuff. It's not very long. It's probably less than 30 minutes. Totally worth listening to. I kind of cherry pick his shows, but that's a good one. Recommend that. Okay, so yeah, so there's we're not giving this Microsoft 365 call pilot stuff enough space frankly, but there's almost too much going on there and I'll probably spend a lot more time on it when we see what if any of this comes down to consumers, it's worth looking into. There's a ton of it. But on the flip side of this world, Microsoft also makes what they, I think they still refer to as the perpetual licensed versions of Office. And the latest version is now available for businesses long term servicing channel LTSC 2024. You know, if you're kind of a Luddite or you have a specific need, you know, a computer that can't be connected to the Internet or needs to be on a PC that's unchanged for several years, whatever it might be, they don't want customers using this, but they see the demand, so they make these things. So every three, four years, whatever it is, they come up with a new version, I think 2016, 2019 and now 2024. So that's been the kind of cadence there. If you follow along with Microsoft 365 and all the new features, all the new features are going to be like blasts from the past. Like the new default theme that we've been using for three, five years, whatever is one of the major new features in this thing. You know, some accessibility tools you can like comments and replies in documents that you're collaborating on with others. Dynamic array support and charge for Excel. It's like Excel now supports floating point math. You know, it's like it's, it's stuff from the past. But that's the point, right? You've got this thing that's kind of fixed in time. It's not going to change. It comes with very Little in the way of new and many things that are not included, like, you know, the storage, the copilot compatibility, can't use that with that, etc. But oh, and multi PC licensing is not available. Right. So you put it on APC or a Mac if you get that version, and that's where it stays. Right. They're purposefully limiting it. There will be versions for consumers in the coming weeks, so those aren't available yet, but if you are a commercial customer, you can get that now.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

I somehow don't have a link on this next article, but let me see if it's still in the cache here. There it is. So Microsoft last month, I think it was, was talking about how they. We're going to have a security summit with CrowdStrike and others in the industry with the goal of Resin is running it.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that. I don't know. That's interesting. Yeah. They want the industry to kind of agree on how we're going to move forward and not put everything in kernel mode.

[Richard Campbell]

Start using the APIs they provided you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

So I just love that staged photo.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Here's the thing.

[Micah Sargent]

Hilarious.

[Paul Thurrott]

First of all, I was told there was not a tarp in the room. So if you stepped in and you were like the guy from CrowdStrike, you didn't have anything to worry about there.

[Richard Campbell]

That's important.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's important. It's good just for being certain you're going to be okay. But Microsoft put on a positive face to this. If you read this carefully, you'll see two things. One is that they didn't really agree on anything other than changes need to be made. If you read the quotes from some of the people from the companies who were there, some of them are almost negative. Right. So the E SET quote is the most interesting to me because that company, that quote is not actually attributed to a human being. It's just an E SET quote. The other ones all have a person attached to them, but it says, you know, we support modifications to Windows to demonstrate measurable improvements to stability on the conditions that any change must not weaken security, affect performance or limit the choice of cybersecurity solutions. What that means is we don't want Microsoft to do what they usually do and just give itself capabilities that we can't have. No.

[Richard Campbell]

Which I think is very fair. Right. It's like.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's fair.

[Richard Campbell]

Follow your own rules.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, so. But it goes on. So I'm sorry, sorry to interrupt, but it remains imperative that kernel access remains an option for use by cybersecurity products to allow. I know, that's the problem. So David Westin, who I don't recall. I don't think I've met him personally, but I like the guy in kind of a remote way. He seems like a plain talker to me. Maybe I'm projecting there, but I always like to see his name on anything and I like to see him speak as well. But he, you know, thank you for meaningful, you know, positive discussions, blah, blah, blah. But. But even he sort of talked about, look, we have these plans, we have ideas. I think Microsoft would and the industry maybe and vaguely would like to move past this type of issue, but it may be just the way Windows is architected, it may not be.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

We'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the whole problem is here, as long as you have that option.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

This is something that Linux pushed really hard on. It's like the only thing in the kernel is kernel code, kids. That's all there is. Yep. And Microsoft would have to be adherent to that.

[Paul Thurrott]

But. Well, listen, here's the problem. This came up randomly, but it was as Fargo as I believe. It was NT four Point. In fact, it was. It was NT four point zero. They sort of compromised on that position that long ago. It was 30 years ago because NT was big and heavy and slow compared to mainstream windows on x86 hardware. So they were looking at ways to speed it up and one of the best ways they could find was to put the graphics subsystem in the kernel, in the kernel.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And that's one of the things that bit us in Vista.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So, you know, we've been kind of threading that needle ever since Windows was Windows, I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

And the debate every time is, well, the machines are more performant. We don't need that. We can afford the performance hit now because we're that fast. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Quite.

[Richard Campbell]

Shock reliability. I would. And in the midst of the crowdstrike thing, this all seemed very doable, but now, what, a month or so on, people are past it. Right. You know, folks in the discord are commenting on that text saying this sounds like gobbledy doo, because it is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

They made the happy noises. They need to have to say, you know, we think security is really important. I think there's no intent to change anything. Not a chance.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. I have to wrestle with my inner cynical being, but yeah, I 100% agree with that.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not like Microsoft doesn't have security initiatives going. SFI is going full swing and it seems to primarily Be impacting the folks that build demo apps throughout. In the world. Right. Where they need to get secure identities. Right. And all of that sort of thing. So it's not like there aren't security initiatives going on. But this pushing stuff out of the kernel mode, it's not the priority. It should be done, but there's not a crowdstrike every week.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're going to think I'm joking when I say this, but it's possible. It sounds naive even as it comes out of my brain that AI could help solve this problem in a sense. I mean, I think one of the biggest pushes for kernel mode is just this ability to act as quickly as possible.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

By analyzing signals and, you know, going after it. It seems like AI maybe is good at that. And I think maybe. Maybe something. Something. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know. I mean, we don't look at these new large language models as performant technology.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's true.

[Richard Campbell]

And certainly not stuff I want to. Not stuff I want to run in my kernel.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, if you had an MPU and your server could go wrong. I know, I'm sorry. I know. Even, like I said, even as it was forming as ideas in my brain, I was fighting it.

[Richard Campbell]

Arguably the best way to secure Windows might be to abandon the Windows kernel and make Windows a shell over Linux.

[Paul Thurrott]

You, sir, are a heretic. And I will see that you're burned at the stake for that. Yeah, I mean, that's come up a lot too. Right. Over the years.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm not saying anything original here. That's an approach. It would also address the issues with networking. Like there's a bunch of solves here and for the most part it doesn't matter anymore. Coding makes, coding wise, you know, we deployed a Linux on the cloud for a reason. It saves 20 to 30%.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like there's no two ways about it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, yep, yep, yep. And to your point earlier about just processes, computers being so fast now that it kind of obviates a lot of the old complaints. I always think back to the complaints about managed environments like Java or. Net. And, and you know, the early 2000s, one of the big complaints there was the same thing. It was just like, look, you're sucking up cycles here with this runtime. But today, so whatever run time, whatever it is that, you know, dude, we tolerate electron. There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

Because tolerated compatibility of it.

[Paul Thurrott]

You don't rely on it.

[Richard Campbell]

It's everywhere and it's a beast.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

But you know, because in the end, what's More important is reliability and consistency. I'll go slower to work more reliably.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, and the slower that we're talking about is not even perceivably slower is the point. I mean. Yeah, you know, so that's a, that's a, that's a showstopper right there.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, so we'll see. We'll see. I've lost my alternate thought. Richard, thank you. So what are we doing here? Oh, yeah, so just Apple. We talked about Apple last week. That stuff's happened. The iPhones are coming out this week. It was very interesting to me to watch the coverage of this stuff. Mainstream press, Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, whatever, tech press, et cetera. And once again, mark, the difference between this kind of spectrum of ways in which AI is being pushed out into the world. You've got Google and Microsoft at one end, just like whatever. And you've got Apple like this scientist in a lab coat, you know, just kind of like slowly measure, you know, metering it out and we'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm still surprised they announced it. I think they had to. They were forced into it. They are now finding out what they committed to is way harder than they think.

[Paul Thurrott]

I. There's no version of this story where Apple doesn't have a September event for iPhone. You know, like, could you imagine the ramifications of that?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's huge.

[Paul Thurrott]

So yeah, this thing will sink or swim I guess based on the quality of what they're doing. But it's notable to me that they shipped five or six, whatever major platform OS releases. They're shipping new hardware not across the whole board, but new iPhones obviously some other things, but Apple watch I guess, but it's big. And then also just the complexity of what they're doing. If you're in the beta program, public or private, but you can test 18.1, 18.2, like you have a choice of things. You can be in different spaces. And they're also supporting an iOS like iOS 17 point whatever, if you just want to get security updates. And so Apple has found themselves in a place that will be very familiar to your typical Microsoft IT admin. It's kind of interesting, right? They've turned into like this complex kind of provider of platforms. So there you go. Anyway, that's happening.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm waiting for a knock on the door from Dave Cutler for my whole Linux as the kernel thing. Like a very angry 80 year old man's going to come any moment now.

[Paul Thurrott]

A very excited 80 year old is going to say well, I'm glad you mentioned this. This is actually what I've been working on for the past four years.

[Richard Campbell]

You never know that guy's still working. It's his stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. And his whole aim in life was to destroy unix, right? Linux didn't exist at the time. Or maybe it just started happening, but. Well, certainly no, when he started nt, it didn't exist. So, you know, his goal was we are going to kill unix. It's hard to say Unix, like Linux just comes out of the mouth. But yeah, I don't know how. I don't know if he's softened at all. It doesn't appear to have much. If you've seen any of his recent.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, he said some videos and things. He's definitely still Dave Cutler. Yeah, but he's 22 and he still goes to the office.

[Paul Thurrott]

He could still kick the crap out of me, that guy. He's amazing. Yeah. Nothing but respect. And then I just wanted to throw this out here. Not because I want to talk about my stupid app anymore, but because RC1 pushed. RC1 pushed and I, you know, I look for. I can feel it coming, you know, like, I know when the mile, like in my brain, not logically but just I can feel it. It's been a few weeks, I'm like, I'm. We're right in the verge of the next milestone and ever since preview four, you know, obviously five, six, seven, and then now I think RC1 and every time I look and I'm like, oh come on, it's gotta be something. It's gonna be something, gotta be something. And there was nothing. So it is now very clear to me that whatever lame capabilities I got back in May are it.

[Richard Campbell]

And what you have to question is what got pushed back, right? What didn't make it? Because they all, they, they know they're going every year so they take bigger bites than they can ever hope to deliver. And then there's a pruning, you know, in the sort of August timeframe to what they can actually deliver in November. So you're, you're right, what you see is what you get in RC1.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Barring a catastrophe.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

This is it, Right. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And if there is a catastrophe, it's going to be less.

[Richard Campbell]

It's less so not the other way around.

[Paul Thurrott]

What we got as a like a WPF developer is better than zero by a wide margin. But my God, it's so incomplete. It almost makes it more frustrating. It almost would have been better if they did nothing, you know, rather than raise our hopes. So anyway, I've been racing to document what I've done so far. I'm not going to talk about in.

[Richard Campbell]

Great detail, but progress has been made, man.

[Paul Thurrott]

Progress has been made. That's true.

[Richard Campbell]

Really. That commit was only earlier this year. Like I know the.net 10 cycle will be the first very WPF centric cycle.

[Paul Thurrott]

You better be right in the Maui. I spent so much time on this this summer. I don't want to think about it, but it's just horrible.

[Richard Campbell]

I think that's on you, man.

[Paul Thurrott]

I really do. Yeah, I think so too. We were doing. We'd had an ad for some kind of a therapy thing earlier, I believe. Maybe I should look into that. I certainly need it. I think anyone who develops software probably needs some form of therapy. It's hard work.

[Micah Sargent]

Well, we are going to take a break. Not for therapy, but for another.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like a therapy moment.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, you take your therapy break. I'll tell you about the next sponsor. It's Thinkst Canary, bringing you this episode of Windows Weekly. Thinkst Canaries are honeypots. These little devices that can be deployed in minutes. If someone is accessing your lure files or brute forcing your fake internal SSH server, your Thinkst Canary will immediately tell you that you have a problem. And you don't have to worry about a bunch of false alerts. Just choose a profile for your thanks to Canary device and register it with the hosted console for monitoring and notifications. And then you sit back and you wait. Attackers who have breached your network, malicious insiders and other adversaries make themselves known by accessing the Thanksgiving Canary visit, Canary Tools Twit. And for just $7,500 per year, you will get five thanks to Canaries, your own hosted console, upgrades, support and maintenance. And if you use the code Twit Twit in the how did you hear about us? Box, you'll also get 10% off the price for life. You can always return your thinks to Canaries with their two month money back guarantee for a full refund. And it's worth pointing out, during all the years Twit has partnered with thanks to Canary, the refund guarantee has never been claimed. Visit Canary Tools, Slash Twit and enter the code Twit Twit in the how did you hear about us? Box that is Thinkst Canary. And we thank them for sponsoring this week's episode of Windows Weekly. All right, back to the show and we're getting into the hardware.

[Richard Campbell]

Yay.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just have one thing to Say suck it, haters. I did it again. I unmuted myself.

[Micah Sargent]

He's here.

[Richard Campbell]

We can hear water port or anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

I am almost a fully functioning adult.

[Micah Sargent]

Yay.

[Paul Thurrott]

I could pass for a human being sometimes.

[Richard Campbell]

Maybe next up you'll get your lower third and squared away. It'll be exciting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually. The one thing I really got to do is figure out this link problem. I have a notion where I click on these links and it's like some other story. This happens way too much.

[Richard Campbell]

But the first part's always fine. It's later on. I think you're getting tired or something.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think. I know this sounds bizarre, but I don't think it's me. I think there's literally a right click bug in Windows. We talked about this a little bit, right?

[Richard Campbell]

It's possible.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know anywho. Okay. So intel probably, you've heard the news, they're not doing so great, but they've had some good news this weekend. Some bad news too, but mostly good news. And that's a nice change. The good news was Pat Gelsinger met with his board of directors. And my belief is that intel we'll almost certainly have to spin off this Foundry business. And this gets us into an interesting area where the thing that used to be intel is now these two different things. And if it's successful, the Foundry business is obviously the bigger opportunity, which I think is why they don't want to get rid of it. What they've done is building off of the efforts they made several months ago to financially report the Foundry business as if it were a separate company. They separated it out on their quarterly report reports. They're actually going to formally make it a subsidiary, so its own company. Now, the leadership at the Foundry business is not changing and they do report directly to Pat Gelsinger, of course. But I think the separation of church and state is designed to do a couple things. It allows them to pursue their own funding separate from intel, but it also may be reassured some potential customers that the Foundry is not going to share technical details of chip designs with the parent company kind of thing. I think that might be a little bit of an issue.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. The problem for me is this is what AMD did like 15 years ago with Global Foundries, and it was a catastrophe.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, that's got to be weighing on Gelsinger's mind.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Oh, yeah. No, look, broad strokes and just speaking vaguely from a high level, this plan for intel to kind of reestablish itself as a Chip maker and then sign on to build chips for other companies. That does make sense. I mean, we do need alternatives from a national security perspective. We've talked about this. We need some in the United States. Right. That are US Businesses. So yeah, I don't know. We'll see. I mean, there's been mixed signals on how far along the company is with its next gen, what they call the 18Amanufacturing process. Originally intel was going to do some of their Lunar Lake on that process and some third party through tsmc. They're doing all of it on tsmc and then they were going to do all of Arrow Lake on their own. But now they're doing that, they're starting on tsmc. Right. So that's not great.

[Richard Campbell]

And to me there's two basic metrics here. It says does the foundry business get other customers? Which sounds like that's what's happening. And does intel start producing chips with a different foundry?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, so they've already. So that was. This would have been probably late last year. Gelsinger said, look, while we're building out this capacity to stay on the leading edge or to maybe get back on the leading edge, our own chip designs will be built by other companies. Like we're going to have to do that sometimes times. Right. So they are. They're doing that. Right. So if you get a Lunar Lake PC, that thing was built in Taiwan.

[Richard Campbell]

Or the chip was.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Or, or. Well, I should say part of it was because actually they build the chip there, they then they send it to intel and intel actually puts some of the stuff on top of it, if you will. So there's actually some manufacturing that occurs at Intel. Like they put it in a box. No, there's a little bit more to it than that. But so you know, that's. Look, that's always been the kind of tough pill to swallow. The problem is though, as time goes by and they're not reaching that capacity where they want to be, things look bad.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and then you throw in the chip sack, which then looks like a bailout for intel rather than what it was intended to be, which was to repatriate certain technologies.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So the total. These numbers are kind of tough and these are off the top of my head. But the total investment that intel is putting into building out their chip fab capabilities is quoted as being about $100 billion. A chunk of that will come from the US government in the form of loans and subsidies. Right. We've known about, I want to say roughly 10 or 11 billion so far, part of the good news this past week has been a further. I think it was 3 billion, up to 3 billion in direct funding from the Chips Act. Right, right. For creating these leading edge kind of semiconductor fabricators in the United States and Ohio specifically. So, you know, it's a big bet. Right. And the good news, the other piece of the good news is so we've got the government putting in more. We've got AWS who is already partnering with intel on various chips, including Special design Intel Xeon processes for their data centers. Right. They've chosen intel to build what they're calling their AI fabric chips on this Intel 18Amanufacturing process. Right. So that's, I mean, look, a big American company betting on another big American company. Big American company at a time when the US government is looking at these big American companies both negatively and positively. Maybe there's some PR to that too. But it's good, it's all good. So there's that and that's fine. And then the other, the bad news was sort of an asterisk because this is just based on a report from Reuters, which I would just remind you is not Bob's We Leak Stuff.com, it's Reuters. Like they're actual reporters and journalists. Right. Multiple sources, you know, et cetera. But apparently intel went after PlayStation's Sony's business for the PlayStation 6. Right. So AMD has been making the chips for, I know, the PlayStation 5, I want to say also the previous gen console. I'm not sure how far it goes back. I think AMD also makes the Xbox chipset. Right. So the chips that are in the Series X and S, I believe are also amd. Good for them. Right. For going after this.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

They ended up, yeah, they ended up not getting the contract and. And there's been a lot of pushback from people on this. And it's interesting to me how people kind of argue about this like as if this story was somehow like fake or you know, whatever. And to me the big deal is they went for it. I think that's important because from a business perspective, it's right for business or for intel to try to get that business right. From Sony's perspective, it's right for them to kind of look at the competition. You never know, it could come in more technical prowess, lower cost, etc. We don't actually know external to Sony how happy they are with amd. For all we know, they have a terrible relationship. Maybe they're not happy with the chips they've made. So Far or the chips they anticipate making for the next version. Right. So I think it was smart for all these companies to kind of at least look at this. According to Reuters, the problem was not technical. It was just about money. So apparently just a price cheaper.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fair enough. I mean, usually these deals are more complicated than that. They come into things like yields and return policy and all that sort of stuff. Like. Yeah, it's complex.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, how quick can we do you rev to the next chips version, but all that has a cost assigned to it. So in the name, call it money.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean, look, there are fans of all these companies who think whatever they think. And you could look at maybe Radeon graphics, like in an AMD laptop even, and integrated graphics, and say, hey, look, these things are way better. Like Intel's really far behind in that area. It's fair to say that from an integrated graphics standpoint, intel is in pretty good shape. But compared to the Radeon stuff. No, it's Nvidia and Radeon. Right. I mean, those are the two big players there. So does some of that factor into it? Does AMD have better graphics chipset for the next gen PlayStation? Yeah, you know, maybe. I mean, we don't know. Right. This is just based on third party.

[Richard Campbell]

And catfake coming from the Twitch stream mentioned TSMC's operations in Arizona now making the A16 chip, which is for the iPhone 14.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, just be careful with that because they're not making all of them, right?

[Richard Campbell]

No, they're making.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're making some limited.

[Richard Campbell]

If they're making any. That means there's a fab working, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

In North America and that's like 4 nanometer process. Man. That's pretty badass.

[Paul Thurrott]

That is good. Yeah. This is, you know, when relations between China and the United States were falling apart and people were calling on Apple to move as much as they could out of that country to wherever else, you know, maybe Vietnam or India, wherever they could go. And then you realize this doesn't happen quick. You know, you can't just. You can't just say, yep, we're leaving China. A lot of the capacity is there. The people with know how they spent years and years building out that stuff in partnership with those companies. So it's hard. You can't just pick up your ball and go to a different court. I mean, it's not that easy. So, yeah, you're right. The fact that they were able to get that going in the United States is Actually pretty.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And again there, there's always problem. The, the challenge here is not building a fab. It's not getting the, the APL gear. That's not the problem. It's trained people.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, like it's, it is not easy. There's only so many fab factory engineers. It's hard work and it's a very specialized business. So it, the fact that they've got anything working at all is a good sign because it now, it's like now the training pipeline starts to grow out, there's a place to work and you can start expanding. So you know, good on them to actually get to the point where a fab is making anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

And now intel can start stealing those employees away since they're in the United States. It'll be fun.

[Richard Campbell]

Lovely.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's all good. And then this. I didn't know where to put this. I'm not even sure this is worth discussing. It's just insane. And I feel like it kind of deserves some attention. I don't do like I can't really do a hands on thing but I do have this laptop here. So there's this big heavy, thick looking thing that is a Lenovo Think Book that is like Surface Book in that.

[Richard Campbell]

The screen comes off. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

The screen comes off.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I saw those pictures.

[Paul Thurrott]

The difference is that the screen has a computer inside of it that runs Android and it's a Snapdragon gen whatever with 16 gigs of RAM and it's on UFS 3.1 storage. It has its own webcams, it has its own everything. It's its own thing. And then in the bottom there's a core Ultra intel, you know, I think 60th by 32 gig of RAM, whatever, SSD storage. And these two things are separate computers and you can kind of, you can, you can hit a button on it and it's really quick. It just switches between the environments and I.

[Richard Campbell]

This is wacky.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

This is wacky. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And I kind of want one. Now that you've described it like that is weird enough that it makes me happy.

[Micah Sargent]

The name is even wackier.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know the name is unnecessarily weird. It's not even clear if this is the full name, but it's yeah. ThinkBook. So they experiment with ThinkBook for some reason. This is something they've been doing for a while. Gen 5 meaning there were four gens of not this thing but a previous thinkbook plus design that had different screens and different configurations. Hybrid. I think the full name actually includes station is in the name because there's more going on here, right?

[Micah Sargent]

Think Gen 5 hybrid station and tablet.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So it, first of all, it's a laptop.

[Richard Campbell]

Even a Microsoft guy's like dude, you need to work on the name.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. The previous gen versions of this, there were two versions that had like an E Ink display on the outside. Okay, interesting. Right. It's really thick bit, you know, E Ink tablet, I guess. And then there was a couple versions where they had an 8 inch tablet sized screen on the wrist rest which you could use in a dual screen configuration either as like a Wacom style writing surface or just as a second screen which was stupid. It made no sense. But I give them a little bit of credit for experimenting. So now we have two computers, each with its own resources. Ram, storage, cameras, blah blah blah, whatever. You can detach them while they're detached or attached. You can use one or the other. This thing can be used as a standalone Android laptop.

[Richard Campbell]

This is not an all in one, this is an everything in one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So I'm struggling to figure out how I could just show this to you. But in addition to all that, you can integrate the two environments in interesting ways. So this software in here that Lenovo.

[Richard Campbell]

So they can see each other like they have a shared storage space.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. So if you've ever used a virtual environment, you've probably seen something like Apple does this with Parallels does on Apple where some of the folders are mapped so that when you copy to the desktop in the Windows environment, it copies to the desktop on the Mac. They could do that kind of thing. You can run Android, the Android environment in a Windows as an app alongside your Windows apps if you want to do that. It's crazy. It's crazy town. So it's expensive, like north of three grand expensive.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh geez. But you are buying two computers in one.

[Paul Thurrott]

You are buying two computers.

[Richard Campbell]

I've never met him. Upper Foreman and Android tablet didn't cost too much.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And I hate this, I hate to be this guy. But I gotta say the thing that's really compelling here is gonna be when Apple does something like this with iPad MacBook.

[Richard Campbell]

I can't imagine them doing it, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, but there's a stand.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, I'll be there for it.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's a stand that comes with this. It looks like a weapon you would use in the middle ages to disarm like a mounted knight on a horse. And you. It's kind of a weird setup. You detached attach the screen and you put it on the. The easel thing. The stand.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then you have an external like 27 whatever, 29 inch display. You connect that to the base, which is a keyboard with a trackpad.

[Richard Campbell]

Absolutely. The mode. I'd be using it in half.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It's crazy town. But it's. But it's also like. Like this is actually kind of interesting.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah. It gets. You're right. It went from are we jumping the shark? To suddenly. That's a cool looking shark.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So with Surface Book, the computer was all in the screen except for in the higher end versions where there was a GPU separately in the base, but other than that.

[Richard Campbell]

In the base. That's right. So you had two gpu, two video processors, one in the screen, one in the base. And was when you were plugged in the base.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. The. Integrated in the screen. The good gr. The DGPU was.

[Richard Campbell]

But only one cpu.

[Micah Sargent]

When it's on the easel stand as a external monitor, is that going. Is that wireless or is that wired?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's. You could do either one.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's actually acting as a monitor. It's not.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Monitor.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. It does all this.

[Micah Sargent]

This is interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

This is insane.

[Paul Thurrott]

You kind of run out of. There's so much like. There's so many different configurations. It's kind of weird.

[Micah Sargent]

Is it loud?

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm gonna fly to Mexico with this thing in my bag. So.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

When. When you never hear from me again.

[Richard Campbell]

It's because of this.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's because someone in customs pulled me aside and they saw this thing and said, yeah, I don't care.

[Micah Sargent]

They said where we draw the line.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

This is like megapixel camera on the back.

[Paul Thurrott]

We allow narcos to happen here. This is not happening.

[Richard Campbell]

There's a shell chip set in that tablet. Then it's just a phone really. You know, it's about the same size as a phone. Yeah. It's got cameras in. On the back. I mean you could pass as a phone.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's crazy. It's a. It's the world's biggest.

[Micah Sargent]

You did say you wanted a bigger phone.

[Richard Campbell]

I do adore how wacky Lenovo is. Like, they're just.

[Paul Thurrott]

I really wacky. This one, it's. This is one of those crazy as a fox moments where you're like, this is crazy enough. It might just work.

[Richard Campbell]

Just might just work.

[Paul Thurrott]

It just like.

[Richard Campbell]

They clearly run a division of nutters that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

The fact that this made it to production. They didn't just make one and Put it on stage.

[Paul Thurrott]

Remember how crazy Surface book was and how we laughed? Hey, listen to me. Hold on. You're gonna. You're gonna try to interrupt, but hold on. You're gonna love this idea. Like, it's. It's. It's crazy, you know?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's hilarious, though. So awesome.

[Micah Sargent]

Wow. This is cool. But. Yeah. Is it. How. How loud has it been for you?

[Paul Thurrott]

The fans, you mean?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It hasn't been. Oddly. It's been fine. I mean, I. Well, I mean, right now it's probably.

[Richard Campbell]

I totally understand why you didn't know where to put this. Because we don't have a section in the notes called crazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's completely silent. It's crazy. Yeah. Crazy time. That's the new. The new subbing. The new segment on Crazy Time.

[Micah Sargent]

And it's all just Lenovo stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

My big complaint about this thing as a tablet. The tablet is humongous, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's also a 16 by 10 display. So in portrait mode, it's, you know, it's tall and thin.

[Richard Campbell]

That's nice.

[Micah Sargent]

I do like 1610, though.

[Paul Thurrott]

I do, too, For.

[Richard Campbell]

So it could be a tablet or a portable. A wireless display.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. And it can also be a. An Android laptop if you want. Right. There's literally this button on the keyboard that switches and it's instantaneous.

[Micah Sargent]

I love that little switch button.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It's click. It's crazy. So if you wanted. If you, you know. So Android, like I said early in the show, is getting this windowing capability. This thing could turn into kind of a productive Android laptop, which is a mix of words you all understand but don't make sense together.

[Richard Campbell]

Now I'm starting to feel like the name isn't long enough.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, I know. You're right. You're absolutely right. Think book. Gen 5 hybrid station and tablet really doesn't cover enough.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. It's so weird. I don't know what to say about it. Anyway, keep on keeping on.

[Micah Sargent]

That's what I say.

[Paul Thurrott]

I wanted to mention it because it's nuts and I just. I applaud.

[Richard Campbell]

We need to celebrate this. Just.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Because it's so wacky.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's so crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

I love it. So that keyboard is actually a computer. You can plug it into a display. Off you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

You could just. You could take the keyboard with you.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And just use that as a computer. Assuming you had a display. Right. Somewhere, you know, at work or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Take. Get a VR goggle set with a HDMI plug, plug it in. Be sitting on. Sitting on the Plane with VR goggles and a keyboard in your lap.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, man, that is really interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is lappable. Just throwing it out there.

[Richard Campbell]

Fabulous.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, it's crazy.

[Micah Sargent]

Go Lenovo.

[Richard Campbell]

Lenovo.

[Micah Sargent]

While we all celebrate Lenovo, let's take a quick break so I can tell you about our next sponsor of this episode. It's 1Password who we're bringing you this episode of Windows Weekly. I have a question for you. I have a feeling I know the answer. We're all going to cringe a little bit. Do your end users always work on company owned devices and IT approved apps? No. No, no, they don't. I didn't think so. So how in the world do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all of those unmanaged apps and devices?

[Paul Thurrott]

What do you do?

[Micah Sargent]

Well, turn to 1Password because 1Password has the answer. It's Extended Access Management. 1Password Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign in for every app on every device because it solves the problems that traditional IAM and MDM just can't touch. And when you think about the way that we work, there are so many of these devices that aren't running on the system. In fact, just yesterday on security now, we were talking about how somebody in the US Navy thought it'd be a great idea to set up Starlink on one of the naval ships. And by that I mean a personal Starlink. And you know, maybe Extended Access Management could have been helpful in a situation like that. Imagine that your company's security is like the quad of a college campus. There are these nice beautifully placed brick paths that run between the buildings. This is the sort of rainbows and unicorns world that it wants to live in. The company owned devices, those IT approved apps, and the managed employee identities. Unfortunately, we don't live in rainbows and unicorns. We live in the real world which has things that aren't rainbows and unicorns. So there are the paths that people are actually using, the shortcuts that are worn through the grass, that that are actually the straightest line between point A to point B. Those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps and the non employee identities like contractors. Most security tools that you'll find, yeah, they happily work on those wonderfully placed brick paths. But the security problems are more often happening in the place where we're taking those shortcuts. 1Password Extended Access Management. It's the first security solution that brings all of these unmanaged devices, the apps and the identities under your Control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy and every app is visible. It's security for the way we actually work today. And it's now generally available to companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra and currently in beta for Google Workspace customers. So check it [e-mail] Windows Weekly. That's 1p a s s w o r d.com and we thank 1Password for sponsoring this week's episode of Windows Weekly. Back to the show and it's time for Xbox Corner, which I still think needs a theme song and I'm sad it doesn't have one. Or a jingle.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we need more stings full stop. Right?

[Micah Sargent]

I agree.

[Paul Thurrott]

I agree. We have a theme now. It's the sad trombone song.

[Richard Campbell]

That was fast. You said the words out loud. Things are going to happen.

[Paul Thurrott]

Also 30 on the muting thing. Anyway. Yeah, good job. Yep. I'm just, I'm nailing it today. It's unbelievable. So, boy, we're having a good time here. But unfortunately Microsoft has laid more. Laid off more employees in the gaming division. Yeah, they just keep dribbling this out. You know, again, I. The big issue I have here is just the constant nature of this. I do understand that when you subsume a company of this size are going to be redundancies and unnecessary employees.

[Richard Campbell]

So this is 600 from Blizzard Division.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, not necessarily.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, because there's so many different groups.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like where, you know, is that Zenimax? Is that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, so, yeah, we don't know. It kind of behooves them not to say, I guess. Although I would imagine some of these people are probably going to go public at some point and talk about this. But what they did say was, and.

[Richard Campbell]

To be clear, Microsoft's doing anything original here. There are layoffs across the gaming industry. It has become very.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean, I made this point some months ago. You know, if you look at the number of employees that Microsoft's laid off and compare it to elsewhere in the industry, it's not.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not substantial. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not up there. It's every job counts and all that. But I guess most of these were corporate supporting functions, not game developers or game publishers or whatever. So there were no games canceled, There were no devices canceled. Interesting. They would say that. And no experiences being canceled unless your experience being an employed person counts. I suppose. So unfortunately, that's happening. I wish they would get on top of this. Know it's almost been a year. Like I Wish we could, you know, figure it out and be done. But anyway.

[Richard Campbell]

But nope, not the way. No, I'm, I'm almost beginning to think it's programmatic that they, that a steady stream of minor. Because they also meantime have what, 3,000 jobs posted, right. Like at some point don't you say, hey, like these two things don't go together? Well, are you just terrorizing your employees?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, Jesus God, I hope that's not that still better than the corporate culture or Activision Blizzard. But yeah, I don't, yeah, I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

But here's my argument is before the pandemic we were moving towards like the unionization of software developers. Like they were really getting their chops on this whole we need a better deal. And the pandemic sort of wobbled all that and they overhired and there was all these sorts of things, but I almost feel like they've gotten addicted to layoffs. Like it's just a good way to keep the thumb on the employees.

[Paul Thurrott]

So Microsoft has been semi unique in this space for being pretty good about unionization attempts with one very recent exception with Raven Software. We talked about back at the. Probably about a month ago. But they've, you know, they, they've recognized unions in the United States and elsewhere. They, they've, you know, they've come out and said, look, we're going to respect these efforts. We're going to allow them to, allow them to happen. The Activision Blizzard quality assurance workers voted to unionize this year, et cetera. So I mean it's, you know, I think a lot of this, well at least for this round anyway, is more tied to, you know, the redundancy thing, the kind of back end business, not the developers, not the game publisher, that kind of thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. And obviously they don't make any of it clear.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, they don't. Yeah. It behooves them not to, I guess in a way. But this goes back so far. I have a hard time remembering this, but back in the Xbox 360 days, holy man. I know there was a, well, there were a couple features related to like the social aspect of gaming. Right. And so one was this friend request feature which they got rid of. I don't even remember Xbox One maybe something like that. Or at least in Xbox Series X.

[Richard Campbell]

They were just copying Steam, who had it from the very beginning and still has it.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's a rich history of that. I remember where they did the Kinect and they came out with Whatever the version of Microsoft's Miis were for the little cartoon little guys we had, some of us still have those graphics on our accounts. Like we've done this, you know, for a long time. But anywho, I. They are apparently bringing this back. And so in a true social network, if you think about how like something like Twitter or whatever works, like, you have friends, like the people you actually have connections with, and you both decide together, we're going to, you know, be collaborative, you know, share information. And then you have followers. Right. And the followers are people who could kind of see what you're doing. And you as an individual might be able to configure that, but also. Also determine what those people see. Xbox used to have that too. Right. And you could kind of picture people wanting to follow others. Right. To see what their escapades are in certain games or whatever. But they don't have that. That's another one they got rid of. But they are testing bringing back this friend. Well, not friends. I mean, obviously they have friends, but friend requests, basically. So. Yeah. So what's old is new again. And then my favorite story of the week, Microsoft has announced three more games coming to Xbox Game Pass in the second half of September.

[Richard Campbell]

Any of them you've heard of?

[Paul Thurrott]

How many of them are Activision Blizzard games?

[Richard Campbell]

I think none. That would be a given.

[Paul Thurrott]

None. Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

I can't even tease you about it anymore about it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just don't even. I'm losing my mind. They announced this sale, this acquisition a year ago. So we're closing in on the 12 month mark here.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. It's this month, right? It'd be 12 months October now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So we've gotten what, two games? Maybe three. Starting next month, we'll have three. Yikes. So I don't. Can't remember anything, but I know Xbox Game Pass ultimate, which is the thing I pay for is 20 bucks a month now, I think for most of that year was probably 1799, I'm guessing. I would like my money back, please, because seriously, what is happening? But anyway, wow.

[Richard Campbell]

They never promised those tier one games would show up in Game Pass. You just imply from everything they did.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, based on previous statements and then the fact that the company that made those statements purchased another game studio. Yeah, I did sort of assume. Because they did say it, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, apparently you assumed incorrectly, Mr. Thurrott.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Just pray we don't misassume play.

[Richard Campbell]

We do not change the deal.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. This is kind of a random note, but if you do play Overwatch 2 on Xbox. Overwatch is, I think a Blizzard game. So it's owned by Microsoft. There's a bunch of bonus persons if you're a game pass member. Yeah, yeah, it's a, it's a Fortnite type. Well. Or you know, like a fast moving. It kind of reminds me of Unreal Tournament, like.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Kind of thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but it's Blizzard's version of Fortnite.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's cartoony graphics, but very fast, you know, so if you're into this game and that's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's a competition game, right? Big esports game.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, right, right, exactly. That kind of thing. And then I of course have linked to the wrong story yet again right here at the end. But if you recall and I, Richard, you might remember, this is probably. I feel like this was late last year, but yep, Unity, which makes this game engine the most popular one in the world.

[Richard Campbell]

You mean that one?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, those guys, they announced this kind of runtime fee for game developers that went over like a lead balloon, like 20 developers. Yeah. They were like, this is going to bankrupt us. Like we can't actually do this.

[Richard Campbell]

You just destroyed the business. Yeah, that was literally. This is literally this time last year.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just look it up. Yeah, you're right. It was this week last year. That's hilarious. So they kind of went back and forth on this. The CEO had to apologize. I think they might have fired the guy.

[Richard Campbell]

They did.

[Paul Thurrott]

And in fact I think he might have been an ex Microsoft guy. But anyway, it doesn't matter. January, they laid off a bunch of people and then at the one year mark of announcing this, they were like, oh, we're just kidding. We're not doing that anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

They finally fully backed off from it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, yep. So I guess that's a good outcome.

[Richard Campbell]

John Ricci tells. That was the guy. He's over, actually. And he was, he was EA before he was Unity.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Ea. Okay. I was. Yeah, I don't recognize the name. So I was wrong about that. But yeah. So this is just. Oh boy.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway, I mean, I guess there's been a wrestling match all along about how Unity survives as a company grows. That kind of thing. Like they, they. This is the whole mono game. Like, like these guys started out as a python shop and then Miguel Diacaza convinced them that NET was the way to go. They were the point that cu. It's an important story and I swear to you, half the games made these days come through Unity. And some really good ones, better ones than you know, you think this is.

[Paul Thurrott]

A way you can write, you can.

[Richard Campbell]

Make reveals modern games with Unity.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

And I think there's. It might be just. It's not like they make no money. They do, but I think they look over at multimillion dollar titles made on Unity and go, hey, where's our cut?

[Paul Thurrott]

We want a piece of that. Yep. Yeah, Look, I think customers would have accepted some structure that made sense.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Frankly.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's also a way to present it, to sort of walk into, like, we want to be fair here and, you know, engage in conversation, even if you have an intentional outcome. You know, I compared. I compare this to when Maker's Mark was running low on. On bourbon and said, hey, we're going to lower the ABV of Maker's Market. Everyone went, no, don't do it. So they raised the price instead. Hey, we listened to you. You told us what you wanted. Now you can pay more, and it fixes the problem.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Don't ever listen to what customers ask for. That's a huge mistake.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, you can listen, tell them what they want.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I used to work in banking a million years ago, and our kind of saying was, like, the customer is almost never right. Well, because they were named, like, well, they're out of business now. Well, no. New England used to have a protected banking region, so eventually they let in the national bank, so they were all bought up.

[Micah Sargent]

They didn't go, is that like where they've got people with swords?

[Paul Thurrott]

And.

[Micah Sargent]

And, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it was just something probably dating back to the 1700s that.

[Richard Campbell]

For whatever reason, deploy the trebuchet.

[Paul Thurrott]

If you were in the New England region, you could buy and merge with banks there, but not external.

[Micah Sargent]

Oh, I see.

[Richard Campbell]

No nationals.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So now it's all. It's all, like, everywhere else in the country now.

[Richard Campbell]

But, yeah, try and be.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but people would always come to you, like, because it's money, it's your money.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

They'd be freaking out, you know, like, where's my money? And then they'd be like, well, you took it out here and you did this with it here. And they're like, oh, yeah, sorry. You know, but they, you know, they. They come in upset because it's like something you did, and it's like, no, we're not playing with your money.

[Micah Sargent]

Right. We're not touching your money. We are, but, you know, again, the 1700s.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Micah Sargent]

Anyway, you don't have to keep it in your mattress, but. All right. Anything else you want to say about Unity?

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Micah Sargent]

All Right. This.

[Paul Thurrott]

I hope to never speak about unity ever again.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, come on.

[Micah Sargent]

Almost correctly, you know you are watching Windows Weekly this week hosted by yours truly, Micah Sargent as well, of course, Paul Therott and Richard Campbell. We are going to be back in just a moment with the tips and picks, but I do want to mention a fun little thing called Club twit at Twit TV Clubtwit. For just $7 a month you can join the club and when you do, you gain access to some pretty awesome benefits. Every single Twit show with no ads, just the content. You gain access to the Twit bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show. After the show, special Club Twit events get published there as well. And access to the members only Discord Server. A fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and those of us here at TWiT. Also, some special events take place there. Later today I will be doing my next sort of hangout for Micah's Crafting Corner. We have been slowly but surely building what is called Jason's Kitchen. It's a little miniature set here and we've built it piece by piece. So we are working on what is happening, this sort of sink situation going on.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're building a dollhouse. What is happening?

[Micah Sargent]

It's kind of like a dollhouse, but it's just one little piece of a dollhouse.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like it.

[Micah Sargent]

So that's Micah's Crafting Corner. You come with your crafts. It's just a cozy hangout time. You work on your crafts while I'm doing my sort of happy trees moments as we build these pieces together. And you heard it here first, apparently sometime soon we're going to see Richard Campbell build a PC in the club.

[Richard Campbell]

Goodness knows when, but yeah, goodness knows.

[Micah Sargent]

When, but it will happen or else. And so you should join the club at Twit TV ClubTwit. Again, just seven bucks a month. Paul and I both do shows for the club as well, so you can regularly tune into those and get the video versions of them. Thank you for being a member, if you are one, in which case you're probably not hearing this unless you're watching live, but if you aren't, we'd love to have you. And now we are back for the back of the book. The tips and picks of the week.

[Paul Thurrott]

You'll have to see when this comes out, but I did an episode of Hands on Windows, which I recommended. They call the Microsoft Paint Masterclass. I don't know if they're going to go with that name, but I hope they do. Black Friday Week is here and so are amazing deals at Amazon. You'll save so much on early holiday athletic gifts like bikes, tents and outdoor gear. You'll have money left over for a premium yoga mat so you can try to touch your toes by New Year's.

[Micah Sargent]

Almost there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Or that Pro Series 2 person sled with titanium alloy skis. Oh, what fun it is to save. Black Friday week is here. With deals up to 35% off, it's better over here at&t customers. Switching to T Mobile has never been easier. We'll pay off your existing phone and give you a new one free. All on America's largest 5G network. Visit t mobile.com carrierfreedom to switch today. Pay off up to $650 via virtual prepaid MasterCard in 15 days. Free phone up to $830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax, qualifying port and trade and service on go 5G next and credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance and required finance agreement is due. All right, so a couple of tips. Bill Gates has a new documentary series coming out on Netflix. In fact, it might have just come out. I have mixed emotions about this one. I'm going to try not to be super controversial here, but there was a, I think a three part Bill Gates documentary on Netflix a couple of years ago that I found to be an incredible bit of history rewriting on the part of someone who almost single handedly destroyed the industry by himself. So I think he's trying to rehabilitate his image in his kind of philanthropist years, which I get.

[Richard Campbell]

But I think in the post, Melinda, who have you been hanging out with? Bill phase. He definitely needs some brand. Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

You need some, some help? I just remind people like this the name. What's. I can't remember. I think it's called what's Next with Bill Gates? You know.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is the guy who wrote the book the Road Ahead and didn't mention the Internet. Basically right. When the Internet was happening. So I don't know, I mean, maybe, I mean he's Bill Gates so I'll probably have to watch it, but I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And considering the relationship between Bill and Reed Hastings, I suspect when he says, yeah, you know, I'd like to do he's going to get it right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yep. What's next? What's. I'll tell you what's. Next. He's getting a Netflix series. That's what's next.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then just randomly something, something that's happening online. Amazon's having their big prime day deal day thing back. September or sorry, 10-8-9. So if you pay attention to Amazon.com, which you probably do if you've ever bought something online, which you have, start [e-mail] right now because there's already stuff.

[Micah Sargent]

I was like, don't lie to me, don't lie to me.

[Paul Thurrott]

October, Amazon so much. Yeah, I have, I, I, I probably have an Amazon package arriving at my house every other day at this point.

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

My problem is in October I'm pretty much on a remote road for a month. So if I start ordering stuff, it's going to sit for a while.

[Paul Thurrott]

Schedule. They need a scheduler, you know, for this, right?

[Micah Sargent]

Yeah, yeah, that'd be nice. Hold this until, hold it in some.

[Paul Thurrott]

Local facility until like, you know, click the button or whatever. Yes, actually. So one of the nice things about Mexico by the way, is I can get Amazon there.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not 100 obviously of the stuff and some stuff is more expensive but some stuff is, you know, cheaper too. It's kind of cool. And we do get next day there. It's crazy. At least in Mexico City.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Living.

[Richard Campbell]

One of the nice things about living up on the coast here is that we have a mailbox they don't deliver. Normally delivered to the house.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

So I can, I can, that's actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

Good because that it will be safe and a thing. Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, this is, I can literally tell the posty lady Karen to say hey.

[Paul Thurrott]

Do you call her the posty lady?

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, the lady who described you described.

[Paul Thurrott]

Her as the posty lady.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, in Canada we tend to call them posties because up here we don't go postal like some countries. Did I say that out loud?

[Micah Sargent]

Always too soon.

[Paul Thurrott]

A well deserved dig, but go on.

[Richard Campbell]

But I have, I have, have asked her, hey, I'm going to be gone for a month. Just hold my stuff and I'll come and get it from.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that's great.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's fine because then it doesn't tie up space on the, we had, you know, the, the mailboxes are only so big so there's parcel boxes but they're shared kind of thing. So what will happen is you in your mailbox there'll be a key to open that. So to tie that up for a month because I'm on the road would be rude. So it's like, hey, just hold these, I will be back. And. And she's a. And she's a grol fan too. So I have on occasion just sort of dropped a six pack off on that.

[Paul Thurrott]

So nice.

[Richard Campbell]

I love living in a small town, man. Can't tell you.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've always had good relationships with the postal UPS, FedEx, whatever, deliveries, delivery guys. The one here, though, I like the guy a lot, but he knows it's me, so he'll. He actually beeps as he drives up, kissing. So you'll hear him come. He'll be like, beep. And it's like, dude, what is this? Like I'm a pavlog dog now. Like, I'm like, oh my God, oh my God.

[Richard Campbell]

New PCs. New PCs.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like I could be out in the world and hears like a car beep and I'm like, oh my God, I'm getting something. You know, it's.

[Micah Sargent]

That's amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

I really, I hate that I've been like trained.

[Micah Sargent]

He's running a test on you.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I'm not saying you don't go running out all excited.

[Paul Thurrott]

I should tell you. I'm sorry, I forgot the point of that joke was I have walked outside of my house and no one was there because someone was just driving by be and beeped randomly and I thought I was like, oh my God, here comes comes and I'm like, where's the time? Like a dog waiting for his master to come home.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm so hungry.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Micah Sargent]

That's amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Sad.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Car horns make Paul drool. I'm so noted.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I want, I wanted to. I have twice tried to do an episode on Hands on Windows. Speaking of that podcast about Explorer Patcher, it's one of many utilities you can use to kind of help de and sure defy Windows, right? And so in this case, it's specifically for Explorer. It does a couple other things, mostly about Explorer. It is a technical app. It really screws through the system a little bit. One of the bits of advice, I'm going to put this in the book, not the Explorer Patcher bit, but this other bit of advice, which is if you've been around a while, you will know and recall that there was and still is a utility in Windows called called System Restore. Right. And whenever they introduced this, I want to say it might have even been xp. But whenever this came to light, it was a front end to a kind of a back end command line scriptable capability that Windows had had for a couple of years previous. And what it gives you that kind of VM like capability to go back in time. Right. And so back in the day, before NT became the normal version of Windows, you could install a bad driver and not be able to boot Windows like it would never get in. And so starting with Windows, actually Millennium Edition and then xp, they added driver rollback, et cetera. But if you think you're going to be doing something dangerous in Windows, you can just run, start, search and find it. It's still the classic System Properties control panel with the multiple tabs that dates back a million years, but you can actually enable system restore. You can dedicate some amount of storage to these backups if you will make a restore point, make a restore point. And if you screw up your system, like if you install this app and somehow it screwed it up, although I've had pretty good luck with it, you can then restore it to that point. And system restore is important because you can get to it from the recovery environment. So you can boot your computer with your installation media, or if you made a standalone recovery disk, you can get to it from outside of Windows. So you can actually roll back Windows to a previous point in time from without. From without, from outside of Windows. I'm just learning the language. It's fun. So you should know about that. And I think a lot of you, anyone listening to the show probably is like, oh my God, you probably haven't thought about it in a while. It's still there, right? So you can still do this. I recommend trying it before you do Explorer Patcher, but what this will let you do is go back to previous versions of Explorer and multiple versions. You could go back to the version from Windows 7 if you wanted to, which is class, literally. But the version I like is actually the version from Windows 10. And the reason I like it is it has a kind of a ribbon, but it's collapsed by default. And it doesn't have any of the annoyances of backup this folder. Back up this folder, back up this folder. Because in Windows 11 it sits there like a little animated thing. If you're in desktop documents, pictures at least, and maybe probably just those three.

[Richard Campbell]

Click me, click me.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. And it makes me insane. And I actually really like not having it there. So this is one way to do it. It's not the only way, but it's something to look as free.

[Richard Campbell]

I got enough trouble with attention. Don't push it, you know?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah. It's like we let you work in your flow. Oh, unless you're not doing what we want. Then we just do this to you all day long and you know, then.

[Richard Campbell]

We try and do seizures.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly. So anyway, there you go.

[Richard Campbell]

Awesome.

[Micah Sargent]

All righty. Now it's time for the run and radio. Tell us what's going on.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and I talked a little bit about a show that's not coming up, coming up for a few weeks from now. But this week's show is with Eli Holderness, and we were talking about asymmetric encryption. And so Eli is a proper mathematician. Like got the degree, educated in the space, but has moved very much into compute, needless to say, mostly spends time in security because encryption, you know, is a math problem, without a doubt. And so they speak at all the conferences and they started doing a particular talk on encryption and we got into a conversation about them. Like, I should just make this show because, I mean, these days we use symmetric encryption primarily, right? This is tls, this is ssl, like what we're used to. And there's been a big push in the industry to get away from having these big jumps where we have to replace one technology another to try and smooth things out. And on the other side of this is this expected threat from quantum computing for decrypting all kinds of things. And so moving off of prime number driven encryption is in general like NIST is pushing on this. It's an upcoming force. And so this is where we ended up going. If you're a geek and this space, you'll enjoy this conversation because we totally geeked out. But at the same time I kept pulling it back to. As an admin, here's what you can think about because there are good solution paths being built for moving to new encryption types in the immediate future, in the next few years that you largely won't be disruptive, but they will be resistant to the emerging threats to various kinds of encryption. So even though we spent a lot of time explaining what asymmetric comprision is about, for most part you won't need to know. It'll just work.

[Micah Sargent]

And now it is time for a blast from the past. A trip into the past I've had.

[Paul Thurrott]

At least I'm ecstatic.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it has gotten very funny on how we do a whiskey you've never heard of because people keep bringing me weird whiskeys and I love them. But I. This is the last of the classic malts. I felt like it was just time to. I shouldn't have been last. It's a great whiskey. And it's the Talisker Talisker 10, which is on the Isle of Skye It's. It's located in a little town in a little village called Karbus, which is on the Mingus peninsula on the Isle of Skye. The Isle of Sky is the largest of the Inner Hebrides Island. If you ever see a picture of it or you look at it on Google Maps, you'll see it sort of looks like a wing, although it does have a non trivial set of mountains on it. It's important to remember that this was the land going back 20,000 years, that when Daggerland was still exposed before it became the North Sea. So this is all connected together and people have been there for a very long time time. Some of the earliest documentation of it goes all the way back to folks like Ptolemy in the Romans. He actually drew a map of it and it was named Scittis, which is apparently a Celtic word for winged. Because if you look at the land, it looks sort of wing shaped. There are. There's plenty of evidence there that there were humans that going back to the Mesolithic period. For those who are not up on their ancient history, this is Mesolithic meaning Middle Stone Age, as opposed to the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. Well, that actually means the Mesolithics were probably the last of the hunter gatherers. So this is seven to 17,000 years ago. So tail end of the Ice Age kind of stuff, as opposed to the Neolithics is really when farming starts to emerge, at least in that part of the world. Although there's evidence that, and this is what's found in some of these sites in sky, that the Mesolithics were starting to make pottery as well as stone tools and the like. So Inhumans persisted in that area the entire time as the ocean rose up and cut off those islands and made them into islands. You go all the way through to the Iron Age. You have the Picts. There's writings about the Isle of Skye in Ireland from 700 AD. And the Vikings, of course, control this area. We've talked about the Hebrides before, all the way down to the Isle of Man. All sort of resolved back into what would become the Scotland with the Treaty of Perth in 1266. What do you need to know about Skye? This is the land of the clan MacLeod. Yeah, the movie. But Dunvegan Castle has been the seat of that clan and is still an operable castle going back to the 13th century. So like I said, the lineages are long there. And of course, being in Scotland mins, they went through all of the trouble with the English forced immigration Turning all the land into sheep farms. The famines, the forced, you know, pushing people into other countries. In the middle 1800s, when the Talisker distillery is founded, there's about 20,000 people living on Skye. By 1970, there's barely 7,000. Today it's around 10. It may be an island, but there is a bridge, weirdly named the Sky Bridge that connects it onto there. There's also a ferry available and the business there these days is primarily tourism centric, so lots of nature walks, great mountain climbing, scenic views. They Talisker has been the only distillery on there since it was the only distillery started back in 1830. It's been there a very long time. Although in 2017, the Torabhag Distillery opened up. And so now there's I think just three or four. Right. I already mentioned Rase, which is a little island right beside sky, so nominally doesn't count, but it's roughly in the same region. There is a whiskey called the Isle of Skye. It is not made on Skye I've talked about on the show. It's actually made in Glasgow. Let's not confuse those things. So Hugh McCaskill leases the land from the McLeod clan in the 1830s. He does not name it for the village he's in, he names it for his estate, Talisker. And there's a bankruptcy, there's some changing of hands. In 1880, it gets a major rebuild. Then we come into the 20th century. Distillers Company buys it in 1925. This will eventually be acquired by Diageo, and of course, it's been owned by Diageo since the very beginning. Their distilling process was unusual. There's strong Irish influence because up until 1928, they were triple distilling, which is very much an Irish thing with smaller stills. But in 1928, they switched over to follow the Scottish convention of twice distilled low wine still and a spirit still. Famously, in 1960, there was a major fire that burned the entire distillery to the ground and there was a big push to literally remake the original five stills in every detail. Took them a couple of years. And they still use those remade stills from 1960 to this day. So two wash stills, about 10,000 liters each, which are quite small, relatively speaking, straight lie arms, which is unusual. So the swan neck comes up and it just goes straight out. They have three spirits still, also unusual. They're smaller, 7,500 liters. They don't have a reflex bulb. So one of the characters that we talk about in italisker whiskey is quite spicy, and as an argument, it's because there's less reflux. So more of those sharper flavors stay in with the whiskey over time. Use stainless steel mash, tons of wooden washbacks. This is very sort of standard stuff. And in the case of Talisker 10, at least, they age entirely in bourbon casks. And this, as I mentioned before, is one of the whiskies of the classic malts of Scotland. In 1988, this was a United Distillers promotion. And normally I wouldn't talk so much about marketing stuff, but this keeps coming up because it literally changed the path of whiskey. So whiskey did very well coming out of World War II in the 1950s and 60s. But as the economic doldrums of the 70s came in with the OPEC crisis and while runaway inflation, people turned to cheaper drinks. The other thing that happened, especially in America, was that soft drinks became very cheap. The advent of. Of liquefied sugar, of high fructose corn syrup drove the cut the price of soda in half because they didn't need to use real sugar anymore. And so the highball became the drink, right? A Bacardi and Coke, that kind of thing. All pushed by spirits manufacturers. And whiskey sales dropped tremendously through the 70s and the early 80s. And then in 1988, this promotion came out, and what United Distillers was doing was they made a package, package essentially, of eight whiskies. They called them the classic malts. And they were supposed to be all from different regions. The fact that Talisker is by itself on skies, for the most part, Talisker has always been referred to as just part of Islay because it's also a peated whiskey, like all of the whiskies are in Islay. That's not how United Distillers referred to it. United Distillers broke down these eight whiskies into. Or these seven whiskies into seven regions. So there was a lowland, which is generally a recognized region. That was the Glen Kinchi. There was a Speyside Crag and more, which you've obviously talked about. Then there was Lagavulin, the Is, and then there was. They messed with the highlands. They created two different regions of highlands. So the Dalwhini 15 was considered a highland, but so was the Oban 14, which is also highland, but they called it West Highland, which, admittedly, it's on the west side of the Highlands, but so is Dalwhini. So, okay, they didn't mention Campbelltown, which is generally a recognized region, but distillers should own a distillery there. So just leave that out. And then of course, they called the Talisker 10 the Sky Whiskey, which admittedly it is and was at that time the only one, and had been for like 150 years until 2017 when some of these others started opening up. At the time of the promotion, Talisker was producing a million and a half liters a year of whiskey, which sounds like a lot, but within a few years that doubled. Today they make three and a half million liters of whiskey a year. So the change was astonishing, the growth in the marketplace. And oddly enough, and this was not expected by United Distillers, they admitted much, it was the peded whiskies that did best. Both Lagavulin and Talisker just took off and became this huge product. And for the most part, Talisker really just made a tank again. Only when it was bought by, when Diageo took over in the 90s did they start making others. They made an 18 for a while, although it's periodic in the early 2010s, when whiskey was doing so well that they simply didn't lay up enough. Like you can't make a 12 year in less than 12 years. So when you start to run low, what do you do? So they started producing specialty versions without year notifications. If it has a 10 on it means that's the youngest thing in the bottle, right? But when they call it Storm, it's a four year old man. You don't want to put a four on the bottle. So you get these very young whiskies. When they don't want the names, they just blend them together to get a flavor profile that people like. So there are a bunch of unusual versions. In fact, Diageo has taken over that whole concept of the classic malts. They still release them, but they now they do customized versions of them where they'll take the regular whiskey, but they'll do like a six month finishing in a sherry cask. So you can only find it in the collection. Normally these were sold together. So the whole idea, one of the reasons it was so effective, it's like, hey, you can order this as a block and you'll get a good price on it. And so you get these seven different whiskies on your shelf all at once called the classic malts. And it's what again, because they presumed the Craggamore was going to be the hit and the Lagavulin ended up being the Hit they. They got bars to take on whiskies they wouldn't ordinary take on. And it worked. So you can go find the more expensive variants like this. There's the. The new release literally this year is called Talisker the wild explorador. It's 140 bucks. Don't buy this. What the. It has no year on. Like, what are you doing? Anyway, by the 10. The 10 is lovely. It is colored, right. They have a consistency thing. It is chill filtered. It's 46%. Actually they mark it as 45.8. I'll call that 46%. It's not a strongly peated whiskey. You know what I really like about Talisker? It tastes like it's on the ocean. It's got that little iodine nose, like that sense of the sea. A little bit of saltiness in the palate and then. And you really don't smell the peat going in. But a little smokiness shows up later like you had a fire on the beach. That's what it's like drinking that stuff. It's strictly aged in bourbon cast, so there's nothing fancy there. And. Yeah, but it's. It's clearly from an island and you can find it at Bevmo for about $75. It's absolutely worth having on your shop shelf. And if you, if you're Pete curious, this is a good place to start.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm listening.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, a lot of people go got confronted with an ARD bag or a Lagavulin the first time they taste whiskey, say, I don't like whiskey. And to that person, I hand them like a Dalmore 18 and ruin their lives. Now, you love a 200 bottle of whiskey because that thing drinks like smooth caramel. But when you want to start flirting with other flavors and people say, well, I'm kind of afraid of peets, it's like, yeah, try the Talisker 10. Don't do the Art Bag 10. Ardbeg 10 is like, I really have an urge to lick a forest fire. Like Ardbeg will deliver. But if you want to come in slowly, come in with the Talisker.

[Micah Sargent]

All right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, curious.

[Micah Sargent]

Yes. To the end of this episode of Windows Weekly. I already mentioned Club Twit during the show. I'll just remind you, Twit TV Club Twit is how you go to sign up for $7 a month. Richard Campbell. Of course, folks can check out your podcast run as radio. Anything you want to pitch this week.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, we're putting out a show every week as normal. We just wrapped up our Next Gen AI show last week and now we'll the ad you're going to see every so often on run as is for our Fabric Conference in April. Go to fabricconf.com look, it's going to be the second show we've done, the second annual fourth. We sold it out 4,000 people. We are planning for 8,000 for next year. Wow.

[Micah Sargent]

Awesome.

[Richard Campbell]

So yeah, expect it to be massive. The excitement around the product is astonishing and really happy with what we got done this year. So we're stoked to really go all out for next year.

[Micah Sargent]

Cool. That's amazing. And for you Paul tharott.com anything you'd like to let us know about?

[Paul Thurrott]

Not really. Got a lot of book updates to do in the next month because of this stupid Windows thing I was talking about earlier, but I don't know. Not really.

[Micah Sargent]

All right, head to Thorot.com T H U R R if you'd like to get the show notes for this show, you can head to TWIT TV ww. Whenever we publish the episode, you'll find those there. The show records live every Wednesday round about 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. I will not be back next week. Leo will be back so you can tune in to watch the show live at that point. And of course available later on as a podcast that Kevin puts together in a nice neat package. I am there's one thing I was going to say that I'm now forgetting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Was it that I was five for five on the mute thing?

[Micah Sargent]

Five for five on the mute. That's exactly what it was. Congratulations. So yes, thank you everybody for tuning in and we well, they will see you again next week for another episode of Windows Weekly.

[Richard Campbell]

Bye bye. It's better over here.

[Paul Thurrott]

ATT customers switching to T Mobile has never been easier. We'll pay off your existing phone and give you a new one free. All on America's largest 5G network. Visit t mobile.com carrierfreedom to switch today. Pay off up to $650 via virtual prepaid MasterCard in 15 days. Free phone up to $830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax. Qualifying port and trade in service on Go 5G next and credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and balance and required finance agreement is due.

[Richard Campbell]

Imagine relying on a dozen different software programs to run your business, none of which are connected and each one more expensive and more complicated than the last. It be pretty stressful. Now imagine Odoo. Odoo has all the programs you'll ever need, and they're all connected on one platform. Doesn't Odoo sound amazing? Let Odoo harmonize your business with simple, efficient software that can handle everything for.

[Paul Thurrott]

A fraction of the price.

[Richard Campbell]

Sign up [e-mail] that's odoo.com. how do you feel when you switch to GEICO and save on your car insurance?

[Micah Sargent]

It's like going to work on one.

[Richard Campbell]

Thursday morning morning and thinking to yourself.

[Micah Sargent]

Just one more day until Friday.

[Richard Campbell]

But then somebody in the elevator says, happy Friday. Then you check your phone quickly and discover today is actually Friday. So yes, Happy Friday. Random stranger in the elevator. Happy Friday indeed. Yep, switching and saving with GEICO feels just like that. Get more with Geico.