WW 907: It's Interesting Being Me - Edge's data trick, Outlook's AI Themes, .NET 9

Summary

Summary of Windows Weekly Episode 907: "It's Interesting Being Me - Edge's Data Trick, Outlook's AI Themes, .NET 9"

Recorded on Wednesday, November 13, 2024

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Introduction

In Episode 907 of Windows Weekly, host Paul Thurrott and co-host Leo Laporte delve into the latest developments surrounding Microsoft's ecosystem. With regular co-host Richard Campbell taking a week off due to illness, Paul and Leo steer the conversation solo, covering critical updates from Windows 24H2, Microsoft Edge's new data handling tactics, the integration of AI in Outlook, and advancements in .NET 9.

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Windows 24H2 Update: Ongoing Quality Concerns

The discussion opens with a focus on the Windows 24H2 update, highlighting persistent quality issues that continue to frustrate users.

• Paul Thurrott describes the update as "a parade with no end" (00:00), emphasizing the never-ending stream of problems.

• Leo Laporte concurs, stating, "24H2 is possibly the most unreliable, most poorly engineered version of Windows ever made" (02:54). He shares personal anecdotes, including users experiencing unsupported Windows versions post-update and observing similar complaints on Reddit.

• The hosts express skepticism about Microsoft's rapid update cycle, suggesting that releasing updates twice a month may compromise reliability (03:43).

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Microsoft Edge's Data Handling Tactics

Transitioning to Microsoft Edge, Paul and Leo examine the browser's recent maneuvers concerning user data.

• Paul Thurrott introduces the topic by mentioning "Edge's data trick" (5:50), referring to Edge's strategy to sync Chrome data, which has raised privacy concerns.

• Leo Laporte explains how Edge prompts users to sync data with Google even if Chrome isn't installed, leading to increased tracking: "It's reaching out to Google via back channels" (41:17).

• The conversation highlights the intrusive nature of Edge's data synchronization prompts and the challenges users face when attempting to disable or reassign the Copilot key to prevent accidental activations (06:16).

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Outlook's AI-Powered Themes

The episode shifts focus to Outlook's new AI-driven themes, a feature introduced in the Windows 24H2 update.

• Leo Laporte discusses the integration of AI in Outlook, allowing users to create custom themes based on prompts, similar to generative AI image tools: "It's like a generative AI thing that creates an image" (69:17).

• Paul Thurrott touches on user reactions, noting the mixed sentiments toward the new Outlook app replacing traditional Mail, Calendar, and People apps: "There is a lot of negativity around this kind of thing" (52:36).

• The hosts explore how these AI themes cater primarily to Microsoft 365 subscribers, with free account users encountering ads, thereby segmenting the user experience based on subscription status (55:08).

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Advancements in .NET 9 and .NET Conf Insights

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to .NET 9 and insights from recent .NET Conf events.

• Paul Thurrott and Leo Laporte discuss the release of .NET 9, emphasizing its open-source and cross-platform enhancements: "It's open source and cross-platform and all the good things" (29:12).

• Leo Laporte highlights improvements to WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), including better integration with Windows 11 theming and automatic switching between light and dark modes: "Now you can have it match the Windows 11 theme" (54:21).

• They also touch upon third-party frameworks like Uno, which enable WPF-like applications to run seamlessly on macOS and Linux, broadening the scope for developers: "Uno is going to make a big announcement tomorrow" (95:22).

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Enhancements in Windows Security Features

Security remains a central theme, with the hosts exploring new features aimed at bolstering Windows' defenses.

• Paul Thurrott introduces the concept of “admin protection,” a new security feature in Windows 24H2 designed to safeguard administrator accounts by isolating permissions: “Administrator protection... aims to protect” (29:01).

• Leo Laporte discusses the balance between enhanced security and user convenience, debating whether these updates have made users more security-conscious or overly paranoid: "Have we done our audience a disservice by making them so paranoid?" (58:57).

• They also explore updates to User Account Control (UAC), including new keyboard shortcuts that streamline running applications with administrative privileges without bypassing security prompts: “They added a keyboard shortcut that will run apps in admin mode” (25:06).

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Microsoft Edge and User Experience Challenges

The hosts return to discussing Microsoft Edge, focusing on its user experience and background processes.

• Leo Laporte criticizes Edge’s persistent background processes and intrusive default settings, making it difficult for users to fully transition to alternative browsers without encountering Edge-related interruptions: “It's one of the big things they're trying to do” (45:05).

• They explore methods to disable Edge’s startup applications through Task Manager, highlighting the challenges users face in managing Edge’s resources: “You can disable startup apps in Task Manager” (46:24).

• The conversation underscores the frustration among users who prefer alternative browsers but are hindered by Edge’s aggressive integration into the Windows ecosystem.

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Closing Remarks and Future Outlook

As the episode concludes, Paul and Leo reflect on the current state of Microsoft’s platforms and speculate on future directions.

• Paul Thurrott mentions upcoming discussions on Activision releases on Game Pass and the evolving landscape of cloud gaming and cross-platform integrations: “We talked about this last time” (112:58).

• Leo Laporte speculates on Microsoft's potential moves in the gaming sector, including next-gen console innovations and deeper integrations with mobile and cloud gaming services: “They're trying to make a go of the game streaming stuff over the cloud” (116:59).

• They encourage listeners to stay engaged through Club Twit and other streaming platforms, promoting their ongoing commitment to providing in-depth analysis and updates on Microsoft’s technologies.

• The absence of Richard Campbell is noted, with expressions of well-wishes and anticipation for his return: “We miss you, Richard. Come back soon” (127:25).

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Notable Quotes

• Paul Thurrott: “This is possibly the most unreliable, most poorly engineered version of Windows ever made” (02:54).

• Leo Laporte: “24H2 has been dogged by problems ever since the October stable release” (02:54).

• Leo Laporte: “It's reaching out to Google via back channels” (41:17).

• Paul Thurrott: “They added a keyboard shortcut that will run apps in admin mode” (25:06).

• Leo Laporte: “Have we done our audience a disservice by making them so paranoid?” (58:57).

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Conclusion

Episode 907 of Windows Weekly provides a comprehensive look into the challenges and advancements within Microsoft's ecosystem. From the troubled Windows 24H2 update and Edge's controversial data handling to Outlook's AI enhancements and .NET 9's promising features, Paul Thurrott and Leo Laporte offer insightful commentary. Despite technical hurdles and user frustrations, the hosts remain optimistic about Microsoft's trajectory, particularly in security and developer tools. Listeners are encouraged to engage through various platforms and stay tuned for future discussions, especially with Richard Campbell's anticipated return.

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For those interested in the detailed technical discussions and further insights, tuning into this episode of Windows Weekly is highly recommended.

Transcript

[Paul Thurrott]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Therotz here. Richard Campbell has the week off. We're going to talk about 24H2. The quality issues continue, as Paul says, like a parade with no end. A new trick Microsoft Edge has for getting your Chrome data and why ARM earns about a tenth what Qualcomm does. Don't even get me started on Apple. All that and a lot more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Leo Laporte]

This is twit.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therad and Richard Campbell. Episode 907, recorded Wednesday, November 13, 2024. It's interesting being me. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Microsoft. Normally, you winners and dozers, we have three of us in the studio. But Rich Campbell is not feeling too good after all those travels. He brought back the Tunisian flu or something. So it's just me and you, Paul.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm surprised this doesn't happen to him more often. He travels to a degree I don't even understand.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, and I travel a lot, or I used to, but man, he's on the road a lot.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah, that's. That's really his job, isn't it? Is, is this public speaker?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Right, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Have podium, will travel kind of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, good for him. I'm amazed he didn't do it at all. It's great.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

But that's okay because this is the way Windows Weekly was for the first four or five hundred shows. And so, yeah, we can do it. We can do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Paul Thurat is in Mexico City. He is, of course, the man in charge of the rot.com t h u r r o t t.com and he writes some excellent books including Windows Everywhere and the Field guide to Windows 11, [e-mail] and he is Prestige 11 on call duty. Are you.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't even know anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

Do you get back to your old prestige level? Do you have to start?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think each game has its own prestige, but you get little pop ups when stuff happens. It was like you've won 50 multiplayer games or whatever. That's nice. It's good.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So we'll talk about. I'm sure we'll talk about that in our vaunted Xbox segment. But before we do that, today, we're trying to do these things in order. And of course the most important thing is 24H2.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. And it's going great, Leo. You know, like in Mexico. Like, if you were a Mexico travel blogger, you would do something like your daily dose of Mexico.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Your daily dose of 24H2 is like, what went wrong today?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Because this is possibly the most unreliable, most poorly engineered version of Windows ever made. I made that case I don't know, two, three weeks ago. And then every week since, there's been new issues. The latest is I got an email from someone who said, I just updated from 23 to 24H2 and now it's telling me that my version of Windows is unsupported. I was like, wow, I've never seen that, but I'm not surprised. And now I'm seeing on Reddit that multiple people are seeing this. There's going to be. I think Microsoft has found out which KB screwed it up. But that's what happens when you update something like Windows twice a month at least you can have reliability problems.

[Paul Thurrott]

But is this for normals or is this Windows Insider build?

[Leo Laporte]

No, this is just normal.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is everything.

[Leo Laporte]

24H2. The weird thing about this is that in the modern era anyway, 24H2 in some ways has been tested more than any version of Windows I can think of. It went out first in June on copilot plus PCs. Plenty of time to get this thing right. And man, it has just been dogged by problems ever since the October stable release. So at least they keep updating it and introducing new problems. So we always have something to talk about.

[Paul Thurrott]

Always something new.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm trying to see the positive side of this.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know, something fun. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So. Oh well, what are you going to do? He says browsing apple.commac no.

[Paul Thurrott]

By the way, I did get the new Mac Mini and yeah, it's really cute.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it mini? What do you call it? Mini.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, this is the box I could show you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's the size of the first ipod box.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, pretty much.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty much exactly the same size.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're right. And it's a little bigger than a ipod or even an Apple tv, but it's a lot smaller than the Mac Studio that I replaced it with.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean. Yeah, right. This looks like the cybertruck version of it now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

So would you describe it as. Is it as small as like an intel nuclear? Because those were kind of notable.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's nuc. Like, it reminds me of maybe a small nuclear. Yeah, it's pretty small. Yeah. I had a Linux NUC from System 76. It was about the same size. So, yeah, I guess it is.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it's a much more powerful computer, though. That's the other thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, that's what it seems to. I can't tell. But this is the problem with normal people is that you could have benchmarks, you know, say this is the fastest processor ever. You know, my browser, you know, it's. Yeah, yeah. So it. But it's. Yeah, it's. The reports are quite good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Enough Mac talk. This is Windows Weekly. Let's talk about Patch Tuesday, which was yesterday.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So Patch Tuesday. There's not a lot new, but there was one important feature in here for me personally on 24H2, which is a new copilot key setting. So if you go to Settings app, I know personalization, text input, which is a part of Settings, no one has ever visited, there's a copilot key setting. And I was really excited about this because I wanted to turn it off.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I remember you saying that. In fact, I remember kind of saying, oh, here it comes. We're going to have. And no, can't turn it off.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not an option. Yeah. So what I could do is change it.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can reassign it Search.

[Leo Laporte]

I can reassign it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I can reassign it to an app. So you at least don't want it to write an app. I'm going to head. I'm going to write an app that does nothing and I'm going to assign it to that because right now what I've assigned it to is search.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And the only advantage that search has over copilot is that when I summon it by mistake, which I do about 17 times a day, I can dismiss it by hitting Escape. So that's nice. It's like slightly. Slightly more elegant fixing of my mistake, I guess, because I have ham hands. But yeah, beyond that, not really a lot going on. Notification suggestions, which is hilarious. I think about that as a notification for notifications. You know, you get a notification that says it doesn't look like you're using this notification a lot or would you like to be notified about this other thing you're not getting notifications for?

[Paul Thurrott]

You want more notifications? Good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I feel like this is a gross misunderstanding of notifications. It also has the new preview of sandbox, the 2.0 version, which is great. Other than the fact that I feel like Sandbox has a really limited use case and I don't feel that it's the future of virtualization or anything. And I'm a Little curious why they're spending so much time on this, but that's fine if you don't know what that is. Sandbox is just a temporary in time hybrid virtual machine that's based on the hardware of your PC that comes up in real time. You use it, you make changes, you do whatever, you close it, those changes go away. So every time you bring it up, it's just like a fresh version. And it's basically just a way to test software that you might be a little iffy about. So it's not really the type of thing most people are going to notice.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I got a question for you. And I know everybody loves it when I ask questions about Windows.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, let's step through this. All right, you open this, it's Windows Q+I.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, no, no, sorry. No, I did Winver and for some reason it says I'm on 22H2.

[Leo Laporte]

22H2. Yeah, that's good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. But now remember, this is in Parallels. I did update.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is a little more difficult because it's Parallels. Right. So I. There's no. So I don't know of an official good way to just to force it to 24H2. I will tell you that I did, on my own Mac, force it to 24H2.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

But I did it by going to a site called UUP Dump.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, no, I don't want to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. I'm just telling you what I did. I downloaded the. Well, I downloaded a set of files that creates an ISO for the ARM version of Windows 24.2.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I see. It's because I'm on Windows on ARM that I.

[Leo Laporte]

And on Parallels. Right. So there's all these reasons why you might or might not be getting the update and it gets complicated.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is this TPM thing and all of that.

[Leo Laporte]

No, shouldn't be. I don't know enough about Parallel. I feel like this. I feel like Parallels must offer some official way to do this. That's not what you. Yeah, I'll have to check like through Parallels.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like it says I'm up to date.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

I guess if I joined the Insiders program, maybe it would.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, don't do that. No, no, no, no, no. Look, that's not crazy. So one of the things that is was. Is in the notes for later, but I'll just mention it now. I was hoping to discuss this with Richard because he talked to someone from Microsoft about this topic and got zero answer whatsoever. So whatever is that when 24H2 shipped for intel and or for x86, I should say Microsoft added a note to the download page that said the windows on ARM ISOs were coming soon and it's been a month plus they still have not come. And so there's a whole bunch of things tied into this that are a little complicated. One is that the modern Windows and ARM devices, of course, are Snapdragon based. They have the Prism emulator, much better performance, etc. But you will, on your Mac, be able to take advantage of some of the performance improvements in Prism. So you want to get 24H2, you're actually going to have a better experience, but you also don't want to put your machine or any. Anyone who has an older device or any device. Actually, come to think of it, you don't want to put your ARM device into the Insider program because that downloadable ISO is not available. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm looking at the Parallels support site and you can see what it says here. It has a process, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, of course it does.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a process. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet if you started a new VM, you would probably get 24H2, I would imagine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

But. Yeah, I just forced the issue. I didn't want to wait. Yeah, it's, you know, it's a vm. I don't know. I'm not sure what you're using it for. I mean.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I'm happy. I just. I guess it's okay, right? I mean, I'm not.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, I.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's only because I want to keep up with the Joneses. I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. The reality is, well, there's two things. So there's two sides. You would see better performance. 24h2, that said, you're seeing awesome performance. You probably would.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm fine.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not going to notice it. And then the way I would use it if I was just like a normal person would be. I think it's called Coherence mode, where you just kind of run the apps.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In the Mac.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's pretty cool, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I like that a lot. And in that case, you'd never notice what the version was, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

No. Okay. I'm happy. You made me happy. Sorry, everybody. Let's continue with the show.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, actually, while you're doing that, I'm going to write the app that does nothing. So I can fix the Copilot key. I'll have it just make a duck sound. So every time I hit the key, I'll go. It would be Pretty funny. That's what it does. Halfway.

[Paul Thurrott]

That'd be good. I like it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's probably the sound that. That's probably what Microsoft thinks I sound like, you know, like threats at it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Again, it sounds like. I don't really care if I'm 24h2, to be honest, at this point.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but I understand why you do. I did. I mean, I. I went and did the work, you know, I. They'll get there eventually.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, the real reason I was looking is I wanted to do your copilot thing, but I wouldn't have a copilot key, so it wouldn't make any difference anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

But you say go to settings, personalization, text input, scroll down programs like auto hotkeys and stuff. You know, there are.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, this is the type of thing I think is going to get better over time. But right now there's just three options. So it's search, copilot, or custom. If you click custom, you see the apps that are installed in your system. I don't know. I guess I could have 300 instances of notepad running maybe, or.

[Paul Thurrott]

But this is. Your point is that you hit the. Because of where the key is. You hit it all the time and you don't want anything to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know what, it is like the. It's next to the arrow key, right. And those arrow keys are small. I use arrow keys a lot for navigation. I have. My fingers are the size of, you know, erasers or whatever. Hams. Thank you. And I hit it by mistake all the time. I'm willing to accept that this is user error. I just would like it to stop.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. You know, that's kind of the whole thing about customizing your computer is to compensate for your own failings.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly. Right. It's. Yes, I need glasses for my co pilot or something. I don't know. You know what I mean?

[Paul Thurrott]

Believe me, I know you. This is, after all our 907th episode. I know you fairly well by the.

[Leo Laporte]

This time, I will tell you. I was walking up. Down the street, whatever, up street with my wife from lunch, and Stephanie said this. She said, this is kind of weird. We walked by some group of people, but she says it's kind of weird. But one thing I have trouble with here is I can never tell if people are dressed in a costume or if it's just what they're wearing. And I literally said, I've been doing this podcast with leo for like 18 years and I have the same problem. You're like, I'm Like, Leo has, like, outfits.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm always hiding.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I mean, like, you have like. Like for every event. Like, you have hats and things. And I have. I just wear the same exact thing every day.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, this is actually to go with this outfit.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Like, it is. You know. Now, granted, the person who walked by looked like a character from a Batman movie or whatever. I don't know what was going on there, but it wasn't.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like a country where people like to dress up. I think it's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's really interesting. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Do you think that's exclusive to me? I think it's Mexico City, because I think you go out.

[Leo Laporte]

It could be a Latino thing. I don't know. I will say, since we're on this topic, not to go wildly off top, off course, or whatever. We went to a cantina the other night, and this is a place where if you drink enough, your food is free. And they had live acts who were singing. The first guy to sang remakes of songs like. Or, you know, did, like, you know, famous songs. And then it was all, you know, Mexican music from the ages or whatever. So. And it was all. They were fantastic. Very loud. It's Mexico.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah. I've noticed that the bands play loud.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything's loud here. This place is addicted to noise. You could have a single person in a store before they're open, setting up. They have a speaker the size of a Volkswagen cranked to full volume.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

While they're cleaning. And I just don't understand it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think that is. That is kind of Latin culture.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And I don't. Eventually I'll just be deaf and it won't matter. But I. This. This. This place was. It was fascinating because what you saw was men and women of all ages dancing in the aisles with each other without inhibition or any sense of anything. And I said to the people we were with, you know, they beat that out of you in the United States when you're like five or six. Like, we don't. We. This. This big burly man, muscles and tattoos and shirt open and the chains and everything. And he's dancing like a little kid.

[Paul Thurrott]

No means.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's wonderful just here.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, it's the way it is. It's not. I'm. I have so much accepted. I am so. I don't know if the word is shy or. I would never. I just couldn't. You know, I don't like to be singing to the radio and I look over and someone sees Me singing in my car and can't hear me. And I'm still embarrassed by that, you know, or something like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, okay. Sorry. I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's a joyous, wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a different culture.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And I think it's really great. So let's see. We did Patch Tuesday. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Oh, and just added to that though, real quick. I didn't write about this, but the Windows and the Windows Update team posted that they're not going to do a preview Update for Windows 11 in December. So that would be the week D update. It's probably the week of Christmas is why. So that means we're not. But they will have a normal update in December. Patch Tuesday, and they will have a normal update in January. So I guess that one's just not going to be tested. That's fine. And they didn't mention November, so yesterday was Patch Tuesday. That means two weeks from yesterday will be week D preview update day. We'll see if they have. They didn't mention it. So I don't know what the schedule is there, but you know, Microsoft kind of shuts down for the second half of December every year, so maybe not surprising.

[Paul Thurrott]

What are we going to do for the end of the year? I mean, we used to have Chris Capacello on at the end of every year. We had Mary Jo Foley on last time. That was fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. I'm running out of surprises. We're running out of former co hosts.

[Paul Thurrott]

Bring a Mariachi band in and yeah, yeah, Play Loud.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Prism emulator improvements in the Canary build.

[Leo Laporte]

I mentioned this because I was hoping, I was thinking Richard would be here and he had. He. I think you mentioned his most recent episode at the time of Run as Radio or maybe he mentioned it the week before, I don't remember. But it was a woman from Microsoft who was talking about how ARM is now a first class citizen at Microsoft and these things are updated the exact same way, et cetera, et cetera. And I thought it was kind of an interesting conversation for many level or for many reasons. But I think to most people that assertion would be met with, wait, you didn't just do this like eight years ago? Like, what do you mean? Like it's now it's a first class citizen. You know, it seemed like every time you fixed a bug in Windows, you would fix it in Windows and arm. Like, you know, and I don't quite understand that. I will just say that when you go back to the Windows, the original Windows rt, which was the first ARM version of Windows. That was not the case. These things were treated as discrete, separate products, much like Microsoft has things like Windows for Iot or had Windows CE back in the day or Windows Phone or whatever. These were offshoots, but they weren't always on the same train, if you will, for updates or whatever features, even though they were largely similar at the time.

[Paul Thurrott]

This was the episode.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

October 30th.

[Leo Laporte]

Aria Hansen I also, again with the expectation Richard was going to be here. I was going to tell him the thing I just told my wife as well, which was that it's interesting sometimes being me because I'll listen to a podcast like this and then he starts talking about me. I'm like, wait, what's happening?

[Paul Thurrott]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's like. It's weird. Like, you know, the hunter has become the hunted. You know, like it's. It's a weird experience. Right. You know, I mean, obviously he's like the co host of the show. I mean, it makes sense. But I. It's still a little surprising every time something like that happens. It was kind of amusing, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I'm going to call this show.

[Leo Laporte]

It's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Since you've now given me this opening. It's interesting being me.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we'll see if I can't outdo that.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's early yet.

[Leo Laporte]

It's early, Yeah. I wouldn't etch it into stone quite yet. Anywho, Richard asked about the Windows 11 on Arm isos and she didn't have an answer for that because how could she? And they're not there yet, so I don't know what to tell you.

[Paul Thurrott]

What ISOs are there?

[Leo Laporte]

Just the. Just intel, you know, x86, x64.

[Paul Thurrott]

No ARM ISOs, no ARM.

[Leo Laporte]

They've never been. Microsoft has never offered those for public download other than the insider preview version.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Hence the issue with 22H4 or 24H2. I mean, yeah, yeah. If I could get an ISO, I could just install it, but I can't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. And I. Depending on the computer you have, you do have the, you know, depending the ability to get a recovery image from the manufacturer. So Microsoft offers those for its computers.

[Paul Thurrott]

God, I can't believe they're still.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. It should just be.

[Paul Thurrott]

That system still exists is ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. And the fact that they ship 24H2 without just making this simple download available to people doesn't make sense to me. But my, you know, whatever. That's my whole life right now. So.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Why is that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Why is that surprising for you young people? When you used to be, when you'd buy a computer, you'd get a CD in it. It was called the recovery disk. And it included the entire Windows install with extra additions from that manufacturer. And you could use it if your hard drive died or whatever to reset the computer. Then they stopped doing that and they started putting a partition on. Right. That you could do it for.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Recovery partition. You could also just download from. Well, things have gotten more sophisticated. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So there was an interim period, I remember that was really awful, where they stopped putting the CD in because Microsoft was afraid of piracy. And you had to make your own CD by downloading a bunch of files.

[Leo Laporte]

And if, depending on the PC maker, you had one shot at this, you did, Right. When you did, if you ran it, it was over. It would never let you do it again.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that really. I blame Microsoft because they were afraid of piracy so much, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so maybe I. I complain a lot. Just. I'll end that sentence right there and. But I complain a lot about Windows, for sure. It's maybe helpful for me. You've reminded me, I used to. When I traveled for work, I would ship. I would travel with this little CD case. Yes. I would have Windows Office, you know, a bunch of my data. Whatever it was, it would be the way I. You know, just in case. Because I never trust these things. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

What was it? Hiram's boot. Boot disk.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Jeez.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like a. All that weird. Like a custom Ms. DOS boot copy of Spin, Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Bunch of. Yeah, it was crazy. And you'd have that in a. In a binder. You know, it's funny how this was a part of our life and now you're a few years later. It's like distant memory, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean. Well, we have new things to complain about. It's not like they solved all the problems, but I. But to be fair. Well, not to be fair. No, it's not fair. There's no version of this where this shouldn't be available. But I suppose as you should have.

[Paul Thurrott]

Isos, that you could go and use the Microsoft Build tool to make an ISO for every computer. It's just simple.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's even you could make a recovery Disk in Windows 11 on ARM. You can do that. That's fine, I guess. Having the one. Well, it's a flash drive now, but I think having the original setup disk is actually superior. And you were talking about how the PC makers would customize those. Yeah. CDs they had at the time. DVDs. Eventually. Today, you Know, we do have a more sophisticated system where they could deliver, you know, crap. We're at the speed of sound now and just, you know, you get it through Windows Update, but you still get all the crap too. So, you know, it's. It's way better.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Way better. Yeah. Way better.

[Paul Thurrott]

Crap.

[Leo Laporte]

Where.

[Paul Thurrott]

In a moment.

[Leo Laporte]

Crap. Where is a service. Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. I'm running Windows on ARM only because I'm running in Parallels on a Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

So I guess, look, even on the Mac, you benefit, like I said. Or you will when you get 24H2 from the improvements to the Prism emulator, which are dramatic and are about to get even better.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I want. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And then the. Just all the compatibility stuff that's occurred thanks to the co pilot plus PCs. Right. There's a, you know, I can't get.

[Paul Thurrott]

It, is what you're saying.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, I don't. You. Right. I mean, you can. You just can't get it officially.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have to kind of work around.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean, I wrote. I wrote an article about it if you want to go see.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, good. I'll go look on Thrive.

[Leo Laporte]

But I don't necessarily recommend to, you know, what I would call normal or mainstream users.

[Paul Thurrott]

But there are advantages to it because Prism has been improved. That's the emulator that runs x86 software under Windows on ARM. And I would like to see how much better that is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. But the biggest, I mean, maybe for your purposes, virtualization, emulation, whatever, the bigger deal is just how much software is now native on arm and those things will run better on the Mac too.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, that's true.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's nice. Just kind of automatic.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Thank you, Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it only took 12 years. What has it been, 12 years? Yeah. Okay. Not too much to say on the Windows Insider front. That Canary build from last week was a big deal. There's been a more recent Canary build today that's just mostly bug fixes, including that one, the reliability issue I mentioned last week, which is when you open the more info whatever it's called button in the command bar of File Explorer, it goes off the top of the screen because seriously, it's like maybe you don't touch it so much and it will be okay. You know, it's like if you have a scab, Windows is like a scab. Don't touch it so much. Try to leave it alone. It would be better. And then there's also been Devin beta builds. There is one Notable thing I'm actually pretty excited about because the type of thing I do a lot, which is Microsoft is adding a keyboard shortcut that will run apps in admin mode. Right. So in other words, you double click something and it opens normally under your user account or whatever, and then you hold down two keys and you double click it. It runs under admin. Right. So today we have to right click the execute, you know, start, run as admin, you know, go through uac, et cetera. So that's cool. That's good. Actually, I run things as admin all the time because I hate my computer being reliable. So it's good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Gibson was talking about this yesterday on Security. Now the. Microsoft's changed UAC a little bit so that I don't know. Are you aware of that?

[Leo Laporte]

I wasn't aware of any change to uac, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, okay. I don't know where he gets his material.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's beautiful. I thought you were going to say he was talking about pseudo and.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, he. No, well, he would if he could. No, but he was talking about how you. He said. Well, first of all, he says, I run as administrator and I turn off UAC because of course.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. That's actually, I'm actually really surprised to hear that. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, no, he's, he's a.

[Leo Laporte]

That's like saying I bought a new car but I turned off that third middle light because it's superfluous.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't, I don't understand why, why go to the effort? Like why even. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not gonna get an accident. I don't need airbags.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, he's at. But that's kind of his attitude. He's like, I know what I'm doing. I'm a, I'm a guru security expert. I don't need to UAC to nanny me. But he was approving of the new. I think he was. It's hard to tell sometimes of the new uac, which made it a little bit his.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this is Steve Gibson. When you say new UAC, do you mean the version they introduced, Windows 7?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, you know, I'll have to go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Back and look at the show notes.

[Leo Laporte]

I haven't noticed any differences in uac. Go ahead.

[Paul Thurrott]

People are, you know, inured now to uac. So it pops up, they go, yeah, yeah, yeah. They click. Ok, so apparently, I don't know, I'll get the show notes and I'll.

[Leo Laporte]

So in keeping with our keyboard shortcut conversation of earlier, you get into These kind of habits. So for me, UAC is tab, tab, tab and right. You know, like that's. I don't even think about it. Like I let alone go try to find the mouse cursor.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, right. Although I think sometimes UAC will ask for the password. Right. And then you can't just kind of tap, tap, tap. That's like on the more serious.

[Leo Laporte]

That's probably a Windows hello authentication type thing or maybe a Microsoft account authentication.

[Paul Thurrott]

Let me. Okay, let me. UAC wasn't in the way enough so they fixed it. He says, I love it. I'm looking at the show notes. We've all come to know User Account Control Windows. Clever and workable. There you go. Solution to the age old dilemma of users running with root privileges. Microsoft. Let's see. Okay. Administrator protection in an upcoming platform security feature in Windows 11 which aims to protect free floating. You know this admin rights for administrator users language still perform all admin features with just in time admin privileges. It's off by default. Needs to be enabled by group policy.

[Leo Laporte]

This is not in Windows yet. That's the. It's just not there yet.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's why. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

So it's something called admin protection which is currently in the Canary builds, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, yeah, no, that's not been rolled into stable to my knowledge. So in fact, you know, Microsoft's been talking a lot about security this year for all the obvious reasons. And there are, you know, I, I talked about Windows. Hello. ESS is kind of an example of the whole platform kind of raising the bar on security. It took, I'd have to think about this really, 15 plus years for TPM, whatever to become required right now in Windows 11. And it's just we kind of accept this as part of the PC. This ESS stuff is going to be that. And then not because of CrowdStrike necessarily, but related to CrowdStrike, they started talking about all the ways they're going to secure Windows and new ways they're going to secure Windows. This is one of them. And then there are things related to passkeys and authentication, which actually just wrote about this today, oddly about a year ago in trying to figure out what it meant when Microsoft said we just added a passkey manager to Windows, I went down that rabbit hole with two FA passkeys and authentication and how things work under the covers in Windows. And there are further changes coming there related to Windows. Hello. There's a lot of stuff coming but I'm not aware of this being.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't Think it's a canary right now. So you've got some time to. I think the idea is it shouldn't be as easy to escalate permissions. And so they're isolating them all inside this new model.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is funny because I just talked about this keyboard shortcut that makes it easier. And well, it's easier. You're still going to get the UAC prompt. So in other words, it's easier. Easier to get that thing started. But then it's not actually, you know, you have to go through the process.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

This is. I don't think I put this in the notes, but since we're on this topic. What? Every year Microsoft will announce new features in whatever new version of Windows. And most of the time you go down the list, you're like, okay. You're like, yep, yep, yep. And then you get to that one where you're like, wait, what is this? And last year it was that passkey thing that set me off at a two month investigation research and whatever it took months. And because security, security is hard. Right. In 24H2 they made the claim that we are now automatically enabling BitLocker or device encryption on every Windows PC regardless of sign in. Right before, if you signed in with a Microsoft account or a work or school account, an Enter ID account, it would. That would encrypt the disk. That's not possible. I read that. I said you can't be doing that because the only other way to sign in would be with a local account. And if you have a local account, you might not even have a password. You don't have any way to store a recovery key anywhere automatically like you do with Microsoft's managed account. So I spent the past two weeks working on that little topic. And the way it works is kind of strange language, but Windows 11 Home versus Pro, it's device encryption. You get BitLocker management with Pro BitLocker to go as well. If you sign up with Microsoft account or school account. Yep. You get the. It's automatic. If you sign in with a local account, it says it's enabled but it's not activated. So you have to activate it. When you activate it, you have to download that or do something, store it somewhere of recovery key because you have to. That's a requirement of this thing, right? So that explains it. Except there's another difference, right? So if you're using Windows 11 Pro, you could go into the BitLocker control panel and just turn it on. It's fine because it will prompt you to Store that thing. But you, you can do it as a local account. You, you don't have to have a managed account if you're using Windows 11 Home, you have to sign in with a Microsoft account. So the workaround there is, if you accept Microsoft's defaults, you'll see your local account has been transformed into a Microsoft account. That's probably not what you want.

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

So my advice there is to. Well, hey, just don't do this. Who cares? It's stupid. But if you have to do this. No, if for some reason, you know, from a cold boot, your local account is the only thing I'm going to use. You have to create a Microsoft account, sign in, Sign in with that account. It will encrypt the disk, sign out, delete it, and you're good to go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then if you want to. So it will decrypt automatically even if you're not signed into that account after from then on.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's encrypted for good and you can't. But it has to take.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you can use it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you could, as the user, turn it off.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I'm just saying when you log in, it must decrypt because otherwise you wouldn't be able to use your hard drive.

[Leo Laporte]

It does it automatically on the fly. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Even if you're not logged into the MSA account.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. It doesn't matter which account using it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Doesn'T matter at that point.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's always been the case. But yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you need the MSA to do.

[Leo Laporte]

It, but you don't to store the recovery key. Because you have to have some way to get into this thing. Yeah. So if you turn on your computer one day, it doesn't boot up your hardware thing. It says enter your BitLocker recovery key, which is the wrong terminology. Whatever. But you have to go get that.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, that's because people lose this. I know. Gosh. I've formatted drives and lost the certificates and I have no way of getting the BitLocker unlocked. And I understand that. So that's when they started storing it on the Microsoft account. And that's a good thing. In the words of Martha Stewart, it's a good thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, I want to take a break and then we will come back and we will talk about Edge. It's learned a new trick. Isn't that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really an old trick. It's just reusing because Microsoft has never had an original idea. But yes, it is a. It's a Trick.

[Paul Thurrott]

A new trick. A new trick. And. And a lot more still to come. We're sorry that Richard Campbell's a little under the weather. He will be back, I'm sure, next week. But meanwhile, it's Paul Thoreau and me. Sorry. Doing. Doing Windows Weekly. Sorry, sorry. Apologies all around.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm here all week. Sorry.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I'm just teasing. It's a great show and everybody loves you, Paul. Our show, you know, we have that kind of relationship. I just want everybody to know. Le Paul looks at me and says, are you wearing a costume?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Right. Are you wearing costume?

[Paul Thurrott]

You look like a clown.

[Leo Laporte]

You look like a clown. I said that to a college teacher. She said, why doesn't anyone take me seriously? And I said, I think it's the clown, though. I never got along with that woman.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think that was the end of that relationship.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

This week, Windows Weekly, brought to you by those great folks at US Cloud. And they are the number one Microsoft Unified Support replacement. Replacement. So I know probably a lot of you are using Microsoft Unified support and that means you are paying more and getting less. This is why you should know about US Cloud, the global leader in third party Microsoft Enterprise support. They support 50 of the Fortune 500. So they know how to handle big installations and big companies. They also save you money. Switching to US Cloud could save your business 30 to 50% on a true comparable replacement for Microsoft Unified Support. They of course US Cloud supports the entire Microsoft stack. They're there of course 24, seven every day of the year. But here's the thing, they respond faster and they resolve tickets quicker for clients. And by the way, clients, just don't let the name fool you all over the world. But you will always talk to real humans, US Based. Always. And these aren't just real humans. They are expert level engineers. US Cloud reaches out and recruits the smartest, best people with an average of 14.9 years. And that's for Break Fix or DSE. As I said, they're all based in the US. Your data will never leave the US. And here's something that US Cloud does. If Microsoft still does not do financially backed SLAs on response time, initial ticket response average is under four minutes. And you know when your hair's on fire and the network's down and everything's going crazy, four minutes even feels long, right? Anything longer? No. Four minutes. You need somebody to help you fast. Last year 94% of US Cloud's clients reported saving 1/3 or more when switching from Microsoft's unified support to US Cloud. From Fortune 500 companies to large health systems, major financial institutions, even to federal agencies, U.S. cloud ensures that vital Microsoft systems are working for over 6 million users globally every single day. They, I mean, I'm talking big brands that trust US Cloud. Caterpillar uses US Cloud. HP, Aflac, Dun and Bradstreet, Under Armour, KeyBank, even the IT folks at Gartner have chosen US Cloud for their Microsoft support needs. I saw an interview with the Director of Information Technologies who said, and this was so great, in fact, I gotta get a recording of it. Cause he's. The way he says it's great. And within an hour US Cloud responded with, I wanna say, four engineers. So not only did they bring the right guys to the call, they brought the cavalry. I just felt like, wow, that was amazing. That was unlike anything I'd experienced with Microsoft in my eight years of being with Premier. We made the right choice, end quote. When it comes to compliance, no one gets it better than US Cloud. They're ISO, gdpr, ESG compliant. Not just regulatory requirements for them. These are strategic imperatives that drive operational efficiency, legal compliance, risk management and corporate reputation. These standards foster trust and loyalty among customers and stakeholders. They attract investment and they ensure long term sustainability and success in a competitive global market. Uscloud.com Great. I had a wonderful call with them and I was very impressed. I want you to visit US Cloud. I think you'll be impressed. Book a call today, find out how much you can save. And they said, you know, they said, look how much we saved. I said, you shouldn't focus on how much you're saving. You should focus on this as better support. These people are, you've got the best engineers. They say, yeah, and you save. Okay, that's uscloud.com book a call today. Get faster, better Microsoft support for less. It's all of the above. Okay, you can restore your microphone now, Paul. I have the discord. I have to say, you know what? I completely agree with you. Some of those animated gifts, pretty wild. Pretty wild. Is it the squirrel that did it?

[Leo Laporte]

No, it was. I don't, I don't want to. I. This is going to sound like I'm making fun of this person. That's not.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, don't make fun of anybody.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I. It's a club message. It's just like this, you know, I read it on the Internet, it must be true type things. It's like, oh yeah, it's just like, Yep. I mean, I read it, it must be there.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know this is not, you know, a Firefox. Look at that.

[Leo Laporte]

I would love that. Something as common as the UAC prompt has been updated without my knowledge. That would be amazing to me. But now here it is.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is the. This is the quote. That's. Anyway, Paul, this is a chance for me to say, everybody should join the club. Get in the Discord. You too can laugh along with Windows Weekly's Paul Thorax.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like a virtual version of a dunk tank, that affair, you know, seven.

[Paul Thurrott]

Bucks a month ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Discord, special events. You get to see the video, for instance, for Paul's hands on Windows. A lot of good stuff. We would love to have you in the Club Twit. TV Club Twit. All right, let's continue on with the fun fest.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

What's Edge up to?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm curious what you think the motivation is here. Right. So this is something I run into a lot because I set up Windows so many times and I think about this. I'm really curious about this, but when you set up Edge, the first time you run Edge on a new computer, you step through three screens, right? Where you and I, literally, in all three of the screens, I advise changing the default every time. So I'm going to get this wrong off the top of my head, despite the fact that I've done it a thousand times in this trip alone. But roughly speaking, it wants to sync with your other browser. It doesn't say this. It means Chrome. It literally won't sync with anything else. If you accept that default and you don't have Chrome install, which you wouldn't, I guess it will ask you to sign into your Google account and every time Chrome or Edge launches, it will sync all of the data from Chrome into Edge. Now, if you're switching from Chrome to Edge, this is arguably a benefit of some kind. I mean, the old way of doing this and you can still do this is just to import your data.

[Paul Thurrott]

Kind of a manual thing. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is just reaching out to Google via back channels. I guess there's some other stuff in there that's really squirrely. In fact, these additions to the Edge first run experience were to me so severe that I created a new chapter in the book to deal with this. How to stop it from doing all this terrible stuff. The last of the three screens, literally. It doesn't say this, but what it literally means is we would like to track you more than our privacy policies allow. If you leave this box checked Which a lot of people will do. We will now be tracking you even more. And the notion that anyone would actually take the time to go and read and see what was changed and would agree to this is astonishing to me. But I think most people don't read it and have no idea.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just go, okay, yeah, fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this new track, they just go boom, boom, boom.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, right. You got to be careful with this stuff. Now, one of the things I do in my book, since I just brought this up, is I know a lot of people stepped through this and didn't think about it. Right? Just like I know that a lot of people set up Windows and didn't look at that privacy page. That's actually very important to look at. And so I took the time to document. It's too late. So how do you fix it now? And you can go back and find where those settings are, right? Yeah. One of the settings in Edge is one you can't find in the ui. You can search for it and get to it that way. That's. That's how dishonest Edge is. It's just a piece of junk anyway. One of the many things that Microsoft has been doing in recent years in Windows 11 is trying to prevent you from switching to another browser. They took the one awesome thing that came out of antitrust in the late 90s, early 2000s, the default apps interface, and they completely kneecapped it in the initial version of Windows 11, specifically to prevent people from switching from Edge to another browser. There are behaviors in Windows 11 that, even when you do correctly switch to another browser, will still run Edge Right. When you click a link in widgets or in search, et cetera. So we all know about this stuff. They've done things like you go to the download page for Chrome, which I'm guessing is the most visited website on Earth, if you use Edge and they see that you're trying to download Chrome and like, well, hold on a second. We have a great browser. So they throw up, pop up. They've done everything they can do, right? What they're doing now is you're running another browser at Chrome and it will pop up. That thing that you see in the Edge first run experience, it's not a new experience. It's just appearing in a different time. It's saying, hey, you could enhance your browsing experience with Copilot if you use Microsoft Edge and we'll sync all your stuff. So it'll be just like using Chrome, except we'll be the ones tracking you instead of Google, which I don't think is in the language of the dialogue box, but you get the idea.

[Paul Thurrott]

You get the idea. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah, it's a new little Microsoft. I just don't. I really. I would like so badly for this company to get by these kinds of behaviors and there's just no evidence of that ever happening. It just keeps getting worse.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is the, this is the dialogue you're talking about. And it doesn't look like you're switching to.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you are, right? I mean, this is very, like I said, very much like the first or second. I think it's the first step in the Edge first run experience where, you know, your life would be a lot better.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, browse the rib with the best. How could it be better performing than Chrome? Isn't it just Chromium?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not going to try to justify that. That's crazy talk.

[Paul Thurrott]

How exactly could you be better? I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. Well, they do have.

[Paul Thurrott]

They strip stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

They do have system integrations.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. All right.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, the way they're faster is there's a process that runs a startup.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, it loads when you turn on the machine.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a great tip right there. If you don't use Edge and most of you don't turn that thing off, don't let it run itself.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, it does. Okay, wait a minute. Tell me this. Because you don't. So even if you're not using Edge.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, especially if you're not using Edge.

[Paul Thurrott]

This will start up anyway, of course.

[Leo Laporte]

Because they want this thing to run quick in the background. The idea is that you do click on something in widgets or search or where else goes. Oh, yeah, it's just right there. Thank you. Hello.

[Paul Thurrott]

So is this a services. How do you turn this off? You don't.

[Leo Laporte]

So there's two interfaces for this. If you go into Settings, it's Settings, Apps, startup apps. I think is the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, it's a startup app.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also in the Task Manager. That's the more standard way.

[Paul Thurrott]

You don't have to open services in.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but, you know, it's a little. I find the Task Manager interface to be a little easier to use, but you can sort this list by things that are enabled versus disabled. And it's, you know, I'm doing it right now. So, for example, on this computer, which I've not spent. I just reset this a day or two ago. So Microsoft Edge is running on this computer by default, even though I don't use it. Microsoft Teams Never use that notion. Don't need that to start up. Quick share from Google, which I installed for something we'll talk about later. Skype, Slack. Geez Louise. It goes on and on. Brave software update, Discord, Grammarly, Greenshot. It's crazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but that's all modern computing systems. That's true. Even Linux. That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

If you use Brave, then, yes, the Brave Software updater might be something you want running in the background when you first run your computer. But if you use Brave, the Edge thing is one thing you would not want. Right, right. So, yeah. Anyway, I don't know. I keep trying to. Bridge is one of those things I try to reconcile myself with, and it's almost like a conscience thing. It's okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

As a user experience, but it's also a little bloated. There's a lot of stuff in there. I wish it was a little more modular. I wish it was easier to get rid of the stuff. I didn't want that kind of thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm sorry. I'm running my task manager as a little sidebar in the window. Let me go full screen.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You still can't read it very well.

[Leo Laporte]

It's time. Well, so. All right, so you're in this. I can't. I can barely see that. But this is the startup apps view. So one thing to do. Oh, no, it's not. You're in the processes. So on the left side, go. It's like the fourth or fifth one down is the next one up, this little speed. So you can sort this by whether they run disabled. And that's the best way to do it. Right. So you can actually see what's. You know, see them all together and then you can disable the ones.

[Paul Thurrott]

Can you right click and disable the app?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yep. Yeah, you can.

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's. Get rid of that.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's. Get rid of this system security helps.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, I didn't say that. I'm sorry. Sorry. Yeah. I can barely see this.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like I might need that. I'm just saying.

[Leo Laporte]

I meant get rid of Edge.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the problem. Of course it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

You don't know. Am I disabling something I need.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. Do we talk about this by. No. This must have been hands on Windows. So if you go back to the processes view.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The top view, the typical reason someone would load this thing is because something's wrong. Right. You have an app.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, this is like Mark Russinovich's Process Explorer. They probably incorporated that in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And they've incorporated features from that, actually. So this is what's running right now. So you look at this and you think, well, okay, well, you're not here just to look at what's running. You're here because something went wrong. Right. So there's new Things in Windows 11 where you can right click and you can have this thing run in efficient mode that actually takes the load off the processor and sometimes that fix problems. But a lot of times what you have to do is just kill the thing. Right. And so what you want to do is right click and then kill the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Processor and then kill it with fire.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. But here's the problem. So this thing is dynamic, right? As things are running, the list of things you're looking at shifts, right. It jumps up or down. So you do this thing where it's like whack a mole. You like right click where to go. Right click the wrong thing. So if you hold down the control key, it pauses that. It's kind of a neat thing. So, unfortunately, if you spend enough time in here where you need to know this, something's gone horribly wrong in your life. But it's good to know it's because that's. That's handy. I spend more time in Task Manager than I'm comfortable admitting.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, I haven't used this in a long time. I used to open the services menu and all that stuff. But this is all in here now.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's great. Okay, thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure.

[Paul Thurrott]

Again. Once again, we've decided that it'd be better for Paul to explain how Windows work.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Than actually cover anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Open a hex editor.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm sorry. I won't derail you anymore, Paul.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's fine. We're about to get derailed again. Because if you think Edge is bad, I'd like to introduce you to Microsoft's next humor, which is called the New Outlook. They. They've started reminding customers that as of the end of December of this year, Mail, Calendar, and People, the Inbox apps that have been included in windows since Windows 8 are no longer supported. So they're. They're gone from 24H2. If you do a clean install, you won't see that. Now, those now and People's actually been gone technically since Windows 11 started.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's funny because I immediately removed that from my. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I. I've been removing. I. Knowing this was coming. I was removing these apps for a few months here anyway, and I don't use them Anyway, they're terrible. But. But man, there's something about the new Outlook that has really touched a raw spot for a lot of Windows users. And because somebody actually just asked me about this via email and mentioned the show, I guess I'll just say this now, which is that I've been writing the chapter for this app for the book for a while now and I've been using this app. And if you have a Microsoft account or a worker school account, I think it's fine. I don't understand what all the drama is about. Now if you came in here with a Google account and that's all you're going to use, or you're not paying for a Microsoft 365 subscription and you have a Microsoft account, you're going to see ads and that's obviously not a great experience. But I don't know, I don't think that that app is for those people really. I think this is for people who found male in particular, but calm people to be normal people, to be a little too simple and not necessarily very good from sort of an accessibility perspective and then find the traditional Outlook app to be this big hair bald, which it is, and that this is cutting some happy middle ground. It's actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

I see.

[Leo Laporte]

It's sort of web based in the sense that it's using WebView. It is in fact a native Windows app. But compared to the other Inbox apps that the apps that come with Windows, it might be the most complex and full featured of them. It's crazy. There's a lot of stuff going on in this app. It's pretty busy, but it works. It's weird to me.

[Paul Thurrott]

People use the web.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I do. People will say, well, what should I replace this with? And I'm like, why would you even use this thing?

[Paul Thurrott]

You don't need an app.

[Leo Laporte]

I many years ago switched over to Gmail through my Google Workspace thing with a custom domain and I configured it so that it collects all the mail from all my accounts and can reply to those messages as if coming from those accounts. I did that once and now it just works and I don't really think about it. It works great. I don't know. I don't know. But everyone's different, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

I guess every time I set up a computer for my wife, for Lisa, Yeah. I say, okay, I want to back up your data, move your day. She says, there's nothing on there. I said, what do you mean? She says, I use everything's in the web. There is literally no local data. On my systems.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Like, why do you know, we used to. It was the 1990s. That's how old this joke is. In fact, it was the same guy I was talking about earlier with his mother, who I had seen a long time. Anyway, random coincidence there. We used to joke about carrying around your PST file in a floppy disk shirt pocket.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Because you know, this self. At any time, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And of course it fit on the floppy too. Yeah. I don't. I want this stuff in the cloud. I don't want this. I don't need email local.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's really. I mean, she's using her computer like a. Like a Chromebook, basically. There's. Yeah, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Which, by the way, which almost diminishes what she's doing because that technically is more sophisticated in this case, it's silly to store this stuff locally and have. You know, it's. It's such a.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just everything's on Google Drive or Gmail, so she doesn't care what computer she's using. She doesn't care if I've backed it up. It doesn't matter.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And so. And I think that's probably. I'm gonna guess that's the majority of users now do it that way. They're in the cloud 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

I think so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Except for gamers or, you know, But.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this speaks to something that's very. Well, maybe it isn't, but to me, it's very particular to the Windows community. What I would call it, meaning we have this group of people who have been using this product for decades. They're very specific. They like things to be a certain way. They don't like change, and they complain about everything. Obviously, you're looking at me saying, yeah, we know exactly what you're talking about, Paul. That's you. I get it. But everything that changes is met by pushback. You can look in the discord now and see every specific feature that one person needs is not in this app. Maybe. Maybe it is. And they can't find it. It doesn't matter. And they're losing their minds over this. And it's like, guys, this is email. Who cares? Like, what is it? I just don't. I find it bizarre, you know, like, how much negativity there is around this kind of thing. So all I can say is I use the web because, you know, I think that's the right way to do it. But that's for me anyway. And I look at this app and I think it's fine. Like, it works fine. I use it with Gmail. It works fine. I have to sign it with my Microsoft account to make sure I don't get the ad thing, but other than that it's fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, so you don't get ads if you sign up with your Microsoft account.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't get ads if you sign in with a Microsoft account that has a Microsoft 365 subscription.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, because you subscribe.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. If you don't pay for something, you will get ads. So there's that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I am, you know, I'm kind of. I think that eight bucks a month I spend on my Microsoft 365 account is well spent, I assume.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, how does Gmail work? I don't even know. If you had. If you didn't pay for Gmail, would you see ads in Gmail you can't pay for?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I see. In Workspace.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what I mean?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

You. I don't know. I don't even know. I guess Gmail's free.

[Paul Thurrott]

Unless.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then you could buy Workspace.

[Leo Laporte]

But are there ads or do they just track you around the Internet and that's how you pay for it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I use Fast Mail. No ads.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so. No, but this is. Sorry. So just to beat this to death, one person says your wife is using a $2,500 Mac to do what a $500 Chromebook can do. That's not true. She's using email that way because it's the best way to do it. And she's using a Mac because she needs it for other things. You're focusing on the wrong thing here. Email shouldn't be this thing that gets in. I'm not here to manage my email. I'm here to read it, respond to it, or archive it, and then I move on. That's it.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's it. Increasingly, though, I mean, what the person's saying is not wrong. Because increasingly your computer is really just an interface to a browser. But you might like how Apple does it.

[Leo Laporte]

Depends.

[Paul Thurrott]

Versus how Microsoft does it. But it's just an interface to a browser. I'm trying to think of what you.

[Leo Laporte]

But your wife is not just using email on the Mac, is the point.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but when she uses Documents, she's using Google Sheets or Google Docs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, so I don't know if she. Yeah, but these are.

[Leo Laporte]

But these are the models. Right. So you could run a proprietary system like Windows or Chromebook, I guess, Chrome os. And you'll be tracked by those companies all over the Internet unless you do something about it. And even then, probably can't stop it. Honestly, she doesn't care.

[Paul Thurrott]

She runs honey and red.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just saying what if she'll do that? But when you run a Mac, I mean, one of the things or macOS, one of the. One of the little agreements you have here is like, they're not doing that. And so that's a decision that people can make. I mean, it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

But she installs rakuten on top of. And every time I say, you know, they're tracking around the web, she waves a rakuten check in my face and says, yeah, and they pay me for that. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there you go. I mean, at least she knows what she's doing. Most people are not that explicit about their choices. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think people don't care that much. We. Our audience does. We know our audience pretty well. And they care a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they care a lot.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but that's our audience.

[Leo Laporte]

I care, too. I've spent so much time trying to figure out ways to stop the tracking in Windows 11, stop the bad behaviors in Windows 11.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, but here's a question. Have we done our audience, long term, a disservice by talking so much about security and privacy, making them so paranoid? And they spend a lot of energy, as we do, blocking all that stuff. But is that. Have we done them a favor? Or maybe we've. Maybe we've made a bunch of paranoid.

[Leo Laporte]

So, look, I can't say universally every idea we've had has been genius or anything like that. But, I mean, but. But understand that the motivation is pure. Right. That the goal is. I think there's a much bigger problem in the world of people who don't even put a password on their phone or refuse to use 2fa because it's too hard.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a big issue. And will not accept the smallest of inconveniences to secure all of their online identity and data. And I don't understand that. So, look, I think you can overdo it. One of the things, if Richard was here, we would talk about. Richard is still using, I believe, security keys for his accounts. I think that's too much for most people.

[Paul Thurrott]

It absolutely is. I've kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Too much. Yeah, we all do it. And then we're like, okay, this is too much. But there are these things happening now with passkeys and with two fa where it's an acceptable middle ground.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Between this physical security device and nothing.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that's an improvement.

[Leo Laporte]

And It's a huge improvement. And I think I could never talk about that enough. I think that's super important. So if there are people watching us listening to this whole, you know, bypass uac, like Stephen, Steve Gibson or whatever, they think they know better. Okay. I mean, you're taking your life in your own hands, but, you know, it's like riding a motorcycle. I'm a safe driver. Okay? But there's a Mac truck out there with your name on it, and you don't see it coming. And it doesn't matter how good of a driver you are. And that's the problem. Like, I think we. There are reasonable things that we can do. Good. And that's part of the problem with the Windows 11 stuff. Is there a reasonable thing I could recommend to everyone that solves all the problems? And the answer is no. So how unreasonable do you want to get? You know, I'm going to break the bottle off and be like, you want to go nuts? We're going to go nuts. Because you could go nuts. You know, there's all kinds of nuts. So things you can do.

[Paul Thurrott]

We've always talked about the kind of. The balance between security and privacy and convenience. And one kind of set subtracts from the other. So more security, privacy, less convenient. And I think that we've come. The world has come along a little bit, as you say, with past and.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Stuff that it's kind of not so imbalanced that you can have. You kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

I do think that making pass keys portable and maybe not calling them pass keys, I know that's a weird one, but just thinking of it as passwordless I think is a little conceptual leap for people. And I think in a couple years time we're going to be in such a good place.

[Paul Thurrott]

We talked about this last, last time. I like Passport. That. My old Microsoft passport. It's kind of what it is. It's your passport to all these sites.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like an identity card or something. Except the only difference is you have one for every site, which is maybe not ideal, but which is why the.

[Leo Laporte]

Portable thing is a step in the right direction, because not before you, not only did you have one for every site, but you had one for every machine for every site. Or you, you had some weird mix of somewhere here, somewhere there, somewhere, you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Know, that was not better. That's not better.

[Leo Laporte]

No, that's just complexity.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're trying. But again, I don't want to be. I'm sorry, I just, you know, you said something. I Think it's really important, you know, was our net impact beneficial or did we just spinning our wheels? Whatever. I'd like to think obviously that it was, but I think the important point is blindly accepting what big tech throws down your throat is not the right approach. No matter what. Question everything. If what we find is that one, this one thing is fine, then it's fine, we'll move on. You know, you don't have to beat everything to death. But I agree. I think this, I think this is a fight worth fighting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I'm with you. I mean, obviously we've done that for 20 years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I sometimes, you know, I like to.

[Leo Laporte]

This is my earliest observation. I just wrote about this in the, in the mid-1990s, maybe the early 1990s. Someone I worked with. Yeah. So it would have been like 94ish. Somewhere around there, I was complaining about something in Windows and I just forgotten it was Novell owned. Word perfect at the time. I just gotten them to help solve a problem that I was having with the registry in Windows 3.1, if you could believe that. WordPerfect was maybe the first only app that used the Registry. Then it became kind of a big deal in 95. Anyway, this guy was complaining about whatever it was, and I said, why don't you talk to Microsoft about it and get him to fix it? And he's like, oh, they would never make an EJ don't care about me. And I'm like, you're, you're paying them? Like, like, do you not understand the relationship? I mean, like, you're paying them? Yeah, yeah, I, you know, I even, you know, as a young guy, I was like, which is why the stuff that's happening now with insertification everywhere, but in Windows particularly, so horrible. We pay for this stuff, right? Like, I, I. And by the way, if we don't, I would like to be able to pay for it so I don't have those terrible behaviors.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, and that's kind of what got us in this predicament, was in the early days of technology, companies said, we want to scale growth at any cost. And so we're going to give it away like Gmail, but it costs them money to do it. So at some point they have to extract some value out of you. And that's where all of this began.

[Leo Laporte]

But again, there's a reasonable middle ground here. We talked about notion a few weeks back and I said, I don't understand, understand how they're not charging me for this. I would pay for this thing. Now what I don't want to do is pay a couple hundred bucks a year and have ads everywhere. Right. There's some middle ground where that makes sense. I would Pay Microsoft through Microsoft365 or whatever to not have tracking and ads and crap or and whatever else in Windows. I would pay. Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

People are cheap. You and I both like to pay for stuff we use because we understand that makes it more permanent. That gives people incentive to support you. You get what you pay for, but people are cheap.

[Leo Laporte]

So just a couple of things. Like in the broader world it is fair to say that security, well, like something like airbags and cars first came to luxury vehicles and then they made their way downstream. There's always going to be a have and a have nothing. I can't solve poverty. I'm just, you know, there will always be people who choose to get the ad supported version because it is cheap and they can do that thing. But every quarter I do all the financial earnings and blah, blah, blah, whatever. And one of the companies I'm most fascinated about, and I just did it the other day and we're not going to talk about it because who cares is Spotify. And Spotify is interesting to me because Spotify is very transparent and they tell you exactly how many subscribers they have, how many subscribers pay them, how many subscribers are ad supported and how much revenues they get from each. And the ones who pay them is a smaller audience. Although by the way, as a percentage growing pretty dramatically. The revenues are something to the order of 8x. It's not even close. So if you can get a small audience to pay to get something they want and the rest accept the ad supported crap, that's actually a pretty good business model. A lot of companies do it. Microsoft could do it in Windows. They just don't. And I look, like I said I can't solve poverty.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, it makes me think we should have a club for people who don't want ads. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know if.

[Paul Thurrott]

Seven bucks.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I don't know if you've ever heard of this kind of thing before. It's an interesting model. A minority of people will pay and it's exactly. They're more lucrative to that to you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Than it's not yet. More lucrative. I have to be honest.

[Leo Laporte]

But it can be.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the, that's the dream. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You starting out. I mean I'm sure if you looked at Spotify from 12 years ago that would be the case.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it's a big help the people who join the club. But it's only still about 1% of the total audience. If we got to 5%, it would be more lucrative than the advertisers. So that's all we need to do. We just need to grow it, that's all. Hey, speaking of paying for things, if you pay for Copilot. Oh, God.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So the interesting thing about this to me is paying for Copilot might actually be going away, right? They haven't gotten their announcements lined up, but I talked about that weird thing where the Asia part of Microsoft pre announced that you would get these things and I said, they don't have a thing like this. And then they announced it in the insider program. So I think the model a year from now is going to be that you have a Microsoft 365 subscription, which you pay for. The prices are going to go up. I mean, that's honestly, it's been a while, so maybe that's due and you will get tokens or credits or whatever they're calling them toward Copilot services, right? So instead of paying for Copilot Pro, which is 20 bucks a month for an individual, or Microsoft 365 copilot, which is $30 per month per user, you pay what you just pay for your subscription like you always have. And then you can use Copilot in things like Word and Excel and wherever else you might use Copilot. And you get those, you know, those benefits until you ex. You know, you've used up all the resources at that point. If you use it that much, you could say, maybe I do want to pay for Copilot. But I think the. This is. I wrote Surprise six months ago, something like, I'm not going to pay for AI, right? I am not going to pay for AI. I will pay for Microsoft 365, which will offer AI features, right? I'm not paying for AI, but AI is part of that feature set that I don't mind paying for, depending on the service, right? So anyway, that hasn't happened yet. So if you do pay for Copilot, that is are a dummy, you can now use the new Outlook app that nobody likes and use it to create custom themes, which is the dumbest nexus of things.

[Paul Thurrott]

How do you do it? Do you say, hey, Copilot, do a new theme.

[Leo Laporte]

How do you do it? So if you've ever so Google has something like this in the pixel and I think, no, Apple doesn't do this yet. They will where you can create, use Prompts to create some kind of an image. Right now, I forget what they call it on pixels. I think it's not pixel wallpaper or something like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Let's try this. I have a pixel.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So it's kind of cool. It's just a generative AI thing. It creates an image. So you say something like, I want a river, I want a balloon. And I want it to be in the style of a, you know, Renaissance painting or whatever. All right. And then you get like several choices and you can pick one or not. And because Pixel also does dynamic theming, your phone will then take on this color scheme. Yeah, it's pretty cool, right? So it's. This Outlook capability is just like that. Same just for Outlook. Like Outlook is like. If you look at the screenshot that's in the. You'll see that Outlook is a curious app. This was true of the Mail and Calendar apps too, by the way, in that unique among Windows 11 apps, it has this background image thing that it does. It's not really clear for this picture. Each of the pieces of the ui, like the navigation pane on the left, that folder list that's next, and then the reading pane, et cetera, they're actually separated out as modules. You can see between them a little bit. They use this. They have background images or colors or, you know, outlook.com, you know, and Outlook on the web have had themes as well for a long time, like classic themes. But yeah, it's. I guess. Although, you know, my thing is you're there to read the email. When are you. When are you looking at a blank background of an app? It's kind of a weird. It's kind of a weird.

[Paul Thurrott]

It says it refreshes every four hours. That means it regenerates a new image every four hours.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't have. I don't pay for Outlook anymore. I refer a copilot. So I can't even look at this.

[Paul Thurrott]

But it's kind of an intriguing idea. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, I think this makes more sense at the OS level, frankly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it does. So is it better than a wallpaper rotator?

[Leo Laporte]

Right? Yeah. Right. Yeah. Because you'll be sitting there one day and you'll minimize something and like, look at that thing, you know, like a weird image on the background because, you know, AI can do that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Does anybody do that, say, customize your whole OS based on AI images change every few hours?

[Leo Laporte]

It seems like the type of thing Google and Apple would have done by now. I think Google's gotten the closest with that thing I was talking about, which.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is pretty on the pixel.

[Leo Laporte]

The only thing, my only problem with that is how temporary that stuff is. So you generate something, you're like, maybe, and then you generate something again. Then the thing you did before is gone. It's gone. It's gone. Yeah, because obviously they don't want to be storing all stuff everywhere. Most of it's garbage, but there's some kind of. It's pretty cool. I think that stuff's neat.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right. All right, Mr. Thorat.

[Leo Laporte]

So before we move on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Cool. Oh, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. Did I put this? No, I did. This is the right place. I still haven't published my laptop review. This is the Lunar Lake thing. It will be after the show or tomorrow, but it will be soon. I'm just pretty close. I meant to get it done over the weekend. I keep running into issues with this computer. I'll just say this, I can't remember what I said about this last week, but there's a problem with Lunar Lake where if it's set to the default power management state, it just doesn't work properly. The battery life is pretty good when it's like that, but it's. But you can't use it. It's kind of like the first generation ARM devices where you're like, wow, it gets 24 hours of battery life. Can you run any apps? No. No, you cannot run any apps. But it will stay up forever. So you switch it to best performance, which I think most people know intuitively, means the battery life is going to go down. If you do that, the performance is fine. Intel says it's a bug that supposedly they're going to fix this and someday you'll be able to leave it in the default power management, have acceptable performance and good battery life. But this is. In fact, I don't have it here. This kills the battery life, like kills the battery life. So I think I was seeing six and a half hours before compared to eight and a half for the AMD Zen 5 compared to 11 for Snapdragon. When you make this change, four hours, maybe four and a quarter, it's not good. So it works good. But you better be near power because yikes. And of course it's an intel chip. So one of the things you also don't see on Snapdragon, that you do see on intel especially, but x86, let's say, is a fairly dramatic performance drop off when you're on battery. I don't remember the exact numbers, but with Snapdragon, when It's, you know, if you use a Mac, for example, like a mat, like the Mac, MacBook Air that I have, the M3, the difference between it on power and it on battery, from a performance perspective is negligible to nothing. It's the same. Like, it's one of the magic things about Macs or Apple silicon or whatever. On Snapdragon, the difference is somewhere in the order of 3%, something like that. It's tiny. You don't notice it. Yeah, but you really notice it on this thing. And it's a problem you slow on.

[Paul Thurrott]

When you're.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not just slow. You run into problems. Like, I. It's been so long for me having seen things like this, I can't kind of can't believe. It happens where it stops. The window goes white, it's going to crash, and you let it sit there, and it eventually kind of recovers, and then you keep working, and then it pauses again, and you're like, what is happening here? And it's just. Something's wrong with it. And, I mean, sometimes it's seconds, several seconds, 10 seconds. I don't know. It doesn't sound like a lot, but when you're in the middle of typing a sentence and the window goes white and you can't write anymore, and you're like, is it okay? And then, you know, tick the clock and then, nope, it's back. And then it catches up with all the stuff you just put in there. It's just not a good experience. So supposedly Intel's going to fix this. We'll see. It's a tough one, because I really. I really wanted this to work well, and it's. It's a little loopy, unfortunately.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, this might cheer you up. Retcon 5 has taken your prompt and created a river and a balloon in a Renaissance painting.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there it is. That's. See, that's beautiful. What do you. What was this?

[Paul Thurrott]

How did you do that? Retcon? Is that AI or did you actually find a red.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I noticed the real deal, it's not formatted to look like my phone.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, can you please have that be a. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Could it be in portrait mode?

[Paul Thurrott]

Too much landscape.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it looks great.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. Is that AI? It's Mid Journey. Mid Journey has gotten so good.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a little scary how good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but, Leo, what about the people whose job it was to create Renaissance style paintings for you when you asked them to? Like, where are those guys going to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Get Thomas Kincaid, Master of Life is going to be out of work, kids.

[Leo Laporte]

Pretty sure he's been a robot for about 20 years, but, oh, yeah, he's already.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's already retired.

[Leo Laporte]

What's Bill Murray? What's that guy? The guy. The guy with the afro. Bob Ross. Bob Ross. What's he going to do?

[Paul Thurrott]

Who's going to paint those happy little trees, huh?

[Leo Laporte]

That's going to be one of the styles. Bob Ross.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I'm sure it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Just like. What was that documentary filmmaker that. That would do the. Oh, yeah, what's the guy's name?

[Paul Thurrott]

Apple. Apple stole his name. And he was really.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he got really mad because he would do that effect where he would just scroll over a still image because. Ken Burns. Yes, Ken Burns.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. He started with a civil War.

[Leo Laporte]

Civil War, that's right. Because there were no movies. You had only still images. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Pan and scan this image. And Apple created a Ken Burns effect, which in I. In imovie. And he was pissed. So then they paid him, they licensed it. So everybody's happy.

[Leo Laporte]

But you're going to see. You know, maybe they don't call it that, but it's going to be like the Bob Ross effect, you know, the.

[Paul Thurrott]

AI well, that's what I've been honest.

[Leo Laporte]

In the style of Bob Ross.

[Paul Thurrott]

Painters are pissed off about, as they say. Well, you ingest it all.

[Leo Laporte]

Painters. I love that. You. Who are these painters?

[Paul Thurrott]

The painters. The painter people.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not saying they don't exist. I mean, don't get me wrong. But like, there are artists, you know, like, if you were to list like the top 10 careers, I don't think like oil painter of. You know, like. I would like to get a portrait of my family and I would like it to take 27 hours. Could you have one of those things?

[Paul Thurrott]

I have in my library in the other room? I have a nice library built in bookshelves and stuff. That's something I've always wanted. And I have a portrait of my great, great, great, great, great, great, great. Going back to the 1830s, I think. Grandfather.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

By. Done by an itinerant painter. That was a job.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

The guy would go around on a horse in a wagon and he would.

[Leo Laporte]

Say, paint your phone. Paint your.

[Paul Thurrott]

Paint your portrait for $50.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. And those guys were probably pissed about.

[Paul Thurrott]

Photos, you know, like Matthew Brady comes along and all things. You hardly ever see her in a wagon anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Great, great, whatever Grandfather. That guy could have had like a. The biggest smile on earth on that photo or in that painting. But if you took a photo of that guy, well, it doesn't.

[Paul Thurrott]

In the painting.

[Leo Laporte]

He had to hold it for like three minutes or whatever. Right. That was the problem.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but he actually. He's very grim. Maybe. I don't know, maybe he knew that photos were coming.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe he was my great panther because it was the 1830s.

[Paul Thurrott]

His wife there were. They both got their paintings.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I've never seen it, but I've seen. But I have. His name is Anthony, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

But the point is, you know, things.

[Paul Thurrott]

Change now we have photos.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, here's. Here's a. Here's a. The type of happy attitude I always bring to everything I talk about. You know, maybe this thing will get people to appreciate the style of paintings more than they did 10 years ago.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a beautiful Renaissance painting. I love.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a great. It's a high quality image.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Is Raphael upset that he's not getting a little something something on the back?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, Botticelli is so pissed.

[Leo Laporte]

Those guys are rolling in their graves, if they weren't already dust or whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, so upset. All right, let's take a little break before we annoy any more painters and.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, the crucial painter segment of our.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no more painters listening to our show.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. That's how it goes.

[Paul Thurrott]

My. My mom's an artist or what? I mean, she doesn't anymore because she's getting on, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, I went to art school. One of my best friend's wife's graduated from art school. You know, she's allegedly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, my sister has an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Very prestigious art school. My nephews both have degrees from risd.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's not a lot of. Well, one of them is a graphic artist, so he has a lot of work. That's Will.

[Leo Laporte]

When I went to art school, they didn't even have a computer. It was literally.

[Paul Thurrott]

But you studied graphic design, though, right?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I just.

[Paul Thurrott]

No fine art.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Yeah, I left. I mean, I only went a year. I quickly realized if my goal was to never make any money, this was the right career path.

[Paul Thurrott]

But my daughter studied to be a poet, which is even better, frankly. So did you paint the painting behind you? Is that. Is that your work?

[Leo Laporte]

No. No. So they have great art fairs or whatever here on weekends and. No, we have a couple. You can't really see the other ones, but we have a couple from this woman. And. Yeah, you know, they're. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Beautiful. We. We have. My mom's art is on most of our walls, but we have some local artists we really like, and I think it's good to support painters.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not a painting behind my head, by the way. But that's.

[Paul Thurrott]

What is it? Is it a print? What is it?

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not a. It's like a 3D. It's, it's, it's, it's metal and has, like, color insets and stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that's cool.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of a, like a modern version of a. Like a tile kind of a thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it kind of looks like that. I thought it might be a stained glass window a little bit, kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

So, I mean, I can tell just from the commentary or people are misunderstanding the point. It's not that this stuff goes away. It's that it was never big to begin with, and now more people will have access to it in ways that are really interesting. I mean, it's, if anything, it has broadened the availability of this style of thing to. People would never have known about it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Retcon5 could never have painted a Renaissance painting.

[Leo Laporte]

Still not a painting behind me. I keep getting it to the painting behind, but it's not.

[Paul Thurrott]

Still not a painting. This is not a painting either.

[Leo Laporte]

Still not a painting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nor is it a neon sign.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

But it's not gonna matter.

[Leo Laporte]

It could be. We have paintings. We have paintings right over there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hey, let me do an ad.

[Leo Laporte]

Sure.

[Paul Thurrott]

A crazy thought. And we'll try to raise some money and then when we come back, we will talk more about other things because you're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat, which has the week off our show today, brought to you by Veam v. Double Eam, the data resilience experts. Without your data, if you're a company your customers trust, turns to digital dust. That's why Veeam's data protection. And note this. Ransomware recovery ensures that you can secure and restore your enterprise data wherever and whenever you need it, no matter what happens. Even ransomware. Veeam is the number one global market leader in data resilience, trusted by over 77% of the Fortune 500 to keep their businesses running when digital disruptions like ransomware strike. Seems like. You know, I read in the headlines this company paid $10 million to ransomware gang to get their data back. And I always say, how did you let them get your data? How did. How come you don't have a backup plan? Well, that's what Veeam will help you do. It'll let you back up and recover your data instantly, and not just on prem, but across your entire cloud ecosystem. Veeam does more than that it proactively detects malicious activity. So within, you know, you're probably going to stop the bad guys before they strike. And, and this is really important, it removes the guesswork by automating your recovery plans and policies. I bet you a lot of companies don't even have a recovery plan and policy. Their recovery plan is, oh, we hope it doesn't happen. We hope it doesn't happen. Well, no, you need to get Veeam. And by the way, if the worst happens, you'll get real time support from ransomware recovery experts. They will help you get back up and running and it won't cost you $10 million. Data. It's the lifeblood of your business. So get Data Resilient with veeam. Go to v doubleeam.com to learn more. V E E A M find out why 77% of the Fortune 577% use Veeam. Veeam.com we thank Veeam so much for supporting Windows Weekly. Actually, we thank them for the job they do to protect our listeners and viewers, businesses. And we thank you as a fine twit listener and Windows Weekly listener for the support you give us by telling Veeam when you, you know, when they ask, oh yeah, we saw that. I saw it with Paul and Windows Weekly.

[Leo Laporte]

It's great, great stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right. Are there still earnings? Are we not done with earnings?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they dribble in. That's the problem. So there's a bunch back to back to back. And then, you know, the laggards like I mentioned, Spotify for example, we want to talk about them. But just quickly, ARM and Qualcomm, because they're involved in a something something that could turn into a legal in court challenge in December. We'll see. But arm, which had been kind of creeping up to the billion mark in revenues, only hit 844 million this past.

[Paul Thurrott]

Quarter, which is, that's kind of surprising. That's such a small amount of money compared to all the people who use Army.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

For their designs.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, it's crazy. You know, Qualcomm, the biggest licensee I believe of ARM made 10.24 billion in revenue. Right. They're going gangbusters. 12 was 20% growth. Right. Both these companies were asked in their post earnings conference calls, what's going on with the other guy? Anything you want to talk about there? And both of them kind of say the same thing. It's like we can't really talk about it. But they're wrong and we're Going to defend our blah, blah, blah. We'll see what happens. Happens. I don't think it makes sense for this to go to court. I think the, the outcome here is fairly obvious. We probably talked about this, this notion that this some kind of happy middle ground where Qualcomm pays more but not what ARM wants them to pay. And that makes some sense. We'll see. But ARM had to, you know, for regulatory reasons, has to assume they're going to lose this case, which they don't say they believe. And they're not expanding as quickly into AI as I think a lot of people would like. But they're doing okay. It's fine. But you're right, I agree. It blows my mind. And maybe this is part of the problem. They look over at Qualcomm and Apple and all these other companies like, you know, those guys seem like they're doing pretty good. We don't even have a billion bucks. We make these reference designs. What's going on?

[Paul Thurrott]

So it's kind of amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And I didn't have time to write about this, but when I, it just happened. But when I reported earlier in the month, I guess on intel and amd and even in its diminished state, you know, intel is still quite a bit bigger than AMD from a revenue perspective, whatever. From a, getting their processors out in the world into PCs. Much bigger. Much bigger. And it's kind of the lingering inertia effects of all of their payola stuff over the years. Like they, you know, they pay to play. Like they've done a good job with that. But amd, the other thing we would have talked about at the time was their revenues from the data center, which is increasingly kind of AI GPU based is going gangbusters. But they're still just a fifth the size of Nvidia from revenue perspective. And so there are other two businesses which is basically client computing, which is, you know, holding pattern. It's okay. Although I think they make the best chips for PCs right now in the x86 space. And then from graphics cards is negligible. That's going down big, big time. Right. So they're not, it's just not good. So it was very, it's very clear they're making a big push in the data center and they had to make a regulatory filing or they made a regulatory filing in which they had to admit they are laying off people so they can focus more on that data center revenue. They're, they're kind of shuffling the decks a bit and less emphasis on the client stuff, more on the data center, which long term, I don't know, that could be bad. I think I, I think AMD is important in the PC space. I hope that doesn't fall off a cliff.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no kidding.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so we'll see.

[Paul Thurrott]

Would you say intel has fallen off a cliff?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, yeah, of course. I mean but they're still the biggest fish in this small pond that is PCs. Right. It's still a couple hundred million years.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's called the PC pond. The small pond.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, compared to smartphones and Iot and cloud. Yes, it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

What a change.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

What a huge change.

[Leo Laporte]

So the silver lining, if you will, I made this case probably several years ago now, was that Microsoft, which once ruled the industry was whatever size it was, personal computing. Today Microsoft owns the, I would say the smallest of the big three or four client platforms. It's bigger than it's ever been.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're doing fine, you know, and the PC is okay. It's not, you know, it's not going away. I mean I think the post PC world that some people thought was imminent is not happening. But it's not going to. What is it, 20 probably 2011, 2013 at the latest. We were looking at. Oh yeah, they're going to sell 500 million things that you know, 500 million units a year. No, they're not. That's never happening. So we're in the 2 to 240, 250 range, I would say right now. But you know, if that's all you have, you're screwed. Like AMD is going data center for all the obvious reasons. Nvidia is the biggest hardware. Well actually I guess Apple is. But Apple Nvidia are humongous hardware companies. All based on our. No, not at all. Based on that. I'm sorry, based on.

[Paul Thurrott]

But based on ARM.

[Leo Laporte]

On in Apple's case and based on GPUs and Nvidia's case in the cloud. Right. Intel dominates this market, but it's like they're not doing great. I don't know if you noticed. Not going good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, I know. I really wanted to talk to Richard about this. I might just call him.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, Richard does a show called NET Rocks.

[Leo Laporte]

We knew for quite some time. Microsoft's fairly transparent about this. Always hits the date but in early to mid November they have a Net conf every year. It's virtual three day conference. It's ongoing right now. Literally. You could go look up google.net conf and you'll see Live event happening right now. The first day was Yesterday they released Net9 and a new version of Visual Studio to match. Net9 brings a bunch of capabilities across the stack and Net is not the. Net we grew up with. It's open source and cross platform and all the good things. For me, it's mostly about this WPF thing I've been talking about all year. Back at Build in May, they said, wpf is back. We're bringing back this app platform that debuted. Well, technically it debuted in 2003 with Longhorn as Avalon, but it shipped really, I would say in 2006, I guess. Never got a lot of use inside of Microsoft, which is kind of why it kind of fell by the wayside, but huge use out in the world and to this day it's still incredibly popular. So they've kind of brought it back. It's really sophisticated. It's my favorite version of that NET Pad app that I write and I've been. I spent a lot of the summer updating it for these new features, which include things like Windows 11 theming and so forth. I identified several missing features and as every milestone of Net9 came and went without an update for WPF, I was getting a little edgy. But they fixed one of the things I complained about in the RTM version and I didn't even know it was coming. One of the things you can do with WPF now is have it match the Windows 11 theme. You get all the controls that look right and rounded corners and all that. But you also get lighter dark mode. So if your computer is in dark mode, the app will be in dark mode. If you switch it, it switches with it. It's nice, but most modern apps give you a settings interface where you can say, no, I want light mode all the time or I want dark mode all the time, or yes, I'll accept the system state. And that was not a capability in wpf. So the app, as it stood until pretty recently, it was like, well, I mean, at least we get that, but we don't get the. The way to switch them on the fly. So they added that capability and it's pretty simple. So that's nice. That was one of the. It was one of about four things I need, you know, for this thing to be there.

[Paul Thurrott]

But it's kind of a funny little thing not to have, to be honest with you.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought so. It seemed pretty obvious to me. I thought it was so obvious that I actually built the UI for it, thinking it would come at some point.

[Paul Thurrott]

It'll Be there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. I mean I didn't expect it today or yesterday, whatever, but it did, so it happened. That's cool. I can update the app. That's good. There's other stuff going on. They call today Microsoft Day NET Conf. Tomorrow is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wait a minute, hold on. That's hysterical. I know because as you said, it's open source now, it's global. But it was a Microsoft technology.

[Leo Laporte]

Microsoft is obviously the biggest sugar daddy for. NET or whatever you want to call them. But NET is.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is.

[Leo Laporte]

NET Foundation. It's out in the world. It's for everything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thanks to Miguel de Icaza for making.

[Leo Laporte]

No, he's the best. Literally. You're literally right. Very early on, I think when they first announced Net, he wanted to make a version for Linux and then did. Then over time he made a version for Android and that was Xamarin and it became. Microsoft bought it eventually but that work formed the basis of the open source, what is now Net. The old proprietary version is done. It literally is because of. Amazing. It is astonishing.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's really cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Tomorrow they're going to talk about third party stuff. I'm looking forward to that. Uno is going to make a big announcement tomorrow they make a WPF like app framework that works cross platform. In other words, the app I created, NET Pad, it could run on the Mac or Linux or whatever. That's very interesting. Then Avalon, which was a third party WPF replacement back at a time when Microsoft was not supporting WPF in any meaningful way. So they're still kicking around and we'll learn about that tomorrow. I just got an email about this so I thought I'd throw it out there like every other company on earth. Qualcomm is pushing AI stuff at devs and they're doing the second of two webinars about AI development on Snapdragon X tomorrow, Thursday. It's free. The first one is. You can just go stream it this one if you miss it, you'll be able to see it in the future if you're interested in this topic that is happening but I was hoping the WPF team I guess is going to discuss some further improvements are going to make I guess the net 10 timeframe. I think that might be tomorrow. I thought it was happening today, but I think it might be tomorrow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe more next week. We'll see.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, yeah, and I'm sure if you listen to NET Rocks, there'll be some stuff there with Richard Campbell at runnersradio. Com.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been checking. I've actually Been checking this in case they had it lock and loaded for net conf. I haven't seen a new one yet.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's actually a bad time for Richard.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. I want it so bad because I feel like he might know things, but. Yeah, that's too bad.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, next week, folks, stay tuned. You're watching Windows Weekly. Normally, Paul Thurot and Richard Campbell of Renasradio.com, richard has the day off. Paul is here in the Roma Norte, Mexico City. You're going home for Thanksgiving?

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Then are you going to go back for the winter? Are you going to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we. This has been our longest trip here so far, but we're going to try to do at least three months starting.

[Paul Thurrott]

How does it feel?

[Leo Laporte]

It feels normal.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want to go home.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say, I love Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a big thing with our whole family. My wife does all the cooking. It's great. Love it. I got some other stuff going on that weekend, which is going to be kind of fun. You know, Christmas, obviously, we always do a big New Year's thing with friends and family, but we also have my daughter graduating from school and we have to move her and then move her again in January. And it's going to be just a really busy time. But once that's over. Yeah, we're gonna come back here. So I don't know, do you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Will you rent out your house in Pennsylvania or what will you do?

[Leo Laporte]

No, we don't know. We rent it. So we sold our house. Yeah, we rent it. So, I mean, if anything, we. I don't know, maybe just get rid of it. I don't know. I will say.

[Paul Thurrott]

But then you would have one home, one domicile, and it would be in Mexico City.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Does that make you feel strange or.

[Leo Laporte]

It seems normal. Now, I was just. I mentioned this a couple times for some reason, but when we got lunch today, I was saying to Stephanie, my wife, like, one thing I really like, you know, we couldn't eat lunch or dinner outside. We do every day, like every single inexpensive matter.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it's good and it's.

[Leo Laporte]

The weather's perfect.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, like, you can be outside every day.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Has it snowed yet in Mackenzie?

[Leo Laporte]

No. I don't know. We've had frost. I get frost warnings on my phone. Yeah. You know, like, here we go.

[Paul Thurrott]

You go.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's the thing. I don't. And she. That's what she said. She said, you know, I don't think we appreciate, like, how dark and Cold. It's going to be when we get back. Because the time changed and.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we're looking at. I think Pennsylvania gets 13 minutes of sunlight this time.

[Paul Thurrott]

You don't do a time change either.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

And because you're fairly southerly, you get a lot of. You get a long day. Longer day.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Can I move in with you?

[Leo Laporte]

It's a small apartment, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

I wish we'd planned better for retirement. But. Oh, well, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but who does? I mean.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Right now.

[Leo Laporte]

AT T Mobile get four 5G phones on us and four lines for $25 a line per month when you switch with eligible trade ins. All on America's largest 5G network. Minimum of 4 lines for 25 per line per month with auto paid using.

[Paul Thurrott]

Debit or bank account.

[Leo Laporte]

$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.

[Paul Thurrott]

CT mobile.com how do you feel when you switch to Geico and save on your car insurance?

[Leo Laporte]

It's like going to work on one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thursday morning and thinking to yourself just one more day until Friday. But then somebody in the elevator says happy Friyay. Then you check your phone quickly and discover today is actually Friday. So yes, Happy Friday. Random stranger in the elevator. Happy Friday indeed. Yep, switching and saving with Geico feels just like that. Get more with geico. It is time now, my friends, for our vaunted Xbox segment. You know what cracks me about this first item, Apple, which is not notorious for the volume of AAA games available for it does have a couple. There's Baldur's Gate 3. Valheim is now a native on the Macintosh and one of the games they always talk about is Death Stranding. I didn't realize you couldn't get it on an Xbox all this time.

[Leo Laporte]

I almost went after this game on a different platform and I like it, to be honest.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a fun game. It's different.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks interesting. If you look at the timing of it, it was literally almost to the day three years after it debuted on the PlayStation 5.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think they must have had a, I don't know, three year exclusivity or something.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, maybe that's what it was. It is available on Mac platform.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think it's on. It was on PC too, wasn't it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So you're saying on consoles.

[Leo Laporte]

On console. Yeah. So now it's across all the Xbox stuff. So that's great. I haven't looked at it yet, but actually I suspect.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's a good game.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks good.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a little. A different story, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it does have Ned Stark, so that's good. Is it?

[Leo Laporte]

He looks like. No, you're talking about. This is from the Walking Dead.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, Walking Dead guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Norman Reedus.

[Paul Thurrott]

Norman Reedus. Thank you. Kevin King.

[Leo Laporte]

The perpetual state of. I shaved a week ago. Somehow I don't understand that weird looking guy.

[Paul Thurrott]

They have a thing. They have a special razor. The one week ago, Razer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. So yeah, that came out of nowhere. That just kind of happened. I thought that was really cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's. It's a different kind of a fun kind of game. I kind of like it. There's the PS5 ad for it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, of course. It's going to look probably how the Xbox version starts up.

[Paul Thurrott]

That'd be funny, wouldn't it? Because it is a PlayStation studio.

[Leo Laporte]

You wish you had one of these.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Nothing creepy about this. Yes, I know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeesh. There is some creepy. This is kind of a. It's a different kind of a game. Kojima is an auteur.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is interesting because it is a Sony game.

[Leo Laporte]

So this reminds me a little bit of like the. Is it called the Castillo Project or something like that? It's got that kind of vibe to it.

[Paul Thurrott]

What would you say, Kevin? Have you played Death Stranding? Yeah, I finished it. You finished it? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

What would you say it's like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, three years ago, like everyone else.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a pretty good game, right? Yeah. You play as a delivery man, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Deliver essential goods during a post apocalypse. Yeah. So this is like a Neal Stephenson slash the Postman right before COVID so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, did it. It came out right before COVID It's even older than three years. Wow. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

But it was remarkably on point.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was prescient, as we say. Prescient. It's kind of creepy looking.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it is.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's fun though. I enjoyed it. Well, it's just on PlayStation. I mean Xbox. It's not on Game Pass or anything.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think it's across. I think it's on everything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, okay, sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me just make sure.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I believe.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, it's on PC Game Pass previously actually. Oh, yeah, I thought so. I thought it was on. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, okay, cool. Well then I can play it because I have Game Pass.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

They did ask Phil Spencer, are you ever going to put some Microsoft exclusives on PS5 or.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he said we're going to put them all on a base. This is a lot like the Outlook topic before and honestly it's tied a little bit to this death stranding thing where these companies want to get their games everywhere, but it's also super controversial in that kind of fan base way. And I, look, I said this to Brad this morning. If you want this thing to survive, this thing being Xbox, you have to understand it's not going to be console. It's going to, it has to. They have to go everywhere. They have to. So they still are being kind of cagey about it. But in an interview with Bloomberg he did say a couple of things that were pretty explicit which I, which I kind of like think about a quote like this. He said, longer term I love us building devices. I mean there's so much to unpack in that sentence. It's so short, longer term. So you don't like you building devices now is what you're saying. In other words, if you look out further to the horizon, there will become an age where we're building more devices. Where.

[Paul Thurrott]

What does that mean? What is it? Is it Xbox a device? I don't even know what that means.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well right now the big focus at Xbox is getting these games on other platforms to increase the audience size.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, they buy something like Activision Blizzard where those gamers are on Mobile, they're on PlayStation 5, they're wherever they are right there on Switch or whatever. They're all over the place. So that, you know, obviously Call of Duty, big deal. Got it. Some of the king games are mobile, big deal. Yep, got it. But Microsoft wants to apply this model to a lot of what they do and they want to apply some of what they've done right. Or semi successfully or whatever, something. Or think maybe I should say the things that were strategic to them are strategic to them that weren't for Activision Blizzard, like getting called Duty on Game Pass. Right. So they've got this kind of mix of things they're trying to figure out right now. It's been a tough year, I think everyone understands that. But we got a pretty weak console refresh. There are rumors or leaks, I should say they're not rumors that Microsoft has been working on true next gen consoles that are really interesting. One of the possibilities being based on arm, right? When you look, when you hear something like longer term you can kind of imagine like there are going to Be more devices. Some of them will be maybe traditional consoles like we know today. Some of them will be portable gaming, something somethings. We'll see. One of the things I speculated was that perhaps Microsoft could license Xbox OS to hardware makers like they license Windows and let companies that are better at this or smaller companies that could withstand smaller margins make the hardware right. Maybe there's some version of the Xbox as a developer platform where you create a game that runs on the console. Maybe it runs streaming or otherwise on mobile, maybe it runs on Windows. Maybe these things are kind of closer than they are today. So we'll see. We don't really know. What we know is that short term hardware sales are falling off a cliff. Activision Blizzard, I guess you could argue from a revenue perspective is kind of keeping it afloat. But they have a lot of good ip, right? And so Halo, Gears, whatever. This stuff should be on PlayStation, which to a certain part of this population out there, the community is not what you want to hear. I get it. But I always point to Call of Duty as the example of why this can work. So when I was heavily into Call of Duty, one of the things I saw happen over time was that 10 years ago or whatever, when I got online I was playing against Xbox people. At one point it changed so that now I was playing against Xbox and PlayStation people. And that made a. For a dramatically bigger audience. Now I play against. You can. Now one could play against Xbox, PlayStation, PC and game streaming users, meaning someone could be sitting there on an iPad with a controller streaming the Xbox version of Call of Duty over the cloud and playing against me in a multiplayer game. And I could be on the PC, I could be on Xbox, whatever. So that's, that's the model, that's the, I don't know, big tent. I don't know what we call that. Like it's a more diverse, open, big market. And that's what Xbox is becoming. And some people can't stand it. But he kind of addressed a lot of this in a very short interview and said, you know, look, we're trying. There's no version of the future where we make a thousand dollar console and it sells like it's not going to happen. Which is a slight dig at PlayStation, which sells a $700 console, which is not going to sell. Right? I mean it's not going to make a difference. But he wants to make mobile devices, whatever that means. People have been asking for that for maybe decades, but certainly for years. They want to open mobile app game stores on iOS and Android. And that's held up and all the regulatory nonsense going on right now. So we'll see what happens there. You know, they're trying to make a go of the game streaming stuff over the cloud. Obviously. They're pretty. They're set up pretty well for that. And they have these subscription services. Right. Which one might imagine what if you were an Xbox game, a game pass ultimate customer, and you could play those games on Nintendo or PlayStation. Right. So we'll see. We'll see where the world goes. But.

[Paul Thurrott]

But if he's making devices, it sounds like he. Do you think that Microsoft wants to make, for instance, Instance, a Steam Deck or a Switch or.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I do.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what they're. That's what they're talking about.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Vaguely, because they don't know what model might work. Right. So I have sort of.

[Paul Thurrott]

They don't have hard plans. They just.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I mean, if you look at the current generation of consoles, we talk PlayStation, Xbox all day long. But the reality is the big seller here is Nintendo with Switch. Right. The Switch. This is this thing that has cartoonish graphics, it's portable, you can dock it, play it on your tv, but you can also sit in a bus going to work, play games there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. We were talking about. People love them Covid games. I. Somebody in the chat room like me played Animal Crossing. Yeah. For like a solid year in 2020.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the only way you could cope with this. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Because it was the only way we could cope. And.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm thinking I might need something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, Brad made this comment today, so. Well, he goes, well, I don't think of that as the traditional Xbox game or whatever. It's like. Right. It has the point. It needs to be bigger.

[Paul Thurrott]

The casual game universe is much bigger.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a much bigger market. And for all that stuff that we just talked about, the three major consoles, PC, which is probably roughly the same as those three things combined, tiny compared to mobile gaming. So there's a whole world out there that Xbox is trying to get into in a meaningful way. And if Microsoft has proven anything, it can't make hardware successfully. It's as bad it.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's a little screenshot from Animal Crossing. New Horizons, just.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. That's 2020 in a nutshell. Right there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right there.

[Leo Laporte]

That's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Oh, God.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll just say, look, obviously a big focus of mine in gaming for 10, 15 years, whatever that was, was Call of Duty. I have in recent months played Call of Duty over the cloud. It worked fine. It wasn't great, it wasn't perfect, but it worked fine. Especially single player. I played Call of Duty on mobile with an iPad and a controller. It's surprisingly good. You know, the world is changing. So even if you're kind of what we would think of as a hardcore gamer, the type of person who might in the past have built their own PC, swapped out the graphics card every couple years, whatever, you know, that stuff is always going to be there. But I think we can bring what I would call like modern, sophisticated games to a bigger audience now because the devices we have are so capable.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So anyway, that's the Xbox thing. The one thing that hasn't deviated when they talk about the future is the plan. Right. Which is just. It can't just be this console. It's too small.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, and it's weird that the people who care about the Xbox the most are the ones who are resistant to that the most because they, the thing they like is this little sliver. And do you think releasing the future.

[Paul Thurrott]

Age of Empires on iPads, was that a kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

He specifically mentions that in the interview, actually. Oh, yeah?

[Paul Thurrott]

What does he say?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let's go, let's go to the tape.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like a toe in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let me see. Yeah, it was a. Actually maybe we didn't quote it. Let me find the original. Yeah. So Asia.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, he says, I have to say.

[Leo Laporte]

So they partnered with Tencent on that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Obviously big mobile developer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, interesting and big in China. Right. Like this is kind of interesting, actually mentioned China. So he says it's been a good area for us to learn from creative teams that have really unique capability. The real opportunity is to partner with creative teams in China for global. So, you know, when Microsoft was trying to buy Activision Blizzard, they would talk, why are you doing this? You're going to spend $68 billion. Like what? You know, and the assumption. And it was always, well, it's, it's about Call of Duty, you know, but it, it was to some degree, but really the number one thing was mobile. This was an area where Microsoft had just made these tiny little incursions with some Halo offshoots that, you know, whatever they were, okay. But they have these great franchises that they haven't done enough with. And with Activision Blizzard they have even more of these things. Plus you get these studios that have been doing these mobile cross platform games for a long time. So I think we're going to see more of this stuff. I think we're going to see a positive. We're going to see Halo Gears on PlayStation for starters. They've already said they're going to bring Halo back to Nintendo, to the Switch, or to whatever. The next thing is extending my Call of Duty multiplayer thing. I think there's no reason. I don't know. I know there's no reason why a native iPad version of Call of Duty could not be playing in a multiplayer match with people on PC and console. There's no way that's. It's possible. It just isn't happening yet. So I think there's a lot going on. I think they've been a little too quiet. Except when they have to lay off people. They've been pretty loud about that. I wish there was more in the way of positive announcements this year, but that's the way it's gone.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hey, let's talk about that major new Activision release on Game Pass. Everybody's pretty darn excited about that.

[Leo Laporte]

So I literally. I've heard several people who literally said to me, see? See, it's happening. They're starting to bring Activision games to Game Pass. They just brought three of them to Game Pass. What are you complaining about? What I'm complaining about?

[Paul Thurrott]

Don't knock Spyro the Dragon. Spyro, which is, by the way, ancient SEGA game. That's from Sega.

[Leo Laporte]

What the. What is this?

[Paul Thurrott]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

Are you kidding me? They just broke, like, PlayStation. We just brought Atari.

[Paul Thurrott]

Was it a PlayStation game? Okay. Who cares?

[Leo Laporte]

It's. Jeez, Come on. Anyway, I'm glad for the people who want this. Congratulations. I guess you got what you wanted. I don't know. It's not something I care about personally.

[Paul Thurrott]

I used to play this with my kid.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

When he was a kid.

[Leo Laporte]

When he was a kid. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just a long time ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's like, you know, congratulations. Death Stranding came to the Xbox. Great. It was on everything else years ago. So.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's weird being in that position. Right. Like, we're in. All this is like the way they bring games to the Mac usually, like. Or whatever. Like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, here's yesterday's Triple A game.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. You know, that's how the Mac gets it.

[Leo Laporte]

That's second class, you know? So to me, that's not very exciting.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway. Yep. Stupid purple dragon. So you get that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. You played it on the. On the. On the PlayStation. Original PlayStation. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Jeez. Really? That long ago?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. I suspect the graphics a little bit better. This is.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's Reignited all right, forget it's reignited.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's a fire dragon.

[Leo Laporte]

Probably blows fire. Yeah, he's a fire. I don't. I already thought about this more than I want to. So this was kind of off book. Like they usually do one or two or even three game pass announcements per month. This was when they just kind of came out with just like the death straining thing. It kind of came out of nowhere. So that's fine. It's a gimme. It's, you know, found money or whatever. This will read like, wait, they didn't have this. So Microsoft has brought back a feature that the Xbox community has been clamoring for for years now, which is the. Which is called friend requests. The social experience on Xbox has kind of changed a lot. Honestly. This was something dating back to the Xbox 360, if I'm not mistaken, and now it's back. So I don't know what this means is from your console you can send, accept and remove, I guess friend requests. You can now follow or accept followers on Xbox. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like you can we do this before?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. So 15 years ago, whenever the heck it was. I know, I know, it doesn't make any sense to me, but it's back, so. Okay, it's coming.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's coming back.

[Leo Laporte]

I know it's, it's. It's painful even talk along with Spyro the Dragon. It's exactly. What's old is old again or whatever the phrase is. It's still old, but it's back. I don't know, it's like super resolution. I guess it's, you know, whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, a couple of Nvidia stories. So Nvidia has a GeForce now service that is an alternative to like Xbox cloud gaming. I guess this is where they're hosting PC games in the cloud and industry and you can play. It's a pretty good service, it seems like. But one of the cool things. Well, there's a couple of cool things about it. They have paid and unpaid tiers and of course, you know, the people who pay get, you know, better placement in the queue and so forth. But what they didn't do until right now is limit your ability to play games each month. But now they actually have. They're starting to cap usage even for paid users because I guess a lot of people are on there for a long time. So let's do the math on this. So they're going to have different tiers. So the. I think the. I think it's the basic one is 100. Basic paid plan is 100 hours a month. Let me bring up calculator here. Hundreds. So that means you could play for about three and a half hours a day in a typical month. I guess. Were you doing this more than that? That should be enough for almost anybody. I couldn't agree more.

[Paul Thurrott]

But how much do you want to do that?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. They're going to have like 15 hours of playtime rollover per month.

[Paul Thurrott]

They must, I mean, they've done the math. They know that that's, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They know what it's costing them. Yeah, yeah, yep. Yeah. It's always the case with online services. There's some tiny percentages abusing it and taking advantage of all the resources and.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're gonna make you pay for that. And then if you go over the, the 100 hours you can pay, I think it's three bucks a month.

[Paul Thurrott]

100 hours is a lot. I mean, unless it's your only gaming platform. Maybe if you were, that was it.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, three and a half hours.

[Paul Thurrott]

Seems like a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

Trying to imagine that human being. I, I, but I, I, yeah, it's possible.

[Paul Thurrott]

I sometimes have eight hours sesh.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but you're playing it on your device or whatever, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Like on a computer, like a 55 inch screen. I'm, yeah, I'm in Viking World.

[Leo Laporte]

You're not streaming it from a data center. It's like you're, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's right.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, that's what's weird to me. Although like I said, you know, the game though, the cloud gaming experience has gotten better. I think with Call of duty Black Ops 6, they wanted to make sure that was a pretty good experience, so they bumped up all the resources and whatnot. But I don't know, I can only imagine what AI services suffered because of that little change. But my God, you're killing us. Yeah, it's kind of weird. But anyway, that's good. And then Nvidia, infamously on the PC, has this app called the GeForce Experience, which is quite an experience, by the way, if you've ever used it.

[Paul Thurrott]

So what is that? Is that Windows?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So I don't remember when this started, but a couple years ago they, they actually force you to sign into an Nvidia account to use this thing and you get it on when you have an Nvidia graphics card and.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, this, I love this. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So what it does is a lot of features.

[Leo Laporte]

It makes sure your drivers are up to date, but it also Optimizes for the games you have installed. So you see there's a lot of things that do this and a lot of, you know, this is kind of a common thing, but they're replacing it with something called the Nvidia app. And to me the big change is you don't have to sign in anymore. And it's also a lot more responsive. I think the original GeForce Experience app, which was probably written in Visual Basic or something, it's just this ancient terrible thing and I feel like every time I run it I have to install drivers every time. I don't know what's going on with it. This is probably going to be a big improvement. I assume at some point push you to it. You know, if you're on GeForce Experience you'll just get this at some point. But right now you can go to the Nvidia website and just download and see what it's like at least. So that's out and that's good. And then finally Sony revealed as part of their earnings, right, more earnings that they have now sold 65 million PlayStation 5 consoles. Which, you know, for this, for the price of this thing and the fact that they launched in the pandemic, they were supply issues in the very beginning. Pretty good. So the problem for PlayStation 5 is it's on track to be the lowest selling PlayStation console of all time. And what they need to beat is the PlayStation 3, which the numbers vary, but I want to say it's about 88 million. So somehow between now and end of life, this thing has to sell another. What is that, 23 million units. Ish.

[Paul Thurrott]

Would really help you sell those 23 million units is make a $700 version of the PlayStation 5 and call it. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's an idea. I sell a 1080p version for 200 bucks. But that would sell like gangbusters, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I doubt that their developer pipeline could accommodate that. I think that's the problem. I bet the assets are so humongous.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's it.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know how they would ever do such. You know, we need like I just mentioned, super resolution. We need like super resolution. You know, take a, take a game and like de asset it down, scale, downscale it. Yeah, yeah. I mean they can make Doom run on a toaster. I guess this is technically possible. But anyway, the big deal here to me is I would just say, look, we don't know what Microsoft has sold. 7, 8 million. No, it's probably, I don't know, 30 million somewhere in there somewhere. It's less than half certainly of what Sony has sold. But I just. Given the circumstances and given this part of the market and the way the world's gone, honestly I'm not sure it could have done better other than the fact that cost reduction hasn't really happened. That's typical with each console generation. And then they've had things like PlayStation VR which did great on PlayStation 4 and fell off a cliff and they stopped doing it on PlayStation 5. So they're obviously seeing the effect of some, some changes to the market too. But yeah, 65 million, that's a. Microsoft would kill for that number.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. How many Xboxes we don't.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to guess 30, 25. 30. Somewhere in there we have to guess it's less than half. Yeah. There was a point where historically it had been 20, like 50% for a long time and there was a point where. I don't remember who said this, some analysts, but it was like actually it's closer to a third now. Like it's not, it's not great.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, that's not great. You're watching Windows Weekly. This is Mr. Paul Thurat. You probably have met before. I hope you have. If you're new to the show, we welcome you. We stream well, you know, there are new, you know, I assume that everybody knows you and knows the show, but we are streaming now on all these new platforms, eight different platforms. So I think we are getting some new people every once in a while. We're on Tick Tock now. I see people saying Leo laporte still alive, things like that. So she's. It's.

[Leo Laporte]

What do we have to do to be popular on Tik Tok? Like is there some kind of a dance we have to do?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we have to do a dance.

[Leo Laporte]

Like remember the Fortnite dances were big for a little while. I'll start doing that because that's like how out of touch I am.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, look, we're putting, we're putting landscape video on TikTok so you kind of get a sense that we probably don't know what we're doing. But we are also on Discord for our club members. We're on YouTube, Twitch, LinkedIn, Facebook, X dot com. We're on X dot com we are all over the place. And right now we have 600 so people watching on those various streams. So thank you. Welcome. And if you've not been here before, this is our Microsoft show. Paul and usually Richard Campbell's here. He's got the week off. He'll be back, I hope next week. And we'll get Richard's contribution of course. His website is run as radio.com and I will use this as an opportunity to just plug as he often does. The latest show which is about SQL Server Management Studio with Aaron Stalato. We miss you, Richard. Come back, come back soon.

[Leo Laporte]

After investing billions to light up our network, T Mobile is America's largest 5G network. Plus right now you can switch keep your phone and we'll pay it off up to $800. See how you can save on every plan versus Verizon and AT&T. @t mobile.com KeepAndSwitch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device credit.

[Paul Thurrott]

Service ported 90 plus days with device.

[Leo Laporte]

And eligible carrier and timely redemption required Card has no cash access and expires in six months.

[Paul Thurrott]

How do you feel when you switch to GEICO and save on your car insurance?

[Leo Laporte]

It's like going to work on one.

[Paul Thurrott]

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 Friday indeed. Yep, switching and saving with GEICO feels just like that. Get more with Geico. Meanwhile, we continue with the back of the book and your tip of the week.

[Leo Laporte]

This time. I even know what's happening. So I don't have a tip per se, but I wrote something today that made me go back and look at this. And one of my big goals for this trip, we've been here for almost seven weeks, is to get the Windows 11 field guide updated. So if you have this book, I've actually updated 28 chapters so far.

[Paul Thurrott]

Holy cow. Holy.

[Leo Laporte]

But here's the thing that's actually a lot. But I think what happens is if you go to throttle.com and you see the updates, you're like, okay, he updated the File Explorer chapter. That's really exciting. Or he updated the OneDrive chapter. Big deal. But the thing that I'm actually most excited about with this is most of these chapters have like new content that's meaningful. And I think when you see it, you might say, who cares? But actually, if you own the book, you should download it again because it's something like, I want to say it's 1168 pages or something stupid.

[Paul Thurrott]

Unbelievable.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a stupid amount of time. It's big. But I got to figure something out for the next version. Maybe Figure out something a little more manageable. But anyway, in the meantime I will keep up.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think you should. I'm really glad that people iu still do kind of the definitive book with everything you'd want to know. You know, and more.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, honestly, these days you couldn't publish this book because it'd be too thick for the presses.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Paul Thurrott]

But the fact that you can do it online and you can buy [e-mail] and you can pay as little as 10 bucks and you keep it up.

[Leo Laporte]

To date, which is the big thing that was the point of.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And it's forever updatable.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

If I drop it to 10 bucks, the authors earn pretty much nothing. So. Yeah, get that. Get in there and slide that slider over to the right and give the author.

[Leo Laporte]

Do as you will. But a little something.

[Paul Thurrott]

And the other way to do it, of course, as you mentioned last week, is if you are a member, a premium member@the rot.com.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They got the word person.

[Paul Thurrott]

Get all the web versions of this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And I keep the. Keep the site up to date with the book. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice. Yeah. 24H2 version. I'll get it in a couple of years. Paul.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean I've done. I Do we just talk about this. I did a bunch of local account work the past few weeks.

[Paul Thurrott]

You did it on Hands on Windows too? That's what you're thinking.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. And the Hands on Windows kind of feeds off the stuff that I've been updating the book. One of the big things now is just what I would think of as power user things where you have to use the Registry or maybe even a third party utility to fix a problem in Windows. Whatever. I'm trying to get all that stuff in there. It's getting there. I do have two app picks. Our friends at Stardock released Desktop GPT which they announced. Boy, may. I think back in May, probably it's only available as part of Object Desktop. It is, you could argue it's yet another way to run an AI LLM basically on your computer. But there's some interesting stuff going on with this one. And actually the reason they released it is they were using ChatGPT at the time at the company and said, you know, we found some really useful ways to use this product. We should maybe we could turn this into a product so it works with multiple LLMs. It's. I'm going to call it scriptable is maybe what they call them templates. But you can create These little keyboard shortcuts for things that you want to automate. So if you want to do, you know, all the typical AI things like summarize a document, rewrite a headline, you know, whatever it might be. But you can also have these things run against specific LLMs, which is really interesting. So if you know that one of them is particularly good at whatever tasks you could have that run against that, but then follow it up with a different command or prompt that runs off a different LLM, so it's extensible as well, which I think is kind of interesting. And it's not a standalone product. So, you know, they sell this thing called Object Desktop, which comes with most of their popular desktop utilities. And you get it as part of that. So kind of their Microsoft 365, I guess. So worth looking at for Sure. I also saw that Google, which has a thing called Quick Share, it used to be called Nearby Share, has or is updating it to work on arm. Right. And so this is the thing that Google uses with Android and Chrome OS to share between those devices. But they released a version for Windows I don't know, a year ago whenever it was since renamed it to Quick Share. And that's a way you can share in both directions, back and forth between your phone and your Windows PC.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, so their version of Apple's Airdrop. Kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, on Apple's all the time. That's really. It's amazing. I. Yeah, the seamless nature of that is just astonishing. So this is pretty good. It's. It actually runs on Windows and ARM right now, but it's an X64F, so I don't know if they're going to actually make an ARM native version. I didn't. I never thought to try it on Windows arm, but it works fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

As long as it works.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe you don't need to. It's not about speed. It works. It works fine. Would rather see Google Drive on Windows and arm. Remember they promised that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Kind of curious where that happened, what's going on there. But that could solve some problems for me.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know what these things are really good now is our cameras are our phones.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And we, we take pictures and it's really nice to be able to get it into the computer without having to hook up the phone or mail it to yourself.

[Leo Laporte]

There are a couple of ways to do this. Windows 11 and phone link. If you're nearby, you will actually pop up a notification now, which is cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They also do cross device copy and paste, which I love that. But. Yeah, this. But this is. This is. This solves a problem. When they first announced this, I had said, could you just integrate it, you know, with the thing that Microsoft has? But if you go into nearby sharing, in which is a native Windows 11 feature, if you have configured your Android phone, you can share to your phone from that as well.

[Paul Thurrott]

So there's this nice.

[Leo Laporte]

This is back and forth.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's pretty good way to do it. I like that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now, unfortunately, we don't have a brown liquor pick of the week, but fortunately, your wife is a brilliant.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. So I should say she did not invent this one. So I asked her, I said, could you get a cocktail going? And she said, yep. And then what she gave me, what it gave us now is this thing that she has. Well, we've discovered or whatever in Mexico City. So there's a crazy story behind this. And we go to a place called. It's called Cafe Taco Bar, or just Taco Bar. It literally has the best tacos I've ever had in my entire life. That's where we ate dinner last night. I've been talking about walking back and forth, whatever. I literally. I don't understand. I don't understand why it's a. It looks like a dive bar. The cocktails are off the charts. Super inventive. Really, really good. And the tacos are the best. Like I said, they're the best tacos I've ever had. It's. It makes no sense. So we know the owner. This place is hilarious. Like, there's a. There's a quirky kind of personality to it. It was our neighbor and friend who brought us there the first time. And we were standing outside and it said, you know, taco Bar, and said, mexico City, Paris, New York. I said, they have places in Paris and New York. And she goes, no, they don't. They play. They have this place here. So there's a bunch of that kind of stuff. So, like, they have like. They have a video, like a, like, little TV in the corner. It does, like, photo slideshow. And a lot of. It's just pictures of cocktails and food. But every once in a while we'll say something like, Mexico City, top 50 bars. And then it's like, number 2614, taco bar. So there's kind of a funny thing going on there. But we've gotten to know the owner, and he was telling us this story that he had gone to Europe and he came back with this cocktail called the Salmon Sito. And he introduced the Salmon sito to Mexico City. We're like, yeah, there's no way that's true. You know what I mean? Like, there's no way everything else is made up.

[Paul Thurrott]

Why wouldn't that be? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Stephanie researched this and what she discovered was that that story is not true. Yeah, he invented this cocktail. He guy from Taco Bar invented it. It's from Mexico City and oh my God, it's based. Because I think what. I'm going to have to go talk to him about this now. But I think what happened was he had a Negroni in, you know, Spain or somewhere, of course, and he said, let's do this, but we'll do a version that's different, you know, that's maybe lighter and more appropriate for Mexico City. So he invented something called the salmon sito. So the salmon sito is basically a gin based Negroni, I guess is the way I'd call it. So it's, you know, dry gin, Campari, grapefruit juice. It's a big grapefruit thing. This, the last item there my wife had to explain because I thought this couldn't be correct. But it says a grapefruit twist and grapefruit supreme is just referring to that slice of. They do this kind of hand cut of the grapefruit, which is the size of a soccer ball in this country. It's unbelievable. And you know, wedge. It's a garnish. Yeah, it's basically garnish. Okay. And it's, it is fantastic. It's very refreshing. It's not like, you know, like a Negroni is kind of a heavy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Taste. I don't know what, it's heavy. I don't know. This is the only way to say it. It's, you know, because it's, it's whiskey or bourbon based or whatever. But. And you know, those, that combined with Campari is, you know, it's a little, it's heavy. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is half Campari grape.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. It's almost a health drink, honestly. It's, it's, you know, it's, it's zesty and grapefruity and, you know, it's one of the best. Yeah, yeah. So I haven't for.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, actually, let me read what she wrote here. So I didn't, I didn't paste it. I wanted to kind of surprise people. Yeah. So it was invented in 2013 by Christian de la Torres. That's the guy from, from Conqueror. The guy, the owner sped through the native Mexico City. It's like, I got. Okay, so I guess he had a previous place called Artisana. You can look this up for yourself, I guess. But anyway, now he's. It's. Now it's a big thing at Cafe Taco Bar. So it's pink. It's. Well, actually they described as a riff on the gin and tonic. I think it's more of a Negroni. My wife's really into Negronis. And then that supreme bit is a. Is the cut. You know, it's like hand cut grapefruit. If you cut it just right, it looks like a salmon fish.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the names Little salmon.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, A little salmon salon. Yeah. And then, you know, normally when you, when you cut the flesh out of the fruit, you, you would often toss the rind away, but they always, you know, they rub the grass with that and it's, you know, it's amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Lovely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

That sounds incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. It's a cool drink.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love it. Well, Paul, you know, despite the loss of Richard Campbell for this week, I think we've done a pretty good job of holding down the fort.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I've been practicing drinking this whole trip just in preparation for this moment.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, the salmon sito. I wish I were going to the Taco Cafe. Taco Bar right now. You've made me very, very hungry. That sounds so good.

[Leo Laporte]

They're so good.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's so jealous.

[Leo Laporte]

You see how good they are. It's crazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

We should have bought the place across the street. I blew it. I bet it's gone now.

[Leo Laporte]

I. We know those guys really well and I refer to him as Leo all the time and it's confusing to him. I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's supposed to be my place. Paul Thurat is@the rot.com. no matter where he is in the world, you can always find him at the web. T H U r r o doublegood.com and the book leanpub.com for the field guide to Windows 11 also is a newer book, which is great too. Windows Everywhere. Kind of a. If you love Windows and you like the history of Windows, this is a look at Windows history through the lens of the developing frameworks and things like that. Right. Is that fair?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's probably more broadly interesting than it sounds, honestly, but. Oh, it's great. But it is. Yeah. You know how whatever was happening in the world at the time influenced Windows or vice versa from a kind of a developer.

[Paul Thurrott]

I read most of it on the website because I'm a premium [e-mail] so I know how good it is. It's really, it was very engaging. So I highly Recommend that too. Leanpub.com of course it's a great thing to join Paul's website, become a premium member because you get great content but you can use it all the time. I do. To get Windows News. Richard Campbell, if you were here, would tell you runisradio.com is where he hangs out for his shows run as radio and the show he does with carlfrankman.net rocks. Richard, feel better. I hope we see you next week. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern Time, 1900 UTC. As I mentioned, you can watch us live on a variety of streams all over the place, but probably most people aren't, you know, there at that right time to do that. So the good news is you can watch it at your convenience by downloading a copy, whether it's from our website, Twit tv, WW or there's actually if you go there, you'll see there's a link to a YouTube channel which contains the video of every show. That's great for sharing. If you wanted to share the Salmoncito to a friend, you could just clip that little bit and get the history and the whole thing in there and send it to them and Everybody can watch YouTube. So it's a good way to share and it spreads the word. Another way to spread the word, of course, join Club Twit. And for everybody you get to join with you, you get a free month. So give that a try at TWiT TV ClubTWiT and get your special code so you can share that to everybody. You can also subscribe to the show after the fact. It's on every podcast client everywhere. Just search for Windows Weekly and subscribe audio or video and you get that right when we're done on a Wednesday afternoon. And you can listen to that at your leash. Paul, have a great week, enjoy your tacos and I will see you next week on Windows Weekly as you will. Whether I like it or not.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, like code it. I'm coming back, baby.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's better over here.

[Leo Laporte]

Now at T Mobile get four 5G phones on us and four lines for $25 a line per month when you switch with eligible trade ins, all on America's largest 5G network. Minimum of 4 lines for $25 per line per month with autopay discount using.

[Paul Thurrott]

Debit or bank account, $5 more per line without autopay plus taxes and fees.

[Leo Laporte]

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.

[Paul Thurrott]

CT mobile.com I am Christopher Titus of the Titus Podcast. I am Rachel. And I'm Ken Hyland, AKA the Highlander. When the rest of the world is screaming insanity, we scream sanity. We do a satire comedy, news and.

[Leo Laporte]

Events podcast, first and foremost.

[Paul Thurrott]

Funny first. Whatever's happening in the world, if you want to hear it in a way that doesn't rip your soul out, we'll make you laugh with it. At the end of the day, we just scream sanity. That's what we do.

[Leo Laporte]

Can we just talk sanity? Because they have to scream sanity. Nobody's going to hear it.

[Paul Thurrott]

So tired of you guys screaming I talk stupidity.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's true.

[Paul Thurrott]

The Titus Podcast on all major streaming platforms, YouTube [e-mail] Titus Podcast. It's time to scream sanity.