WW 904: Not Sexy, but Important - Snapdragon Dev Kit canceled, Unity 6, "A-R-M"

Summary

Windows Weekly - Episode 904 Summary: Snapdragon Dev Kit Canceled, Unity 6, "A-R-M"

Released on October 23, 2024

Hosts Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell delve into several critical topics impacting the Microsoft ecosystem and the broader tech industry. In this episode, they discuss the cancellation of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Developer Kit, the release of Unity 6, ongoing legal disputes involving ARM, and noteworthy updates in Windows 11 and Xbox. The conversation is enriched with insightful commentary, technical analysis, and engaging banter.

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1. Snapdragon Developer Kit Cancellation

The episode kicks off with the unexpected cancellation of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Developer Kit. Initially launched to empower developers working with ARM-based systems, the kit faced numerous challenges that led to its discontinuation.

• Paul Thurrott [04:08]:
  "I honestly think it's correct. They went with this company, and I think this company did not show up with the qualms they were expecting."

The hosts analyze possible reasons behind the cancellation, including quality control issues and insufficient market demand. They ponder whether Qualcomm's strategic missteps or the niche appeal of the kit contributed to its downfall.

• Richard Campbell [07:00]:
  "What's wrong with this?"

2. Unity 6 Release

Shifting focus to software development, Unity Technologies announces the release of Unity 6. This update aims to address previous controversies, such as the runtime fee disputes, and introduces enhanced features to bolster Unity's position in the game development market.

• Richard Campbell [105:04]:
  "Unity 6 might be the equivalent of Windows 11. Because Unity 5 came out like 2015, and they've been doing annual updates ever since."

The new version emphasizes improved performance, better integration with modern hardware, and advanced graphical capabilities, making it a significant milestone for developers.

3. ARM Licensing and Legal Disputes

A substantial portion of the discussion revolves around the ongoing legal disputes between Qualcomm and ARM. ARM alleges that Qualcomm is violating licensing agreements, particularly concerning designs acquired through the Nuvia acquisition.

• Paul Thurrott [34:32]:
  "Qualcomm backed off on that. Maybe it's about money, but they should have gone to Dell, Lenovo… They really went up against the top competition."

Qualcomm counters these claims by asserting that their existing licenses and intellectual property safeguards are robust enough to protect them from ARM's allegations. The hosts explore the symbiotic yet contentious relationship between the two companies and its potential ramifications for Microsoft's Windows on ARM devices.

• Richard Campbell [36:02]:
  "You're a shareholder. You have to protect your shareholders."

4. AI Features in Windows 11 and Update Challenges

The integration of AI into Windows 11 continues to be a hot topic. The hosts discuss the rollout of features like Copilot and Super Resolution in the Photos app, evaluating their practicality and user reception.

• Paul Thurrott [51:22]:
  "Super resolution should improve the quality, but I thought it just made it 8x bigger. The quality isn't any better."

Despite the innovative additions, there is notable frustration with the frequency and reliability of Windows updates. The hosts speculate that Microsoft's aggressive push for AI integration may be outpacing the actual value delivered to users.

5. Microsoft and OpenAI Relations

Tensions between Microsoft and OpenAI are briefly touched upon, highlighting leadership changes and strategic shifts within OpenAI that may affect their collaboration.

• Paul Thurrott [60:45]:
  "Microsoft has done everything they can this past year to lessen their reliance on OpenAI."

The disruption caused by these changes raises questions about the future of AI development within Microsoft's ecosystem.

6. Xbox Updates and Age of Empires Mobile

The conversation transitions to gaming, with announcements about Xbox hardware and software updates. Notably, Age of Empires Mobile launches, expanding the beloved franchise into the mobile gaming sphere.

• Leo Laporte [95:36]:
  "I love Age of Empires. Can't wait to see how the mobile extension performs."

Additionally, a new Xbox Wireless Headset is introduced, boasting enhanced battery life and connectivity improvements. However, the hosts suggest alternative headphones for those seeking superior performance.

7. Listener Feedback and Community Engagement

The hosts engage with listener feedback, including a critical email from an Australian fan, Greg Priestley, who labeled the previous episode as the "worst show ever." Paul Thurrott humorously addresses the criticism, emphasizing their commitment to delivering valuable content.

• Greg Priestley [03:06]:
  "This week was the worst, most boring Windows Weekly ever. Who thinks an audio podcast of trying to get Leo to click the right buttons is riveting entertainment?"

8. Recommendations and Tools

Towards the end of the episode, recommendations for useful tools and software are shared. Paul Thurrott highlights the availability of Microsoft 365 Pro licenses at discounted rates, while Unity 6 and Opera's new AI features are discussed as valuable updates for developers and gamers alike.

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Conclusion

Episode 904 of Windows Weekly offers a deep dive into significant developments within Microsoft's ecosystem and the broader tech landscape. From Qualcomm's strategic missteps and Unity's latest engine release to ongoing legal battles with ARM and the challenges of integrating AI into Windows, the hosts provide comprehensive insights and thoughtful analysis. The episode balances technical discussions with relatable commentary, making complex topics accessible to a wide audience.

Notable Quotes Recap:

• Paul Thurrott [04:08]: "I honestly think it's correct. They went with this company, and I think this company did not show up with the qualms they were expecting."
• Richard Campbell [105:04]: "Unity 6 might be the equivalent of Windows 11. Because Unity 5 came out like 2015, and they've been doing annual updates ever since."
• Paul Thurrott [34:32]: "Qualcomm backed off on that. Maybe it's about money, but they should have gone to Dell, Lenovo… They really went up against the top competition."
• Richard Campbell [36:02]: "You're a shareholder. You have to protect your shareholders."
• Paul Thurrott [51:22]: "Super resolution should improve the quality, but I thought it just made it 8x bigger. The quality isn't any better."
• Paul Thurrott [60:45]: "Microsoft has done everything they can this past year to lessen their reliance on OpenAI."
• Leo Laporte [95:36]: "I love Age of Empires. Can't wait to see how the mobile extension performs."
• Greg Priestley [03:06]: "This week was the worst, most boring Windows Weekly ever. Who thinks an audio podcast of trying to get Leo to click the right buttons is riveting entertainment?"

---

This summary encapsulates the key discussions, insights, and conclusions from the episode, providing a comprehensive overview for those who haven't listened.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurot's in Mexico City. Richard Campbell's in Warsaw, Poland. But they're here to talk about Windows. We'll talk about the mystery of the Snapdragon developer box. Why did Qualcomm cancel it? Qualcomm? An arm in court? Could it be. Plus some Xbox news that made me personally very happy. All that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you tr.

[Paul Thurot]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 904, recorded Wednesday, October 23, 2024. Not sexy, but important. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft and we have the global travelers edition today. Joining us from Mexico City, Mexico, Mr. Paul I can now joke in Spanish.

[Paul Thurot]

They were the weakest joke of all time, but totally worth it.

[Leo Laporte]

And people laughed. So it means your Spanish is excellent.

[Paul Thurot]

I can be understood like a one year old could be understood.

[Richard Campbell]

And my pencil is yellow.

[Leo Laporte]

Joining him in our lovely three ways picture window, Mr. Mr. Richard Campbell, who is in Poland.

[Richard Campbell]

Warsaw. Yeah, Warsaw just finished a closing keynote of the developer days. Poland.

[Leo Laporte]

Wonderful. So now you have a little time to relax and enjoy Warsaw or fly at home tomorrow.

[Richard Campbell]

We had the weekend in Warsaw, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, that's good.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's. It's the third week on the road and we're all real ready to go home.

[Leo Laporte]

I love this. Richard's in Warsaw. His picture is better than mine.

[Richard Campbell]

That little obspot. Tiny too. Man, that is a banging camera.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, is that what you're using? Yeah, that's a good camera.

[Richard Campbell]

But I got lots of light on me.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

I've got the good lights. Light's the key clue.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we're gonna talk about today, I feel is this, this new collector's item that I paid zero for?

[Paul Thurot]

Let me tell you guys something. I think 1,000 people reached out to tell me with great alacrity. You have to tell Leo immediately. I think he heard it. I think he knows I found out.

[Richard Campbell]

You've confirmed you did not pay for it because I haven't gotten a check. I know mine has arrived.

[Leo Laporte]

They never billed me for it.

[Richard Campbell]

Interesting. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. Yeah, I mean, that's right. I don't know if that's true or not.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I mean, I'd be fine paying for it. Yeah, he delivered it to.

[Leo Laporte]

We did get, I'm sad to say, one email that basically. Let me see if I can find it. It basically said that was the worst show I've ever listened to.

[Paul Thurot]

Last week?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, last week. Never have Paul walk Leo through anything ever again.

[Paul Thurot]

Wow. I like that. I was the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, I don't. Well, that's why I'm trying to find the email. I want to get you the exact wording.

[Paul Thurot]

I did mention this a couple of times. This will be the worst listening experience ever.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, you were. This is from. It comes from Greg Priestley and he's an Australian, so I'm going to do this in his language just to let you know. This week was the worst, most boring Windows Weekly ever. Who thinks an audio podcast of trying to get Leo to click the right buttons is riveting entertainment?

[Paul Thurot]

Mate, nobody thought that. See, I take great exception to this.

[Leo Laporte]

You warned us.

[Paul Thurot]

Here's the problem. If we delivered an entertaining and educational episode, were you going to get an email from this guy? Because if not, I don't know what to tell you.

[Leo Laporte]

It's fine. I think it was of interest to some. But you do. I think also of interest to some is the fact that for some reason Qualcomm has said, yeah, this didn't work.

[Paul Thurot]

We're. We're.

[Leo Laporte]

We're not going to send any more out.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

And for the two, it said there were 200 of us who got them. Richard, congratulations.

[Richard Campbell]

We're only in the 200. That's pretty. That's pretty cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think that was. Might have been speculation by a tech blog, I can't remember. But we're not going to get billed, apparently. And they don't want it back. Apparently.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So I wonder if they're going to fail. Is the real issue here that they want to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's what I was wondering. What's wrong with this?

[Paul Thurot]

Guys, we got to. We got to cut to the more important topic, which is maybe Leo, we could walk him through resetting the PC today.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, boy. I'm still keen to put Linux on this thing, you know. Not that I've laid hands on it yet, but we'll see what happens. No, anyway, I love a good orphan. That's exciting to me.

[Paul Thurot]

So we had a call with Qualcomm on Monday unrelated to this, and of course, somebody. Somebody asked. But somebody asked. Right. And it was just a slightly more nuanced version of the public statement, which I just. I honestly think is correct. I think they, for better or worse, went with this company. I think this company did not show up with the qualms they were expecting.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Was Arrow just the shipper I don't.

[Paul Thurot]

Know, but it's not. You know, people are saying, like, Qualcomm can't. You know, Qualcomm did this Qual. And it's. Qualcomm hired a third party. The quality of the device make a.

[Richard Campbell]

Mini PC that should have been in our hands by June.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. I think there were a lot of mistakes that we.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

The details in some ways aren't important. It's just that, you know, it just wasn't right. And now Richard and I had this conversation privately, but it's months later and Windows and ARM devices are readily available. They're great. And I think I made this point last week, but if you're a developer, which was the target for this thing? I mean, let's not get too overblown with this. Like, you know, the target for this was a very small audience. I think you'd be better off getting a laptop anyway because part of the testing should involve all the mobility and efficiency stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

So you'd also have got it sooner.

[Leo Laporte]

So Aero was the distributor. Okay, somebody so. And one of the things that a couple of people have said, both in the Twitch chat and our discord, is they lost the license. What does that mean?

[Paul Thurot]

Who lost the license?

[Leo Laporte]

Who lost the license?

[Paul Thurot]

What does that mean? What does that mean?

[Leo Laporte]

What license are they talking about? Yeah, let me just go over behind you guys to the other side. Yeah, I don't know what that means. Who lost the license? Qualcomm. What?

[Richard Campbell]

So this quality.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, I'm sorry. Well, this is a different. I'm sorry, he's talking about a different topic. This is the ARM thing. We'll get to that in the future. We'll get to it. This is. That's a different topic.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, oh, oh, oh.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. This is the ARM license.

[Leo Laporte]

ARM licensing, legal issue. Yeah, but does you think that has anything to do with this?

[Paul Thurot]

I think people just hear call Common ARM and they get confused. You're right. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So we don't know why they pulled this out of the.

[Paul Thurot]

No, well, no, they said it wasn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Up to our standards. Right, but. I know, but it seems. I'm looking forward to you getting home, Richard, and playing with it. And Paul, I'm going to send you mine because you deserve it. I don't know.

[Paul Thurot]

I deserve it? You deserve this hunger.

[Leo Laporte]

And you could figure out what's wrong with it. This thing seems terrible.

[Paul Thurot]

You would like it.

[Leo Laporte]

The other reason is. And you said you were thinking about Linux on it, Richard. There are, of course, Snapdragon Elite versions.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Qualcomm has very explicitly worked to make that happen.

[Leo Laporte]

But in effect, Gerling said he was going to send information about his unit to Ubuntu to help them make a better version. But if there's only 200 in the whole wide world. Yeah, I doubt there's a lot of incentives. This is not a specific machine works well on Linux.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. This is. There's no need for that. They need to make Linux work. They need Linux to work well on the IdeaPad or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I don't know what unique hardware there is in here and stuff, but all of that would need Linux drivers, I'm sure.

[Paul Thurot]

It's just like a nuc. It's a laptop motherboard essentially. Probably some, you know, generic.

[Leo Laporte]

You think it's pretty generic?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I do. I mean, by the way, all the.

[Richard Campbell]

Way down, it's nothing fancy in there.

[Paul Thurot]

But one of the, one of the most notable, notable things about the first, you know, 2, 3, 4, whatever copilot plus PCs I reviewed was how identical they were.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't mean I opened the box and look at the board, but they were just the same. They were exactly the same.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like a laptop in a box, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, it does say on the back evaluation only not FCC approved for resale. So Paul, I was going to ask you for a dollar.

[Paul Thurot]

I will donate a dollar to your choice to the Leo Laporte fund.

[Leo Laporte]

Perhaps can't sell it to you. I saved the box because I thought maybe in 100 years this would be worth something.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know. If it is, I'll give it back to you. I don.

[Leo Laporte]

Things are worth something because they're scarce and this is scarce.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, that's a good point.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Makes it kind of.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, so was interested in Windows and arm. So you know what's.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, that's one of the things we were. When we were chatting on this is like, does this actually hurt Windows on arm.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

I gotta miss this window. Like if this thing had showed up in June, actually encouraged devs to do more conversions to arm, would that make a difference?

[Paul Thurot]

I don't think so.

[Richard Campbell]

Because part of this was, you know, this whole AI head fake is about, hey, let's get. Well, you get the fancy version of Copilot if you buy a Windows on ARM device.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I don't know what to tell you. I'm all over the map on this, Richard. I just listened to your runners radio. No, no, no. Never Rocks episode with Chris Sells, for example.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

And it was striking. I love him and his career is fascinating to me. He's great. It blows my mind that Windows, was it mobile, was it web? Sort of. And what's the next wave? What's the next wave? For a little while it was the digital assistant stuff and then it was maybe VRMR or something in there and then it's like maybe it's AI, maybe that's the thing. But the problem with these other platforms is that they still require the existing platforms to do anything. So I don't know that it's like a wave. I don't know. It's an interesting problem, but I don't know. I don't think Copilot PC on Snapdragon specifically is going to set the world on fire, but we are all going to have NPUs now, apparently. Well, we don't think too much about those. What do they call it? The multimedia extensions that intel put in their chips in the 1990s. Yeah, for a little while there was a dividing line between the haves and have nots but you know, that mattered or didn't. I know, but today that's mpus and just like tpm, like it will just be there, you know?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, it'll just do that. Once upon a time, having a GPU is a big deal.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yep. So.

[Richard Campbell]

And the world of multi. Of multi processor machines continues to expand.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, there you go.

[Richard Campbell]

I debate how well it being used. You know, I often pulling up the monitor just to see does the MPU in this thing ever do anything?

[Paul Thurot]

For me really the answer to that question is no. For the no, it really is. I mean today it's. It's basically no. Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

But yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So really we don't know what went wrong?

[Richard Campbell]

Not really, no.

[Paul Thurot]

I just. I guess I just think it boils down to this company was terrible. The product they made is whatever. They didn't deliver it on time. Maybe they couldn't ship it in the.

[Leo Laporte]

Volume and there wasn't a need for it.

[Paul Thurot]

Maybe there wasn't a. Yeah, there was.

[Richard Campbell]

A need for this in June before the laptop. This should have arrived before the laptop. So many pieces. For crying out loud. Integrating a laptop is hard. Stuffing things in a plastic box is pretty easy. So you know, this should have been first. And the fact that the moment it wasn't stop.

[Paul Thurot]

I look, part of this is might be tied to the history of Qualcomm and Windows and ARM and the fact that these guys over promised and undelivered for several years before what happened.

[Richard Campbell]

Like actually like narrative they built a really remarkable chip. By all accounts, a remarkable chip.

[Paul Thurot]

Absolutely. And we'll touch on that a little bit later too, because it comes up again and again. But literally, I don't think I wrote it. I went back, I had to look some things up today I went back and read something I wrote last October where Qualcomm once again made a bunch of promises. And I just said, look, I want to believe I do, but they failed us every time. And it is astonishing how well they are, how good these are, you know?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But I also think Qualcomm's not used to building the center point of a PC. They're used to building chipsets for phones. You know, like, this is a different business with different partners. And I think they struggled with those differences. And this mini PC is worse still because they really went up.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm sure it was about money, but really they should have gone to Dell, Lenovo. HP is one of those companies and said, please make one of these.

[Leo Laporte]

Could they have done it for the price?

[Paul Thurot]

Who knows?

[Richard Campbell]

I think the other part is it was all a loss leader in the.

[Paul Thurot]

First place because that's the Highest end chip, 32 gigs of RAM. I don't remember the storage, but these are pretty expensive components, right? Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And by that and Windows Home, which.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm really happy about, because the first.

[Richard Campbell]

Thing I'm going to do is try and force a pro license out of that thing.

[Paul Thurot]

I just had an email from a service that offered me three Windows 10 Windows 11 Pro licenses for. I think it was $2.08 or something. So if you need to upgrade on the cheap, you can do it. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just a quick question of how quickly can you get it to switch to a better license before you fully UBI'd even. Right. Because retroing it afterwards, you don't get the same effect.

[Paul Thurot]

That's true. Yeah. Especially if you want something like. Well, I get this is something I'm still. I, I, as part of the testing, I have to do them. Here is the automatic disk encryption stuff. Right. So Windows 11 has always offered that if you sign in with a Microsoft account, Windows on Home, it's just disk encryption. They don't call it bitlocker. You don't get the tools. But it does happen automatically.

[Leo Laporte]

It's RSA, it's the strongest.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. But the 24H2, supposedly that happens even if you don't sign in with a Microsoft account. And I have to test that because I don't quite understand. You need some way to have a Recovery key if you can't get into the computer. So I haven't looked at that yet.

[Richard Campbell]

But you triggered something in me. Now I think if I switch up to Pro, Will recall run.

[Paul Thurot]

Will recall run on a system that doesn't have it today or.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, presuming these copilot plus PCs are on a run recall because somebody said that would happen.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. I don't think it matters if you're in home or pro, so that should.

[Richard Campbell]

Be a good question.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, it's good that there's automatic encryption because the issue is when you throw out or sell or recycle a computer, unless you have it encrypted, your hard drive, you know, very likely is going to be visible to.

[Richard Campbell]

I destroy all the drives before I get rid of the machine.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but most people don't. Right, but if you encrypt it, then it's. It's gibberish no matter what. So for.

[Paul Thurot]

I would say for 90 something percent high 90s, that just happens automatically and no one has to think about it or.

[Leo Laporte]

All phones are that now do that for that reason. Okay, well, so yeah, I'll send it to you. Paul, I'm going to wait till you get back. I don't want to. Should I send it to Mexico City?

[Paul Thurot]

No, no, no, no. I told you my declare story. I don't. The less hardware I fly with, the better, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

So once you get back, let me know when are you coming home for Christmas or.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, for Thanksgiving. So the nine.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, good. I'll send it to you for Thanksgiving. It'll be a wonderful way to celebrate.

[Paul Thurot]

My other turkey for November.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Break out the carving night, kids. We've got the Snapdragon dev kit right here.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right. I want the oyster.

[Leo Laporte]

Mostly I just want to know. I want you to break it. I want to know why they took it back. You want to know that?

[Paul Thurot]

Well, Richard, I think Rich is going to have our first look at that. I'm curious. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm betting there's warranty issues and they didn't want to warranty it. Taking money is a good way to just say I have to warranty well.

[Paul Thurot]

And by the way, putting a sticker on the box that says FCC not compliant is one way to get around being compliant. And we can't sell it, so maybe the fix was too expensive.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, not the same.

[Leo Laporte]

It comes with an HDMI Thunderbolt. HDMI adapters chapter. Yeah, I mean, I'm perfectly happy it doesn't.

[Paul Thurot]

Listen, if you wanted to hold on to that I understand that's worth more than the box.

[Leo Laporte]

I would keep the adapter and you. And you have the rest of it.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm just sitting here with like an HDMI thing hitting the back of the box. Why does this work?

[Leo Laporte]

It's nicely equipped. You know, it's got two USBA ports, two, three type C ports. And by the way, very handily they've numbered them in case you lose track.

[Paul Thurot]

Because you know how important that is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is. Yeah, the numbering is 0, 1 and 2, so I love it. And then they put this hatch, as we showed you last week, on the. On the trans.

[Paul Thurot]

That's my favorite part about it.

[Leo Laporte]

What, like why? I don't understand that.

[Paul Thurot]

You don't want someone sticking a quarter in there by mistake or something.

[Leo Laporte]

There's nothing would fit.

[Paul Thurot]

So stupid.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's cool. I mean it says X Elite on and it has the logo. I mean it is. Anyway, you put that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

If you decide you want to give it away, send it back to me. And postage.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I mean I will use. I'll use it. So I'll explain why. I'll explain how and why. I'll use it later in the show because it's going to come up. Okay. Oh, good.

[Richard Campbell]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's see here. We're only 17 minutes and 50 seconds into the show. We've careful calculations and we have yet to talk about Windows. So let's do it.

[Paul Thurot]

Let's do it. Do you need to take an ad break first?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I need to, but we can.

[Paul Thurot]

Get to maybe the first part here. Yeah, it's like it never happened.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so we have a shared document and foolishly, Paul has given me access, edit access.

[Paul Thurot]

I cringe a little bit every time I see orange text appear in my otherwise pristine document.

[Leo Laporte]

No can move stuff around, pictures. I can do all sorts of stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

To really good stuff. He's deleting my personal photos.

[Leo Laporte]

It's at this point I think Paul thinks of me as a precocious 8 year old.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Annoying him in.

[Paul Thurot]

No. You know, actually what I've learned is it's not just you. Because I share some notions with my wife and I don't like when she touches anything either, so.

[Leo Laporte]

But you were really masterful last week. You could have gotten angry, but you were patient, you were calm. You said click the button. No, the button. The one in the upper left. The button.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, you did that very well.

[Paul Thurot]

The other. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

As I felt as a senior citizen, I was well served by you, Paul.

[Paul Thurot]

So thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Windows 11 week D. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So it's weekday. Right. So we're all really well attuned to the calendar now, thanks to Microsoft and their updating policies. So the Tuesday weekday is when Microsoft puts out their preview updates. And so we did get one as expected, and then we didn't get one as expected. So if you're on 23H2, if you want, you can install next month's patch Tuesday update. Now, if you're on 24H2, there's nothing. But my guess based on history, will get one this week. Right. Some other time. That's how it usually goes. So nothing major to speak of. Well, no, that's not fair. I'm sorry. This will include the copilot key customization feature and settings, which I have to say I'm really looking forward to.

[Richard Campbell]

It is now you can use do anything with the key.

[Paul Thurot]

I type really quickly, but I also type really messily.

[Richard Campbell]

Copilot key. You change the context of everything.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. And it is astonishing how much I must rely on autocorrect, but God, I'm not. This is going to sound impossible, but I bet I launched copilot inadvertently 20 times a day. Plus, there you go.

[Richard Campbell]

See, we need a macrosoft button that counts how many times you hit it as well as do something less than.

[Paul Thurot]

Unbelievable and then followed by control W to kill it. And I bet Microsoft's telemetry from Mexico is going up. They're like, we're seeing a lot of copilot usage in Mexico, guys. You know?

[Leo Laporte]

No, you don't go crazy in Mexico City.

[Paul Thurot]

It must be because the very first demo yousef Maddie ever did was a Mexico City itinerary. Remember the original Bing launch got them all Bing. Yeah. So anyway, useless. Not much else is interesting. I feel like one of these features, it's notification suggestions. I thought that was already in the product. Maybe it's already in 24H2 and not in 23H2. I'm not really sure, but because, you know, if I can't keep track, you know, the Windows virtual keyboard is getting a gamepad now for games, obviously. So that's kind of cool. Virtual gamepad, but that's about it. I mean, it's not too much. Not too much in there.

[Richard Campbell]

And you figured it's 24H2 slightly delayed, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I base that only on the fact that they've done it three, five times this year already. Right. Where they deliver one. Well, there haven't been that many months, so maybe three.

[Richard Campbell]

There's been a lot of quality concerns with 24H2. So it makes me wonder if they're not really tearing it apart trying to figure out what that's going on.

[Paul Thurot]

See, that would assume some form of adult supervision over there. I don't think that's it. I think.

[Richard Campbell]

I think when blue screens and stuff started popping up, the adults showed up and said, what are you kids doing?

[Paul Thurot]

God, you would hope so. I mean, I had a guy write me the other day about the forced Folder backup in OneDrive in Windows 11, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, welcome.

[Paul Thurot]

I said, dude, I sounded the alarm on this over a year ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Was his name Leo?

[Paul Thurot]

Leo? Maybe it was you actually, during the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Good Lord, that was that. I actually am glad I did that because honestly, I just thought you were.

[Paul Thurot]

This is the response I have every time someone. Whether it was December, March, July, now a year later, where someone's like, oh, my God, did you notice? I mean, did I notice I switched to Google Drive because of this? Yeah, I noticed. But it's astonishing to me that they've not fixed this. I mean, made it better. It's on purpose.

[Leo Laporte]

But you. But you did show me that one switch that you can flip and then it just. It stops, it gives up.

[Paul Thurot]

And I mean, I. Yeah, I don't. So I don't. I don't ever do that myself, oddly. I let it do its thing. I feel like sometimes you got to feed the beast, but I. Oh, never feed the beast. No, but I don't. But the thing is, the reason I do that is I don't have anything in those folders, right? So it. Syncing them doesn't matter.

[Leo Laporte]

See, I had 800 gigabytes in there.

[Richard Campbell]

Who put half a terabyte in our solders? I mean, honestly.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, it's still going to do it because I have stuff in the other folders that I made that are outside of that system, but they're still in OneDrive and they still do that little sync thing. It's not because they're downloading the files. They're downloading whatever they call the on demand version of the. The placeholder versions of those files. Right. It has to do that for disk indexing purposes, for search purposes. It's just metadata. So it does. It takes a long time. I mean, I have 880 gigabytes of stuff in there somehow, so it takes a while, but I let it do it because I do want to be able to search and I do want to access those things. But I don't worry about the download part because I don't really have anything there. It's okay. Okay, okay, okay, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

More Armac.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. This week is Qualcomm's big annual event for Snapdragon, Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii and it's a multi day event. So I think there could still be more Windows announcements, including perhaps new chips, right? New generation chips. We'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

It would be awesome if they announced new Snapdragon X chips.

[Paul Thurot]

I think they will. I mean they do. That's where they do it and it's when they do it. So we'll see. But they did last year. That was the original announcement for this one. And my expectation. I don't know anything about it, they haven't briefed me or anything, but that is what I expect. But as we sit here on Wednesday, they've had a couple of momentous days. So on the phone side, they're bringing those Orion cores from the PC chips, the Nuvia based chips to the phone and dramatic performance gains, which is really interesting. Like 40, 50%.

[Richard Campbell]

These will be for Android.

[Paul Thurot]

Crazy. Yes. There were a bunch of little announcements around software and device drivers, which impacts me directly. Although I was really hoping. I was thinking Google said they were bringing Drive to arm. This would have been the time and place. They haven't said it yet, but they did specifically mention the focusrite and the problem. The one hardware issue I have with arm, which is how I will use this device if Leo sends it to me is at home, I'll use it on my desk. It'll be the thing I podcast with. The only reason I don't know is because the focusrite's not compatible and I need that for the microphone.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect. Then I really will send it to you if you're going to use.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean that's, that's how all the users. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, right. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Here in Mexico, I have just a USB microphone. So, you know, that works fine, obviously, but I have the nice Heil Mic at home, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. And when the. And when the Snapdragon Elite developer kit inevitably blows up, it will know because we'll be on the air and.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And when the flames shoot out of it.

[Paul Thurot]

Do you guys smell something funny? We can say it's the sound of a platform dying.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why they discontinued it.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, dark. Very dark.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Gurling did say that the fans are a little overactive. He said he could hear him. I couldn't really hear him.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think that's going to be a problem. But just to be aware of, we'll check some more.

[Paul Thurot]

So the entire time I've been here in Mexico, I've been using the Snapdragon based Surface laptop for all the podcast stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

No problems. It doesn't. There's no fan. There's no. It's great.

[Richard Campbell]

No wind up.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so maybe that's related to what was going on. I mean, it shouldn't need a fan.

[Paul Thurot]

That's the whole point. It does need a fan, unfortunately, but it. Maybe they were just cheap fans or.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it has what it looks like a copper heat pipe. I can see it through the.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, we don't have a single example of a passively cooled Snapdragon X PC. Maybe someday.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And most of the reviewers, including Girling, said it just doesn't hold up. Stand up to the big competition that they're trying to be, which is the Apple Silicon chips.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I. So they're in the. I always use this term. They're in the ballpark. I think the current gen chips compare well with the M3. Right. For the most.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. But on a portable sense, like the efficiency stuff, the battery life stuff, it's great. But it's not as good as the MacBook Air. Right. It's about two.

[Leo Laporte]

And the M4 is going to be out.

[Paul Thurot]

The M4 is going to be a different ballpark. Yeah. So we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

Although I have to say what we've noticed on the Apple side is that most of the benefit was switching to this new ARM platform and that the subsequent updates from M1, 2, 3 and now M4 are minor. Have been.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, the bigger advances come in the form of apps. Well, the OS itself, obviously, but then the app's going native and so as more and more apps go native, you realize more and more benefits. And so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's true in Windows on ARM as well, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

That would be the. That's where you really want to have like a dev machine so that people can get their stuff across.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I should say. Well, you know, we'll see. We have not seen a gen 2, gen 3, whatever on the Snapdragon X.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean now, now you're making a useful point there, Paul, which is maybe they're about to announce a new chip set and there's going to be new dev machines for it. And why are we still trying to ship the old ones?

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, delay really killed.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, that. Actually, that. That makes a lot more sense to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Than almost anything else I've heard. So. Yeah, that could be it. So one of the big things that happened this week was. I mentioned this earlier. I don't know if we were before the show or after, but after it started. But Qualcomm had a call with the press on Monday ahead of the show to talk about Intel. Not to talk about buying intel, but rather to complain about the misleading information that they provided about Lunar Lake at ifa.

[Richard Campbell]

Now, interesting.

[Paul Thurot]

IFA to me was the high point of Intel's year. They released the anti intel core chip in Lunar Lake. They stepped away from all of the things they had done before and did things differently, by the way. Exactly. Mirroring what they had done when they moved from Pentium to the core chipset itself 15, 18 years ago, whenever that was. I mean, I thought their public posture was strong. It was aggressive. Turns out it was at least partially smoke and mirrors. Now, look, it's marketing, right? Obviously, when you make some kind of a product, you want to highlight the things that make you look good and you want to sort of ignore the things that make you look bad. But the types of comparisons that intel did were questionable. So I'm not Saying Qualcomm is 100% right, but they made a really good case that Intel. I mean, at what point does misleading become lying? It's kind of hard to say.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of hysterical because Qualcomm's been doing that year after year after year.

[Paul Thurot]

So I'm going to say the same thing that I would say to someone who complains when Microsoft issues an antitrust complain about someone else, which is that who would know it better than them? We know antitrust violations when we see them. Guys, come on. So, yes, fair enough. But look, it doesn't obviate the fact that what intel did was kind of questionable. So whatever I will say, I'll give credit where it's due. I was not thinking along these lines, but Rich woods brought up, well, what about graphics? I mean, you guys are killing intel all over the place, but you're not killing them on graphics. And to their credit, the guys from Qualcomm were like, no, no, all props to Intel. That is one area where they're nailing it. For Gen1, we needed to hit processor like CPU performance and battery life. That was the big goal. They're looking at GPU 4. They didn't say gen 2, but a future gen. So maybe it is gen 2, maybe it's gen 3, I don't know. But.

[Richard Campbell]

I'd be real generous with Intel's doing really well there because the next thing to say is, wait till you see Our next chip.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, right. When intel announced Meteor Lake late last year, the biggest gain, the single became Core Ultra. The single biggest improvement was the graphics, the integrated graphics. And I tested it at the time in December on just a regular laptop. And it could play games like not, you know, the very latest game on, you know, 60 frames a second at native resolution, but you know, 19 or 1080p, you know, 30, 60 frames a second, whatever good AAA games like it worked. And this was kind of ushering in a new era for that type of performance. And now with Lunar Lake, they pretty much have doubled it again like they did this. It's not just gen over gen, it's like year over year. That's unprecedented. So for all of Intel's problems, and there are many, they really got the GPU stuff right. And AMD was already in a good place. So it's not like AMD is lagging there behind, but Intel's doing great with integrated gpu. Is the one needle in that haystack I can pull out that has like a positive shine to it. So Monday starts with Qualcomm complaining about Intel. Okay, fair enough. Qualcomm announces Orion Kors from the Snapdragon X coming to the phone. Awesome. As expected. Right? And then ARM holding sued Qualcomm again for this licensing problem. Right. So I spent the better part of the morning researching this and didn't uncover anything unexpected or new. But sure enough, it's. What it boils down to is Nuvia had a non transferable license for arm. Qualcomm of course has licenses for arm. ARM believes that Qualcomm has to pay for Nuvia's license or they cannot use those designs. They must throw them away. That's in the agreement. Apparently we don't know that because we don't see the agreement. Right. So all we have to go on.

[Richard Campbell]

You bought this company, but you can't use their tech unless you pay double for the license.

[Paul Thurot]

Right? So this is a lot like any conversation we would have about any company buying intel and what does that Mean to the x86 license that AMD has? And everyone seems to know that they have to throw it away and start over and blah blah, blah, you know. Okay, maybe we know more about that one because I think that case actually did go to court or maybe the settlement they had was public, I'm not sure. But what I do know is that there is no public record of ARMS agreement with Qualcomm. And all we can do is go. All we can go on is what they've said. Qualcomm is very confident that its licenses and IP assets protect it from this claim and that if we go to court, we will win and that the court will see this. So we'll see. My expectation is not that this thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Goes to court now this is settled.

[Paul Thurot]

That they settle courtroom steps.

[Richard Campbell]

Deal. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. If we make this the simplest possible conversation, Qualcomm wants to pay one, ARM wants to charge two, and we're going to meet somewhere in the middle. That's my guess. I also looked this up. So now that a couple things have happened in the interim between the time that Qualcomm started making chips for PCs and today, Apple came out with Apple Silicon M series chips for Macs, raising the bar yet again. I mean, Windows and ARM already look sad and pathetic as it were was. But as soon as that happened, it just exponentially awful. Microsoft was going all 64 bit with Windows 11. It was going to be announced the next year. They wanted to get that going. They wanted X64 and ARM64 to be reasonably identical. And they were nowhere close at the time. Arm, by the way, was going public. So ARM now releases quarterly earnings statements. Yes, arm makes exactly 1 10th as much revenues as Qualcomm. Exactly 1 10th. In fact, last quarter it was literally 1. It was to almost a dollar 110 and 10%. Yep. If like 900 something million versus 9 something billion. Yeah. Just, you know, horrific. So you know, Qualcomm can afford it. I'm saying now it makes sense.

[Richard Campbell]

You really want to play dueling lawyers in this game. Like I don't know this, but the sensible thing here is you don't want the discovery. This is all private information.

[Paul Thurot]

That's exactly right. Those documents that I alluded to earlier that are private and not public, both companies want that to remain true. And the thing is, maybe Qualcomm would pay 1.2 of the 2 or 1.3 or something. I don't know. It is odd to me that ARM has been very vocal. ARM has worked to undermine Qualcomm with its statements a couple of times. Yeah, ARM announced this during Qualcomm's biggest annual event. Come on, you think that's a coincidence? Well, it's, you know, all spare and.

[Richard Campbell]

Whatever, but yeah, you're literally trying to play public opinion in stock price games, in negotiating.

[Paul Thurot]

But here's the thing. I don't know what the percentages of ARMS revenues that come from Qualcomm or the percentage of ARM chips that ship in the world that are Qualcomms. I don't know. It's a big number. Right. Either way, they have to be their biggest partner, slash customer. They have to be. Right. When you as a public company defend yourself against what you perceive to be some sort of a license or IP violation, infringement, you have to. Right. You're legally obligated to protect yourself. You have to. You have to protect your shareholders. However, when you undermine your biggest customer partner and you could materially harm them.

[Richard Campbell]

Your company, in the process, you're har.

[Paul Thurot]

You're harming you.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

And that you're harming. Right. So it's a strange dynamic.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, no. They're both running around with a gun pointed ahead, saying, one move and the idiot gets it right.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, yes. And they're like walking backwards and one of them is going to trip. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

It's very much an ego dance at this point. Or is it a shareholder dance, like you're showing off?

[Paul Thurot]

I would say more.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, we are defending with vigor.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. You're not the first person that. It's interesting you said that. Ego has come up a couple of times. I know people run companies and people have egos, but at the end of the day, this is a publicly traded company and you have to.

[Richard Campbell]

They're a shareholder.

[Paul Thurot]

Egos. Maybe the wrong term. It's. Yes. You have a responsibility to shareholders.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, that's why when I complain about, say, Microsoft being a lot less transparent about their finances, and I will, I could argue in a vague way that that's bad for shareholders because you need to know that information to know how the company's doing, etc. Etc. Someone from Microsoft could just point at the stock price and say, that's all they need to know. Idiot. Who cares? It's going great, you know, So I don't know. It's an interesting thing. It has an interesting history. It's always fascinating when.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I mean, these two are stuck with each other. They're just bickering, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah. They're not. Well, from a size perspective, they're not the same. But ARM has the same hold over Qualcomm in a way that Qualcomm has over it. They both need each other, but if.

[Richard Campbell]

Either harms, either one, both suffer.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. That's the thing. It's the opposite. Like, what do you call it when you have a. Like the little fish latches onto the shark and catches the. The garbage that comes out of his mouth and they have relationship symbiotic symbiotic.

[Richard Campbell]

Thank you.

[Paul Thurot]

So what's a non symbiotic relationship? Is there a term for that? Because it's, it's a. It's weird. It's both.

[Richard Campbell]

I guess it's technically empiric relationship mutualism.

[Paul Thurot]

Is when both parties benefit. Mutual assured arrogance.

[Richard Campbell]

You know they are.

[Leo Laporte]

Kevin, Kevin King, who is a Shark fan.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Watches Shark Week religiously so you can trust him.

[Paul Thurot]

It's more of a shark life actually.

[Leo Laporte]

I think given that you're Mexico City, we should call it a Mexican standoff.

[Paul Thurot]

Well here of course they just call it a standoff.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's. Oh actually you want to do the Orion core thing and then we can do the ad break.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, well we kind of did. So it's not always clear on the outside, I think what is happening here. But the processor cores that are in the Snapdragon X and like all processor types, there's two types. They don't call them efficient and performance. Every company has their own names. I forget what they call them. But if you go back to the original Nuvia acquisition announcement, they paid $1.4 billion for this company, I think it was January 2021. Never mentioned Windows, never mentioned PC. But 50% of the quotes at the bottom of the article are from PC companies and Microsoft. In fact, the top one's from Microsoft. So it was very clearly going to be something that was heading to the PC. And of course they were more explicit about it later. But the other 50% were all mobile companies. Samsung, Google. So it was also always going to go to mobile as well. I think we. In the PC space, I think a lot of people, but a lot of us sort of saw Nuvia as this is them fixing Windows and arm, which is certainly what happened. But it's not just that it was always going to go to the phone as well. And so yeah, yesterday I think it was they announced the. I'm never getting. Their names are so terrible. Snapdragon 8, I think it says 8. I think they're calling it. I remember, who cares. Is their next gen phone chip for phones. Not just phones, phones and tablets.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's. But it's essentially the elite in here.

[Paul Thurot]

Going well it's the same processor. So you know the three parts is the adrenal gpu, there's the MPU which I think is Helix, maybe is the brand they use for that. I don't think those are the same. I think they still have because you have to meet the, you know, efficiency need. This is 3 nanometer GPU.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

CPU. CPU CPU. I mean, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, I've boxed it up ready to go.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. Maybe a little Christmas paper on there. You know, I will.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll wrap it, but I forgot to take my. To wipe it, so. But you know, you know how to do that, right?

[Paul Thurot]

I do know.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I walk you through it?

[Paul Thurot]

You know what? Let's do a special episode. I think Leo. Leo tells Paul how to reset windows. Might be entertaining. Actually, it might be the antidote to that guy's complaint.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm excited about the McConjee Thanksgiving. That's pretty cool.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's a very special.

[Paul Thurot]

My family's gonna be really surprised when they take that lid off the turkey. And it's not what they think.

[Leo Laporte]

Greg Priestley, you stay tuned because that's coming up. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Poor guy. You were right. We're not. Greg, we're agreeing with you.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, no, I could feel it happening. I was like, oh, yeah, Paul said it. This is not going to sound good, baby.

[Leo Laporte]

This is bad. A little plug for Club Twit here. Kevin, who is, as I mentioned, a Shark fan and loves Shark Week, has just told us he does not have a tv. Can't afford a TV now. That's why it's so very important.

[Paul Thurot]

Can we get a tip jar going.

[Leo Laporte]

For him that you join Club Twit. Because if you join Club Twit, this young man will be able to watch Shark Week once again. I don't know.

[Paul Thurot]

We don't have a way to show Kevin.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess I do.

[Paul Thurot]

He's Kevin sitting there in his underwear in his house.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm younger than you.

[Paul Thurot]

Imagine one of these guys, but like 25 younger.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, okay. Club Twit is our. Is our little, little membership club. We do it through memberful. And, you know, one of the things that's great about Club Twit is it's a great community of people who listen to our shows. And we just love it. I know we now have about 655 people watching on our live streams, on YouTube and Twitch and Kik and X and everywhere. And all of you, some of you are anywhere seeing it for the first time, saying, you know, it's pretty good. We would like you to join the club because it is pretty good. We've got lots of shows. They're ad free. When you're in the club, you get access to the Discord where you could chat with other members, other winners and dozers. You can also see stuff that we don't normally put out in public like our Stacy's Book Club. Coming up Friday, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern. Stacy and I will talk about a brand new sci fi book that Jason Snell, our MacBreak weekly host said is the best book of the year. Adrian Tchaikovsky's service model. You know what, you, if you get it right now, you could probably finish it before Friday and join us to discuss it. I also did a coffee thing. Yes. Last week and I think we're gonna do more of those including a tasting with Mark Prince, the coffee geek and Sarah Dooley from beans.com and she says she's gonna put together a little tasting kit. So we'll, we'll fill you in on that. That'll be a club only thing. But the thing about those, you can watch them live, everybody can watch them live. But we make them available to club members only on the Twitter feed. So that's another benefit. Seven bucks a month. I mean that's a lot of podcasts. Charge that much for one show. That's for everything. And it really does help us keep the lights on. None of it goes into my pocket. It's really to keep people like Kevin and our great team working and keep putting out these shows and Paul and Richard and everybody. So Twit TV club. Twit. Okay, thanks in advance. Meanwhile, let me continue with a word from our sponsor and then we'll get back to Paul and Richard and the Windows Weekly our show today brought to you. I just met these guys last week and I was so blown away. I don't know if you've ever heard of them. I hadn't. US Cloud, you may want to hear about them. They're the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. They do it better for less than Microsoft. US Cloud is the global leader in third party Microsoft enterprise support. 50 of the Fortune 500 uses US Cloud. And that's because switching to US Cloud can save. You can save your business 30 to 50%. That's on a true comparable replacement for Microsoft unified support. US Cloud supports the entire Microsoft stack 24, 7, 365 days a year. They respond faster, they resolve tickets quicker for clients all over the world. And you will always talk to real humans and fast too. Check out their proven track record expert level engineers with an average of 14.9 years. 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HP, Affleck, Dun and Bradstreet, Under Armour, KeyBank. Even the IT folks at Gartner have chosen US Cloud for their Microsoft support. Here's a great quote. This is from a director of Information technologies. It was an interview I heard, it was really cool. He says, I'll try to channel him. And within an hour US Cloud responded with, I want to say, four engineers. So not only did they bring the right guys to the call, but they brought the cavalry. I just felt like, wow, that was amazing. That was unlike anything I had experienced with Microsoft in my eight years being with Premier. We made the right choice. That's a great quote from a person really there, right? Really on the front line. And of course, when it comes to compliance, no one gets it better than US Cloud. ISO, gdpr, ESG compliance. They're not just regulatory requirements, but strategic imperatives that drive operational efficiency, legal compliance, risk management and their corporate reputation. 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[Paul Thurot]

Oh my God. What?

[Leo Laporte]

What? Did I shock?

[Richard Campbell]

You got a good shock look out of Paul there. It was a good one.

[Paul Thurot]

Three things just happened in sequence like a. If the Discord people could stop distracting me, please. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, animated gifts. There is that the problem?

[Paul Thurot]

I just clicked on a link in the thing. It opened in the wrong browser. Then I went to close it. I closed the notes and I'm like, I'm done. I just don't. I don't know how to use computer anymore. I don't know what's going on.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I don't blame you. You know what? If I saw this, I would be a little bit baffled as well. What is this? Yeah, look at that.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, I know. This is what happens. See, this is what happens with the, with the.

[Leo Laporte]

Too much coffee. You're talking about coffee, right?

[Paul Thurot]

I get into it, you know, stop being interesting. What's wrong with you?

[Leo Laporte]

Easily.

[Paul Thurot]

I am.

[Leo Laporte]

You see, these are the club members. They're. They're great. They're really fun in there. Get on in there. Get on. That's funny. All right, enough of. Enough of that.

[Paul Thurot]

What were we talking? I forgot.

[Leo Laporte]

What were we talking about?

[Richard Campbell]

It's Insider time.

[Paul Thurot]

So in the past week there have been two bells. Unless I missed something. Devin Canary. Neither one is particularly interesting. But the only thing to really know is that both of them feature at least one feature that is in that week D update that went out Tuesday. So they're already kind of behind the times, if you will. More interestingly, Microsoft announced separately in separate posts, which I thought was actually interesting, to keep reusing words, two new features that will go out across various channels in the Insider program. And one of them is actually unstable, at least for me. I went and looked at the Snapdragon system I have here and I have this feature which is on October 1st or 2nd, Microsoft announced a bunch of kind of wave 2 copilot plus PC features. One of them was a feature called Super Resolution for the Photos app. So the Photos app already has background blur.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know how you feel about these names.

[Paul Thurot]

God. Super resolved. Right? So this, when they. This was one of the announcements that I was like, you know, I could actually use this feature. I really could use this. I have old photos that are often low res. Like my dad scan them in many cases has no idea what he's doing obviously. And they're just low res. Right. So I thought this would be kind of cool. And I have it. I for some reason this is in my. On my stable 24H2 machine. It was supposed to be rolling out to the Insider program, but like I said, I already have it. So cool. It's in addition to the stuff that's there. Background blur, remove and replace is in Photos regardless of Copilot PC There's a restyle image feature which is. I can't remember. I think it's unique to Copilot PC, I think. And this is the one where you have an image of some kind of photo and you can redo it using generative AI in the style on it.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

An impressionistic painting or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go. Make it a Monet.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And now they have super, super resolution. So I tried this on eight different images. I got the same results every time, which some people are telling me is actually what I should expect. But the image I used in my article was me wearing orange clothes at age 5 ish and survived a house fire. Yeah, well, it was the 70s. I mean, we were all doing it. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Everybody wearing orange.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I was heading out to Studio 51 or whatever, or 57.

[Richard Campbell]

We just got rid of our black and white world. So of course you're wearing orange.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's right.

[Paul Thurot]

That's a good point. That's right. Well, I mean with the. With the green matching couch behind me, you know, if I'm not mistaken, the.

[Richard Campbell]

Harvest gold shag carpet. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a very similar picture, Paul, actually. Yeah, yeah, I like it.

[Paul Thurot]

But you're wearing it now.

[Leo Laporte]

So I have that couch right behind.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, actually I do have that couch. So yeah, you can super scale it or upscale it to 8x. Right. So I did. And the same results. So to me, the quality of the image isn't any better, but some people are telling me. Yeah, well, that's the point. Right. I thought it was same image, just 8s bigger, which, you know, honestly is still very useful, but based on their original description, it should also improve the quality.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So resolution is not so super.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, There you go. Right. It's. Yeah, they implemented that half of it, so.

[Leo Laporte]

But that is better. I mean, if you blew it up this big, it's humongous.

[Paul Thurot]

I can't remember the exact pixel, kind of, but I think it. Maybe it's in the article, but it's. It is, it's very big, but it's still blurry and out of focus a little bit. Whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's good to know what the.

[Richard Campbell]

What the little sharp contrast fix.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You buy a Photoshop, wiz could take this into Photoshop.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I mean, I have used tools online to do this from time to time. This particular image I'm going to forget because I did so many of them, but this one only took a few seconds. There was one, it went for two minutes. Wow. You know, but it runs off the MPU I know. A long time and it didn't look any better. But being able to do this locally is great.

[Richard Campbell]

Honestly, anytime I can pin an NPU is a good day for me. Right. Like I'm just gonna run.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna actually search my photo collection for images under a certain resolution and I'm gonna play with this.

[Richard Campbell]

Make that MPU work. It's been laying around.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, you lazy second. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Just take it. Homework for you, kid. Let's go. Yeah, I like it. So there's more to come. They announced several other features, so we weren't expecting anything until November. And that was going to be.

[Richard Campbell]

This is the AI we deserve. Right? Is improvements in existing software.

[Paul Thurot]

May you always get the AI you deserve.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Paul Thurot]

Is a good proverb or something. It's not a product, it's in a fortune cookie.

[Richard Campbell]

It's msg.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

You just sprinkle a little yum yum on it.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. Right. The white dust falls out of the cookie, the building clears and then there's something about Copilot plus in there for some reason. So the other one is Microsoft Store Update, which is not super interesting, unfortunately, but just a more immersive trailer experience. So if you've ever looked through games, especially in the store, usually it kind of plays in the background of the page and that kind of thing. I don't know. Who cares? That's not super interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

So more seizures. More seizure inducing.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Right. Ye. For the people who have no attention span whatsoever. We're going to do everything we can to make this distract you further. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So that's that. A couple of AI type things and. Yeah, mostly actually all Microsoft related. Oh no. Leo had a nice break in there, so there's a lot. I moved it again.

[Leo Laporte]

You guys are. You're throwing me off.

[Paul Thurot]

I know. I don't know why. I don't know why I'm calling it out. I'm sorry. I want people to share in my sharing your suffering, my reaction or whatever. So there was a report in the New York Times detailing all of. Well, not all of some of the behind the scenes maneuvering that's occurring between Microsoft and OpenAI. I think it's fair to say they don't have the healthiest relationship. Oh my God.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, Microsoft, horrified by what happened with Sam Altman last November, I think it was. Obviously it had no warning that this was coming. No idea that it could happen. And then we saw the result. They created their own in house AI. It's not a division. It's weird. The wording on it is kind of strange. It kind of exists outside of the normal Microsoft divisions. Right. With yes. Coming over from inflection with basically kind of like Nokia. It's like we didn't buy Nokia. You know, we didn't buy people. But we did, didn't we? You know like we kind of got it. All right. So you know it's interesting. Microsoft has done it.

[Richard Campbell]

Remember there was that moment during the Sam Altman crazy where Sam was going to come join Microsoft and all. That's right. We're going to go with them. Maybe we've made a boo boo.

[Paul Thurot]

Maybe a little boo. Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

And I was talking about dark sachet because I like a dark sachet.

[Paul Thurot]

The good old days of Microsoft. I miss it. It would be like if they made a good Star wars prequel, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

But let's not get crazy now. Mr.

[Paul Thurot]

I will say the ease at which people come and go from OpenAI should be disturbing.

[Richard Campbell]

And by come and go you mean go.

[Paul Thurot]

Mostly go. Well, Sam Altman came back but yes, I think, I don't know this never left.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you kidding? He never went anywhere.

[Paul Thurot]

Well but if you look at the.

[Leo Laporte]

Core leadership of the company and Satya.

[Paul Thurot]

I think they've all left at one point or another. I think they all.

[Leo Laporte]

Mira Marati just left and she's.

[Paul Thurot]

That's what I mean. I mean she was. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The best idea was Altman's replacement pro tem replacement.

[Paul Thurot]

You definitely wanted her as the public face. She was well spoken face of the 40 unlike you know Mr. I am a human. I am not a, not a robot. You know. Yeah. Okay. Okay Sam, go recharge. You know kind of a weird guy but of course AI, he would be so yeah. This company is scary and it could destroy the industry or could just implode. It's like a black, a black hole. I don't know what's going to happen.

[Richard Campbell]

Here but obviously the biggest integrator I've gotten here is they're trying to restructure into a normal company so they can go public.

[Paul Thurot]

A normal company like this was that.

[Leo Laporte]

Weird charter where they were partly nonprofit, partly for profit. Then they realized oh this is really expensive. We can't be a non profit.

[Richard Campbell]

It doesn't make sense.

[Leo Laporte]

And then $167 billion.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So I wonder if as a cap table is coming together these senior people are not getting the cut they want.

[Leo Laporte]

And so they're going To Sam Allman has famously said. He's famously said, I don't take any money. I have no stake in this.

[Paul Thurot]

But, Leo, I mean, you say that. We can't believe.

[Leo Laporte]

I do say that.

[Paul Thurot]

I.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, with me, it's true.

[Paul Thurot]

I'll show you.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll show you the check.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm telling. I'm sure he doesn't fly commercial. I mean, he must be taking some money. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve Jobs famously got paid a dollar a year.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yeah. He did okay for himself. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But they gave him a G5, so.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, he wasn't barefoot, living in the woods.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no. And a new Mercedes every. Whatever.

[Paul Thurot]

The police ran out every parking in a handicap spot.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So I don't know. Look, Microsoft has done everything they can this past year to lessen their reliance on OpenAI. OpenAI has likewise started partnering with a lot more companies, which they were always able to do. This was not something Microsoft knew and no surprise, but things are lining up a little differently here. And I think it all was triggered by that Sam Altman episode a year ago. Well.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's what. He also got the observer seat. But now that's gone away, too.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there's even more at play than that because this turns out this AI is very, very expensive.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

It isn't. The hockey stick that they were kind of claiming it was going to be. There is a raise, a ton of money.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You also got to make a product. Right. Like, weird.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I don't think at this point they're saying.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, if you're suggesting any profit until we're not worth $13 million, I have an argument to make to the contrary. No. So I don't know. It's. Microsoft's investment is sound. That's fine. Everyone. Apple talks about putting money in.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. They're just putting Azure credits in for the most part.

[Paul Thurot]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Or no.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, because. No, because OpenAI is worth so much now that if they sold their stake or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

They would come out ahead by.

[Leo Laporte]

Till it's not.

[Paul Thurot]

I know, but that's the secret of investing.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the problem. Get into the right paper because you can't sell, you can't capitalize on it, or you tank the company.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

And so really, it's a long bet.

[Paul Thurot]

On the ARM Qualcomm problem. We'll see what happens. It's interesting. Microsoft has the resources to do AI themselves in the old days. This is a little bit like the Team story where Gates kind of came out and said, guys, we already have these things in place. Why aren't we just doing this? You could make the same argument with AI, I think, as of now, I think they're pretty much there. I'd imagine we'll find out soon enough, I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

Especially when you keep bleeding talent like they've been bleeding. Suleiman is gone, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, Suleiman is the guy.

[Richard Campbell]

Sorry, not Suleiman.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. Their top leadership from a year ago. Who's left? I mean, most of the board's gone, you know, obviously.

[Richard Campbell]

And look, if you're one of those founding players and you're leaving open AI, something's seriously wrong. Like, this is supposed to be your win.

[Paul Thurot]

You're leaving open AI now?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You were there at the beginning. You've got founder stakes. Or you should have had founder stakes. You should be looking at this, going, I'm about to cash in billions.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Instead, the good. Well, I think we don't know what their situation is, the company, obviously, but these people are very valuable right now, and you could argue that they're.

[Richard Campbell]

I think they're getting offers that are unbelievable. But more importantly, Altman's not locking them in, they're getting. Showing them. Here's your position. Here's what you stand to make. Stay here and make great things.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, it could be the old Patriots playbook. It doesn't matter who the player is. We have the plan and it will work. It works. Until it doesn't work.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Until there's nobody left. And I'm trying to figure out who's, like, who's even going to turn off the lights at this point, Right?

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know. Elon Musk, probably. So this is just a Minor story, but OpenAI released an early version of ChatGPT for Windows, which by all accounts is just a web app. Whatever. But I will just point out that it came several months after it released native apps or apps for Mac and iPhone. And why did we spend $13 billion on this thing for it?

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little weird, isn't it? I mean, you have a web app.

[Paul Thurot]

But, I mean, like, just realistically speaking, aren't most of your users on Windows? I know it's weird, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, but we just use the web, right? We just use the.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, no, but. Yeah, but why even put out a Mac app? Why would you even make.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't understand why you put out an app, to be honest.

[Paul Thurot]

Maybe they're trying. This might have been about courting Apple. Actually, that might explain.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. Because of course, Apple doesn't have any AI yet, but will.

[Paul Thurot]

And they're partnering with them on the Siri stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

They have Apple Intelligence someday.

[Leo Laporte]

Next week, the first Apple intelligence arrives. And it's just a little tiny bit of intelligence.

[Paul Thurot]

It's a little intelligent. But next year they should have called it Apple Flowers for Algernon. You know, we'll see. But I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

That's an obscure reference. I hope you all. You got to be as smart, literate person to understand.

[Paul Thurot]

Maybe I don't know. Charlie. Charlie. For you movie lovers.

[Leo Laporte]

Charlie.

[Paul Thurot]

Not the ads. You know, it's Charlie. Not those. Not that Charlie. I'm all over the map today. Sorry. Okay, so we've talked a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me just tell you something from the other side of 60. Pretty soon all your references fall on deaf ears because I'm going to run through.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm weaving. Okay. So last year the big conversation here around AI was the stuff from Build and Stevie Batiste talking about the three app models for AI and Copilot being the first one. Copilot is this. Yeah. And the beside the app thing is interesting and it's the right way to come to market. You already have this thing. You use Microsoft Word, maybe, or Windows, whatever it is. And we can make it better by this thing on the side. That's Copilot. That will work with you and kind of work within the app that you're using. Microsoft. Now, I mentioned the Copilot PC wave 2, but before that they also had a Copilot. Really? Microsoft 365 Copilot wave 2 announcement. And they started reusing. But let's say they started using the term agents. And I'm starting to think this is kind of the second phase, if you will, of this push that Microsoft's making. Right. That Copilot is this thing that works with you. So it's kind of sitting there waiting for you to command it. And then agents are basically these background processes or I guess, services that work for you. Yeah. And that can get really intelligent. It's simple when you think about it. It's like a price alert on an item you want to buy.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Ping me when it hits a certain number and I will buy it then that kind of thing. It's obvious. Right? Like this is. I. I think this is going to.

[Richard Campbell]

Be, I would argue, buy it. If it hits this price, then let me know you've done it.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, There you go. Fair enough. Yeah. I mean that could be one way you could write like a stock price or something. You know, buy, buy, buy, whatever. Yeah, I mean that's right. That would be one of the. Yeah. So the, the first agent products for businesses, but call it for end users if you will, are coming out of Dynamics. So I fell asleep. I didn't really pay attention to any of it.

[Richard Campbell]

But that's a multi billion dollar business, Paul. I'm going to run the chunk of the world.

[Paul Thurot]

I hear you. I'm sure you're right. I will accept that as a fact.

[Richard Campbell]

Both guys, it's really important.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. Well. And those guys both have a C in their title, so it's okay. It is important.

[Richard Campbell]

It's erp, CRM and serious accounting software. Like it's not sexy, but it's important.

[Paul Thurot]

I am not disagreeing. I'm not disagreeing with anything you're saying.

[Leo Laporte]

The problem is the word business. Because Paul didn't like that.

[Paul Thurot]

It's not business. Some business. I'm okay with some of it. It's just the dynamic CRM. Geez.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's dynamic.

[Paul Thurot]

So like I just stop. I mean, but, but look, it's going to come everywhere and I haven't. I will. I may not write about this or not. We'll see. But I'm going to. I'll just talk about it. Now this reminds me of the Hailstorm part of the original Net go to market vision which didn't end up happening.

[Richard Campbell]

We've just been declared a pernicious monopoly. Let's ask everyone for their credentials.

[Paul Thurot]

Exactly. Now by the way, Hailstorm was actually a great idea. Maybe they weren't able to capitalize it at the time. We are in a much better place technologically for this to make sense today obviously. And I think AI in the same way that AI kind of makes search make sense. Right. By not solving search by just forgetting about the traditional ways we would try to find things. Forget about metadata.

[Richard Campbell]

Why would you do that anymore? When you have an answer.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, we're just going to do this other thing. I think this can have the same impact. So for example, I'll just keep using the price thing. People will install some sort of a extension in their browser to do like Amazon price comparisons or something. Yeah, there's no end too small.

[Richard Campbell]

Why would I use Amazon? I have a device that goes looking for prices for a product, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. So this is potentially disruptive. It's.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Again, it's a sleeper.

[Richard Campbell]

I would have gone to Amazon because it's convenient for me, but I've got software that's going to thumb all the sites. That's right, Amazon.

[Paul Thurot]

Listen, I know I'm not alone in this one. The doorbell rings. It's a package from Amazon. I ordered it. I have no idea.

[Richard Campbell]

I just don't know what it is.

[Paul Thurot]

I would say 75% of the time I'm not expecting it. It's a surprise. It's like a little Christmas every day or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Imagine what it's going to be like with AI show up two years later. Right. You just know. I know, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. I've had that happen.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

But I in the world of tomorrow, my doorbell is going to ring, I'm going to open it and it's going to be a mountain of boxes there and it's going to be. Because AI bought a bunch of stuff for me and said. But you said, you said, you know, to do this thing at this time, I'm like, okay, that's right. I didn't mean buy all the things. I just. So we'll see how this goes. But I think it's going to be big. I really do. I think this is.

[Richard Campbell]

Now I need the agentic based return.

[Paul Thurot]

System and I like that you have just tried to normalize the word agentic.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah. No, they've been using it like crazy and I giggle it.

[Paul Thurot]

If you say it enough in casual conversation. We're just going to accept it as a word and. Which I guess is how it happens. Agentic. It's like agentic. Is it like we take it out, doctor? No, no, it's. It's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

It's agentic.

[Paul Thurot]

It's agentic. Oh no. Am I how belong to how? It's smarter, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

You know.

[Paul Thurot]

No, no, you misunderstand.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. Now I do want to take a little break. You're watching Windows Weekly. It's Paul Thurod and Richard Campbell. Paul's doing the play by play. Richard's the color man today.

[Paul Thurot]

I like it's a who's on first route.

[Leo Laporte]

As long as the color is brown, as in brown liquor, I think we're happy with that.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

That's coming up.

[Richard Campbell]

Somebody asked me the other day about my role of Windows Weekly. It's like Paul does all the writing and I make fun of it.

[Paul Thurot]

Honestly, it's just a formal formalization of our normal relationship. Yeah, it's scheduled now.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll be back with more in just a bit. First, a word from our sponsor. And the word is in intelligence.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. What? Make your.

[Leo Laporte]

Make your own Joke up now. Well, it's brought to you, we're brought to you today by Flashpoint. Okay, you know what? Governments have intelligence agencies, right? To gather intelligence about what's going on in the world. I think businesses need something similar for security leaders in business today. 2024 has been a year like no other. Cyber threats and physical security concerns have continued to increase. Now geopolitical instability is adding a new layer of risk and uncertainty. How do you plan in a world on fire? Well, by the way, I got some stats that's gonna, that's gonna set your hair on fire. Last year there was a staggering 84% rise in ransomware attacks. 84% last year. Data breaches went up 34% last year. That's trillions of dollars in financial losses, threats to safety worldwide. That's why you need Flashpoint. Flashpoint. Flashpoint empowers organizations to make the mission critical decisions that will keep their people and their assets safe. It does this by combining cutting edge technology with the expertise of world class analyst teams. It's your own intelligence agency. And with Ignite, Flashpoint's award winning threat intelligence platform, you get access to critical data, finished intelligence alerts and analytics all in one place. You can maximize your existing security investments and plan for what's happening in the next few months, in the next year, in the next 10 years. Some Flashpoint customers avoid as much as $500 million in fraud loss every year. Half a billion dollars. And many report a huge ROI. Something like 482% ROI in six months. No wonder Flashpoint earned Frost and Sullivan's 2024 Global Product Leadership Award for unrivaled threat data and intelligence. I have a quote from a senior vice president of Cyber operations at a big U.S. financial institution. You would know their name. They said Flashpoint. There's a direct quote. Flashpoint saves us over $80 million in fraud losses every year. Their proactive approach and sharp insights are crucial in keeping our financial institutions secure. They're not just a solution, they're a strategic partner helping us stay ahead of cyber threats. It's no wonder Flashpoint is trusted by both mission critical businesses and governments worldwide. Not everybody's got the CIA, but you can always get Flashpoint. Here's the deal. To access the industry's best threat data and intelligence, visit Flashpoint IO today. That's Flashpoint IO. We thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly. Now with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell, let's continue on with something exciting.

[Richard Campbell]

More copilot.

[Paul Thurot]

Still convinced that you're just like secretly messing with me all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

I am secretly not so secret. Secretly not so secretly.

[Richard Campbell]

All the gaslighting all the time.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, sometimes the conspiracies are true. So I don't have this in the notes.

[Richard Campbell]

They aren't after you.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right. Microsoft added handoff support to its Office apps on Mac, iPhone and iPad today. I believe I just saw that headline flash by. So I haven't looked at that yet. But. But separate from that, they released new versions of Copilot. Sorry, new versions of OneNote on Mac and iPad that include Copilot. Because Copilot has to be in everything.

[Richard Campbell]

Everything.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, you got your co pilot in my peanut butter.

[Richard Campbell]

Not a lot of love for OneNote these days, but if you need a Copilot, we got that.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Yeah. Maybe it could make it work. Like Notion. Is that a thing? Does it do that? Because if it does.

[Richard Campbell]

Because goodness knows, Loop doesn't.

[Paul Thurot]

She's Loop. Loop. What is this Loop you speak of?

[Richard Campbell]

What is this Loop you speak of? I'm using both. And it's like having the worst of both worlds.

[Paul Thurot]

Loop is the Zune of notion. I know. I'm sorry I said that.

[Richard Campbell]

So I've now come to appreciate I actually have to open my phone while I'm still using Loop on my PC to be sure that everything that's on my PC shows up in my phone. It's just like, the sink's not that reliable. It's bad.

[Paul Thurot]

I am. Okay, I'm going to say this against my better judgment, but there have been a few moments, maybe more than a few this year, where I've done something on, like, the Apple side and it's just worked. And I sort of, you know, thought about the life of waste I've had. But. So I just. I finally wrote my iPhone review yesterday, or published my iPhone review yesterday, and one of the last things I had to do was get some screenshots off of it to put it in the review.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

And I attached it with a USB cable, an Apple USB cable to my PC and I got this message that's been popping up a lot lately. It says the USB port may not provide enough power for the device. You just connected. Try connecting it to power Now. This is an iPhone. I don't understand what are you talking about? Of course it provides enough power. I spent a better part of this week with another device going from PC to PC trying to find one that had a USB port that was providing enough power, and I never did. So I had to go through a USB powered separately USB hub to make that happen. I'm not going to do that for the iPhone. So I started to think, how could I do this? Do I email these to myself? How do I do it? It? And I thought, wait a minute, there's an icloud website. Maybe I could just get them from there. So I went to the icloud website, signed in, sure enough, there they were. I downloaded them. Great. And then I realized I needed one more. So I took the screenshot on the iPhone and as I did it, something moved on the screen in front of me. I looked over and it appeared immediately in the icloud website.

[Richard Campbell]

Immediately.

[Paul Thurot]

Think about that. Think about what I just said. I mean, the reason you have to think about it is because you probably use OneDrive. And what I just said is ludicrous. It's science fiction. But it just worked. And that is astonishing to me. Yep. So I'm sorry I said it. Please delete that part of the podcast. I don't want anyone to hear that. Okay. This is irritating. Like, whatever. The thing I don't use works great. It's like the story of my life, I think. It's like when you get in the wrong line. What's the wrong line? The one I got in?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, now let me crap on Apple. So there was, you know, there's a meme this year about how Apple is two years behind in AI. Right, Right. And Bloomberg semi confirmed it. Mark Gurman, citing several sources inside the company. There is some consensus that that's the time for that. They're two years behind. Now this might be an overt marketing campaign on Apple support. I know. That's the. What does it really mean to be behind? Right. So if it means shipping, okay, maybe. But maybe shipping isn't the greatest thing in the world.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know. Richard has shipped so far.

[Paul Thurot]

You got your Pixel. You have your Pixel 9, right. You didn't travel to Europe at the time. Right. So you flew safely in a plane. Everything's good?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. No more swelling.

[Paul Thurot]

You must have. Did you get the. You get like a Gemini thing for a year for free or whatever? Did you get that deal?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So your phone is exploding with AI and dripping, dripping, dripping. Okay. It's sopping stuck to my shoe. Yes. So that's one way to do it, right? Yeah. Does it compile? Yeah. Put it in there. Who cares? So I think between the two, maybe there's a happy medium, but we're going to see. I will say the one thing Apple has gotten right is they've started talking about how they're behind and they're doing it a really smart way. There's a beautiful.

[Richard Campbell]

It's an expectation setter.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah, that's a good point. It's marketing. Right. But you know, Tim Cook did an interview, I think with the Wall Street Journal or wherever it was. Wall Street Journal doesn't matter. Who cares? It doesn't matter. But he said, look, Apple doesn't. We're not ever first, we would like to be best, you know, and. Okay, that's good. Pithy. You know, Craig Federighi, though, this is a beautiful quote. He says those other chatbots are great if you want to ask a question about quantum mechanics and then have them write a poem about it. Nice. Oh, that is so good. But he says they won't open your garage or send a text message. And that's.

[Richard Campbell]

By the way, mine does. I've set it up. Use the OpenAI interface through Home Assistant. It does my.

[Paul Thurot]

You're ruining the quote. The quote was funny. No, I. But his point is that they're looking at real world use case and actual customer benefit. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, this is exactly what we expect from Apple.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. And exactly what we should expect.

[Richard Campbell]

Anything at all. But I think they freaked out. I think they, they realized if we don't say the WWDC now, we're not going to say it till next year.

[Paul Thurot]

I know. And then we look like we're out till lunch. Exactly. Yeah. So they had to. Yes, they had to. They're hand.

[Richard Campbell]

But I don't think they were ready. I don't think they had anything to show. I don't. I think they were anywhere 100.

[Paul Thurot]

True. I mean, and I also think that.

[Richard Campbell]

Now that they're looking at it harder, they're going, oh, oh my, this is a mess. There was positioning.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. I mean, I think at the beginning in June there was some expectation that obviously iOS 18 is going to ship with something, you know. No. And then. Well, I mean, not related to AI, but they're like, okay, well we'll have 0.1, 0.2 by the end of the year. Good. They're talking about 0.4 now, right. Craig Federighi in that interview talks about this. This is a years long thing, by the way. That's realistically true. Of course it is.

[Richard Campbell]

Because that's what you need to do when you haven't actually started writing anything yet.

[Paul Thurot]

They're waiting for the AI to be good enough to write it for them. No, I don't. So whatever, we'll see. So sometime by next WWDC we'll all be watching this with these AI powered iPhones or something, I don't know. And they'll be in a better place. But the one thing they do get right is that thing I just told that story about these. I am often aggravated about things that happen in Windows. Right. I think this is not news to anybody. I've ranted a time or two. But the opposite of that, which is something I can only imagine, it's not something I experience that much, is when little things happen and they delight you and it happens. I mean, don't get me wrong, it does happen, but it's amazing. I mean Apple, they're pretty good at it. Just give credit where it's due. So two years behind. What? Two years behind chaos. I mean, that's okay. Yeah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

The one thing they can't do is come out poorly.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, right, right. Well, it makes sense.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what they do.

[Paul Thurot]

They wait, they've, they never did it right. There are things like, like Apple Maps is a good example of them coming up poorly and doing pretty well in the, in the long run now it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Great by the way.

[Paul Thurot]

It's pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

Reliable.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I still, I, I get in a car and I can't bring myself to put Apple Maps up. You know, I just, that's. I don't know, maybe it's me.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a lot of anecdotal evidence.

[Paul Thurot]

That it's quite good.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact in some cases better than Google Maps. I've actually started using it in lieu of Google Maps.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurot]

But you use. Partly.

[Leo Laporte]

That's because how do we trust you? This is the delight you were talking about, Paul. It shows up on my watch, as you know, it buzzes my wrist when it's time to turn on my car. It shows up in the heads up display. I mean it's all of that integration works so nicely.

[Paul Thurot]

Let me give you the contrary. I was eating lunch today, my wrist buzzed. I looked down and it was a notification for Google Maps, which is interesting because I'm not mapping anything and I swear to God I'm not making this up. I looked on my phone to see what it was and it said, hey, we're working on your timeline over here and there's a gap. Can you tell us what you were doing during that time?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh my God, that's priority.

[Paul Thurot]

Yikes.

[Leo Laporte]

What were you doing on the night of December 5, 1990?

[Paul Thurot]

Who's that? What are you. What Are you literally asking me to provide personal information about myself? Can you believe that? So I guess we have a gap.

[Richard Campbell]

In our stocking of you. Can you fill it for me?

[Leo Laporte]

I was driving to a friend's and she said, oh, Google Maps will take you down this street. Don't do that. Keep going to go down this street. And I thought, oh, interesting. I'll try Apple Maps. Apple Maps. Got it. Right. So I don't think there used to be. Would always get.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm not gonna. I'm not arguing on Google's behalf, but I suspect because Google is so widely used and including Waze. Right. All the data.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there's a lot more.

[Paul Thurot]

Part of the way that they do things is to make it good for groups of people, not just for you. Like in other words, we're gonna send some people this way, some people this way.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interesting. I think see what happens.

[Paul Thurot]

They think they did not see what happened. Well, well, maybe I always got but to kind of normalize the traffic a little bit so it's better overall. But it may not be the most efficient thing for you personally. Maybe I'm making this up. I don't actually know.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

That's what it feels like socialism software. Okay. I was going to say whatever the. Like it's like taking crowdsourcing and turning it back on the crowd almost. It's just we know what's best. It's a theory of mine. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

It's interesting. No, it would make sense.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, you. You get a phone, you have to. On an app by app basis. Like am I going to let this thing send me notifications so you have something like Uber. Like obviously I want Uber notifications. These are important. Your driver's here. Your drive is a minute away, whatever it is. But those are not the notifications I get. I get notifications for Uber eat every day. You can't turn that off. You can. We live in a bizarre world.

[Leo Laporte]

It's getting worse.

[Paul Thurot]

You know what? This is a topic in here, isn't it? Yeah. This is actually literally the next topic. So I Let me quickly just blow through this because Google sued by Epic, lost, ordered to open up Play Store, blah, blah, blah, whatever. We all know this. Obviously they're going to stay that order so that they can appeal. And that's what happened in the judge in the case. The judge who issued issued the edict decided that this was the right thing because of course it is. You can't give Google 60 days. You know, I don't care how Big and powerful you are. You can't just change everything like that. So I do believe they're guilty, but I also do believe they gave him three years, though.

[Leo Laporte]

He said you have till 2027.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But really is go negotiate, make a deal.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Which, by the way, during the trial is what he told them to settle this case. Yep. It would be in Google's best interest to settle this case in the long run. But what I wanted to get to was. I don't know if you guys noticed, but there's been a lot of weird stuff about Windows Updates in Windows 11 this year. Have I mentioned it? I think it's come up a time or two. No. And I feel like 50% of what I talk about now or think about or look at and wonder about is how Microsoft releases updates, which is really just a futile undertaking because there's no way to rationalize it or understand it. I don't think they do. I think they just. Just make it up as they go along. But it is very interesting to me that if you look at the mobile space this year, it's been just as chaotic. We talked about Apple intelligence and their need to get that out the door and announce it even when it wasn't ready. And now being very explicit about we're going to do this now this and then this and that. Very unusual. And then Google the second year, they tried to do this, but this year explicitly tried to get Android 15 out the door two months earlier than usual. Well, technically 30 days earlier than usual. So they could make the earlier Pixel launch failed. But not only did they not make it, they released more new products at one new phones at one time than ever before. All shipped with last year's Android. This thing came in late. It didn't just ship on the normal old time, it shipped two months late. It just came out on my Pixel device. By Pixel 9, I was in the beta and for the first time ever, usually you unenroll in the beta, you then go back to whatever the shipping version is. If you want, you can hold off the update and you'll just get to, in this case 15 when it comes out. That's not the way this worked. They were telling people they had to wipe their phones and go back to 14 for the first time, and then later said, well, actually just wait until the release and then we'll get to it and we'll just keep ignoring the update message every single day for two and a half months, maybe three months, whatever the time frame is. I have had to dismiss a Notification on my phone telling me they need to wipe it. And it was only today that that message changed and they gave me the non wipe version. I could just upgrade to stereo. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's been the weirdest migration tool. That's really interesting.

[Paul Thurot]

It has never happened before and so for all the chaos that I see on the Windows side and it is nothing but chaos. It's interesting. It's not, you know, not for the same reasons but this has been a really wild year for these platforms for all the major personal computing platforms. All of them.

[Richard Campbell]

And at the same time there's been and the layoffs and sort of the psychological oppression of those workforce.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

You know this random layoff thing is really. And I wonder if we're starting to see it in the software like that.

[Paul Thurot]

Actually, you know there is one. You know what the one common element to this is is AI. Right. The mad. No, it really is. I mean it start. I mean Windows was a mess before this but remember the big event of one year ago now was Microsoft rushing copilot out the door into Windows by making it part of a monthly cumulative update. What would have been a major version upgrade they just released like it was another Tuesday in September or whatever it was. And it's been crazier than ever ever since.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It has been nutty.

[Paul Thurot]

But I just don't know that I want to. It's been a crazy, crazy year.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hard when you kind of go, I don't get what's going on.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't either. That's what I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

If there's a rationality to it or there's an explanation for it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

But then if things are happening and it's like why, that's when conspiracy theories start to take off. And even me, and I think I'm a fairly cynical son of a gun but even I am starting to think what are they up to?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I mean you will never find any lack of evidence that most of this stuff is eh. And they're pushing it like it's the second coming. You know I wrote this in a comment in an article to someone's comment and I said something like, you know, the amount of marketing and push that you see on AI is not commensurate with the value that you're getting from it. It is commensurate with the amount of money they have to spend on it.

[Richard Campbell]

That they have been spending.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah. And it's it. And it's a weird. I don't know that there's anything like this I can think of it. In the history of the industry. I mean, it's crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Most of the time when we're forcing a function like that because we need to spend a bunch of money to get to a value we know about.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And this time, this.

[Paul Thurot]

We're just looking out. It's foggy. It. It might be okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, this is. You know, there's a delusion around AI because of science fiction that's made everything harder.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that's right.

[Leo Laporte]

What scares me is I think that some of these AI people are true believers.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. We definitely. Without a doubt.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're planning.

[Paul Thurot]

In any.

[Leo Laporte]

They're planning a world where AI is really capable.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I almost feel like they're thinking the rest of you is. You're expendable once this AI takes off.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, well, that's how cultists work. The problem is that eventually, you know, the comet doesn't come and.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Right. There's a room full of white Nikes and a jump.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Paul Thurot]

With an open AI logo on them.

[Leo Laporte]

I worry. I really. I really do. I think there. There are people out there. Sam Altman is probably one of them. Peter Thiel, Palmer, Lucky. That are just kind of thinking. Or Elon.

[Paul Thurot]

You notice they all have every one of those names you just said. They're just. It's like AI Bros.

[Leo Laporte]

They're AI Bros. That's the new thing.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. And.

[Leo Laporte]

And, I mean, Elon genuinely thinks we can live on Mars, and he would prefer to do that than fix what's going on here.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is problematic, to say the least.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right. Yeah. 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm trying to stay sane in a crazy world.

[Paul Thurot]

We all are.

[Leo Laporte]

Where are you? I lost track.

[Paul Thurot]

It's time for an ad.

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for an ad. Okay. I'll take your word for it.

[Paul Thurot]

Leo, do an ad. I demand it.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it.

[Paul Thurot]

Really?

[Leo Laporte]

We're just here to serve.

[Paul Thurot]

Paul. That's really good, but we've gotten to the point where I'm, like, looking forward to an ad.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, dear. Well, I got a good one for you.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's a good product.

[Leo Laporte]

I got a really good one for you. There's something called Veeam. Do you know Veeam? Let me tell you something. If you don't know Veeam, you need to know Veeam. If you're in business, your data is everything. Without your data, customer trust turns to digital dust. I wrote a poem. That's why Veeam's data protection. And this is this is. I want you to remember these two words. Ransomware recovery ensures that you can secure and restore your enterprise data wherever and whenever you need it, no matter what happens. And when I say no matter what happens, even if you get bit by the worst possible thing ransomware. Veeam is the number one global market leader in data resilience. Trusted by. This is an amazing stat. Over 77% of the Fortune 500. Over 77% of the fortune 500 uses Veeam to keep their businesses running when digital disruptions like ransomware strike. I mean, I don't even want to focus on ransomware alone because there's so many things that could happen, right? You need data resilience. You need to have a plan. Veeam lets you backup and recover your data instantly, no matter where it is, across your entire cloud ecosystem. And with Veeam, you can proactively detect malicious activity so you can stop the bad guys cold before you get bit by the ransomware. Remove the guesswork by and this is really important, automating your recovery plans and policies. You do have recovery plans and policies, right? So many don't get real time support from ransomware recovery experts. Look it, you need Veeam. Data is the lifeblood of your business. Protect it. Get data resilient with Veeam. V EE E A M2E's V A M. Go to veeam.com to learn more. I don't want, I don't want to see you in the headlines. Go to veeam.com right now. We thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly and the, and the good work that Paul and Richard are doing keeping us all up to date on what's going on in the world of Windows. Now, the Moment at least 10% of you are waiting for. The Xbox segment.

[Richard Campbell]

The Xbox riled by this because here it comes.

[Paul Thurot]

Wait a minute.

[Leo Laporte]

Kevin has to play this.

[Paul Thurot]

Look at the sting. It's the best. Halo backwards. Halo. It's like Bizarro World in Bizarro World. Bizarro. So I was going to say the. Yeah. 10% want the Xbox segment the other night. Are you just waiting for Richard to talk about brown liquor? It's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, between the two of you, we got the, we got the.

[Paul Thurot]

Just like Steve Jobs, you know, between the Mac and the PC, we have 100% of the industry.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, this first story really excites me because I am an Age of Empires fanatic.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I love this game. I mean, I haven't played it in a while, but this Was for a long time. My go to.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't have any idea if this is any good or not, but Age of Empires Mobile is now live. You can go get it.

[Leo Laporte]

Where can I get it?

[Paul Thurot]

I'm getting it iOS and Android, so in the store. It's in the epic games for Leo. So you really get it there and then.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S everywhere you want it.

[Paul Thurot]

Speaking of bizarro World, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, some games, it could be a touch game, I think so.

[Paul Thurot]

I just. I think we talked about this briefly maybe a week or two ago. Diablo Mobile is fantastic. Yeah. Love it.

[Richard Campbell]

Maybe that was a really great team that put that version together. Like, it's not Diablo. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

It was problematic in the way, though, that it made you continue to give them money.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, well.

[Paul Thurot]

But that's what games are now. I mean, that we. We just accept the fact that, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Pay to play is the thing. Right. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, somewhat. By the way, I blame Apple a little bit for this because they don't allow you demos. They don't allow you to give people a game for a week and see if they, like, you have to either buy it or not. And so what happened? It really drove a market of freemium games. So people could download it and play it for free, but at some point you got to monetize. So they had all these, you know, in game purchases. So I think Apple's.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, if you could. I can't speak to how Diablo does this, but if there's a version where you pay and don't have to worry about that. I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

No, there's not.

[Paul Thurot]

There isn't. Yeah. So.

[Leo Laporte]

And Diablo Immortal, really? I mean, you could. I've been playing it without giving a penny.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's.

[Paul Thurot]

It can be irritating. Yeah. No. Even though something like Duolingo, which is not a game but is, you know, Gamified, becomes irritating because of all the ads. If you don't just, you know, just. Yeah, right. I want to do this with Windows and all the junk that's in Windows.

[Leo Laporte]

I will always pay up front, a flat fee rather than get pinged every five seconds.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm downloading Age of Empires right now.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm very curious to hear what you think about this.

[Leo Laporte]

I will let you know within seconds. This is still a Microsoft game though, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. They own it. Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's so funny because so many people want to play Age of Empires that there is Forge of Empires, Game of Empires. There are so many clones.

[Paul Thurot]

Another problem with the App Store is on mobile.

[Richard Campbell]

This kind of junk, very carefully, when.

[Paul Thurot]

You only have one place to go to get something, that's how that happens. Right. You wouldn't see this out on the web or whatever. I mean, you would see a little bit of it, but. But I think that heightens that effect as well. You want people to click on the wrong thing, Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, that's one strategy, I guess, for making a game.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a fairly big game because it's taken a while to download. Yeah, it should. It's a beautiful game.

[Paul Thurot]

Should be. You're dialing.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it would look nice on an iPad. I think this makes sense, actually. It's touchy. It's a mouse game.

[Paul Thurot]

It's touchy. Don't be touchy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's touchy. It's a touchy game.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I mean, it's a couple of months ago, but I looked at some what I would call kind of AAA or former AAA games on mobile. I mean, these things. These devices are awesome now. I mean, so, you know, Call of.

[Richard Campbell]

Duty viral as realize.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And they have, you know, this has an.

[Paul Thurot]

And the processes are awesome. Yep. The GPU stuff's great. Apple's got a great hardware accelerated API.

[Richard Campbell]

The new iPad, you could just watch that battery drain.

[Paul Thurot]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true.

[Paul Thurot]

You know what you won't hear on an iPad is the. Is the fans, you know. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll put it on the new M4 iPad too. That'll be. That might even be better than this.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Here it is. Where they hid the volume.

[Paul Thurot]

You could do. You could video out from this thing with usb.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I can actually.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Barbarian raiders about to destruction and chaos to the land.

[Paul Thurot]

Crown Princess Joseph.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of nice.

[Paul Thurot]

Is this the new season of Ring of Power?

[Richard Campbell]

Really?

[Leo Laporte]

Seems like that. Crown Princess Josephine. Wow. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

It's. Roberta Williams is back.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, just think how we felt about this 30 years ago. You know, we were playing Little Grapple.

[Richard Campbell]

An animated sequence that has essentially nothing to do with the actual game.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's true too. I always skip those. Anyway, sorry. Go ahead. Let's do some Halo news.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So a week or two ago, we were talking about Halo. The Halo studios switching over to the Unreal Engine. But the other entity entry in this space, of course, is Unity.

[Richard Campbell]

Doesn't ask you to write C. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Unity hasn't screwed up their whole lives over the past year, but they're back and they're not doing that controversial runtime fee. Anything that didn't yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Funny how they backed off on that.

[Paul Thurot]

I believe they fired their CEO. Right. Didn't they? Or left. Anyway, anyway. Yeah, so they have a new version of the Unity engine, but speaking of.

[Richard Campbell]

Which, it's been coming for a while.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Unity six during. I think it was yesterday's Qualcomm keynote, Tim Sweeney was on. Oh, not. He might have been in video. Not a stage, but he was there talking about there's an Unreal Engine version for mobile that, you know, looks awesome because that's, you know, that's the reality of these chipsets now. They're just, they have incredible graphics. So I think it's going to be a golden era for error for mobile gaming. Unless you Netflix. I didn't write this up, but I will go back to when they originally announced this. I don't understand Netflix being in gaming.

[Richard Campbell]

Personally, but sell more stuff to their customers.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I mean, Apple was a computer company and then they became Apple and they do other things. I mean, they're all, hey, Chick Fil.

[Leo Laporte]

A has gone into streaming video. I mean, all right, fair enough. It's a weird world. Like I said, I don't get any of it.

[Paul Thurot]

I think of this as the breakfast cereal phenomenon. Once you have a breakfast cereal, that's where you've gone off the rails completely. So look, it's entertainment. Fine, but don't put it in the Netflix app.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Anyway, I haven't written this up, but they started up a big AAA game studio, hired a bunch of really famous people from other game studios. We're going to release AAA games on Netflix and they just closed it down.

[Richard Campbell]

So this was harder than they thought.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. This semi verifies what I've always kind of believed, which is that they can't make money doing this. This doesn't make sense. Yeah. So I think, I think it's harder.

[Leo Laporte]

Than you think I am. By the way, this is coming straight off the iPad and you're right, video right into hdmi.

[Richard Campbell]

That's pretty select.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is the game.

[Richard Campbell]

Also not Age of Empires gameplay.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I've never seen any of these cutscenes. This is bizarre, but whatever.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, at some point it's going to, you know, go back to that mile high view of the place.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this is the. Yeah, so I have to find the holy source.

[Paul Thurot]

This is actually what's happening. So it's zooming out. Not. Okay, there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

That was just a cut scene.

[Paul Thurot]

And so now that integration between the cutscene and what it looks like was pretty. Yeah, that's not bad.

[Leo Laporte]

So here we are. And I can border exploration tap to repair the house. Okay. I can zoom in. Oh. See, this keeps going to cutscenes, but this is the training. This is the.

[Paul Thurot]

Let me do another walkthrough. Click the button up in the top.

[Leo Laporte]

No, stop, stop.

[Paul Thurot]

I think I just triggered ptsd.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So let me. Can I zoom now? I can't pitch to zoom, which is kind of too bad, because that was how. Examine the dead bodies. Oh, there we go. We have to examine the dead bodies. It told me to.

[Paul Thurot]

I would have given my left leg as a child playing D and D. I know, to have had this kind of a game.

[Richard Campbell]

No kidding.

[Paul Thurot]

I had like an eight bit Bard's Tale. You would go down the hallway so slow. It was like, you know, grandpa with a walker. And it would have to redraw every single frame. It was horrible. You know, look at this thing.

[Leo Laporte]

See if I've got the volume up. Oh, it's trying to do the volume through the hdmi. That's what's going on.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So I know not to totally move away from the whole Unity thing, But I think Unity 6 might be the equivalent of Windows 11.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh.

[Richard Campbell]

Because Unity 5 came out like 2015, and they've been doing annual updates ever since. I don't know why they decided to declare a new version number.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

They've kind of changed the pattern.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So I don't know, you know, what that was about, other than obviously Unreal Engine shipped a new version which was genuinely, you know, a revolutionary version of Unreal Engine.

[Leo Laporte]

We're having some combat here. We got some combat going on. I don't know what's going on. I don't know if I'm supposed to do anything.

[Paul Thurot]

I noticed this game is demon free. Is there a reason we're not playing Diablo?

[Leo Laporte]

This is peaceful. Diablo.

[Richard Campbell]

All I know is we're playing video games on a podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, let's stop doing that. I don't want to.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't think Australian fans. I don't know that that was a complaint. I think it was just.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I always am doing that behind the scenes.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Paul Thurot]

Nice. That's what I used to do on work calls until they made me actually be on video. You're playing Call of Duty. Yeah. Right. Microsoft announced a rev of its Xbox wireless headset. So this is basically. Well, there was a wireless version, a wired version. It's a little expensive, but it has. I don't know, it's always had. I guess it's. I guess it already Had Dolby Atmos. I wasn't sure if that was new, but voice isolation, bigger battery, Bluetooth 5.3, whatever that gets you. I assume that has something to do with Quick Connect or whatever. Yeah. So I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

As I was Xbox One, I mean, can't you just.

[Paul Thurot]

That's what I. Why not just go with a good pair of headphones, one of the logic packs or, you know, some people like the brand. I don't know. But yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't buy an Xbox brand.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that was not the brand I would think of. Like, if I was, I mean, I'd.

[Leo Laporte]

Go for the Jabra. Do you use a job?

[Richard Campbell]

What do you use? I've used Jabra. I remember. I don't. I'm part of the PC master race, so I would never do any.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right, of course.

[Paul Thurot]

So what do you, what do, what do you use? Like when you fly? What do you use when you fly? You must put headphones on.

[Richard Campbell]

I got a pair of Bose earbuds in Noise Cancer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, those are pretty good. I just, you know, Apple, just this new 8.1 that you were talking about that's coming out on Monday, we think has a new capability with the AirPods to turn them into hearing aids.

[Paul Thurot]

I know, genius.

[Leo Laporte]

I wear hearing aids. So I was actually very curious because my hearing aids cost $7,000.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

And I could buy several hundred AirPods.

[Paul Thurot]

You could afford to lose a few AirPods.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, just buy them.

[Leo Laporte]

So I set it up, I got the beta, downloaded it, set it up. I'm going to talk more about it on MacBreak weekly next week. But I wanted to see. And there's one big issue that I don't like. It works, in effect, pretty much works like hearing aids. You do a hearing test? The hearing test was wrong. It said you have no hearing loss. I don't know what you're talking about.

[Paul Thurot]

Wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

But anyway, I put them in and you can hear the world around you. And you know, that's nice, but with real hearing aids, they don't occlude your ear. So you hear this everything around you, they're just amplifying the voices you're relying on there.

[Paul Thurot]

Their, whatever they call their pass through technology with Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

It seals your ear and so everything, all the audio has to come through the microphone.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I did not like that. I thought that was not a good. So for those who were thinking very Apple Vision Pro.

[Richard Campbell]

Ish, right? It's like, don't worry, we'll give you what reality Take care of it.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, this is the. This is kind of a standard earbud issue in a way. Right. Like you.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and I'm wearing sealed ears in ear monitors right now because I don't want to hear background noise. I want to hear exactly what's going out on the podcast. But when you're wearing hearing aids, you're out and about, you're in the real world. You want to hear the real world. It's amplifying the human voices so that you can understand.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Do you hear yourself? You must hear yourself through there. It's modern.

[Leo Laporte]

You do. You do a little bit. That's a problem.

[Paul Thurot]

I would want to. I mean, I find it odd when you can't.

[Leo Laporte]

The more modern hearing aids are getting faster and faster. They're putting better process. So it used to be a little chorusing, you know, where you hear the voice twice, you hear it through the hearing aid, but you also hear it through your body.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, boy. It's like a translation almost.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but it's not so slow that it's like an echo. It's more like a chorus, like two people singing. A little bit off.

[Paul Thurot]

A little off.

[Leo Laporte]

And that. Yeah. But it's gotten better and better and better as the processors have gotten faster. So instead of sounding like this.

[Paul Thurot]

It does.

[Leo Laporte]

It sounds. It doesn't sound. And you get. Immediately get used to it.

[Paul Thurot]

This was the conversation that Richard, you had with Chris Sells about the glasses, the problem of getting processor. Whatever into these small form factors. You know, hearing aids have been around for a long time, so, you know, it makes sense that they're kind of.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, an audio needs a lot less compute.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The bottom line was, no, I don't think the AirPods are a replacement for hearing aids. Yes. They're a lot cheaper, and for some people, they'll be helpful, I think.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

They're like hearing aids.

[Paul Thurot]

Sometime in my 40s, I walked into a crowded room, and someone was talking to me. And what I could hear clearly was not the person talking to me, someone over there, you know, and it was this weird kind of moment of like, what's going on here? You know, you must have. Everyone hears differently, I guess, but we must have all had that experience where you hear maybe a voice here and it sounds like it's someone right there, and you look and he's over there, maybe, or, you know, it's off somehow. And I feel like that would be a problem with these things, but I don't know. I mean, I'm intrigued by this.

[Leo Laporte]

I well, you'll be old soon and.

[Paul Thurot]

You can try them and, like, Tuesday.

[Leo Laporte]

To be honest, it's appalling that hearing aids cost so much money. Thousands of dollars.

[Richard Campbell]

But I do think.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're not usually covered by insurance or Medicare. Doesn't cost.

[Paul Thurot]

Which is ridiculous because this happens to be basically everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

And you need it. Yeah, you need it. There's a lot of evidence that if you start hearing.

[Paul Thurot]

Sorry, that's a. It's a pretty interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Why those earbuds are useful because they give you the idea, hey, your hearing could be better.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. And the hearing test is good. And I have, I guess, friends who.

[Paul Thurot]

Refuse to acknowledge they can't hear anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, there are a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

People won't wear them.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Who might wear AirPods all the time.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Because that's the other thing is you have to wear AirPods all the time, and your wife's gonna say, are you listening to me?

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I. Was that. When you first said that, I. That's what flashed my brain, like, we've all been out in the world and seen someone just talking to space, but they're talking through earbuds or something. Right. And so at some point, that becomes normal.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Might be schizophrenia. Might be Bluetooth. You don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

We got used to it with Bluetooth.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, but how would it be the.

[Leo Laporte]

Way the AirPods look, with a little drip of white? I thought, no, that's terrible. But we all got used to it. Everybody.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, except one thing. You're used to it because we know what they're doing. But when you're right in front of me and we're talking and you're wearing tour earbuds, I'd be like, yeah, that's interesting to me. You know, like, you'd have to say, I'm using these. We're gonna have to have another level of acceptance here, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

It will happen. I mean, obviously. These things are really pervasive.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So before we move on, just want to say real quick, the new Call of Duty is coming out this week, so we won't see much of you Friday. Well, I'm actually. I might. I might set this one out.

[Richard Campbell]

Where is the Xbox right now?

[Paul Thurot]

Which Xbox? You mean my Xbox?

[Leo Laporte]

That's telling.

[Paul Thurot]

But as I alluded to earlier.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm sorry, don't you own that place in Norte. Isn't that home?

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have an Xbox in.

[Paul Thurot]

Where are you leading me, your Honor? What do you mean?

[Richard Campbell]

Figure out if there's an Xbox in Mexico.

[Paul Thurot]

There is not but I have do several PCs and at least a few of them can play games really well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so that's interesting. I now you were giving up Call of Duty for a while, but that's over. Is that, was that.

[Paul Thurot]

No, it's not. I'm. I'm, I'm actually no, I have not played Call of Duty, so. Wow. Still do I. I don't see that changing.

[Richard Campbell]

It's good.

[Paul Thurot]

That's good.

[Leo Laporte]

When you acknowledge that accepting you have.

[Paul Thurot]

A problem, you have a problem and.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't have control over it.

[Paul Thurot]

You got to be one of the first stages of something.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, that's good.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah. But don't want to admit you have a problem. The game's out on Friday, so enjoy that.

[Leo Laporte]

I may have an Age of Empires problem.

[Paul Thurot]

Now.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks like it will be a fun mobile game.

[Paul Thurot]

We all have our thing, our show today.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll take a break and then the back of the book's coming. Brown liquor tips, picks, that kind of thing. But before we do that, let me tell you about our sponsor, Experts Exchange. It's funny, when we first talked to them on the phone, I said there's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I used to use Experts Exchange during the radio show. People would ask a question and Experts Exchange was like my backup expert. And I just, I don't know, I lost track of it over the years, as maybe you did. Other sites came and went and so forth. But I went back to Experts Exchange and I have to say, the quality of the answers, the quality information is unbeat. It's a network of trustworthy and talented tech professionals. You can go there to get industry insights and advice from people who are actually using the products in your stack. Then that beats paying for expensive enterprise level tech support. And they are the tech community for people tired of the AI sellout. And I like that. No AI man. Experts Exchanges. Real people, real experts with real answers. Experts Exchange is ready to help carry the fight for the future of human intelligence. With Experts Exchange you get access to professionals in over 400 different fields. Coding, of course, that was one of the things I went there for. Microsoft Azure, DevOps, AWS, and on and on and on. And here's the thing. Not only, not only is there no AI, there's no snark. So many of these other sites where you go and they go, oh, that question again. We aren't going to answer that. Their sites, they'll close it, they'll say, oh no, we answered that. Never mind, go away. Or they'll say, well, you could do it that way, but I think you should do it this way. No, no, not an Experts Exchange. Duplicate questions are encouraged. There are no dumb questions. The contributors there are real tech junkies. You know, people like us who love it, graciously answering all questions. They've realized that the true benefit of becoming an expert in an area is that you could pass it on to others. Not patronizingly, not condescendingly, but genuinely helping other people, lifting them up, paying it forward. One member said, I never had ChatGPT stop and ask me a question before. That happens on EE all the time. Experts Exchange is proudly committed to fostering a community where human collaboration is fundamental. I think that's community is a is a big word in my book these days. And humans only we can do that, right? Their expert directory full of experts to help you find what you need. Including, I'm proud to say some people will listen to our shows. Like Rodney. Rodney Barnhart. He's a VMware V expert, regular Security now listener, Cisco design professionals, executive IT directors and more. And really important you know that we see this more and more. LinkedIn started doing it. Reddit's been doing it. Many of these platforms betray their contributors by selling the content to train AI models. X does it at Experts Exchange, not X Experts Exchange. Your privacy is not for sale. They stand against the betrayal of contributors worldwide. They have never and promise they will never sell your data content or your likeness. They block and strictly prohibit AI companies from scraping content from their site to train the LLMs. Their moderators strictly forbid the direct use of LLM content in their threads. You're getting human answers from human experts. That's great. Experts deserve a place where they can confidently share their knowledge without worrying about some company stealing it to increase shareholder value. And humanity deserves a safe haven from AI. Experts Exchange. Real people who are there because they want to support you and help you. And by the way, it's kind of everybody helps. So it's not just you go there to ask a question, but then you may answer your question too. That's what's so great about it. It's really a helping community. Experts Exchange, they believe that you will find this so valuable that they have actually said we're going to give you three months free. No credit card or anything, just three months free so you could try it out. So you don't take my word for it. Visit e-e.com twit to learn more. 90 days free. E-e.com experts exchange. And now back to our experts, starting with Paul Thurot with his tip of the week.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm not sure I've ever recommended a podcast, given that this is a podcast, but I mentioned I was listening to one of Richard's podcasts this week, and I don't listen to a lot of tech podcasts, but I listen to Richard's. And Scott Hanselman has a podcast I like, but I. I kind of select the episodes. And Scott and Mark Rosinovich just started a podcast.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God. To me now that's Superstars. Wow.

[Paul Thurot]

It's not. Yeah, these guys are great. They're great together. These are short episodes. They're not really competing with anything. It's just interesting to me that they're doing it at all.

[Richard Campbell]

So they did a couple of stage things that build and that worked.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, they usually have a little comedy routine thing going. It's good. Kind of Jeffrey Snover's gone, I guess. I don't know. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice, Scott. Mark, Learn two. And then it's different stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, right. Exactly. And, yeah, it's not going to be. Well, who knows what it's going to be. Actually, I was going to say it's not, honestly, super technical, which I think is kind of the point. Although it's tech adjacent. Right. It's interesting. So I just throw it out there.

[Leo Laporte]

We love both of those guys.

[Paul Thurot]

They're fantastic. They're great. They're great. I think we talked about Notebook LM the Google tool Week two ago. Whatever it was, it is now generally available. This is the thing that you throw text at. It could be a giant document, whatever, and it turns it into a podcast with two AI created hosts that banter and talk about. It's crazy. It's crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm sure one of those sounds just like me.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little insulting because it sounds a little bit too much like our shows. Yeah, it's like. Oh, God, really? Do we sound like that?

[Paul Thurot]

Wow. Yep. Yep, we do.

[Leo Laporte]

So you transformed a Sadovsky blog post into a podcast.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, you should just play the beginning of. It's crazy. It's. Oh, that's funny. No, not that one. The. Sorry. Go. Yeah, just click the video like the. No, we're doing it again.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, tell me what to click.

[Paul Thurot]

The video. It's the video.

[Leo Laporte]

The vi. The. This video. Okay. Okay, here we go.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, so don't reboot the computer. You're cruising on your Windows PC. Right. But it feels like. Like super snappy, you know, like Your smartphone. No waiting around, just smooth sailing. That was kind of the whole idea behind Windows on arm. Woa. We're calling it arm. Ooh. That's how you can tell it's. Yeah, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

That was not a human. That's like Connie Chung saying dose.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. I'm trying to remember the. There's an audio book where they did something very similar and it was the whole book. So imagine it's a book about Windows and ARM and they mention it 11,000 times and say ARM 11,000 times.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I hate that.

[Paul Thurot]

It was something like that. Yeah. And today we're going way back, like 2012, back to Microsoft when they first jumped into this whole thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The tech world was like freaking out with excitement.

[Richard Campbell]

And lucky for us, we get this inside scoop.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say, the voices are really, really, really, really well done.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And they don't sound mechanical or. I know, it's machine like. It's Castle. Castle Wolfenstein. This is really good. It was by Stephen Sinofsky. He was the big cheese at Windows back then and he like spills the tea on how they made WOA happen. The engineering craziness, all of it.

[Paul Thurot]

You said it. I mean, ARM processors, they were just starting to get big. And you'll never get over it. This new hardware, that was a whole other rodeo.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, totally a gamble. See ARM and by 86 what most PCs use back then.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, enough.

[Paul Thurot]

I know it's tough, but seriously, the voices are amazing and it's so natural. Except for the ARM bit.

[Leo Laporte]

They probably fixed that by now. You know, I mean, they keep tweaking it.

[Paul Thurot]

A friend of mine once referred to our boss says, you know, you almost sound human. It's really. That's fascinating.

[Leo Laporte]

This is wild.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, here we are. Here we are. The AI. You can see the light at the.

[Paul Thurot]

End of the tunnel. It's a train. Let's see. Okay, so I mentioned Qualcomm talking about more and more apps going native on arm. They had some things that weren't super interesting to me, but they talked about affinity photos, which I do use myself and pay for. If you're. If you have affinity, you might be able to do this anyway. But if you have or don't have maybe affinity photo 2. There's a beta version that you can download from their site directly. I think you have to sign into your account. But it has some new AI based features that work off the NPU in a Snapdragon X based computer. Now I may be also against a X64 computer I'm not sure Qualcomm was the one promoting this, so there's probably more to that story. But object selection and subject selection, which are two pretty obvious features. This is actually interesting to me because this is where Affinity photo falls apart today compared to Photoshop. So when you want to do things like select objects, it's actually not too good at it anyway. I have only used this a little bit, but when you buy Affinity products, you get the updates as long as they don't do a major version upgrade. So this is 2.6, so it should be coming to everybody, I think next month. And Then also Opera 1 R2 came out today. So this is the new version of that company's flagship web browser, which has a few new AI features as well. But honestly, I guess it's AI best technically. But I think the most interesting feature is the new dynamic themes that they have, which include Glass effects, which will be triggering for us in the Windows community because it goes back to, you know, the Aeroglass stuff from Longhorn and then Windows Vista, etc. But it's a pretty browser. The AI stuff, I don't know. It's interesting. They introduced like a command line environment for their Aria Chatbot. So you control slash and then you can type commands. It has generative image generation and understanding. So the second one is where you either point it at a web image or upload an image to it. And it will help you understand what it is you're looking at. Which is a conversation I have with myself a lot where I look at something on the web and say, what the hell am I looking at? I'm not sure Aria could actually answer that question, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Just ask it.

[Paul Thurot]

Why? Why? The existential question. Those are the questions I cannot answer. You know, they'll say, why would Microsoft screw up Windows 11? I'm like, I can't answer that. I can just detail the ways in which they do it.

[Leo Laporte]

The ways in which they do it. That's okay, I'll take.

[Richard Campbell]

I have no answers.

[Leo Laporte]

I do like affinity photos. I use it on my iPad.

[Paul Thurot]

I like it a lot. It's great.

[Leo Laporte]

It makes you wonder, why buy Photoshop, frankly?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. They don't have a monthly bill. I kind of don't like that, but other than that, it is pretty good. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Just wish they'd bill me monthly. Said no one ever.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Opera did.

[Richard Campbell]

Opera.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you did it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. That means. You know what that means? Run as radio time.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Had a conversation with my friend Jim Duffy, working for a new company called Island Systems. And we were talking about using Azure virtual machines or Azure virtual desktops, so isolated client instances for security purposes. Now, he'd gone down a very particular path on this, which is getting compliant with the new government supplier regulations, because the US Government's getting very big on supplier attacks. And so there's a new specification called the NIST SP 800 171, which has over 100 requirements in it. And so if you're a supplier to the US Government, it's pretty serious business. Do you need to be compliant with this in the next year? And that includes getting audited for it. And that's not necessarily what I wanted to talk to him about. It's good that there's a standard, because that's a very high bar. But then actually talking about how to get there and talking about truly securing data, including with remote workers, and so having virtual desktops so that you basically control all the information in the cloud through your security perimeter with the cloud is pretty compelling. The other part about that I really appreciated from Jim is saying, hey, you don't have to fix your entire companies. You can take this high security project you're doing and package it up this way, and it's still a SO company, but it's got a higher security perimeter than the rest of it. So it sort of spoke to a way for us to move quickly in key areas and then see the advantages of this, of really protecting data, being ransomware resistant, of, you know, dealing with all those issues and saying, do I want to propagate this across the rest of the company? And, you know, it's based on a very significant government standard from nist.

[Paul Thurot]

Uh.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, are we.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm with you. Bonk.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Are we bonky?

[Paul Thurot]

You had a little.

[Leo Laporte]

Little kachonk.

[Paul Thurot]

Little kachonk. He's eight bit.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm all the way from Poland. What are you gonna do?

[Leo Laporte]

Do you need me to redo anything?

[Paul Thurot]

No, just keep going. You're good.

[Richard Campbell]

All right. Well, I went, popped down to the bar today and picked up a couple ounces of Nectar Dior from Glen Morangi, one of my favorites. And the reason I did that is that we were out for dinner, a bunch of us, the speaker cadre for this particular conference. At the end of the meal, when they asked me what I wanted for dessert, I said whiskey, which is hardly a surprise. That's a pretty normal thing for me. And I looked at the list of whiskies. They had, several of the Glen Merangi versions. Now, we've talked about Glenmorangie before I did a few weeks ago, talking about the Quintus Ruben, which is the port aged version. The Nectar d'or is a Saturn version. So Glenmorangie is up in the far north of Scotland, normally considered a Highland, although its style is much more like the Spey. It's actually past Dalmore. There had been whiskey made there literally for hundreds of years. Officially that area was was making Whiskey starting in 1843 by a fellow named William Matheson when he actually bought up a couple of giant gin stills. Really, really tall ones. They call them the Giraffes because they're over 5 meters high, about 17ft tall. And it's important to note that in 1843 the coffee still had been invented, invented about 10 years before. And so a lot of the gin producers were switching over to column stills, the coffee stills, because they were more efficient. And so these stills were. These old style gin pot stills were cheap, easy to come by. And so Matheson grabbed a pair of them and made the Morangi distillery. Although he would later rename the place Glenmorangie, meaning Field of Tranquility. You know, if you squint close in Gaelic. So good enough. And you'd think that their logo would be the Giraffe. And they do celebrate World Giraffe Day having a couple of stills named after Giraffe. But their logo is actually based on the Cadbull stone from the pics which we talked about in the previous show. Very cool bit of technology. So producing since the 1850s, converted up to steam in 1887, which is very early, getting rid of the risk of explosions. And then it was sold to McDonald and Muir in 1918. They are a large operation, 10 dunnage buildings right along the water there, plus some extra rack rooms. And they have been doing tours since the 1990s. They've been doing single malts since they became cool. The company was acquired by Louis Vuitton Motemisi LVMH in 2000. The Age in bourbon casts, this particular style they call the core range really came about in the early 90s. And their whole idea was that they aged in bourbon casts primarily Jack Daniels and heaven hill for 10 years and then some they would bottle as is a 10 year old just aged in bourbon and then they or they would do finishing ages. So La Santa did two years years in sherry. Quintus Rubin does four years in port and Nectar Dior two years in Satiren Cass. That's a sweet dessert wine from France. There are other additions on top of that. And in the whiskey industry, this was sort of looked down on as kind of a tacky party trick. Rather than committing to one right way to make their whiskey here they were doing all these different things and so sort of like pick and choose you thing. But the reason I had Nectar Dior at the party was that and brought this whole story up is that when I went to order whiskey, every bunch of other folks stopped and sort of looked at me like, ooh, Richard's ordering whiskey. What are you ordering? And I said, well, I think I'm gonna get the Lamborangi. And I told this story about how they did all these things and they actually happened to have Both the original 10 and the nectar Dior on the list. So I got both. Both. And so you're able to taste the 10 year and then taste the Nectar Dior and see that those couple of extra years in the Satern casks really did something cool to them. So, you know, this is a light whiskey. The wine casks really add a sort of fruitiness to it. Just what you'd hope, a little sweetness. It's cool. It's really nice drinking Now. Nectar Dior is relatively easy to come by. It's about 75 US for a place like tornado total weiner bev bow 45% ABV. The Satiren casts are a bit smaller, so the contact level is fairly short in that. But it's not going to be around much longer. It looks like Glen Morangi is moving on. And this has happened to a few of the other editions as well. Where originally this Corridor is all 10 year old bourbon casts with a couple of years or maybe four years of finishing casts. Today when you go on the website, you'll find that Nectar Dior isn't there anymore. It's now called the Nectar and it's a 16 year. So apparently they now have had these bourbon casks laid up long enough that they're using. They're putting 14 years into the bourbon casks and then they're doing two years in sweet dessert wine casks. Although this new addition that they're called calling the Nectar is actually both Saterns. Mon Baziac, which is also French Moscatel, which is a Spanish dessert wine, and Tojaki, which is a Hungarian dessert wine. So they're sort of mixing and matching and pulling them together to make something new called the Nectar. I don't have pricing in the US yet. It's only available in Europe so far, running about €80 if you can find it. But I imagine in the Next year or so, we will see the nectar appear in the US as well. And that's what I got. Thanks, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Great, great, Great talking to you, Richard. Thank you for being here. Richard Campbell in Warsaw. You're going. Are you coming home soon?

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. Next leaving for home tomorrow. And the next show will be from home.

[Leo Laporte]

It's amazing. He was drinking and talking at the same time.

[Paul Thurot]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's our Richard. Hey. That's it for Windows Weekly. Richard will be back from Warsaw next week in beautiful British Columbia. Paul, you're going to stay in. In Mexico City for a little bit.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, till right before Thanksgiving.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Well, we shall communicate. Do you want me to ship you the Snapdragon Advocate now so you have a little gift waiting for you?

[Paul Thurot]

Or I would wait just in case. I don't, you know, I don't want my neighbor to hobble over and take it off my porch.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, look, a collector's item.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, it's a turkey.

[Leo Laporte]

I could sell this on ebay.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I'll see it like as a pottery plant or something inside the window.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, there were only 200 of those, 200 of those shipped worldwide. And you have one and I have one. I don't think so.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul Thurat [e-mail]. that's his website. T H U double R, double O. No, one O. T H U R.

[Paul Thurot]

T U. I was agreeing to that. I was like, yep, that is exactly how my name is spelled.

[Leo Laporte]

Thu. I got that much right. Double R. Then there's an O. Then there's a double T. Dot com. Become a premium member. I am. And it's really worth it. Lots of great stuff on that site. And of course his books, including the Windows Everywhere book, which is kind of a history of Windows through its development platforms and the Field guide to Windows 11. Both [e-mail] Richard Campbell is at Run As Radio. That's where you'll find Net Rocks, the show he does with that lovely Carl Franklin. We should get Carl on the show sometime.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I love Carl.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he's great.

[Paul Thurot]

I love that show. I really like. I just, I like both of his shows, but that one's more is dev focused. So it's kind of more interesting to me usually. Although I know a lot of the people he has on the other show too, on Run As. But yeah, love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Run as radio.com for both of Richard's shows. We do Windows Weekly on a Wednesday around 11am Pacific. Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. It will remain 1800 UTC until after Halloween and then it will become 1900 UTC.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

No one knows.

[Paul Thurot]

So Mexico doesn't do. I was. I almost said celebrate. Mexico doesn't do daylight save. I know they celebrate a lot of things in Mexico, let me tell you. Every day is a celebration here.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that.

[Paul Thurot]

It's not daylight savings. It is literally part of every day. But, yeah, they don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Day of the Dead. You're gonna. Are you now, traditionally, Mexico City didn't used to do it, but they do it now. Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Because of the James Bond movie. Because of Spectre. That's true. So it's amazing. It's really big. So I will not go to Zocalo for this. They do a parade up the Reforma, which is like the Mexico City champs or whatever. But the metro gets dangerous with that many people. Not because of pickpockets, just crazy dangerous. Yeah, crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So, yeah, they. They do it right here. It's. It's for. You know, you would think they've been doing it for 2,000 years or something, but it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so much fun.

[Paul Thurot]

It's more closer to 12 years.

[Leo Laporte]

We will see you next Wednesday. It'll be the day after. Is that right?

[Paul Thurot]

That.

[Leo Laporte]

No, not next Wednesday. No, no, it will be. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. It's the start. I think it starts. It might start is right around then. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The 30th. And then officially it's November 1st and 2nd.

[Paul Thurot]

But sometimes it stretches a little longer.

[Leo Laporte]

Than just a little.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, well, we will see you. I'll be wearing my Day of the Dead costume.

[Paul Thurot]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Just for you. You could. You can also get the show on demand after the fact. Paul has it on his website. We also have it on ours. Twit tv, ww. There's both audio.

[Paul Thurot]

I just linked to it. To be clear. Don't like host it or anything that's easy to find.

[Leo Laporte]

If you'[e-mail], you go, oh, yeah, there's the show. He also does a show with Brad Sams that is. Is. That's daily, right?

[Paul Thurot]

I think we could call that a. Like a show with, you know, it's got zero. We talk for five to ten minutes a day. It's just. We just check in with each other, basically.

[Leo Laporte]

That's nice. That's fun.

[Paul Thurot]

Sometimes we talk about grass seed. It's not really.

[Leo Laporte]

I like the Scots grow guy. That's what you're probably.

[Paul Thurot]

I like a. I like eggs. You never know what you're going to get.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, let's not Go down that road. What else was going to say? Oh, there's a YouTube channel for Windows Weekly. Great way to share little clips. And of course you can. And I encourage you to subscribe so you get it automatically as soon as it's available. Just go to your favorite podcast client and search for Windows Weekly. Paul, we've been doing this a long time now.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And I am very grateful to you and Richard for making my Wednesday mornings a lot of fun.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, well, that's a very polite way to say it.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been playing, you know, Age of Empires.

[Paul Thurot]

Of Empires going in there. Yeah, it's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me just look when our first show was. If we go to.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, I can tell you exactly when it was. I mean. Well, within a couple of weeks. I mean it was. It was before Windows Vista shipped. It was the closing days of the Xpress.

[Leo Laporte]

The first one was road to RC1.

[Paul Thurot]

For Windows Vista 6 or 5.

[Leo Laporte]

September 28, 2006. Very first episode.

[Paul Thurot]

September 28. Yeah, that sounds about right.

[Leo Laporte]

28Th. That's right. All of them by the way are available at TWIT TV ww. So you can go back in time and hear all of them. The real Vista ship date.

[Paul Thurot]

Wow. I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, and the new office ribbon.

[Paul Thurot]

We were looking forward to this stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

This is back when Paul was young and naive, young and innocent. Still excited about the world.

[Paul Thurot]

Crazy. I know. I had so much hope in front of me and so much disappointment that I didn't know was coming. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul Thurot, Richard Campbell. Thank you so much. We will see you next Wednesday. Thanks to all of you winning and dozers. Special thanks to our Club TWIT members. We appreciate it. See you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye bye now.

[Paul Thurot]

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

[Richard Campbell]

A line per month when you switch with eligible trade ins.

[Paul Thurot]

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.

[Leo Laporte]

CT mobile.com how do you feel when you switch to GEICO and save on your car insurance? It's like going to work on one Thursday morning and thinking to yourself just one more day until Friday. 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 friyay indeed. Yep, switching and saving with Geico feels just like that. Get more with Geico.