WW 914: Something Weird From the Closet - Snapdragon X, Dell kills XPS, Qualcomm beats Arm

Summary

Episode WW 914: "Something Weird From the Closet - Snapdragon X, Dell kills XPS, Qualcomm beats Arm"
Release Date: January 8, 2025
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell
Podcast: Windows Weekly (Audio) by TWiT

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1. CES 2025 Highlights: New PCs and Chip Announcements

The episode opens with excitement about CES 2025, where major announcements from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm set the tone for the year. Paul Thurrott remarks, “This is the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh,” highlighting Microsoft’s push for users to transition from Windows 10 due to its impending end of life. Leo adds, “Microsoft and Intel are citing the same factors,” pointing to a coordinated effort to upgrade the PC ecosystem.

2. The Decline of Windows 10 and the Rise of Linux?

A significant discussion revolves around the statistics from Statcounter showing that 63% of PCs are still running Windows 10, nearing its end of service. Paul expresses skepticism, “It’s more likely to be the year of the Linux desktop,” suggesting a potential shift in user preferences. Richard Campbell counters, “Most VM isn’t running Windows XP,” emphasizing the prevalence of legacy systems in various environments.

3. New CPU Developments: Intel’s Arrow Lake and Qualcomm’s Snapdragons

The conversation shifts to the rapid advancements in CPU technology. Paul mentions Intel’s new Arrow Lake chips as successors to Meteor Lake, noting their lack of Copilot Plus PC capabilities. “They don’t have Copilot Plus PC capable CPUs,” he states [06:02]. Richard anticipates possible PE reorganization, “They are ripe for a PE reorganization which really means dismantling,” reflecting concerns over Intel’s market position.

Qualcomm, on the other hand, is portrayed as gaining ground against ARM. Paul explains, “Qualcomm is trying to hit the volume part of the market,” emphasizing their focus on battery life and efficiency. However, there are reservations about Qualcomm’s readiness for enterprise-scale management, citing missing features like SNMP and Intune [07:24].

4. Dell’s Rebranding: The End of XPS and Legacy Lines

Dell’s bold move to rebrand all its PC lines, eliminating beloved series like XPS, Latitude, and Inspiron, is met with mixed reactions. Leo humorously suggests, “We could just say Max or Pro,” critiquing the loss of established branding. Paul concurs, “Inspiron, Precision, Latitude, XPS were unique to Dell. Now, brands like Dell Pro Max and Ultra are confusing.” This rebranding strategy is seen as diluting Dell’s market presence and confusing loyal customers [45:37].

5. Qualcomm vs. ARM Holdings: Legal Battles and Market Dynamics

A pivotal segment covers the legal tussle between Qualcomm and ARM Holdings. Paul summarizes the court verdict, “Qualcomm is not legally responsible for anything that Nuvia did with regards to a license agreement before they acquired the company” [35:23]. This victory positions Qualcomm favorably, but ARM’s attempts to appeal are stifled by the judge’s directive for mediation first. The hosts discuss ARM’s challenges in maintaining its licensing business amidst fierce competition and internal issues [65:04].

6. Microsoft’s AI Investments and OpenAI Partnership

Microsoft’s substantial investment in AI, particularly through its partnership with OpenAI, is dissected. Paul reveals a strategic agreement where OpenAI defines AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) as achieving $100 billion in profits, effectively granting Microsoft exclusive rights until that milestone [105:13]. This move is critiqued as Microsoft securing long-term control over AI advancements, potentially sidelining other tech giants like Google and Amazon.

7. AI Integration in Microsoft 365: Copilot and Future Prospects

The integration of AI into Microsoft 365 via Copilot is another key topic. Paul highlights, “Copilot can assist in writing, PowerShell scripting, and even in app functionalities like Notepad’s new text rewriting tools” [95:34]. This AI-driven enhancement aims to boost productivity, though there are concerns about over-reliance and the fragmented rollout process [96:04]. Richard notes, “GitHub Copilot is free for VS Code now, which is really neat,” underscoring the accessibility of AI tools for developers.

8. Xbox and Gaming: Bridging Console and PC Experiences

The hosts explore the evolving landscape of gaming, focusing on Xbox’s efforts to blend console and PC experiences. Phil Spencer’s vision of leveraging Xbox OS architecture for handheld gaming devices is discussed, along with the introduction of Snapdragon-based gaming PCs by brands like Geekom and Lenovo [116:00]. Paul muses, “We’re in a good place for Xbox to integrate more seamlessly with Windows,” while acknowledging the technical challenges of ARM-based systems in gaming contexts.

9. Whiskey and Kilbeggin Distillery: A Nostalgic Interlude

In a departure from tech talk, the episode features a heartfelt segment on Kilbeggin Distillery, blending history with a love for Irish whiskey. Richard recounts the distillery’s revival and its cultural significance, saying, “This is a classic Irish whiskey that you probably haven't had. It's a little bit off the beaten path” [155:32]. The hosts share personal anecdotes and discuss different whiskey types, adding a warm, communal feel to the episode.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurrott [04:31]: “This is the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh.”
• Paul Thurrott [06:02]: “They don’t have Copilot Plus PC capable CPUs.”
• Paul Thurrott [35:23]: “Qualcomm is not legally responsible for anything that Nuvia did with regards to a license agreement before they acquired the company.”
• Paul Thurrott [105:13]: “They defined AGI as $100 billion in profits, effectively granting Microsoft exclusive rights until that milestone.”
• Richard Campbell [155:32]: “This is a classic Irish whiskey that you probably haven't had. It's a little bit off the beaten path.”

Conclusion:

Episode 914 of Windows Weekly provides a comprehensive overview of the current tech landscape, from groundbreaking CPU releases and legal battles to significant shifts in PC branding and AI integrations. The blend of technical analysis with lighter segments like whiskey discussions offers listeners both depth and variety, making it a valuable resource for Microsoft enthusiasts and tech aficionados alike.

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This summary captures the essence of Episode WW 914, highlighting key discussions and insights while incorporating notable quotes and timestamps for reference. It provides a structured and engaging overview for those who haven't tuned into the podcast.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell are here. First show of 2025. And of course, how does 2025 begin? Just like every year with CES. Lots of new PCs, announcements from Intel, AMD and Qualcomm. We'll talk about all of those, plus a new segment Paul's going to call this week in 24H. Two problems. That and a bunch of AI all coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from trust.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 914, recorded Wednesday, January 8, 2025. Something weird from the closet. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Microsoft. Brand new year, brand new show. Exactly like the old one. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Paul Thurat in macunji, Pennsylvania, where the Arctic cold is creeping down from the 51st state. How are you?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Welcome to the country. Richard, you and Greenland were. We're happy to have you both.

[Richard Campbell]

We're all very excited.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Denmark was not amused. But, you know, screw those guys.

[Leo Laporte]

What are they gonna do, fight us?

[Paul Thurrott]

Put up a strongly worded letter?

[Leo Laporte]

Hello, Paul. How was your holiday?

[Paul Thurrott]

It was fantastic. I wish it could just keep going. This is the problem. When I slow down, I just want it to never speed up again.

[Richard Campbell]

It's addictive food.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, that's Richard Campbell of Run His Radio. He's no stranger because he was here for the TWIT holiday show and last week's. Last Sunday's this Week in Tech. And we really appreciate it.

[Richard Campbell]

We had a lot of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

We don't, you know, on this show, we don't have a whole lot of time to talk about things besides Microsoft, but you are just a savant in so many areas. It was really good. Yeah. I really appreciate it.

[Richard Campbell]

Always can tell a story, that's for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Maranasradio.com how was your holiday?

[Richard Campbell]

Fantastic. Did the Christmas in the city with the girls and then the New Year's with our friends up on the coast. Nobody died of hypothermia, which is a good sign.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, what more do you want?

[Leo Laporte]

Is it. Is it a little chilly?

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, it's pretty mild here.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You get to see. It's funny. It's, it's. It's warmer there in the Great White north than it is for poor Paul and.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's. It's big on gray.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty. That's a picture. Yeah, that's my window and a Half.

[Richard Campbell]

So not likely to see snow. Well, it'll just be cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Ever, really? All winter?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, maybe one snowfall in the morning, but it'll rain that afternoon.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Well, now that we've had the weather report, There we go. I'm glad to know that this will be 2025. Will be the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh. That just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it, Paul?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's more likely to be the year of the Linux desktop, you know, I guess we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

We can only hope.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, look, I.

[Leo Laporte]

That's me being biased and bigoted against the world's most popular operating system.

[Paul Thurrott]

You mean Windows 10, which is kind of the problem for Windows 11.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it is, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is the data, such as it is. I realize this isn't the most trustworthy source, but Statcounter, whatever, 63% of PCs out in the world are running Windows 10. And we're about, what are we nine months away from it going? End of life, right? End of service.

[Leo Laporte]

So 63% of the people using PCs today will be out of luck or SOL or EOL.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, the number is probably higher because that probably doesn't take into account.

[Richard Campbell]

Certain corporate PCs, but only that which can be counted. And there's plenty.

[Paul Thurrott]

So let's just go with that. It's okay. By comparison, Windows 7 at this point, right before, you know, nine months away from its expiration, only had 25% usage share, and it was second to Windows 10 at the time. So this is the challenge for Microsoft and the big debate here is one we've had which is, you know, will Microsoft extend support as it did for XP? N7. Right. Well.

[Richard Campbell]

And it already bumped out 11 once, mind you, it was supposed to be April this year. Now it's October.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, So I don't have an opinion on that. Obviously they have the paid program in place. They're actually offering it for consumers for the first time ever for, I think in that case, for one year of extended support. I don't know. We've all been out in the world. I've been to dentists, doctor offices, obviously, subways, transportation, whatever, and seen out of support Windows versions all the time. I see this all the time.

[Richard Campbell]

So I think most VM isn't running Windows XP.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, the ones that are still running OS 2, maybe. I don't know, but hopefully not. But I don't know. I don't know what to say to this.

[Richard Campbell]

So I'm astonished that they would say that. You know, I just did the sysadmin show for the beginning of the year and one of the things they said was if I'm making a five year bet on hardware right now, this is a terrible year.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is. Everything is changing so fast right now.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you know, just, I mean we talked a lot about intel last year, especially the second half of the year and this notion that Lunar Lake was this kind of one off that they had to do to meet the copilot plus PC requirements. And then this past week, this week at CES they announced the other Core Ultra Series 2 chips which were all what they call Arrow Lake chips, which are the real successor to Meteor Lake. We'll talk about this a little while. They don't have copilot plus PC capable NPOs. None of them. Not a one of them, no. So it's kind of a crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

You know the side conversation I've had with folks that are in the space is like they are so ripe for a PE reorganization which really means it dismantling. Like they're primed for that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Which means, I mean one hand, if TSMC started making their chips, the chips would be better. But that's two years away. If they move quickly.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like it's just not that fast to retool to make those chips in a different way get out of intel fabs. So again, my problem was if I'm making a five year bet on hardware, not that I think it'll be unsupported. If I bought machines today, they'll take care of them. But what'll be terrible is two years from now there'll be a dramatically better version of the intel chipset.

[Paul Thurrott]

Or they'll just be gone.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it seems unlikely, but not out of realms. Like the only machine I would recommend buying right now from a system in perspective, a five year commit. Perspective. AMD.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I understand Windows 11, obviously. Well, you really don't have a choice. And we're talking businesses that want to stick with x86 for all the usual reasons. Yeah, those guys.

[Richard Campbell]

The thing is, how do you bet on Snapdragon when it's still not fully in management on an enterprise scale.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It just isn't. I imagine it will be sometime in 25 I hope but at this moment it isn't and that's not a good bet.

[Leo Laporte]

What's missing? SNMP intune. What's missing?

[Richard Campbell]

It's. Yeah, it's more. They update. How can I do the manage update cycle the same way? Like unless you're on the very latest update mechanisms which lots of People aren't inside of, you know, all of that's in Twitch for, for Microsoft as well. Like WSUS is out update for businesses, you know, on its last legs. It's just we don't know how this is going to land.

[Paul Thurrott]

What I mean is Qualcomm was coming from behind after several years of defeats and was trying to hit the part of the market that's kind of the volume part where they could make a difference and did. So we'll see what happens there. I mean as far as the rest of the.

[Richard Campbell]

Are they going to make a enterprise product which is like a Dell Latitude, a conservative, reliable, long term maintenance machine? I don't know how you do that on a first gen chipset. That's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

This just in. We don't call them Latitudes anymore. Do you mind? We could just say Max or Pro.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, so we'll get. Well let's get to that.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's say Jupiter. Save that. That's for the big CES segment.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, so CES is this week. I, when I started looking at the notes, of course it's been a few weeks since we've been back. So I was thinking, you know, how do, how do we handle that? You know, there's a couple of weeks worth of news that has occurred. It's. It is slow over the holidays obviously, but things have happened and then this week there's been a lot of news and then after kind of moving them around a little bit, I was like, you know what? So let's not worry about that too too much. But in other words we can just go topic by topic like we do normally and some of the stuff will be a week or two old and some of it will be as new as today. If it's new to you, yeah, it's going to be new. A lot of this will be new to everybody. So the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh is something we've been promised for a couple years now. Microsoft is saying it explicitly, which I think is a little interesting. Intel said the same thing in their announcement for all of their this is a pretend count but 117 different CPUs. They announced CPU models and AMD did the same thing by the way. And then Qualcomm's cute, they had one so slightly different companies, but it's interesting that the two of them. Anyway, Microsoft and Intel are basically citing the same factors. Intel called it a trifecta, which is pretty funny of things that are happening this year that will trigger this supposedly end of Life is obviously the big one for Windows 10. The advent of these AI PCs I think is even more debatable, honestly. And then the lingering security fears from CrowdStrike, which Intel named and Microsoft did not, because, you know, Microsoft pretends that didn't happen. But they do talk about the enhanced security in Windows 11 as a reason to upgrade. And I will say copilot plus PC class PCs and increasingly just all PCs now have this Windows hello ess, for example, and the Microsoft pluton chip stuff. And so there's some good stuff going on there. But I think the problem for the PC industry is that there's not any enthusiasm there. This is for people, individuals who are not businesses. It's a tool that they used for work as little as possible. And when you go to them and say, hey, what do you think about spending like 1,000 bucks on a new computer that does exactly the same thing as what you're already using your 8 year old computer for? They're like, yeah, I don't think so. And then businesses always move very slowly. So we'll see. It's going to be an interesting second half of 2025 in that regard.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think Microsoft wants them to adopt Snapdragon?

[Paul Thurrott]

They talk a lot about it. If you look at their year of the Windows 11 PC refresh thing, I almost said double down. I don't ever want to talk like that. I can't stand that kind of language. But they've gone back to the well of this comment that Snapdragon computers are the fastest PCs in the world, which objectively they absolutely are not, but this is one of those asterisk things and it's like what we mean by that is, you know, MPU performance plus this, this, the other thing, whatever. So Snapdragon based computers obviously have huge advantages. I think what they want, which is the same thing Terry Meyerson wanted when he first talked about moving to arm again, not just getting the freaking intel stickers off the laptops, but getting all PCs, whether they're x86 or ARM to this place where they're reliable, that you open the lid, it comes on. You know, this not a lot of nonsense, is not that roulette wheel effect I always talk about and that these things actually make sense on portable computers. I have to say, for all the problems Intel's had with Lunar Lake, one of the things it does pretty well with, honestly, is battery life. And one of the things, the AMD chips that Richard was talking about, these N5 architecture, including some incredible new ones, they just Announced at ces. Yes. Awesome. Battery life. So Qualcomm still comes out ahead. But when you think all day is not a specific number. I mean I have days where I get up at 6:30 in the morning and I work until 11:30 at night and I take breaks for lunch, dinner and bathroom or whatever. But that's not normal. And I think for most people a normal, like an all day battery life thing would be actual uptime of somewhere between five and eight hours. Whatever. There's actually working on battery. All these computers achieve that. I mean if I have a really long day, I still end up charging like a Snapdragon computer basically every day. It's just that, I mean I could go days for sure, but all day is the, I think all day is the mile is the, the metric we're really looking for. And you know, they mostly do it the new one, the new chip. So I think we're, you know, we're, we're in a good place overall, regardless of which direction you go.

[Leo Laporte]

It does feel like with the ads that I see all over the NFL and we'll see them during the playoffs, Microsoft's really implying that this is the smartest computer ever, right? That this is the best we've ever made.

[Paul Thurrott]

We look, someday in the future we're going to find out some secret agreement that these two companies had this, this, this disgusting cabal of whatever is going on there. But there's no stickers there. No, there are stickers, unfortunately, but there are, there are stickers now. They're, they have little dragon logos on them.

[Leo Laporte]

Dragon inside. Oh, wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, they're still stickers, but yeah. And then these machines don't run as hot, so they're actually harder to scrape off now.

[Leo Laporte]

But they don't melt off.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I'm not kidding. They actually do run cooler, but they're just as hard to get off. No, I, look, this is the. Terry Morrison said this. I always felt this was true. If we could just influence AMD and Intel, especially intel, enough to make them make better chips, more efficient, more reliable, etc. And they're trying, you know, they. I'm not saying they've completely achieved it, but. And there are lots of problems for sure. But I've had so many laptops in this I. Before the Christmas break, I think, I don't know if I talked, I don't think this was ready in time for the last show, But I reviewed 20 laptops last year, which is a lot more than I thought I did, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you mentioned that last time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I did. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sorry, that was in your year end raft.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, gotcha. I'm sorry, I wasn't sure where I was at with that stuff. But the quality, quality stuff, the uptime, efficiency, whatever, this stuff is all going up. I mean, there's bugs, we're moving quick and it's not always coming out exactly right the first time. But PC makers are kind of used to that and you see, I've seen anyway where some of the early versions are kind of rough and then you get toward the second half of the year, it's like, okay. Actually these are getting, you know, they're, they're looking, they're looking pretty good. So, you know, I don't, I'd love to see a world where we were all running on arm. I still kind of think that's the world someday. But this is not a horrible interim step and it's. These computers are really good. X86 computers are still really good for compatibility and even just like game playing. We'll talk about this in the Xbox segment. This new generation of handheld gaming computers in addition to just standard, like a business class laptop that could play a AAA game that came out in 2024 at Native Resolution and high frame rates. Are you kidding me? Like, what's happening? There's something really cool going on with hardware right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, from your mouth to Bill Gates.

[Paul Thurrott]

Ears or whatever, flush twice, it's a long way to New Mexico. The point is.

[Leo Laporte]

I don' that's so mean. That's an Albuquerque joke, is I used.

[Paul Thurrott]

To live in Albuquerque. That's what makes it okay. I love New Mexico.

[Leo Laporte]

I am a New Mexican.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. People used to ask me if I needed a, you know, like a visa to live there. I'm like, it's part of the country.

[Leo Laporte]

No, Mexico.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look into it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Nothing on the desktop front. Like it's all about the laptop.

[Paul Thurrott]

So there is stuff happening on the desktop front. I didn't go too deep into the CES stuff, but there is NUC and small form Factor, Qualcomm and x86, new gen AMD and Intel stuff happening at CES. Right. I don't remember exactly, but Lenovo and I want to say Acer, but also smaller companies like Geekom coming out with Snapdragon, Nuxt and small formats.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I saw that. I thought, well, that's why we don't need a dev kit, I guess. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So we're going to talk about the dev kit a little Bit more too. Well, that's part of that conversation. But yeah, CES is one of the two major times per year where PC makers release new, well, chips from the hardware makers and then new PC designs from the PC makers. The other one is ifa, of course, and it's interesting because it's a consumer show, allegedly. But you see new ThinkPads, new HP workstations and business class computers, et cetera.

[Leo Laporte]

You didn't go this year, did you, or.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, that's because I'm trying to hold onto the thin thread of sanity I still have left, and it's just too much.

[Leo Laporte]

It's crazy, isn't it? I also, correct me if I'm wrong, I feel like there's not a lot to be gleaned there.

[Paul Thurrott]

So the. Look, if you cover maybe the consumer market broadly, I guess, outside, if you.

[Leo Laporte]

Cover TVs, you probably should maybe if you.

[Paul Thurrott]

If Robot Electronics show, this is the place to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they, by the way, they don't want you to call it that. There was a headline, it said something like, association ces.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like, I found a matter compliant smart refrigerator or something. And it's like, well, good for you, you adventurer, you know. So to me, CES went from you walk around the show floor and your feet are killing you for two weeks to PC makers are on site and you can go have these meetings to see all the devices to. Now I can just go to New York and just do it virtually and be briefed ahead of time and I don't have to go anywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

And the big companies don't go. Microsoft doesn't have a booth. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know what Microsoft does there anymore. They used to be in the belly of the place and with their little meeting room and stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

They used to have the best carpet at their booths.

[Paul Thurrott]

I remember they used to be. They used to keynote it. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. Bill Gates for years did that. Didn't.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then Ballmer after him, and Comdex before that. Right. But yeah, they're not the center of the universe anymore. That's the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And seems like the Microsoft events team, like, still is reluctant to do in person events. They made Bill and Ignite in person, but they're not anywhere else.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean, they killed it with Ignite. I don't. Oh, no, we did. No, they didn't. Yeah. So they're still, they're. They're kind of building that, that skill back up, I guess we'll say. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

There's been A lot of turnover in that team, too.

[Paul Thurrott]

So it's not like riding a bike. I think it's what they're saying when.

[Richard Campbell]

I think if you're like, making events and you weren't allowed to make events, you went and did something else.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. You know. Right. Or did events somewhere else, I guess. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, things changed.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. It's too bad.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I'm not. I'm not missing CES a bit. I. I look at a few of the things, it's like, ah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just wondering if I'm rationalized because I don't want to go and, you know, all the senior tech people say I don't have to do that anymore. Thank God.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna say who this was, but I was at an HP pre CES event in December, and Dell and Lenovo had their events, like. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Plus they do events so you don't have to go to see.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. But there was an older guy, older than me, like a guy who had been around, you know, another. Maybe even 20 years before I got involved. And I was talking to him and catching up, and I kind of said something like, hey, you know, I asked him something about AI and he, you know, came back. And then I could tell after a few minutes talking to him, he thought I worked at hp. And I was like, okay, so you're just. You're just getting really old. It's like you're talking to like a grandmother or something and they. I don't remember your name. Or they call you, like, the dog's name and you're like, oh, something's not right, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's mean.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It's okay. I mean, I look like an HP guy. It's fine. It's okay.

[Richard Campbell]

I like it. You understand it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. But, yeah, so I. You know, Richard, you've talked a lot, like, for last half of last year about maybe building a PC or doing something, whatever. You look very much, very closely at the new AMD stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm afraid I have to, because we're not. There's no sign of a Snapdragon motherboard.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

That I could actually build from. The intel stuff is completely influx.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just foolish. Just stay away from that mess. No, the AMD stuff is awesome. And it is. It's got more awesome. Er. I don't know. It's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it crazy to mix Nvidia GPUs with AMD processors?

[Paul Thurrott]

We're going to get to that too. Stop jumping ahead. Oh, no. Oh, sorry. Oh, sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

That's an arm wiring. Minds want to know.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's not crazy. And actually I have seen is this week at least one example of that. Right. So that is an option on certain configurations.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually have that over here in my Alienware, come to think of it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's more excited the prospect of building on a machine with a 5090 because I could probably disconnect the baseboard heater in this room and just, you know, feel. Well, are you chilled? Run a little red Devil Jackson.

[Paul Thurrott]

Depending on what you're doing though, you could almost get by without discrete graphics at this point. And that's what's so exciting about these chipsets. You know, one of the things I saw at the pre release thing, pre CS thing, and that they've since announced, is that they have stupid names, but the AI 300 Pro Max plus, whatever the heck it's called, is allegedly a mobile chip. But it runs at a range of tdp, so it scales up really strongly. They're putting it in laptops that are thin and light. They're putting it in workstations that are desktop machines that have ginormous heat sinks on them. And one of the things that AMD does, I think intel does too, is design these things so that the PC maker can crank them up how they want and configure them to go out the door at certain different ranges or.

[Leo Laporte]

That makes sense.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So the workstation version one chip fits all is just elevated on this thing because it has all this heat.

[Leo Laporte]

Or is that they're doing performance cores and efficiency cores now, so they can really do a mix that makes.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's actually different. AMD and intel do it completely differently. So AMD typically has one type of core that scales per core between efficient and performant ranges.

[Leo Laporte]

Kind of like Speedstep, the old Intel Speedstep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And this was something, you guys might remember. This three, maybe even four years ago in HP actually came out with a Dragonfly. It was a white laptop that used an AMD chip that wasn't available to anyone else. It was just a variation of whatever was normal at the time. But they were doing that and they were bypassing all of the Windows built in power management so they could control the cores on the fly and determine whether it was being efficient or highly performant, depending on the task.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it was the kind of the first step toward what is now just their mainstream chip line is like this now.

[Leo Laporte]

So they all do that.

[Paul Thurrott]

AMD doesn't have different ways, but they all. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I don't believe so. I'm not a, I'm not a hardware guy, but my understanding, it was weird.

[Leo Laporte]

They kind of copied Apple with that in their, in their most recent.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean that's, there's, there's goofy little thing. They're not even little, but there's goofy architectural changes you can make to, to me not being a hardware guy that are. That end up having huge benefits and also cons as well. You know, one of them is just the physical distance between RAM and CPU is important and that's why having that stuff on the chip sometimes is fantastic. Right. You can, I mean Apple hasn't scaled up to like the discrete GPUs per se, but they've. They're pretty. They're probably close enough. Who cares?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, they're getting closer and closer.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean I like who cares? And I think that's the point because on the PC side we're starting to see the first steps into that with these new chips, especially amd. And AMD has discrete graphics.

[Leo Laporte]

This intel gpu, what is it called? Storm, Rage, Threadripper, whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

These stupid names.

[Leo Laporte]

I know crazy names. But people are saying good things about it.

[Richard Campbell]

If I was going to build an AMD machine, sure, be Ryzen 9. But why would you not go Radeon with that? That's.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that was kind of my question.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, because if you could get away with it, why bother? You know, like what would you need it for?

[Richard Campbell]

Or for nothing. Yeah. So your, your alternative is like. Or nothing.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can also just say. Yeah, I mean the alternative literally is nothing. And, and maybe the way to go with this is build it without the graphics now and see how it does. Let use it for a while and then maybe you actually do.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's the question. Do you want it for AI or do you want it for graphics? What is. What is it?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, all the above.

[Paul Thurrott]

Everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

And space heating.

[Paul Thurrott]

But will it. It's going to fit in a NUC enclosure though, right?

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like this is.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I'm talking about an ATX motherboard.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's. This is actually an interesting time to build a PC.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, totally. But I would go with a mid size ATX case. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Like. And you're not going to go intel inside?

[Richard Campbell]

No, because I don't know what chip to buy. I know how long I keep my machine.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it true they announced 117.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, that was just that was me eyeballing it, but that's what it feels like.

[Leo Laporte]

Trifling exaggeration.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, so one of the. This has got to be in here somewhere. I guess not. Well, it sort of is. So one of the things that's really interesting about CES to me and just the PC market in general is intel has kept AMD and Qualcomm, but mostly AMD out of PC makers by and large. It's why you don't see things like an X1 carbon with an AMD chip. Intel pays them a lot of money to make sure that doesn't happen. Intel really can't do that as much anymore. And their designs which have been behind for a while, are now, I would say, well behind. And now PC makers have a little more leeway to do what they want and you can see what they do with, given their own decision making capabilities that you see a lot more AMD happening right now. So this notion of like individual computers that are shipping both AMD and Intel versions was, you know, fairly rare before. That's happening more and more and more.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I think that, I think the makers are looking at the, at the situation with intel and just going, you know, this seems less dramatic.

[Paul Thurrott]

This would be like buying intel now in mass, like you were saying, for like a company where you're buying thousands of units right now would be like going IBM on PCs in 1996. Right. And it's like, do you not know that they didn't have a Windows 95 license? Because I don't know like what planet you're living on. But this like things have changed. So I, you know, we'll see, we'll see, we'll see what happens. You know, the, the year will progress and there'll be more, you know, we'll see, we'll, we'll see what happens. I don't wish intel ill per se.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I want them to be successful and compete.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I would like to, I would like their chips to be really good. I have mixed procedures.

[Richard Campbell]

This is a path forward for intel like the, a PE firm taking that company apart and making it de verticalize and specialize in making good chipset. Chipset designs and the fabs being separate. Like we could have a few years of extraordinarily good x86 machines before the ARM designs do totally overwhelm their archaic.

[Paul Thurrott]

This. Yeah, I keep waiting for some signal that AMD especially, but maybe eventually intel too starts to like they've incorporated ARM like designs into their chip architectures. But actually just like we're going to do ARM 2, you know, at Mass for a piece of stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

And I think Microsoft sees, I mean, ARM is an essential ingredient keeping Windows relevant. If they. With the intel ship so destabilized, regardless of what AMD is doing, being able to jump over to ARM is a good thing. And they've tried many times. I got to think there's a couple of VPs back there. It's like, please this time, Please.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean, yeah, you know, AMD wants to make this big push into the data center, especially with AI. You can have a lot more luck with ARM than you are with x86 at that point. And maybe if that is where they go, they probably won't. I'm sure they're going to go x86.

[Richard Campbell]

But you're seeing this in what Microsoft is building in Maya, in cobalt processes, where because it's a licensable design, they're just licensing their own chips intended for cloud racks. Like, I've held that cobalt in my hand. It's the size of a dessert plate. Right. It's matte, really. It's covered my entire hand. Right, right, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I miss the days when you can actually see the transistors on the ships or they had little, like little wires.

[Leo Laporte]

If you needed new ones.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly. You could. Little soldering, it would be fine.

[Leo Laporte]

I do remember the days when you would pull your RAM chips out, you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Know, little bug feet on the bottom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like would bend one or break one off. God help you. And you're like, oh, I guess that's. That's the end of that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that was a nice little business in the 80s was populating those 640k memory cards for IBM PCs with chips from. With the Japanese RAM right back. Japan was dumping chips on the market cheap, cheap, cheap.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, right.

[Richard Campbell]

Until the FTC came after them.

[Leo Laporte]

Let us. This. Is this a good time to pause?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, Yep. Yeah, definitely.

[Richard Campbell]

I appreciate that we talked about Windows first on Windows Weekly. That's pretty cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Just.

[Paul Thurrott]

It almost didn't go that way. This was a knife's edge decision.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, all right, hang on, fellas, because we will have more, actually more about Windows even in just a bit. But first, a word from our sponsor and a company that you probably should know about. We're welcome back for the year 2025. I'm talking about US Cloud, the number one Microsoft unified support replacement. Now I have to say, when we first started talking about US Cloud, I had a nice call with them, got to know them. I had never heard of Them, I'm hearing about them more and more and you probably are too. We've been talking for, it's been a few months, I think about US Cloud. They are the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. 50 of the Fortune 500 use US Cloud. And 1 of the things they said to me is because we cost less, switching to US Cloud could save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier support. But of course, and businesses care about the bottom line. That's 50%, that's a lot. But I said, but you're also better, right? And they said, well yeah, two times faster average time to resolution than Microsoft, twice as fast. They're also the best engineers in the business. They really recruit the top people. All US based with a lot of experience. So you're getting the right answers faster. But now US Cloud's excited to tell you about a new offering. They've got something new. Their Azure cost optimization services. This is actually interesting. Do you ever, I mean, when was the last time you actually looked at your Azure usage? Right. And honestly I think what happens in companies is you get a little Azure sprawl, right? Little spend creep going on. It's just a little time, but after a while it can really add up. The good news is saving on Azure is easier than you think. With the help of US Cloud, US Cloud offers an eight week Azure engagement powered by VBox. This is really cool. It identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. And with this kind of expert guidance, you'll get access to US Cloud senior engineers. As I said, they're great. They're the best. An average over 16 years. 16 years with Microsoft products. At the end of that eight week period, your interactive dashboard will identify, rebuild even downscale opportunities and unused resources, allowing you to reallocate your IT dollars towards needed resources. You're probably spending more on Azure than you think. Or invest your Azure savings in US Cloud's Microsoft support. I always, I always think that's a good idea like a few of US Cloud's other customers and completely eliminate your unified spend. Sam, the technical manager at bead gaming, gave us Cloud 5 stars. He reviewed them. He said this quote, we found some things that had been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Do the math. For three years, he says not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend in Azure, but once we got to 40 or $50,000 a month, it kind of started to Add up. Yeah. It's simple. You probably are overpaying for Azure right now. Identify and eliminate Azure Creep. Boost your performance. You can do it in eight weeks with USCloud. Just one of USCloud's great services. Visit uscloud.com book a call today to find out how much your team can save. Uscloud.com we thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly. We thank you for supporting us by going there. Book a call, get faster. Better Microsoft Support for less at US Cloud. And now back to our Azure Creeps.

[Paul Thurrott]

Paul Thurai, you said you're probably paying more for Azure than you know. I bet they know that. They're paying a lot of rent.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, when they get the bill.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But do you need all that? Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Which you don't know the answer to is why.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's hard to find out, I'm sure. I mean, it's, you know, it's a bunch of work. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And there are, you know, folks that'll help you with just trying to reduce your Azure bill. It's not a trivial thing.

[Leo Laporte]

So think about it. 40 to $50,000 a month. Yeah. All right. This week in 24H2 problems.

[Richard Campbell]

Paul, why are there problems in 24H2?

[Paul Thurrott]

This week's problem with 24H2 is that if you have Auto HDR enabled in your computer, Microsoft's going to block that upgrade because Microsoft wrote both of those pieces of software and doesn't know what the heck it's doing. I don't know what's happening. It seems like literally every week there's a new problem. We missed a couple of weeks because we were away, but there were other problems. It's just 24H2 is just this cesspool of quality problems is too bad.

[Richard Campbell]

Fantastic again. I keep thinking ever since Eric, Carly made it clear to me that's a new os. And so, you know, that's a good point. Service Pack zero.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Of a new os.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a very good point.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is.

[Leo Laporte]

But I mean, they, I mean, it doesn't make you feel any better, but it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

I, Yeah, I mean, it's a reason. I mean, you know, I don't know, but this is the year of the PC refresh. Come on, guys.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're blocking the update.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're blocking this update now on more computers than. They're not blocking it on. This is like. This is not gone on.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not good.

[Paul Thurrott]

The right trajectory so far, but they'll get there. We'll buy max. It'll be fine either way. The insider program, like the rest of Microsoft, shut down for two, three weeks there. They bounced back and released nothing. So we don't have to get into that too too much. The one thing I will point out is that the new beta build beta is on 23H2, dev is on 24H2, canary is on. Your guess is as good as mine. And they are adding some more features from 24H2 which I'd sort of forgotten about. Weren't in 23H2. Including those little. The labels on the icons when you right click something in the test File Explorer or the desktop where it says cut, copy, paste, delete, whatever, share. I guess that wasn't ever ported back to 23H2. So it's going to be. So that will probably appear in the coming months. Weeks, we'll see. Not particularly exciting. I didn't write about this and I don't have a link to this, but Leo especially might have seen the story with this guy who wrote the original dock for Mac OS X at the time wrote it for Mac OS 9 because that was the only stable system they had. Wrote a blog post recently about it which I thought was really cool. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There's actually an interesting story there. It's James Thompson, who Mac users know because he wrote pcalc, which is a very popular calculator for the Mac. Oh, but before that, what was that little.

[Paul Thurrott]

The little launcher thing that looks a little bit like the dock. Yeah. So I actually used to use that a million years ago. It was like a little. What do you call that kind of a Mac app. It's like not an applet. There's a term for it like a. It was a term for that kind of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

A desk accessory.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And it was a lot like the next. Well, it looked like the Mac os.

[Leo Laporte]

But it was kind of like TSRS on the back in the day.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Terminate and stay resident. So consumer facing name.

[Paul Thurrott]

We are. This is 25 years later almost. And he's describing this, you know, stuff that I think is. I think it's cool. So I love stuff like that.

[Leo Laporte]

So because we are at the 25th anniversary of the announcement of OS X. Steve Jobs announced it at macworld Expo on January 6, 1999 or whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

But.

[Leo Laporte]

But it took him more than a year to ship it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah. And the first version was. And. And he. None of the code that man wrote was in the original version. Someone else redid it and whatever. But it's an amazing story. It is.

[Leo Laporte]

I highly recommend It.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

It's on James Thompson's blog, TLA.

[Paul Thurrott]

So it's 2025. So this is also happens to be the. I got to do math 30th anniversary of Windows 95. The happy birthday 35th anniversary, you know, later of Windows 3, which was the first version that made any sense. And then the 40th anniversary of the initial version of Windows, which we will never speak of because it was so terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

But Nobody used Windows 1.0.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nobody used it. Not even. No one at Microsoft used it. It was terrible. But they finally got that little piece of junk out the door. And so this is kind of a big year for that, but not as important and not as interesting, but a guy who was on the design team, so to speak, for Windows and contributed to the fluent design system which we still use and is a core part of, like WinUI3, etc. Just shared some designs that he had made that could have turned into dynamic wallpapers that were going to be part of Windows 11. Right. And so again, not a major event, but they're pretty and it's kind of cool. You can kind of. If you hold a grudge, like we all do in the Windows world, you will remember Vista Ultimate Extras had a dynamic wallpaper feature called Dreamscape. Maybe, I think Dreamscape, if I'm right.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S just what you want to use your CPU cycles for, is leaving paper behind.

[Paul Thurrott]

The one I liked was. It was subtle. It's a dark, wet scene and rain is hitting the puddles and little, you know, here and there. And it was fun.

[Richard Campbell]

I love that. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. If you're like a cat and you get distracted really easily, you know, it was not a good thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Just build it into the machine. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. All the time.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I always wanted. I always wanted moving wallpaper, but I. But I.

[Paul Thurrott]

Until you actually use it and then you realize, oh, I might have.

[Leo Laporte]

I also think about all the CPU cycles that are going to. Just doing the.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, but see, I would say so. CPU cycles are like the nuke in Call of Duty, you know? What are you saving them for? If you get the thing, you use it.

[Richard Campbell]

You're saving it for.

[Paul Thurrott]

What are you saving it for?

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like it's what you tell your son.

[Paul Thurrott]

I told my son, I walked in one day and he's like, dad, Dad, I gotta tell you something. I'm like. He's like. He goes, I got a nuke. And I'm like, why are you still playing? He goes, I'm gonna get another nuke. And I'm like. I'm like, what? You can get two nukes in one game? He's like, yeah, you have to run the rack. So I sat there, he did. He got the second nuke. Oh, no, no. He had done it before I came in. I said, what happened? He said, I got two nukes. I said, what happened? He goes, oh, the game descends. Like, like, just like it ends. If you have one. Like if you have one and use it, the game ends. And I was like, okay, what happens if you have two? And he goes, the game descends.

[Leo Laporte]

You blow anyway. You blow one up with the other one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, use a nuke in. The game ends. It doesn't matter how many you have. I mean, because of the limits of the amount of a score you could have, you can only technically get two. I guess in the type of game he was playing, it doesn't matter.

[Leo Laporte]

You got to set goals for yourself in life, I find.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So in the CPU cycle sense, I guess. I don't know why they didn't go with this feature. I think some people would have really liked it. I know some people look at this now and say, oh, I would have. You know, Stardock, by the way, sells a utility that does this type of thing.

[Richard Campbell]

If you like this wallpaper solutions out there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean, if this is how you spend your time, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

But I want it free from Microsoft.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

First of all, when do you ever see your wallpaper?

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, Yeah. I mean, I see little corners of it bleeding around. Like. Yeah, I don't do everything full screen, but I think most people, A lot of people do.

[Leo Laporte]

I do. At least on a laptop, for sure.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, definitely on a laptop. Right. I mean, of course. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, yeah, if you're, if you're looking at your desktop, something went wrong, you know, like, did everything crash? What's happening?

[Richard Campbell]

Honestly, no. Windows D and ruined everything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Or you just move the mous into the corner by mistake. You're like, what's going on?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, everything's gone.

[Leo Laporte]

And most people have so many icons in their desktop, you don't really see anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

I use a full screen app for looking at images, like screenshots and images from my computer. So there's no chrome around it. It's just image. Right. I spent. I don't want to, I don't want to exaggerate this, but I spent, I'm going to say 10 to 15 seconds yesterday, clicking on the close button of a window and starting to get really upset. And then I realized, oh, this is a Screen.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a picture.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yep. So I am also getting old fool's.

[Leo Laporte]

Joke where you take a picture of.

[Paul Thurrott]

The desk of, like, a blue screen or like, you know. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I had a buddy who went to great lengths to make his wallpaper look like the screen was transparent. So it was just the wall behind.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you could do that. Take a picture of the wall.

[Richard Campbell]

He'd take a picture of the wall. He'd get it all perfectly aligned, then he'd trim it up.

[Leo Laporte]

This is somebody with not enough to do.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was gonna say he must be. He must kill it at points.

[Richard Campbell]

He's retired. And then he put. Then he digitally added a Visa stand. Stands. It's still there. So it's just. The screen was transparent, but the Visa stand, the monitor stand was still in the shot.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't understand.

[Richard Campbell]

Mike's not a normal human. He's just not.

[Paul Thurrott]

It seems like a lot of things. You, like, imagine the details that matter. If you lived in isolation, you accomplished something, and he had no one to share it with.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, what would be the point is what I would ask this person, because who would enjoy this? He would have to be like, hon, come here, come here, come here. Look what I did. And she's like. Like, are you mental?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

She's like, you know, we have laundry to do. Right? Or whatever. Like, what are you doing?

[Richard Campbell]

His day was made when I walked into his office and took a double take at his screen. Because, like, wait, yes. What? And he's like, all right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but you.

[Richard Campbell]

The 40 hours I put into this is worth it. Now for that moment, I don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

You just justify the way he spent his time.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I actually spent many years of my youth practicing spit takes. That would have been a useful place.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

To be sipping your cup all over the screen.

[Paul Thurrott]

I told you my spit take story. Yes, this is true. I worked in a bank, and the bank had, like, glass in front of the tellers, but there was, like, a empty space right here that went all the way up. Ceiling. And I was drinking a hot chocolate, and this woman came in and she startled me. I didn't expect. So I turned to her and I went. And there was like this perfect brown circle that. It just included her in the middle. It was like, easily 3 to 4ft in diameter or. Yeah, diameter. And anyways, it was horribly embarrassing.

[Leo Laporte]

And did you take your sleeve and rub a little hole in it? Say something.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just like, you get a little on you right there. So the next time she came in, she Said, you're not gonna spit on me this time, are you?

[Leo Laporte]

And I was like, oh my God, careers in banking, I tell you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's not good. Okay. Anyway, I don't know what that has to do with just the ultimate extras.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it would be an excellent disc test hub wall, I guess it was.

[Paul Thurrott]

A dynamic wallpaper of a type and as unwelcome as real dynamic wallpaper. Anyhow, the other PC related thing that. Well, I'm sure there's more, but that we will discuss today. Well, there's actually more up to this too, but is Dell. So Dell, like HP last August has rebranded all of their PC lines and in doing so they have gotten rid of all of their brands.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the best known brands in.

[Paul Thurrott]

Computing, I would say one of the few brands in our space that is up there with like ThinkPad or the.

[Richard Campbell]

XPS was Beloved and the Latitude for different, you know, XPs, Inspiron, Latitude. You knew what you were buying.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, so before they, before the. So these guys got reamed when they went public with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this is, this is literally a rip off of Apple. I mean this is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it's also. Well, so by the way, everyone's saying that, but actually because of the names, like the names they chose.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean Dell, Dell Pro, Dell Max.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, so the Apple M1, Dell Pro, M1 Max.

[Leo Laporte]

And there's one more, there's Ultra, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So. Well, there will be next year, I guess so. Yeah. Actually I think that might be a joke. That might be, I don't know. But this is actually very similar to what HP did. But in HP's defense, like, you know, I, because I asked them at the time, I was like, what are you doing? And they're like, well, we had customers that came to us and said, you know, your most popular brands are named after a ghost and a purple bud.

[Leo Laporte]

And I was like, okay, that's a good point. And it's good probably to clear the decks, but you have a lot of brand.

[Paul Thurrott]

But ahead of the dull public reveal of this someone, this wasn't me, but someone asked them, I don't understand why using these names. And it's like, well, it's logical, blah blah, blah. And like, yeah, here's an idea, why don't you just use XPS for the good one instead of whatever the stupid name you're using. And everyone was like, like, yes. It's like, like duh. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean I just upside to the Dell Pro Max, it means it leaves you room for the Dell Pro Max Ultra.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah, yeah. Oh, the Dell Pro Max Ultra SE R2. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it'll, you know, just like your Azure bill, it'll start accreting more name.

[Richard Campbell]

It's name creep.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just not good. I, I appreciate an attempt at consistency. I get it. I appreciate an attempt at simplicity.

[Leo Laporte]

But I guess you kind of know what you're getting, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Here's the problem though.

[Leo Laporte]

The slide says Dell. Nothing. Which by the way, that's.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, I know.

[Richard Campbell]

Ridiculous.

[Leo Laporte]

In the Apple world when you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

So the one that just says Dell, which is your name, that's the one. That's a piece of crap. Is that what you're telling me?

[Leo Laporte]

Designed for play school and work.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's designed for people who don't buy our computers because something like 70% of their sales are to businesses. What is, why do you even make those?

[Leo Laporte]

Now? Underneath this it says you have Dell base. Dell and Dell Premium.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And all three of these actually have base plus and premium. So you could in theory buy a.

[Paul Thurrott]

Dell Pro Max Premium base or Dell Pro Max base.

[Leo Laporte]

Base.

[Paul Thurrott]

I got the nicest one, but not really, you know, like I don't understand. What is that? Who buys. You got like a Cadillac Cimarron. What is that thing? Like what are you doing?

[Leo Laporte]

Designed for. And then the Pro is designed for professional grade productivity.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sure it is. I don't know. So I mean, look, they obviously have brands like Latitude and Precision in the commercial.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're not, it's not a one for one replacement, is it? Because they have many more names.

[Richard Campbell]

They used to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I don't, I don't, I disagree with this so strongly but I also, I see this happening elsewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Jaguar rebrand. Right? What is going on?

[Paul Thurrott]

I think this is the, this is the question, like brands are hard for sure, but I would, I honestly. Inspiron, Precision, Latitude, xps, these are unique to Dell. They're not all iconic, but they're, I would argue they're pretty good brands. Dell Base. What is this? Like, are you trying to get out of this business? Like, what are you doing? Yeah, I think it's weird.

[Richard Campbell]

You know what, this may be one of those things where it's like, you know, there's another VP coming up who's going to get to be able to rebrand these again and get their promotion.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh my God. Though, but that's such an, I mean you can't do this back to back. You know, you're starting, you've, you've made a years long decision here. You're Stuck with this.

[Richard Campbell]

Be surprised at all if they, you know, two years from now, it's like they bring back an xps.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Oh, yeah. Yep. That's just that.

[Richard Campbell]

And I, I really think your, Your, Your business customers, your enterprise customers go, sorry, I'm only buying Latitudes. You don't sell Latitudes anymore. Then I guess I can go look elsewhere.

[Paul Thurrott]

And not just Latitudes, but like, I don't know them anymore. But back in the day, they were like Latitude C, Latitude D. And they had specific interoperability, not requirements, promises, guarantees. And for many years. And I'm sure they'll continue that. I guess. I know that's.

[Richard Campbell]

I'll guarantee you there's a corporate. There's a document for the salespeople and the big corporate customers. There's like, this is. When you want a Latitude C. It is a. This.

[Paul Thurrott]

So if you were Asus right now, you should be like, all right, listen, we're going to do a Latitude line of business. Laptops.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, just right now. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So, yeah, that's one of the biggest cell phones. Like, it's amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're keeping the Alienware brand. Yeah, but that's. I mean, that. Yes, they are Alienware.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody knows, but they're on there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean, HP actually did the same thing with their.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're gaming.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, they don't own Rog. What's the one.

[Leo Laporte]

They own.

[Paul Thurrott]

Omen. They kept that brand, too. Yeah, they're not.

[Richard Campbell]

But they. I mean, they acquired Alienware in the first place. Right? That was.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It was a separate entity.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's so different.

[Leo Laporte]

Lenovo has Legion. I think it's sensible. Because you don't want to tarnish your brand with gaming.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, definitely, you should tarnish it with your best customers. Just, I don't know. No one was asking for this. It's just so weird. I don't, I don't like it. At least the HP1, I was like, okay. Like now when they explain it, you're like, oh, yeah, okay. But then I see the products coming out and it's all like Omni Elite, something like Studio Book, whatever. And then it has these addendums, like, you know, the X360s they used to have are now called Flip. So it's like Omnibook X Ultra, whatever, Flip. And you're like, wasn't Spectre kind of cool? And it's like, I guess not Japan or something, but come on, like, you could just rename it there.

[Richard Campbell]

No, Lenovo got tangled up in the names like this, too. Like, is it a yoga? It's like there's too many.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this is. This is a. Periodically, this is probably something you want.

[Richard Campbell]

To do is go to, you know. You know what? Dell didn't do that. They stuck with the latitude forever.

[Paul Thurrott]

They literally haven't added a brand.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they really.

[Paul Thurrott]

Theirs were clearly sold, rebought and resold VMware in the time it took them to do this one rebranding.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they went public and. Yeah, exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

They went private, went back public, bought VMware, sold VMware. They're like, should we get rid of XPs? Some guy in the back. Yeah, I don't even know why not. You know what? I'm so. Leo will remember this because this came up on the podcast. But when Microsoft was looking for a CEO after Steve Ballmer, one of the chief candidates was Alan Mulally, who went on. Well, I think at the time was leading Ford. But when he went to Ford, he did the same thing that Satya Nadella eventually did at Microsoft. Bring in all the product groups. Show me what you're doing. And so he has them all there in the room. They get the matrix of all the cars. He goes, let me ask you a question. I only know one brand that this company makes. It's called Taurus. And I don't see it on this list. Where's the Taurus? And they're like, yeah, we renamed that several years ago to the Ford 500, I think. He goes, yeah, rename it back. And they did. They came back. Taurus came back because of him.

[Leo Laporte]

He's like, this is a stupid decision. You don't waste brand equity. That's really, I would think marketing 101, if you've got brand equity built up, people know it. People spend a lot of money advertising to get those names known.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it's so rare to land on one that just is that everybody knows and experts.

[Richard Campbell]

This was not broken. It was not broken.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like XPS was one of the few really like solid. Everyone's heard of it, ThinkPad level brands in the PC space.

[Richard Campbell]

Totally. Did nobody survey on this? Like, are you, I don't know, crazy?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's sad.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, I mean, you know, it's in the scheme of things, it's a pretty minor.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I disagree. This is so many important problem in our industry right now.

[Leo Laporte]

This is.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I don't know. It's just so pointless and unnecessary. I think it's the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

I did love the XPS's.

[Richard Campbell]

I owned many XPS, ran out of Good ideas. I decided to start down the bad ideas.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And also all their laptops are not going to be an inch thick. They got rid of that too. They're not doing thin and light anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

What would the XPS equivalent be?

[Richard Campbell]

Delto Max Premium. Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

It depends on. So it's possible they overused XPS at some point. But it's. Yeah, it will be the medium top.

[Leo Laporte]

The middle.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it should be the top sku. It should be the premium version of.

[Richard Campbell]

That Skew Del Pro Max Premium Ultra. Wow. I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Or as we're gonna call it the DPM pm.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, speaking of Dell though, the one thing they also did announce at CES is their. They have AMD based computers coming out for the first time ever. They're adopting amd. So they. They don't always.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it really the first time?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's how they described it anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh gosh. I thought I could get an AMD on Adele. Maybe not.

[Paul Thurrott]

Huh. I don't shop a lot of Dell, so I'm not really that one. I'm not.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, my alienware is. It is an amd. But that's not Dell.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. But that's. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They did make the alienware better by making it more repairable, more standard parts. It was so non standard. I can't do anything with this alienware. It's just a weird.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So that's a proprietary. That's something we're seeing everywhere, which is really nice. Exposed screws, Normal screws. No, nothing get in. And it's easy. Yeah. If you have a laptop, they all have methods for disabling the battery externally before you shut it off. And then.

[Leo Laporte]

That's huge.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It's unbelievable. You don't have to worry about, you know, killing yourself basically.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it's nice. So. Yeah, that stuff. That has gotten a lot better.

[Leo Laporte]

Some things are getting better.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Most things are terrible. Most things that one thing way better. If that's where you're at. Your life is looking good in 2025.

[Leo Laporte]

Trying to celebrate something, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know it's gonna be okay. We all earlier.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a break. More to come. We're gonna talk about arms, but not legs as we continue.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're our men here. We're armed.

[Leo Laporte]

We're all about the arms. Also. AI Xbox. There's some. A lot of the Xbox news and a little whiskey in my closet. I like Irish whiskey, so I'm. I'm always interested.

[Paul Thurrott]

Richard, you should see if something Weird. From my closet.com is taken.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

And if it's not, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I didn't play it in the show, but I did make a.

[Paul Thurrott]

We'll play it when we get to the whiskey thing. You should play.

[Leo Laporte]

I will play the new whiskey theme.

[Paul Thurrott]

The new. Our new whiskey theme song that is.

[Leo Laporte]

Called Something from the Closet.

[Paul Thurrott]

When you use spoons on your knee to make music was that. It's, it's, it's got that kind of a vibe to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I should have put that in. Okay, I'm gonna do another one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's what it needs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it needs spoons. We. You know, I don't know if I mentioned on this show because this show's doing all right, but we were really close to the edge at the end of the year. We hadn't sold enough advertising to continue operations. And we did two things. One is we called for more people to join the club and lots of you did. So thank you. We welcome all our new club members. But we also just kind of. It was like a Christmas miracle. A bunch of advertisers called and said, hey, we'd like to be on that Windows Weekly show. Tell me more about that. And one of them is Zscaler. And I was thrilled because they are the leader in cloud security. They make a zero trust easy. And now with AI, it's even better. Enterprises, you know, spend all this money on perimeter defenses, on. On firewalls and then VPNs, which, you know, lets the employee get in through the firewall. This is not stopped breaches. I think, you know, you look at the headlines, there's an 18 year over year increase in ransomware attacks in 2024, a $75 million record payout last year. It is not getting better, it's getting worse. And one of the problems is these traditional security tools actually expand your attack surface because you've got public facing IP addresses. They're exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. Yeah, the bad guys are using AI. And another problem of these perimeter defenses struggle to look at encrypted traffic at scale. And why is that a problem? Because once you're compromised, what do the bad guys do? They start exfiltrating all your data. They encrypt it first. So you don't know what it is and you can't figure it out. So there are a lot of problems. VPNs and firewalls also assume that once you're in, you're good. So that enables lateral movement. It Connects users once they're into the entire network work and then they send it out via encrypted traffic. They send out all your data, look for places they can encrypt with ransomware. I mean, it's just a mess. Hackers exploit this is really the bottom line. Traditional security infrastructure. They do it now with AI, they outpace your defenses. It's time to really rethink security. We can't let the bad actors win. They're innovating, they're exploiting your defenses. You need to innovate. With Zscaler, Zero Trust plus AI does a bunch of things that you really do want to do. For one thing, it hides your attack surface. Those making Those apps and IPs just invisible. So they, you know that that helps right there. It also eliminates lateral movement because the assumption is even if you're in the network, you got to prove you're okay. Users are only connected to specific apps, not the entire network. And you're continuously verifying every request based on identity and context. You're simplifying security management with AI powered automation too. And because you're analyzing over, get this, half a trillion daily transactions. Half a trillion transactions every day. AI is fantastic because it can go through all of that and pick out the important attacks that you really need to know about. Hackers cannot attack what they can't see. Protect your organization with Zscaler zero trust plus AI learn [e-mail] security and we invite you to go to that special address. So they say, oh yeah, we're getting a lot of traffic from those Windows Weekly folks. Zscaler.com Security Protect against AI cyber attacks with zero trust plus AI with Zscaler Zscaler.com Security thank you, Zscaler, for supporting the good work that Paul and Rich do every single week on Windows Weekly. Let's talk about.

[Richard Campbell]

I was going to tell you. I've done it. I've registered something weird from my closet and configured it to redirect to the Windows Weekly whiskey playlist list.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's fantastic. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, do something.

[Paul Thurrott]

You got a lot done there. What?

[Leo Laporte]

Jesus.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm pretty quick.

[Leo Laporte]

One commercial break and he's.

[Paul Thurrott]

I started down a rabbit hole. Only got about 33 of the way through.

[Richard Campbell]

What I was trying to do there, my friend. DN Simple. I know what to do there. Get it squared away. 15 bucks a year for a periphery.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

We use DNS Simple. That's a very good one.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Anthony or DN Simple. DN Simple. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I don't know that one. Okay, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it's DNS symbol.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's so simple, I misspelled it.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go. Did I ever tell you that story? But we got, you know, once upon a time, we're on the road trip in Dawn Rocks, and we get pinged by another isp, one I'm not fond of because they're fairly awful. And. But they're offering us money. They want to sponsor and. And Carl shows it to me. I'm like, but they're terrible. And he's like, like, yeah, who isn't terrible? And I said, dn simple is not terrible. And so he literally pinged them and said, hey, we've got an offer from these other guys. We like you better. You should advertise on our show. And they did.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's really good.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, I'm impressed.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, you still took the money from the other company, but it was cool to get, you know?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but at least now we had competition on the show.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, money is money.

[Richard Campbell]

No, we did not take that. Those guys, my goodness.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you have more intestinal fortitude than, say, Mark Zuckerberg.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I guess I was willing to let my kids go hungry. How's that?

[Leo Laporte]

You have kids, Richard?

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're going hungry.

[Richard Campbell]

Not anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

His kids never went hungry. I don't think he had to worry about that.

[Richard Campbell]

Fine.

[Leo Laporte]

They're adults now, so they. They make their own way in the world.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they do.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's talk rm.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, whole arm section here. So the week. The last week we did the show in December, Arm holding and Qualcomm were in court, and Friday came and Qualcomm wiped the floor with them pretty much. There were three questions that the jury had to consider. Only two of them were actually pertinent because the third was whether Nuvia violated the terms of arms agreement, which they couldn't determine, by the way. They didn't say that they did, but based on the evidence and testimony provided, they couldn't come to a determination. But the judge said afterwards, doesn't matter. That company doesn't exist anymore. So who cares what they did? Qualcomm is not legally responsible for anything that Nuvia did with regards to a license agreement before they acquired the company. So ARM holdings, of course, has threatened to. They can't. They actually cannot appeal this verdict, but they can ask for a retrial. To which the judge said, I don't ever want to see you in my court again. So if you actually try to go for that I'm going to require you to undergo mediation first. So I.

[Richard Campbell]

This is because this looked like a negotiating tactic from the first in the. From the first. They shouldn't have gotten past the stairs of the car.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So this. We speculated about the rationale for what they were doing and everything we speculated was true and worse than what we thought. Basically Softbank has come down to them and said, we need you to get more money from licensing. And they got rid of the CEO who was amenable to finding an agreement with Qualcomm, and they put in a guy who was not. And they specifically went after they lied to all of Qualcomm's partners and said their license is expiring next year. It actually goes all the way through 2033, if I'm not mistaken. A lot of nonsense that went on there.

[Richard Campbell]

And they spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions on legal.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Or nothing.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think they've tarnished their little brand there.

[Leo Laporte]

It's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Speaking of tarnishing brands, I think they made a mistake. So they did reveal ARM holding, that they're probably. Well, they did at one time and probably will in the future pursue their own designs for finished chips that they'll sell to PC and hardware makers, which, you know, these invented designs that do not exist are going to be way better than everything Qualcomm does, by the way. But it was just, just, it was.

[Richard Campbell]

Just classic bicycle shed stuff. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, just really.

[Richard Campbell]

Those other schmucks can do this. We can do it too. Like, it's not hard.

[Paul Thurrott]

I. Look, I do understand that ARM is running the world and this is the smallest company in the ARM ecosystem and it's, it kind of doesn't make a lot of sense.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and it, and it does make more than a billion dollars with almost 100% profitability.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, tell me how this company sucks again. Like, it's crazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, Qualcomm is a much bigger and more complex company for sure. But they make 10 times that, literally.

[Richard Campbell]

But they do much harder.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Far more things.

[Paul Thurrott]

And the problem for ARM is that their best customers, so to speak, are not their best customers. Companies like Apple and Qualcomm and many other Samsung and many others, they go off and do their own designs. Right. And so ARM is trying to sell like, we have this new generation design. It's going to be more expensive to license. And they're like, yeah, we don't need that. We barely use your stuff as it is. We. It's vestigial, almost at this point, like we, we have, we've gone off in all these different directions. So I don't. Yeah, I didn't expect this to end well for arm and you know, it didn't. But I do expect this to be the end of it, even though ARM is pretending otherwise. So we'll see. We're all waiting on the Gen 2 Snapdragon X stuff and we're not getting it. So at CES they announced yet another line of Snapdragon X chips. So Snapdragon or Qualcomm, when they first announced this chip it was Snack Snapdragon X Elite. They then kind of berfurcated it into four or five SKUs. The fifth toppest end, highest end version being that developer edition that's only in the dev kit. So it's really whatever number, the one.

[Richard Campbell]

That almost nobody got and I have.

[Paul Thurrott]

No idea IFA, they announced the plus and there were I think two SKUs at one point and then. No, I'm sorry, they announced that in the spring and then at IFA they announced an eight core version of the plus and now they have this non plus, non. So it's just Snapdragon X. So we have X X plus and X Elite. Suddenly we've gone from one processor to whatever that number is. It's a big number. 12, 13, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Pretty sure we came to conclusion. This was all binning that the yields aren't that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And that's what this feels like to me again. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It's trying to use more of the. Lowering less chips.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Granted this is something PC makers were asking for because they wanted a lower cost part that they could put in.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Lower cost PCs.

[Richard Campbell]

And then I read somewhere that Qualcomm's not talking about a next generation chip until like 2026.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So supposedly they're going to announce this mid year and my understanding is it could actually ship by the end of the year. But yeah, they're a little.

[Richard Campbell]

So maybe they're hedging.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're a little off cycle.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's too long, man. It should be out by the middle of this year.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I don't like the way that. Yeah, so we'll see. I'm kind of hoping we actually see something mid year and it's better than what you just said. But we'll. We don't know yet.

[Richard Campbell]

I hope so too. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And the big focus there of course is going to be on gpu. Right. Because it's the one area where they're not doing fantastic. And I mean they're fine. It's for day to day stuff. Honestly, it's awesome. But it is one of those places where they don't do well in the benchmarks and all that. And it's more important, I would say, for them because you're doing emulation. And this is, I was going to say workstation class apps, whatever that might be, or games or whatever that kind of need this power. So we'll see. But they got the primary use case, I think pretty good. And graphics will be the focus next time. Okay. So there's that this chip and the plus will be used by a lot of these Geekom, Lenovo, Acer, I want to say is the other one these kind of entry level NUC style, small form factor Qualcomm based computers. So. So that's kind of, you know, cool. Leo sent me that Snapdragon dev kit back in December, I guess. And I spent congrats. Weeks, I spent. My wife eventually said something to me. You got in. So I work a lot out in the living room and I'll be like on a laptop, a little folding tray thing. Right. And so for this, what I did was I put it out there with a, like a portable USB C display and then a keyboard and a mouse. Nice. And I worked on it, and I worked on it and I worked on it, I worked on it. And one day my wife come out and said, so what do you, what do you think the end game is here with the computer?

[Richard Campbell]

What do you open for?

[Paul Thurrott]

So what I was hoping for was to figure out how to recover it with a USB bootable media. I never figured this out. I. I've spoken to people.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm so glad I gave this to you because this is really.

[Paul Thurrott]

It might not be possible. It is possible to recover it over a, like a Pixie boot recovery over the network. So you'd have to set up like a server that would have the software and I can do that. So like, at least I know I can recover it. So that's what I did. Finally move it in here after that. But my wife was kind of tapping her toe there like, I don't know, we're having people for New Year.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know, maybe it's not the most Christmassy thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It has red lights and stuff. What's the problem?

[Richard Campbell]

I think it was more the muttering that was going on.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's probably. Yeah. And also the hissing of this thing because unlike all other Qualcomm based computers.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S a fan As a fan and.

[Richard Campbell]

The fans running all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So my theory on this is the same as it was before, but basically I think there's a lot of things you could say to this, but this thing should have come out early. But they wanted the surprise of the platform. By the time they had announced it, there were 20 plus laptop designs out in the world. And honestly if you're a developer and you want to target this platform, you should get a laptop because that's the point of these things really. I mean, so it also has the, it's, it's. This is not a, this is a very non standard PC. I think I brought this up maybe last time we talked, but it does not have a normal firmware. This is the type of thing that I think Qualcomm would have probably given to their hardware partners in the past or something. It's just.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's, that's what it looks like and feels like to me.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's, it's not even, it's not even a. The theory I guess is like, well they're developers, they can handle this. It's like, I mean actually I think even for developers this is outside of the normal. Unless you're a device maker, you know, like a driver guy or something like this is a very unusual kind of a device. It's not a normal computer.

[Richard Campbell]

And the nature of the way you have to configure it like to get it up and running from bare metal is very much like, okay, you're a hardware oem, right? Who is.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's more like a phone than it is like a computer. Honestly that whole boot process and you can see it, if you've ever booted up a, like you've gone into the developer tools in Android, then you do like you can side load and unlock it and all that stuff you've seen like the Linux text display that appears sometimes when you boot up, that's what it looks like. It's out of. It's weird.

[Richard Campbell]

And apparently folks have figured out how to run Linux on it. So I think my original thought, now.

[Leo Laporte]

I want it back.

[Richard Campbell]

I think my original thought that this is going to be the machine that hosts an LLM for the house. So that I can totally local do that. So it can be, you know, I have no front end on it, it's just a network connection doing processing for me probably is the best.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know man. I mean you can try that. I think you might be better off getting a low end nuc and probably.

[Richard Campbell]

Doing that but it's an interesting computer. Right. Like I could also get a low end NUC with a PCI slot on it and hang a 5090 on the outside of it under the stairs.

[Paul Thurrott]

And actually they have Thunderbolt enclosures and you could do that right off of the Thunderbolt port. Right. You don't even need a special like port inside of it. So.

[Richard Campbell]

But I got this for free, Paul. I gotta put it to work.

[Paul Thurrott]

You should definitely do something with it. But it's it but it's so non standard. I, I, that's part of the problem. So like Linux is obviously at the.

[Richard Campbell]

Minimum, this is a cautionary tale to others. Right. Like that's the, well I think the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Cautionary tale is to Qualcomm like they should have just gone with a PC maker hardware partner that would have done a good job. Not Bob's computing over the corner of the garage there or whatever that was.

[Richard Campbell]

You can excuse this machine if you shift it in March for the release in June that you shifted in October.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well you announced it at the launch in June or May I guess and then didn't promised it in June but then didn't ship it till whenever. Yeah, big, big mistake. So I don't, Yeah, I think that they probably learned their lessons there. But that's my, that's my take on kind of what happened.

[Richard Campbell]

Well and their emails around this thing and the refund and so forth was very much a sense of anger. Like this is seriously screwed up but you should not have to pay for it and we never want to hear from you about this machine again. Here's all your money back. Go away.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, so my guess on that, and this is just a guess, is that they terminated this agreement with that company.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And that terminated.

[Paul Thurrott]

There was some cost involved. They're like we're going to swallow that cost. You can refund all the money. We're paying you whatever we have to pay you and we're done.

[Richard Campbell]

Go away.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's too bad.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

But now so now it's ces. So Geekom came out a little ahead of time in December and kind of said yeah, we're doing this and then now we know the details. So like I said Geekom, Lenovo and probably other companies are making these NUC and or small form factor computers based on all the new platforms. But Snapdragon, I don't know that any or Snapdragon X Elite, but I do know that they are Snapdragon X and plus at least so that's happening.

[Richard Campbell]

And this, this to Me feels like what nucs originally were, which was mobile chipsets without screens, keyboards and batteries.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Packed in the smallest box you could.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And absolutely. Like that with 100 mil VESA mount in the bottom. So you could just mount it to the back of a monitor. And it's a tight little system.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

So wheezing away in the background.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, you know, I mean on this one. Yes. But I mean, I think these. I think this platform is good for this kind of a form factor. I think. I think it will do fine, especially.

[Richard Campbell]

If they can run it solid state and it's just super stable. Like, this is a far more kioskable solution.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I'm trying to think. I've had at least three intel NUCs. I think they all. I'm sure they all had fans. I'm sure they did. They like a heat sink on the CPU with a little fan. I think that might have been the extent of it. And then I think on one I had like a little extender on the top that probably had its own fan for whatever additional.

[Richard Campbell]

Unless you really ran them hard, they didn't make any noise.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right. And that's what I would expect of Snapdragon too. So that should be fine. And then. This is kind of late breaking, but one of the big rumors of the past year involved when or if Qualcomm's exclusivity agreement with Windows 11 on ARM and Microsoft would run out. There was some rumors still that maybe it went past the end of last year, we still don't know. But tied to that, Nvidia and then mediatek and then Nvidia and mediatek together were rumored to be making ARM chips for PCs. So last night Nvidia announced this supercomputer AI thing running Linux. 3000 bucks and up. It's for researchers, scientists and students, which is kind of weird, but not a mainstream computer. But they revealed that, yes, we are working with MediaTek and they helped design the CPU part of that. And afterwards during a. It was like an analyst event, I guess, the CEO of Nvidia was asked about this. He said, under the terms of our agreement with MediaTek, they're allowed to take this processor that they basically made MediaTek, but we use in this supercomputer thing and they can go make. They're going to make PC designs with it. It's up to them. If they want, they can share that with us and we can make them as well. But whether they do or not, we are also making PC designs and this is that thing we keep talking about that we don't have an example yet of an ARM system of any kind really running with discrete graphics. Nvidia of course, makes the, probably, arguably the best discrete graphics. But anyway, Radeon's pretty close to it, but. And they basically just confirmed it now, very vague. He said something to the tune of I can't really talk about it right now. We'll have more to say later. You know, maybe that's tied to that agreement. I, you know, nobody really knows yet. But he essentially, not essentially literally confirmed those rumors. So Mediatek and Nvidia and maybe Mediatek and with Nvidia together will be selling PC chipsets based on ARM to PC makers.

[Leo Laporte]

So what's the media tech part of this?

[Paul Thurrott]

The CPU. So MediaTek.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is it a good CPU?

[Paul Thurrott]

I, you know what? I. Good. So MediaTek, I've got to find this. I kind of made fun of this. MediaTek describes itself as the world's number one chip supplier for smartphones, smart TVs, ARM based Chromebooks, Android tablets and voice assistant devices.

[Leo Laporte]

It's cheap.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, yeah, so if you buy a, like, I bet the Amazon tablets probably use MediaTek, I would imagine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just reviewed a Lenovo Android tablet that I pretty sure. Yeah, yes, uses MediaTek, which by the way is fine. It's nice, you know, it's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it is known for their inexpensive chipsets, like what they're known for and.

[Leo Laporte]

They'Re somewhat lower power, I would guess.

[Paul Thurrott]

I would think so, yeah. So, you know, we'll see. But I do think the combination of ARM plus Nvidia graphics is super compelling. It's why Microsoft went with Nvidia for the first generation of what was then Windows RT devices. Right. Which yes, I know we didn't do fantastic. But the ARM chips of the day were not powerful enough to do emulation of x86 code, et cetera. But they literally chose Nvidia because it was a known quantity. Their graphics chips of the day were back then, this is 10, what is it, 12 years ago, 15 years ago, whatever, were a big deal. And so they were actually the first choice. Right. They had Texas Instruments, which everyone forgets and should, and also Qualcomm on board. Qualcomm eventually came out, well, would have come out for the second gen when they were doing mini tablets for Windows 8.1 and RT 8.1. But intel scuttled that by paying off all the PC makers. And you know, the Dell, remember the little Dell 8 inch tablet everyone had Briefly ran Intel Atom piece of junk processor because they paid a bill.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's what my AI, my perplexity AI generated a table comparing MediaTek to Snapdragon. They said, actually MediaTek has strong multi core performance and is good for efficiency focused tasks. Uses arms. Molle or Amazon, I was gonna say.

[Paul Thurrott]

So interestingly, they use Arms ARM hold. That's ARM holdings. Right. They use that design.

[Leo Laporte]

They might not instead of Adreno.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, Adrenos is Qualcomm, its own thing. That's kind of the point. Right. So maybe they use the, you know, they pay the license. Maybe they use more of the, the stock ARM stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the thing you'd hang behind your painting. Not with the Nvidia, but yes, because it's probably fanless, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

And now they're making a supercomputer. I mean that's what you're.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, Nvidia made the supercomputer. So if you look at the components of the supercomputer, the CPU is just one part of this giant thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. It's probably more coordination and task. Yeah, exactly, you know, scheduling than anything else. Right, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

It runs a custom version of Linux, but the CPU they call out, it has the way Nvidia described it, this thing is called. The name of it is Grace. Grace Blackwell. It has 20 energy efficient cores named after Grace Hopper.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, almost certainly. Because this whole thing is the Grace Blackwell superchip, which is the. Okay. The Nvidia names are classic, but best in class. Power, efficiency, performance and connectivity. Which is something any company would say, I guess. I'm not really. I don't know what the class. It's a class of one, I think, but there's not a lot of details about this yet. But the interesting thing to me is that they admitted to this partnership and MediaTek walks away with this processor and could do whatever they want with it. And their plans are to make PC chips.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so the Nvidia stuff's in the system on a chip. It's. It's not discreet.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's. It's almost certainly discreet because it's like this giant box or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, it's something like 10,000 tops, though, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean it's, it's something insane. Yeah, it's literally. Well, it's described as a supercomputer. I don't think that's just. I don't think that's like a brand. I think it's literally meets some whatever, you know, I don't know that world at all. But what used to be like a Cray or a. You know, like these computers that would take up an entire.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, your iPhone is actually be faster than a Cray one. I mean.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Oh yeah. No, I just mean comparatively speaking.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. But no, yeah, it's a super computer. I mean that's what. That's what. Yeah, they're calling digits.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think it's super as a computer. I don't. The iPhone. I don't know what.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but they want to put it on a desk, which is interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean it's a. It's because you're not running Windows, it's not a desktop.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but I mean eventually there'll be versions of this that do. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is the first iteration.

[Richard Campbell]

Pedafl and Blackwell is actually the name of a mathematician, so. Ah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's where Blackwell comes from.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. They've had other mathematician names for chipsets like Reuben and things like that, so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's really for AI development. 3000 is pretty good price if it's.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, if it's actually 3,000 is a lot for a desktop, but not a lot for a supercomputer.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Yeah. I mean I would. It's probably like a, like a high end workstation class something. Something.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, a petaflop is a lot of flops.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's an intel level of flops.

[Richard Campbell]

They're saying 200 billion parameters. That's like below GPT3.

[Paul Thurrott]

But running locally. On your desk.

[Richard Campbell]

But running locally.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Two and a half years later, whatever that is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well actually, didn't Microsoft just Release open source, 1 of its 200 billion.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but it's one of the Phi models. These are relatively small.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, these are on device.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Clearly people want to do their own AI with, you know, not go out.

[Paul Thurrott]

To the cloud, you know. I guess so. But if you've done anything with locally, I. Aside from some admittedly awesome things related to video editing, like you know, the image creation stuff and paint or something. It's like, like, like really?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like the difference between finger painting and a Renaissance painting that's on the ceiling of the Vatican or something. Right. Like it's, it's, it's just not there yet. But maybe these are the advances we need for them to get there.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just take a week and a half to download the bottle, you'll be fine. I don't know. I don't know. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. 54 has 14 billion parameters, so it's considerably Smaller.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah. It's not even close. This is. It's more of a typical small language model, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. GPT3 is 175 billion. Apple's apex 200 billion. Like this. This is a nice number to aim for, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Microsoft Bing 7.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that is opt 175 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul and Leo together.

[Paul Thurrott]

1:1 at 1.5 I actually dragged out.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're overclocked.

[Paul Thurrott]

Leo by himself is two walking around in the backyard like Forrest Gump. I don't know. It's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting. Yeah, I saw that. I wondered who that's for. You know, there is a number of.

[Richard Campbell]

Workloads that want LLMs but don't want a cloud dependency.

[Leo Laporte]

The quant in the back row.

[Paul Thurrott]

This reminds me of Microsoft at one point had come up with Windows whatever version Pro for workstation. Right. Or they had the data center SKU in the beginning for server where. So do I go to Fry's Electronics and pick this up on the. No, no, no, no, no. You call us and we send a team out, we put it in for you. It's like it was. It's a completely different kind of thing. And that this is. This strikes me as kind of the modern version of that. It's like this is not for mortals.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. If you need to ask what it's for, you don't need one, Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, exactly. It's like the open AI thing. That's 200 bucks a month. Everyone's like, it's like, yeah, it's not for you.

[Richard Campbell]

No. And arguably like this is me. Take going beyond the Snapdragon DEV box. Like what would be the step above that? It'd be one of these, by the way.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a big gap though.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way. Said that 200 Pro account is doing. They're using it so much they're losing money on it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. I mean he would say that there.

[Leo Laporte]

Is a demand for that. He's a marketer, so maybe.

[Paul Thurrott]

But it's an AI entity, so who cares? I am a human.

[Leo Laporte]

We sell very, very close within a year, maybe months to AIs that are competent to replace a lot of white collar workers.

[Richard Campbell]

Seems.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's really. I mean honestly, if you get a $3,000 box you put on the desk that replaces Mabel in accounting. That ain't. That's a deal.

[Richard Campbell]

The $3,000 box replaces the. The LLM you had four years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so that's why you want the $200 a month. Yeah, well, 401 or three.

[Paul Thurrott]

This stuff is getting Interesting. I would never use this personally. Tomorrow I'm going to record a few episodes of Hands on Windows. And I don't have this in the notes, but I'm going to do. I did an episode about paint. I'm going to do an episode about Notepad. Right. Which sounds ludicrous on the face of it. Except if you look at Notepad now, and this is only available in certain markets, but US, Canada, I'm sure, Western Europe, et cetera. It has rewriting tools built in. And it's funny, I don't actually have them on this computer, so it depends on the computer, apparently. But look at this. It's pretty good. You could copy and paste a paragraph from the web. This is how blogs are going to be written. It might already be how blogs are.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to play for Richard's whiskey segment a song that was generated by Sora AI in a minute.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, but you're talking about replacing jobs.

[Leo Laporte]

So there are replace a lot of jobs. There's a lot of people who write this kind of wallpaper.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, I know, that's what I'm saying. Like that that's where it's going to come from. It's going to a lot of the content creation stuff. People are gonna. I mean, my grandkids, if I ever have any, are gonna be like. So you wrote things and people paid you for that? Yeah, like, you know, it's gonna be confusing. Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

But also there's a lot of other jobs like accounting and so forth. I personally like newspaper delivery. No, I don't think robots are going to be delivering your newspaper.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm old. I don't know. My job's not.

[Leo Laporte]

My brother in law used to ride around petaluma on a horse delivering newspapers.

[Paul Thurrott]

That is amazing. We used to get milk delivered in glass.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is there anything stupider than a liquid that goes bad in a day being delivered in something that explodes if you.

[Leo Laporte]

Drop it 5am now.

[Richard Campbell]

It used to be formaldehyde in the milk to stop it from going bad.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, jeez. That's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't know they actually did it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. That's one of the reasons the FDA was formed is because they could embalm milk. Yeah, well, it stopped it from going bad. You didn't need to refrigerate. It worked. It killed children. But that's a detail.

[Paul Thurrott]

They were dying, but the milk is fine. I mean, we, you know, that's the milk version of compile it and ship it.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, Poison Squad. I recommend its reading.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I want to read it. Oh good. I'm going to make another that's. So it's about the history of the FDA and.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And the whole formaldehyde and milk thing and how until they had the regulation in place, the folks that were trying to sell fresh milk that they need to refrigerate and all these things couldn't sell any because this is a good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Time to read it because would you watch shelf stable milk in about six months?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and there is, you know, there is shape. So now it's UHT milk. But that's, you know, again a different, different era, a different technology.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you sure there's no formaldehyde?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, just a little.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just a little.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it a book or is it the PBS documentary?

[Richard Campbell]

I think they made a documentary.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. There's a book too.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I googled it and I met Cogied it.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

And I found a.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just not gonna.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think that it doesn't have a ring.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just not gonna. You did what to it?

[Leo Laporte]

It's all right. You don't have to remember it because Kagi, like every other good search engine that's competing with Google will probably disappear.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Sooner than later.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not sure I've even heard of cogi.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Coggy's great. But you pay for it. It's got a monthly fee. Remember I used was it Neva for a long time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, the ex Google. And they couldn't make a business model out of it.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they had a fold. COGI is an excellent search engine. Uses Google's results de Googled as well as others. It probably uses Bing too. They have a giant index they make, they build. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Let's take a little break because we, we are so anxious to hear more about Microsoft 365 and AI and of course Xbox and gaming. And then, ladies and gentlemen, the debut of the brand new Whiskey theme as created by an artificial machine.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not quite Jolene done by AI but it's close.

[Leo Laporte]

It's damn close.

[Paul Thurrott]

Pretty close.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty darn impressive.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And since we can't afford Dolly Parton.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, I don't think they could either. I think that was the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, I do want to actually at this point talk a little bit about our club. This is a. You just mentioned Hands on Windows and I thought this would be a good time to mention that that is a show that you can get the audio of everybody can listen to the audio, but if you want the video, that's for club members. There's a lot of stuff we do. We've got a photo review with Chris Markquart coming up tomorrow. That's a club event. Stacy's Book Club, Micah's Crafting Corner, all of that's in the Club Twit Discord, which is a great place to hang out. What we, we try to do is make the club affordable, make the club useful, and we're hoping that that will be enough to get you to join. Now, of course that $7 a month gets you ad free versions of all the shows as well as access to the Discord and a whole bunch of other features. But really what it does for us. Hey, welcome. Oh boy. He just joined the club, signed up today. He says good to have you. What it does is it helps us defray the costs which are not insignificant of the club. Here's a poster from Joe in our club, the glad to have you aboard Club Twit retro poster. These are also part of the many, many benefits of Club Twit, but really we need the money. I want to make sure that I'm clear about that, that the real benefit of Club Twit is to know that you are supporting the ongoing production of this show and all the other shows we do. Right now, less, fewer than 2% of our audience is in the club. I want to get that number higher. I'd love to get if we got it to 5%, that's all. If just 1 in 20 of you were in the club, our financial woes would be over. Wouldn't have to worry about advertising ups and downs. We could do more shows, we could bring you more content. And I think that probably more than now, more than ever, you need the content that we are producing here without fear or favor, more light than heat. And if you have an empty wallet. Okay, Keith, we would love to have you in the club. Find out more at TWIT TV Club Twit or you can scan that little QR code if you're watching the video on the upper left hand corner of the screen. By the way, while you are at the website, I would like to invite you to fill out the survey. This is something else we do. Once a year, at the beginning of the year, we do a survey. We like to get to know our audience. Club members are not. That's not important. We don't want to. We're not collecting information about you individually, but we do want to know in aggregate what you like what you don't like. And it's very helpful for us in ad sales to be able to say things like which we do say 80% of our audience are it decision makers. You know, that kind of thing helps us gain new advertising. So if you would, it's a, you know, if, if you don't want to join the club, at least do the survey. TWiT TV survey should only take you a few minutes. And again, we don't collect information about you individually. It's all done in aggregate. TWiT TV survey and thank you very much for all the support you all give us. We really, we really appreciate it. You support us even by listening to shows.

[Richard Campbell]

If you have a locked AT&T phone.

[Paul Thurrott]

We'Re here with bolt cutters. T Mobile will help pay off your.

[Richard Campbell]

Life locked phone and give you a.

[Paul Thurrott]

New 5G phone for free.

[Richard Campbell]

All on America's largest 5G network.

[Paul Thurrott]

Visit t mobile.com CarrierFreedom via virtual prepaid MasterCard in 15 days. Free phone up to 830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax and a 10 device connection charge.

[Richard Campbell]

Qualifying port and trade in service on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Go5G next and credit required.

[Leo Laporte]

Contact us before canceling entire account to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Continue bill credits or credit stop and.

[Leo Laporte]

Balance on required finance agreement as deal.

[Paul Thurrott]

Bill credits and if you pay off.

[Leo Laporte]

Devices early all right, now I'm done begging. The begging bowl is now going to be put away and we can go on with the show with the big Microsoft 365.

[Paul Thurrott]

I should have combined these two 365 and AI because it's all kind of whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

But nowadays with Copilot, it is kind.

[Richard Campbell]

Of old copilot all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So speaking of which, on one of my computers I got the Microsoft 365 copilot app replacement for the old Microsoft 365 app. I'm not seeing it on this computer yet, but so that's starting to happen. If you were looking forward to that or dreading it or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

They're doing a fragmented rollout there too. I'm enjoying the fact that they've renamed Bing Enterprise into just Microsoft Copilot.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah. It's not confusing.

[Richard Campbell]

No. As opposed to the non Microsoft Copilot. It's like, what?

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Richard Campbell]

So if you are, we address the fact that Copilot GitHub Copilot is free for VS code.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm just. I literally was just going to say that. So I was going to say literally the sentence that was going to wash. If you are a developer, you have heard of I'm sure GitHub copilot. Right. So two of the big things that happened with that recently, one thing's in the notes and the other one's what you just said, which is it's actually free for everyone now. Now to a limit. Right. I think the idea is that if you use it enough, you'll start to like it and say, oh, maybe I do want to pay for this. Smart. So Visual Studio and Visual Studio code, you can use this thing for free now, which is actually really neat. I'm going to try this with this app thing I'm working on.

[Richard Campbell]

I've been encouraging sysadmins to do the same thing because it writes brilliant PowerShell and good KQL Kusto queries for log analytics. Like it's very good at getting you unstuck.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. So one of the. Now that thing launched years ago, but it was always based on the OpenAI stuff internally. And now I've not used it. But my understanding, not my understanding. Now I know you can choose between different models. Like anthropic is one of the options. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Which I think Microsoft being very careful to position itself as not dependent on.

[Paul Thurrott]

OpenAI should things go and they're super stable. I wouldn't worry about that. But now there is news that from Reuters, not from Microsoft, that they are also looking at replacing or reducing its reliance on OpenAI in Microsoft 365 copilot. Right. Which to me is the big. The big user facing copilot. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I would argue it's the most important one to Microsoft because M365 is arguably the most important product.

[Paul Thurrott]

The big bit. Yeah, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the multimillion, the biggest business for.

[Paul Thurrott]

Their biggest customer group.

[Richard Campbell]

And when that version of Copilot comes free, then you really know this story is over.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And this is where I always talk about orchestrations and orchestrators. I mean, I sort of dream of this system where you don't think about this as a user, but it will use the right models based on the task you're trying to accomplish. Like that it will just do this for you. But I think for the short term, I know this is the case in GitHub Copilot, you can, as the user say, well, I want to use this thing now, you can't do this in Microsoft 365 copilot yet, and maybe never at all. We'll see. But that you can go in there and say, well, I happen to know that like Claude, whatever version they're on now is really Good for this type of thing. I'm going to use it for that or whatever. So that's kind of, that's. It's interesting. And we're going to talk about OpenAI in a second. And then actually, I don't know why these I'm going to, I'm going to read for. I don't. This thing has nothing to do with anything. I'm just going to put these all together. So Microsoft, in a fairly bizarre blog post, revealed just in a sentence, in the 2/3 of the way down. You know, it was one of those pro America, everything we do is awesome. We're going to try to deal with this president who's coming in. It's going to be great.

[Richard Campbell]

I think this seemed like a very much a message to Mar? A Lago.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, it's just, it was bizarre. But right in the middle of it or 2/3 of the way through, it said, oh, by the way, we're going to spend $80 billion on infrastructure. AI infrastructure. In our fiscal year 2025, which we're.

[Richard Campbell]

In the middle of now, they've already spent 80 billion.

[Paul Thurrott]

So that's the thing. So they already have. And then if you look at the last few earnings reports, the amount they spent in the most recent quarter, for which there is a report which was the first fiscal quarter of 2025, or what I would call the third calendar quarter of 2024, they spent, wait for it, $20 billion. So of course, 20 billion times 4 is 80. So I feel like we kind of already knew this. But the point of this was twofold. One, to communicate how much they're investing, two, to ask for investment from the US Government. Little handout. And oh, by the way, maybe no regulation. How does that sound? They literally asked for less regulation. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Please don't get in our way. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's kind of a good company, I think they're gonna be doing.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, I know. Well, good. They're in company, I would say. Yeah. Apple.

[Leo Laporte]

There might have been a strategic error to say $80 billion, half of that in the U.S. i have a feeling there are those in the administration who say only half. Only half?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Why not all?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, well, here's the.

[Leo Laporte]

Where's the rest going, by the way?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, because there are certain. The entire eu.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you have to have to have.

[Paul Thurrott]

That data has to be there. I can assure you those profits that aren't being stored in Ireland, so they're all coming back to the United States, baby. So don't worry, you know, so that's.

[Leo Laporte]

That'S that Apple was storing them in Ireland.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, that's why I said Ireland.

[Richard Campbell]

But they do keep money out of the US if they can.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, of course they do. But I mean. But that would be how I would answer the question. I'm not saying it's literally so the profits.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

[Richard Campbell]

But I would. We talked about this on this Week in Tech. But these data centers are starting to destabilize the grid in the northeast.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so weird.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think that's why my screen went blank.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, could be. That's. Could be. Actually.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's why we need Three Island. Three Mile Islands.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. That's 800 megawatts. That's a lot of power. That's a bunch of data centers and more. It's more power than they need.

[Paul Thurrott]

Maybe that would solve the dim light problem I have out in the dining room. It's like a 60 watt bulb out there. Even though it's really like 120 watts or whatever. Like it's super dim.

[Leo Laporte]

See, there you go.

[Richard Campbell]

So blame every problem. I think you're seeing them telegraph the fact that they're about to get into the power business. And shortly after that, they'll have to get into the water business because those are the two they got again, they have for building more data centers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. And then the space business will be next because if there's anything colder than the oceans, there are asteroids with water now.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. The. It's the providing water for cooling. And so just take one of those big ice balls. As they work their way through stressing infrastructure for cities, they're going to keep having to provide their own.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I assume most people are at least vaguely familiar with this term artificial general intelligence. And even if you're kind of an expert in this, you're probably only vaguely aware of it because it's kind of all over the map. But the basics here are that kind of what Leo was saying, that AI will or develop cognitive abilities that are as good as a typical human being. Right. That it could replace them in jobs that are now done by humans. Which of course is a nightmare scenario for a lot of people. Sam Altman cannot stop talking about this.

[Richard Campbell]

That's a good way to recruit.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, but you're also doing an Osborne thing here. Like you, they're not there now. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You don't have a choice to use it, so.

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And you're not going to say, oh, well, I won't buy ChatGPT 3040 because I'm going to wait for the next one.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm going to wait for five. Yeah, well, keep waiting. It's going to be a while.

[Richard Campbell]

And the actual expert in this space say that LLMs aren't the path. Right, right. That we're not actually getting closer to a generalized intelligence. We're just getting good at language.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm sure there's going to be a nexus of AI and quantum computing. That will be the end of all of us.

[Richard Campbell]

That's a different class of supercomputers. We really don't have a way forward.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, so I. My only point here is that the reason I mentioned this is Microsoft and OpenAI have a unique partnership. And it's kind of, again, not super public, but it's kind of understood that OpenAI can be free of this contract and of their Microsoft exclusivity in some ways, or in their requirement to provide Microsoft with all of their technology if and when they achieve AGI. So the information reported that the details of this agreement and the two companies have defined AGI as not some form of intelligence, but rather an amount of money that OpenAI makes selling their artificial intelligence directly to customers.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that number is $100 billion in profits. This is a company that made roughly 4 billion in revenues, not profits, last year. I don't think they are. I can't imagine they're profitable because of all their costs. But this was designed, I think, by Microsoft to be artificially high for artificial gross income.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But there's a reason that milestone's important. Right. Because then OpenAI, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Has become a superpower, is off the hook. Sure. No, that's. That is why. But what I'm saying is that these two companies that are the pioneers now in AI have determined, have defined in a legal agreement AGI as money.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like, guys, come on.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, what they're really saying is, OpenAI, we own you until you start making.

[Richard Campbell]

100 billion so you make enough money. Which is a. Yeah, because if it was really a super intelligence, then that's basically a way of saying, so this is a forever agreement, because there's no obvious path to achieving that. But now you said it at a realistic number, a colossal number. Like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

You realize at the same time they're saying you need to make $100 billion, they're starting to give away this product.

[Leo Laporte]

But the question is, who said 100 billion? OpenAI or Microsoft?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's an agreement between the two.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, but who came up with the number? Who does it benefit? Does it benefit OpenAI.

[Richard Campbell]

I think it benefits Microsoft.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think it benefits Microsoft.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, hugely.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, and actually, I think that bit is important because as we see things evolve over time, you know, OpenAI has partnered with Apple, right? And we're like, oh, Apple has not invested even a dollar in Open AI. That seems like a little, you know, weird. So it's like, oh, maybe Microsoft didn't get the. A good deal here. And then you see this. You're like, no, no, they're fine. They're fine because they get everything OpenAI does until this number is reached. And that means they get everything that OpenAI does.

[Leo Laporte]

This is from the story in the information. We should give credit to Stephanie Palazzolo because she came up with this. But I would like to know, like, who the old kui bono.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know that we could.

[Leo Laporte]

It might be a mutual thing. It might be Microsoft who. So once the. They hit that AGI milestone, then the Open AI no longer has to provide access to its models, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. They're done. They're, they're even soft. We're in the head go off and they go there.

[Richard Campbell]

How many companies make more, have more than 100 billion in profit a year, like 5. It's very small, Microsoft being one of them.

[Leo Laporte]

So in a way it's Microsoft saying, okay, we got you in hand, golden.

[Richard Campbell]

Handcuffs, big as us.

[Leo Laporte]

Then you can you. Well, but if you're Sam Altman, you might also also say, yeah, we're going to get there pretty quick.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, that he is saying that. And, and I. But I think the idea here is that OpenAI will come back to the, to Microsoft at some point and say, look, we need to renegotiate this. And they'll say, sure, yeah, you know, we'll take more of your money instead. How does that sound? And you know, that upfront or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think this is, then the reason I bring it up is it's not really about AGI, it's really about how do we lock in OpenAI for the longest.

[Paul Thurrott]

The point of this is if you thought Microsoft was getting the raw end of this deal, they're okay, they're doing it.

[Leo Laporte]

Unless, I mean, if really you did create super intelligence, that would be worth.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah, we might say, yeah, it'll.

[Richard Campbell]

Make 100 billion making paperclips. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then we're going to get into interesting legal issues similar to ARM and Qualcomm, where Microsoft will say, wait, you. But you made this while we had this agreement. So you have to give it this. No, no, we did it. After we hit that figure or whatever, we'll see how that goes.

[Leo Laporte]

It kind of makes sense if you think about it, because OpenAI right now is extremely expensive. It's kind of like Microsoft is the rocket fuel and it can't get off the pad without the rocket fuel. What they're saying, though, is by the time we hit orbit, we don't need you anymore. And Microsoft's saying, yeah, good luck with that. But I don't know who got the better deal on that one, you know?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we'll have to see what happens. You think so right now, I think Microsoft did. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'd be betting an OpenAI, but that's because I think they're going to hit super.

[Paul Thurrott]

If OpenAI had done what they did and Microsoft didn't get involved, if they somehow partnered with Google or Amazon or whatever, Microsoft would be done.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true.

[Paul Thurrott]

Effectively, like they would just be done. Right. So, I mean, you know, we always talk about this, you know, the bet the company nonsense that Microsoft always talks about. This was literally a bet the company thing. I mean, if they hadn't done this and OpenAI was able to go with someone else, I don't think Microsoft has a future.

[Leo Laporte]

They took it away from Google.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's really what they were trying to do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Of course, there's a lot of raw feelings there still between.

[Leo Laporte]

And Google does not want Microsoft to have it and it probably.

[Paul Thurrott]

And they can't help themselves.

[Richard Campbell]

Like Sundar, OpenAI is taking technology from Google in the first place. That's why it was set up.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like Google has been punished in this space every step of the way. They made Google first.

[Paul Thurrott]

Google looks like the, the putz Xerox park of the 21st century.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

That you had all this stuff in.

[Richard Campbell]

House, you had and you protected your.

[Paul Thurrott]

Existing businesses rather than going to market with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what happened. Right? I mean, so anyway, it's an interesting world, I guess. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

And really it's. It's all kind of a bet. A bet we don't like. If we could add a crystal ball, we knew 10 years still not providing.

[Richard Campbell]

Any profits of any kind anywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's hideously expensive.

[Paul Thurrott]

But did I mention that the text rewriting thing in Notepad is unbelievable and easily worth the $11 billion in investment near the song?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, we're making a lot of progress. Things are happening very quickly.

[Paul Thurrott]

They really are.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve Gibson has been kind of delving into this. And yesterday he said I've never seen. This is the fastest moving technology I've ever seen.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Has ever seen.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And that whatever you said was so today likely will not be true tomorrow.

[Paul Thurrott]

The discussion that I've had with people, some would say, well the Internet was this fast, you know, it's like, I.

[Richard Campbell]

Mean, no, the Internet had decades. I would say this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean that. But that rapid, you know, the 1995 through 2000.

[Leo Laporte]

If you just think about the song generation just taking songs, song generation sounded like. Remember I played it, made a co pilot song for you guys a couple of years ago.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It was, it was gone.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I mentioned the AI Jolene song on purpose because that was done at great expense by a professional musician, blah blah, blah, whatever. And now you could just do it yourself for next to nothing, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

But I also point out this is the largest investment made anywhere across the board. Oh yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Altman says it's going to take a trillion. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Huge amounts of money. You're being poured into this. And again that's Altman saying a trillion is super self serving. He's the one who has to go raise the money.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that's a huge part of that Microsoft revelation about the $80 billion which is not really a revelation which is, you know, we're in a fight against the Chinese here. It's important that we keep this in our hands and then we can sell it to our like the countries and businesses that are our partners and keep it out of Chinese hands. Right. So it also turns into like a national security.

[Leo Laporte]

I do think that the real trick is going to be, and I'm hoping that the Trump administration will see this, that we don't want any one company to dominate and control this. This is a, this is a, this is a creation for humankind.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And this was the whole Idea originally around OpenAI is no, Google shouldn't own this and Microsoft shouldn't own this. It should be open.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I don't remember, I only saw the headline. So this is not a great story but someone has proposed that if AI steals, is found to have stolen content to train itself that that AI should go open source, be made available to the public. Public. Right. The idea being that I know it's 100. That was my response was but that would be all AI, you know, but I mean that's kind of the point.

[Leo Laporte]

There are a couple of things that have happened that made this possible. One is incredible computing power, incredible storage capacity and oh for the last 15 years. Humans are putting everything they know into a public repository that can be scraped.

[Paul Thurrott]

By machines that everyone can scrape. Yeah, well, this is. This is like the railroads going across the country in the 1800s, stealing land and being horrible and killing people and being whatever and then, you know, but, but, but a great scale kind of worked. Like a really good scale. Like, amazing scale. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think only government can have make this happen. And I think there's a governmental urgency to it because other countries are doing that.

[Paul Thurrott]

If only we had a country that was as big as Microsoft, Google, or Amazon.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, once we get Canada. Greenland.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, there you go. That's. That's us trying to scale. There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

I think we scale up and the rest is cake.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. As long as. Yeah, keep looking north.

[Leo Laporte]

Greenland's a giant island. Have you seen it?

[Paul Thurrott]

It depends on which map you're looking at.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Only on Mercator projections.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's either a giant island or a really tiny continent, you know. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry, I shouldn't mock the disabled.

[Richard Campbell]

If you do a Peter's Gall projection. Greenland's not that big.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Mercator. Mr. Mercator did not do us any favors.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, Mercator, we weren't supposed to use that. It was for navigators, for. For European wooden sailing ships.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's super accurate right at the equator. I'm not really sure what the complaint is.

[Richard Campbell]

It's all about its latitude, not actually precision of size. Not that I have strong opinions about these things. Oh, wait, I do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

We should move on to Xbox.

[Paul Thurrott]

Moving on.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, much better. Much more important.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Some Xbox stuff going on.

[Leo Laporte]

So bread and circuses section of the show.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Microsoft has been taking baby steps to make the Xbox experience on Windows be more console. Like. Right. There's a kind of a simplified version of the app. This is a simplified version of the game bar, et cetera. But they want to go a lot deeper than that. And Phil Spencer was talking about how architecturally, Xbox as an OS and Windows are the same underlying kind of hyper V architecture, and that maybe there's a world in which. And by maybe, he means literally, there's a world in which there's a handheld gaming device running that kernel or whatever, that basic part, the foundation, but without all the Windows stuff, you know, but to get there, we're going to have to have Windows handheld gaming PCs first. And, you know, Steam deck type systems are starting to spread pretty rapidly at ces, we've seen a bunch of these things. Azure's got one, which is a second gen for them, Lenovo is offering one that offers a choice of SteamOS or Windows. Fascinating. AMD among their 117 whatever chips that they announced announced a second gen Z2 chip family. There's three or four of them. Only the top end one is better than previous gen from performance efficiency, et cetera. But the other ones are lower cost and are going to power a lot of these devices at new lower price points. And then we've kind of speculated about this. Xbox is kind of in a holding pattern from a hardware perspective. They're almost certainly waiting on arm. We talked about earlier about ARM and Nvidia and what could happen there and I think there's a future where and he kind of alluded to this, Phil Spencer did that. You know we're going to have these handheld gaming PCs but maybe the more efficient thing to really take on the Nintendo Switches of the world or whatever is going to be a custom os. Brad and I talked about this this morning but you know when you think about SteamOS versus Windows you have Linux which is smaller and lighter than Windows and that's good but, and they've done. Valve has a bunch of work to make games run well enough as they can on that system but then on the Windows side heavier, bigger, etc. More resource intensive. But the game compatibility is crazy good and you get all the other games like from Xbox, epic, whatever the other stores are. So it's not just Steam. And maybe there's another way. Maybe Microsoft comes up with a Steam OS type thing that's actually Xbox OS and, and you know, maybe we'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

Most of these handheld machines are not going to survive.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like I really nervous to buy any.

[Paul Thurrott]

Of these so I, I, I wouldn't buy one myself but I'm 58 years old I think, I think you could.

[Leo Laporte]

You could buy the new Switch when it comes out. That's well for sure.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the obvious one to buy. Yeah, yeah but I, or a Steam.

[Paul Thurrott]

Deck but, but a younger person that wanted one a piece of games and wanted to play them on the go. The thing I remember, you know we've gotten into a world where I just reviewed a ThinkPad T14s based on AMD chip. It's not the high end 9 series, whatever. It's just a mid level chip runs Call of duty at 10, you know, 1080p plus it's 1920 by 120045 frames per second roughly. This is a business laptop. Come on like we got enough GPU.

[Richard Campbell]

In it these days.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, we are we're in a good place. So this is the time for this to happen. I would have, I think, you know, when SteamOS Steam Deck first came out, I guess Steam Deck, I don't know, I think there were too many compromises at that. We're just a couple of years in and all of a sudden this is starting to look pretty good. You know, to me, the screen is the, the big issue. I could deal with the, you know, the controller part's fine. I play with the controller actually. So to me it'd be the screen. You know, we get a sniper off across the map and it's one pixel on my screen. I don't know what it would be.

[Richard Campbell]

It would be a pixel 53 inch, 4K. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Like it's one to one size ratio. Like it's like real life size. Like that would make sense. That's awesome.

[Richard Campbell]

That's why we always called them the PC master race in the first place.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. So anyway, there's a lot of stuff happening at CS around this stuff. And Phil Spencer, as he's been doing for the past year instead of releasing Activision titles to get past you bastard, has been talking a lot about these things that may or may not happen. And that's kind of interesting to me because he runs Xbox and he shouldn't be talking like this, but there's got to be a reason. And I think, like I said, I think they're kind of in a little bit of a holding pattern with regards to ARM hardware making sense. I think, I really think that's what they want to do. I think.

[Richard Campbell]

Is that what they're holding out for is get. Let the windows on ARM get stable and then make a handheld out of it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. And I think these things all kind of align at a good time and hopefully in the coming year we will see. It is January, so we got our first Game Pass games. There is an Activation Blizzard title in here. It's the only one I know. Yeah. Well, it's Diablo. Wow. Like the original Diablo.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Diablo 1.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It's not. Well, I think the new one is already 97. Yep. So I mean, if you were upset, I mean, I wasn't. But if you were upset about Activision games not appearing on Game Pass, I mean, there you go. I think you solved the problem. Wow. I don't know, man.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there are people who love it and, and you said that Diablo 4 is available now, so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean there are people that love a track tapes too. I mean, I, I. Is that on Game Pass. I don't know. Yeah, it probably is. If Activision doesn't make it. It. I don't know. I don't know what's happening here, so.

[Richard Campbell]

But reasonably, the rest of the Diablos will come. Then you started.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think that's the expectation now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's only taken a year.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nvidia announced new graphics cards for PC.

[Richard Campbell]

5000 series, the 50s.

[Leo Laporte]

Yay.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, you know, what used to cost $2,000 now costs $500. But don't worry, they have a new $2,000 card too. So if you. If for some reason it's important to you to go from like 100 frames per second to 230 frames per second.

[Richard Campbell]

On your 60 Hz display. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

They got you.

[Leo Laporte]

Who needs these?

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

I will say like a. I don't know. What, 30, 70 or something. 30 or maybe a 20 series in my gaming machine. It's fine. It's fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, but I'm not. Yeah, right. I'm not. What is it used to be Crisis. What is the call? Tough game now.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know. Oh God. Yeah. What is the tough game now? Is there even a game that could take advantage of honestly, just 4K textures?

[Richard Campbell]

Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Like 4K? Like actual 4K. Yeah. Forget 8K. Like actual 4K.

[Leo Laporte]

There is nothing that's that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. What is Crisis 2025? That's a good question.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah. It's more. It's more about what games you actually run in 4K HDR. Like, will they run.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think this is one of those Nintendo might have gotten something right moments where obviously they were kind of mocked for like, oh, the 1000. That's cute. And then they won the generation. And now people are starting to look at gaming PCs and of course, you know, these. I'm sure Steam Deck probably runs at 720p a lot of the time or whatever, so. And we also get into that uncanny Valley thing with the graphics are so realistic. They're not realistic and they look weird. You get the. Even in Call of Duty, like this one of the animations where the guy's walking around with the gun before you start playing the game. If you leave it on, there's he. As he moves around, like one of his eyes kind of disappears for a second on some computers. It's like weird.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Double check this on the gamer. But. And I agree with this completely, Cyberpunk 2077.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Out of sync is saying that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So what's the what's the, what's the resolution you could run this thing at?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, dude, maxed out cyberpunk.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. 4080 at 2160p, 60 frames a second. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

And. And you'll boil water in that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

That'S, that's, that's pressure in the limits to do true 4K. It's all in. And that's. Then that's spec on a RTX 4080. So these 50 series will. Should be able to eat that up.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Yeah, I don't, I'm.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know if you place the bait. It is astonishing.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it? You like it?

[Richard Campbell]

And it's a double whammy of an open world game and all the cyberpunk, which is fun, but actually the storyline is excellent and moving and it's, you know, acted by Keanu Reeves, so that's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a 3080 in my Alienware.

[Richard Campbell]

It's legit. I'm a little behind. That's a great machine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Your graphics card starts with a three Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Come on, you're so old.

[Paul Thurrott]

What is that like the first GLX card that they made for the original? What do you know? Yeah. Yes. I play the Sims on it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's good on the. Oh, the Sims works great on it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Better believe it. And then these other. I almost don't want to talk about this. So Xbox is coming to LG Select LG Smart TVs this year. What does that mean? The Xbox app is going to be available there. So if you have an Xbox console and you want to stream your own games, there's 50 now that will. Or soon. That will work. You can do that. But if you pay for an Xbox game pass Ultimate Subscription, you'll be able to access that library from the LG, whatever the LG gaming hub is called.

[Leo Laporte]

So LG is running the old WebOS, right? The Palm.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I wonder. But no, it's just a browser.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

The way that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, it's the vestiges of a mobile platform. Right. Like it's probably. I think the programming model is probably all web based, but that's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, it makes me think about the idea that I could leave the Xbox downstairs and then play my games upstairs on the led.

[Paul Thurrott]

I would be fascinated if you did that and you found it to be acceptable.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, I just find this like. I don't know. But maybe. Maybe I don't know. And then the less said about Xbox rewards, the better. But there were rumors that this stuff and Microsoft has this set of rewards programs. Use Bing, use Edge, and you had points, you can get stuff. And there are people who like anything in life who use these things religiously and get Apple card gift certificates or whatever it is from all this usage. But. But they. This has already happened out. Yeah. So as of yesterday, they've kind of revamped this program. And what people are discovering is that if you are really into this, this is not as good as it used to be.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the only way those points programs ever go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't ever get better. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So I don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure I've ever done Xbox rewards directly or on purpose. Like I've done the Bing rewards stuff sometimes just to see it or whatever. But it's. I don't know. Whatever. The reward of playing games is playing games. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Who needs a Apple gift card?

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I do, actually, but, you know, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we are. Hey, how exciting you guys. Guys have moved right along. We're ready for the back of the book and of course our whiskey pick in the debut of our new whiskey theme featuring Anne Murray. AI Anne Murray.

[Richard Campbell]

If you have a locked AT&T phone.

[Paul Thurrott]

We'Re here with bolt cutters. T Mobile will help pay off your.

[Richard Campbell]

Locked phone and give you a new.

[Paul Thurrott]

5G phone for free.

[Richard Campbell]

All on America's largest 5G network.

[Paul Thurrott]

Visit t mobile.com carrierfreedom via virtual prepaid MasterCard in 15 days. Free phone up to $830 via 24 monthly bill credits plus tax and a $10 device connection charge.

[Richard Campbell]

Qualifying port and trade in service on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Go5G next and credit required. Contact us before canceling entire account to continue bill credits or credit stop and.

[Leo Laporte]

Balance on required finance agreement as the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Bill credits end if you pay off devices early. This just in. Hot off the bench press. Planet Fitness has added new strength equipment. Save $28 or more when you join today and you can be one of.

[Leo Laporte]

The first to try it out.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're raising the bar with new bench press and our new hack squat will have you actually looking forward to leg day. Plus we're still repping all of the best in class equipment we've always had with most clubs open 24 hours so you can work out your way on your time.

[Richard Campbell]

So let's do this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Join Planet Fitness today and save $28 or more. Just $1 down $15 a month. Cancel anytime DLN's January 10th. See Home Club for details.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching this week in Windows Weekly. That's too many weeks.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's a lot of weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a lot of weeks with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. What's his name? The guy over there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, the guy. The guy with the beard.

[Leo Laporte]

Back of the book time. What do you got, Paul Thurat? Your tip of the week.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I browse it around my newsfeed the other morning, and this was a Mac website of some kind or like one of those Apple whatever. And it just comes up and it says, get Windows 11 Pro for $20. And I'm like, okay. So I go look at this thing, and these are all over the web, right? You can actually get Windows and Office, like, standard.

[Leo Laporte]

I did. I bought it from people.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, as cheap as 30 bucks.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a Penguin with an I. Penguin.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I've also done this a few times recently. And the only reason is that Penguin.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess it's a K. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually, I don't remember the names of the sites I've used, but I've used a few.

[Leo Laporte]

This one I found on Tom's Hardware. We talked about it earlier. I use it at vm, and it was cheap. And, yeah, it seems to be legit.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's a great. Right. That's a great reason to use it. Like, you're in a vm, especially on a Mac, where you want to run Windows and, you know, 130 bucks for Microsoft, 200 bucks for Pro. I just want to run a Windows app.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's a Windows 11 OEM product. Pro key, $22.80.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So here's the thing. So people will sometimes email and say, is this legit? I mean, this is a scam, right? Or this has to be illegal or something. Right. So the site that the Mac Apple site pointed to is a Microsoft partner. So I'm like, oh, that's kind of interesting. It turns out that the key that they're selling for Pro or Home was coming from a different company. So I went and looked them up, and you could get either for as low as $10 apiece. So I'm like, all right, I'm going to do this. You couldn't. They had already sold too many. The offer was gone. And so it occurred to me, on the Surface laptop I'm using, which is Home Edition, I actually last week tried to install Hyper V, forgetting it was home. Hyper V is not available in Home. There's a workaround for that. Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But I was like, you know what? I'm just going to go, let me see how cheap I can do this now. Because like I said, I've done it in the past. I used to use TechEd and MSDN keys. When those things still worked, I had them stocked up over many, many years. Windows 7, Windows 8X would all work in 10 and 11. And then they cut that off finally. So, yeah, I mean, honestly, as recently as this morning, I bought a key for, I think it was 25 bucks. Activated immediately, no problem. And now that's tied to the hardware. I don't see Microsoft ever taking this away. So why am I telling you this? Because I think people look at this and they're a little bit worried about it. Like, well, what could happen? What could they do? What if they stop letting me download updates? Or that can stop. Whatever. Guys, you got this. Like, Microsoft is not going to remove your data from the computer. They're not going to prevent you from getting into it. They're not going to do anything is what they're going to do. They're going to do nothing. And by the way, if you know about it, and if I've been doing it for the past year and if the Mac website's writing about it and Leo promoted it earlier when he did it on his Mac, Microsoft knows about it too. So don't worry about it. The Windows 11 upgrade is free if you have a qualifying computer, which is a lot of them, but as we're about to find out, not all of them. And there's no other market for the. There's no mass market for this stuff. No one is. I don't think this is a concern. So I'm not.

[Leo Laporte]

In other words, they're not worried that they're losing money because they're not losing money.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know what I mean?

[Leo Laporte]

So where do these come from?

[Paul Thurrott]

They buy them in bulk and they sell them per, you know, per.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is like when you would in the old days, you'd go to Egghead and they'd say, well, you have to buy some hardware and we can sell you the oem.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, An OEM key. Yeah, they're not always OEM keys. I've also done this with Office to do some of my testing of like standalone Office versus the subscription version to see how that changes the equation with, you know, onedrive requirements, yada yada. It's kind of fascinating. Like the latest version of Office, the consumer version, which is like home, and I don't remember what the other version is called, but those are actually still fairly expensive because they're Brand new. I'm sorry, sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

Did you have the name family?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, the non subscription versions, like the office 2024 home is the base version without Outlook and then there's one with Outlook that's something else. Standard or whatever the name is. Like you can get the, like the PC Plus 2024 that you know, installs on three computers, blah, blah, whatever. I guess what I'm trying to say is like, I don't think there's a risk here at all. And if there is a. Like, if you spend 20 or 30 bucks and you buy one of these things and worst case scenario, Microsoft's like, you're not doing this anymore. We're turning this off. Who cares? What were you doing before? You're fine. Like, everything's fine. Like, don't worry about it.

[Richard Campbell]

You'll be okay. Yeah, it's all good. The black choppers aren't coming.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nope. No one's. No one cares. That's my thing. I'm not saying it's literally illegal, but I kind of am because I don't. Microsoft would put a stock. Yeah, Microsoft, easily.

[Richard Campbell]

Ultimately, Microsoft's goal is to have everybody on win 11 so they have less Windows.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is how they compete with Linux. This is them keeping Linux off the desktop. I don't know for anyone who cares about this for some reason, I did finish my latest version of net pad based on net 9 and the new WPF stuff before the end of the year.

[Richard Campbell]

Is it faster? Are you happy with net9?

[Paul Thurrott]

I, by the way, found another major bug, which is that if you have an expander control, which is what you would have in Settings in a notepad app, like my Microsoft does, and you expand an expander and you change the theme, it crashes the app. And that's Microsoft's bug. They've acknowledged it. Supposedly they fixed it internally, but I haven't seen the fix. Yeah, so you can crash this thing pretty damn easily if you want. Nice. But yeah, so I'm pretty happy with it. I've got a lot of stuff coming this year, including tabs. Right. Which is the big one. So I'm going to keep working on that. And then as far as apps go, I might actually do another episode about this on Hands on Windows, because I did one a couple of months ago and I highlighted maybe three or four of the tools. I found myself using two tools, a lot more than I ever did before. And both, I guess, are tied to kind of different ways that I'm starting to use computers. So the first One is called PowerToys. Awake. If you've installed PowerToys, you've seen the little coffee cup icon down in the tray next to the normal Powertories icon. What it lets you do is click that and then you can choose some amount of time that the computer stays on and. Or the screen, you can decouple those. I'll do things where, for example, like maybe I'm playing a video game over here, but I'm doing a little bit of work between games over here. And what will happen is because these things are so efficient now, the screen dims. The screen dims, the screen dims. So I'll just go in and say, stay on for an hour. You know, don't dim the screen. I actually use this a lot. It's really cool.

[Richard Campbell]

It should be built into Windows. But it's a power and maybe someday it will.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean that's happens to some of.

[Richard Campbell]

These tools once it's all arm.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. The other big one is, and this is because there's a bug in 24H2 where the, the mouse cursor disappears in certain circumstances, especially when you're working in text. And it's, it's. What's it called? It's called Find and Find my Mouse. You double tap the control key and it puts a little, it does a little like focus circle.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like overlay on the mouse cursor. And I, I use this every single day. Maybe I'm just like old and blind or something. But like I.

[Richard Campbell]

The big also got multiple screens.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And the game I play the most is where's my mouse? Where's the mouse? And I'm like moving the thing around like I don't see it, you know, so you do double tap and there it is.

[Richard Campbell]

There you are.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's never where I thought it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Very useful.

[Richard Campbell]

That's good. I like that one. Oh, and by the way, just to be sticking on the app, I noticed you. You know, I finally gave in and started using a new version of Outlook because of you.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the sentence Paul hates.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because it's good.

[Richard Campbell]

As of this week, you said, you said and, and I think a couple of times on the show I've come and yelled at you about this, but this was the week where I noticed wasn't annoying me anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh. Or the workflow that wasn't what I expected at all. Okay, good.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's one of those things where all of a sudden I'm like, hey, I'm still using the new Outlook and I'm not.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you're not like, you don't want to poke your eyeballs out.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm not raging. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's good. Okay. I'm glad to hear that. Because honestly, I think especially if you have a commercial account or you have a paid Microsoft 365 consumer credit, it's. It's actually, it's actually pretty full feature. Like, it's kind of nice app, used.

[Richard Campbell]

To where things are, and it's got a couple of smart things about it. Yeah. And I just realized, like, I'm now used to that workflow and it doesn't make me angry anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

So we were just talking about the, like, who does, like, who cares about wallpapers and stuff like that? So one of the things that's interesting about this app, and this was true of Mail and Calendar, well, mostly mail in Windows 10. And, you know, before this app was unique among inbox Windows apps, you can configure it to have a background image. Right. And the new Outlook, the way they draw the UI is you have these kind of columns, and if there's no email selected like he had there, you can see the image really well. But the image comes through. If you look at, look between. In the little gutters between things.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, is it cool?

[Paul Thurrott]

You can actually see the image in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, there it is. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It's kind of neat. Like, it's subtle on the screen, but like on the top of those two columns versus favorites, whatever, you can see it. It's in there too, too. Like it's, it's back. Like those things are floating in space. Sort of nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, it's subtle.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I like parody.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I'm not going to use it, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, who would? I mean, come on.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, it's crazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

2025, wake up. But. But.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm glad to hear that he's used to it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm glad to hear that. You know, beat me over the head with something when I see you in a couple weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I used to get that all the time because I. The radio show people would call in, say, hey, you know, I talked to you a couple months ago and you said to do this, and I go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, here we go. You're like, brace for it. Yep. This isn't going to end well.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I'm amazed that Power toys is still around. That is just. It's.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's expanding. There's I, there's more toys. It's a stupid word, but there's more utilities. I wish you could. I wish they were separate, frankly. Yeah, I'd like to. Which is what people say about Office too. It's like, I just want to install this, this and this.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't install them individually. You have to.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's a big giant thing. But it doesn't seem to be super resource intensive. Like, it's good.

[Richard Campbell]

They're all TSRs, really.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

They just sit in the systray. Do the thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Ladies and gentlemen, this would be an excellent time to consider subscribing to the wonderful Run as Radio podcast with your host, Richard Campbell.

[Richard Campbell]

What's staring episode 1000 in the face this year?

[Leo Laporte]

Are you. Wow. Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

But this week's show was with Bailey Bursik, who is one of the senior product managers on the security and identity team. So this is the Entra folks and I've been bringing them in every so often because Entra's done a lot in the past year and a half, two years, that's starting to really have some fruition. And so what was fun to talk about with Bailey was looking at what we call least privilege, or just trying to mostly for administrators, give them fewer privileges. Don't have them run around with super user accounts anymore because they're the vector of threat now. It's very. It's the black hats target sysadmins because they have all the privileges, right. And if they're running in a super user account. And so there's been a real push on. On just enough administration that you only elevate those privileges when you need them, that kind of thing. But it's been really clunky to do. But it isn't anymore. Entra has given us a bunch of new policy features so you can do things like assign your domain account a super user privilege, like the backup manager privilege for an hour, and for that hour everything you do is logged. So it's kind of a big deal. We have a good record that you're using a privileged service, but also at the end of the hour you don't have to log out and log back in or anything like it just goes away. So nobody lives in high end privileges anymore. We also dug into things like the. What was the name of it? Let me just pull that name. I got the entry permissions manager. So the other question was what privileges does this account have that have never been used? So actually being able to have a log of what privileges were actually tested and used and when they were used so that you can start granulating saying, well, that privilege hasn't been used in A year. So let's take it away as well as what ones have those things. And we're not just talking about administrators or users, but also applications because you have to give permissions to applications as well. And so Entra has an overview of all of that and basically provides a dashboard to allow you to see all of the privilege utilization and then be able to tweak and tune it as necessary. So you can sort of pull back privileges bit by bit to again create a sense of least privilege. You only have have the privileges you need.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, a great step forward. I'm very excited to see that this is becoming easier. Finally.

[Leo Laporte]

Okie dokie. I am ready to play the AI generated theme for the Whiskey segment. The theme is called Something from the Closet.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just like a horror movie, only.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it's so good. This is from Suno S U N.

[Paul Thurrott]

O A For a drum of that.

[Richard Campbell]

Old whiskey long on the shelf Years.

[Paul Thurrott]

Gone by it's all the change in myself Dusty bottle hidden well out of sight now we'll drink to the memories.

[Leo Laporte]

And tell coast to the night Pretty good, huh?

[Richard Campbell]

That's not bad.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's insane.

[Leo Laporte]

It wrote the lyrics too.

[Paul Thurrott]

Closet secrets it's kept with whispers of night when nobody slept how would a machine know that? Golden liquid Warm and strong in my hand let's raise a glass Let the stories expand Whiskey. So weird. Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, that's enough of that. You get the idea.

[Richard Campbell]

It's pretty.

[Paul Thurrott]

Listen, when you go to Lilith Tour or whatever it is with this song.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like something from Lilith Tour.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean it. Okay. I think it sounds pretty like. If I didn't tell you ahead of time, you would might think a human wrote it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not. It's not. It doesn't trigger the uncanny valley like a lot of the.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think they've.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the big difference. That's what's crazy about it. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I wrote. I wrote another one here. I'll just play briefly. This is. This is the lyrics. Yeah, it's a little shorter because the lyrics are only. There's only five lines.

[Paul Thurrott]

What weird stuff did he find today? Is there something in your closet? From the aisle of. It's the guy from Halloween. He's coming to kill you.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's pretty good too.

[Richard Campbell]

That's pretty funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway. Richard Campbell. I'm sorry about that, everybody. You're gonna need a good wee dram or something right now to get that taste.

[Richard Campbell]

I got a Little something something.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right.

[Richard Campbell]

I felt like I hadn't talked about Irish in a while. Looking back. I love Irish whiskey, Jane, you know, Last one was Jameson, which was, I don't know, three months ago, four months ago. So I. I went to Kilbagan. Now, Kilbagan is a town near the center of Ireland. It's in the county of Westmeath on the River Brosna. This is literally in the route between Dublin and galway on the M6, although there's a little bypass and stuff these days. Old town, nominally created because of Saint Bican, which is considered one of the twelve apostles of Ireland who founded the monastery there.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how you pronounce that? Not being? I would say being. It's bahan.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm guessing about it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I don't think you're guessing. I think it sounds right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And. And the name Kill Bagan actually comes from the seal. Vacant, which is like the Church of St. Bacon. Ah, all right. Which, of course, you know, as churches do, burned down, was lost to time, that sort of thing. There was another monastery built in the same site, like, 600 years later in the 1100s. Like, I love the time spent on this. Although that one stuck around for about 400 years or so until you have the revolutions in the 1500s.

[Leo Laporte]

And.

[Richard Campbell]

And then the land gets taken from the monastery, granted to a local family called the Lamberts. They dismantle everything. Although as I was digging into this, I found this geophysical survey where they were using multispectral analysis and found the outline in the ground of the original monastery and so forth. So while it had been lost for a few hundred years and it was found again in 2003. But this is actually a story about whiskey. I just told you about the town, and this is a good whiskey area. Just a few kilometers to the south is Tullamore, another great Irish whiskey. And this is a very old whiskey town because this distillery was founded in 1757. So about as old as you get. This is from the McManus family, a gentleman by the name of Matthew McManus who put it together. And apparently in the notes, they used a bunch of the stones from the old monastery as part of the construction for this place. And of course, it's the 1700s, so it's all water powered, so they built it right on the river with a paddle wheel, which, by the way, still exists to this day, to power the pumps to operate the distillery. The Locke family, another old family from that area, takes over the distillery in the 1840s, in fact, to this day, if you go to the Kilbeggin Distillery, you will see the name Locke Lock Distillery on the chimneys. So that even though that's generally known as Kilbeggin because it's in Kilbeggin, it was the Lock family that ran it for many, many years. And that's also when the Industrial Revolution came. So they put in a steam pump or a steam boiler to run the power plant when water wasn't available. The Locke family very respected in the area. And one of the reasons was that John Locke, who in the 1800s was running the distillery, took good care of his people. He built cottages on the site for some of the workers, coal and massive bulk because he needed it for his boilers. But he also is part of your compensation package. You're a worker at the Lock Distillery, is he provided your coal for you, for your home. And to the point where there is a famous newspaper story from the 1860s where they had an accident that damaged one of the boilers at the Lock Distillery, which Locke couldn't afford to replace. And the town raised the money to replace the boiler.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of like the Green Bay Packers, Atlanta.

[Richard Campbell]

And a related story from that same newspaper was it. In 1878, there was a big fire at the distillery and the whole town came out to fight the fire, including rolling a lot of the barrels out of the burning buildings to save them, which I also think is separate motivation high priority. Yeah, save the whiskey. And they became a public company in 1893. The John Locke and Company become a publicly traded company. Now, like many distilleries, they had to shut down during World War I when the grain supplies got short and they were hit hard by us. Prohibition went back, were up and running again with a younger generation of the Locke family in the 1930s after Prohibition was over. But Ireland wasn't having a good time then either. Within 20 years or so, things got very tough. And in 1953 they stopped production, continued to sell some barrels fully shut down in 1957 when they couldn't pay their taxes. But the government never did anything with it. They were kind of raided in the 1960s when Europeans would come in and buy barrels and suddenly res the whiskey, make some money there. Until finally the citizens of Kilbegan rallied in the. In the early 80s. In 1982, they formed the Kilbegan Preservation and Development Association. And one of their goals was to save the distillery. And so they did build. They raised the money to build a museum to distilling. Not even trying to restart distillery per se, which is to preserve the building and not have more bad things happen to it. Until a fellow named John Teeling came along long. So Teeling was an entrepreneur in Ireland in the 1980s. He bought up an old potato alcohol distillery in Louth, which is north of Dublin, and created the Cooley Distillery. Started making some good whiskey using column stills. But he was low on space up there and so he bought Kilbagan from the town for a bargain in 1988 to use their warehouse. The warehouse was largely empty by this point. All the barrels have been sold off off. And so he stored his whiskey in Kilbeggin and over time started using more and more of the facilities of Kilbeggin that were still intact. And so by 2007, coincidentally the 250th anniversary of Kilbeggin, he starts actually making whiskey in the Kilbegon site again. Now he did the, the, the mashing fermentation steps at Coulee, but then he'd bring down the wart and do distillation in the original 180 year old stills in and then barrel it up and store it in the Kilbeggin warehouses. And so that, and they there's a big ceremony that was done for the first firing of those old Stills in 2007. And he had representatives, descendants of the McManuses and the cuts and the locks that had operated the distillery for the past 200 years, although that point had.

[Paul Thurrott]

Been shut down for 50 years.

[Richard Campbell]

By 2010, Kilbangen is a fully operating distillery again. They built out their own mashing and fermentation facilities again, most of which built lost. And in 2011, the Beam Corporation, as in Jim Beam, acquires Cooley, which of course owned Kill Baggin. And then a few years later Suntory bought Beam, as we know. So now the whole package is owned by Suntory, both Cooley and Kilbeggin. In 2015, immediately following that, Teeling, which you, because you may know the name, took his profits from selling off Cooley and Kilbeggin to Beam and Centauri and created a brand new distillery in Dublin called the Tealing Teeling Whiskey Company which will deserve its own story, although I would point out that by 2023 had sold it to Bacardi. So John Teeling man like building distilleries and selling them. He did a bunch of it. So and Forsyths, who are the famous Scottish still makers, actually approached Kilbangen in 2019. They made an exact replica of the 200 year old copper pot still, so they could preserve the original and continue to produce whiskey in the same style, which Kilbeggin has a very interesting approach to it. So now the contemporary version of Kilbeggin today uses an oak mash tun. So the all wood, also wooden washbacks as well. And then they have those replica stills, a wash still of 3,000 liters and a spirit still 2,000 liters. But they only do a double distillation. Most Irish whiskey is triple distilled, but Kilbeggin is not just twice distilled. And then they have this large granite rack house. It's a arced concrete structure with a hard floor. They store their whiskey upright on pallets. I think you got that picture up there perfectly timed there, Leo. So notice five high, which is very tall. So they use the forklifts to move this around, which is why they need the concrete floor and upright barrels. So a little less wood contact. Most of those barrels are used bourbon casks. That's their normal barreling. For the variety of their wood whiskey, they make a few different versions. I'm going to talk about their blended because it's the basic. But they have a small batch rye, which they first started making 2010, about 30% rye. The rest is both malted and unmalted barley, which is, if you remember our Irish stories, that's a common trick for the Irish that they don't just use malted barley because there was a period there where the Irish government would tax malted barley. So they started using unmalted barley. They have a single spot still edition which is both malted and unmarted barley. Barley plus 2.5% of oats because the Irish are crazy. Actually, that's an old school Irish whiskey going back into the 1800s. So they do all these things. And there is a triple cask edition which is bourbon, sherry and virgin oak. That is not what I have here today. So back in 2011 we did a dot net rocks tour across Ireland and we stopped in Dublin. Dublin. And we went up to Belfast and I got a chance to see the Bushmills. And then we went across to Galway and on the way we happened to stop at Kilbeggin. And this is the bottle that I bought.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a pretty. But much prettier than the one on the website.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, this is the old school bottle and these are largely gone. So this is literally a batch 2 edition bottled in August of 2011. And it was that fall that we came there. So this was brand new.

[Leo Laporte]

This is an old Bottle from the.

[Richard Campbell]

Closet, and the cork has immediately broken on. That's excellent.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good sign.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, whiskey, like wine, it gets better. No, in the bottle.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, it does not. You don't normally have air exchange in a whiskey bottle. That's why they do a foil seal on it. And so it is what it is when it gets put in. But you take a look at the color of this, so that's not bad. There's no age declaration on this, which is pretty common. It has to be a minimum of three years, which is sort of normal. I know that this distillery reserve is only barley. So again, it was one of the early whiskeys.

[Paul Thurrott]

They were made at least 16 years old.

[Richard Campbell]

Now it's been sitting in the bottle that long? Yeah, for. For better, worse. Only 40% because they don't really go in for a lot of that stuff. Wow. Now that's so Irish. Isn't it just. Just. No, no, no. Offensive. Nose light on the tongue. You just drinking happy. You know, it doesn't have a big hard hit. It doesn't go out.

[Paul Thurrott]

God, you make me want to drink. There's something wrong with you.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's like it's such a definitive Irish drink just like that. That's why I just pointed you to the blend. Because the basic kill bag and the one you can actually get in the US like this was only made for a couple of years and only at the distillery. And I found it. You can get this at auction. Now, I found a site that was auctioning off these bottles for about £70, so maybe $85, which is typical of Irish whiskey. They're not super expensive, but the regular blended bottle, which I absolutely ranked 25 bucks, you know, and it's a classic Irish whiskey that you probably haven't had. It's a little bit off the beaten path. We've got a bunch of questions in the discord this time. This is very funny. What's the difference between horizontal and vertical barrel aging? Vertical is the standard where you lay the barrel on its side in a rack. It increases the surface area of the liquid exposed to wood to the air.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have to rotate the barrel if it's on its side.

[Richard Campbell]

Is that anything normal normally don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

No. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

And then they thief from. And that's also where the bung is. So if you're going to thief from it. You're able to pop the bung.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thief from the.

[Richard Campbell]

You can't. In a vertical placement.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a technical term.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Does whiskey ever. Does whiskey go Bad in the bottle. No, not when the bottle's full, but I have. There's been a general conversation these days when you get to about a half a bottle of whiskey, if you let it sit for too long, you put.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of oxygen in the bottle.

[Richard Campbell]

It does start to ox, so it sort of loses some of its character, which is really a way to say, hey, if you got a half bottle of wizard, call some friends.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Knock it out.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess you could use a coravan or something and put nitrogen in there and preserve it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you could. It's just very, very vino kind of mindset. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's like. Or. Or drink it.

[Richard Campbell]

Or you could just drink it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Here's an idea.

[Leo Laporte]

I actually have something that might bring you to drink. I've written a little song.

[Paul Thurrott]

I knew you were awfully quiet there.

[Leo Laporte]

For honor of all the Irish. Saint Beacon, if you. If you'd like to hear it.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of historically accurate.

[Richard Campbell]

The fiddle.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Little Irish fiddle.

[Richard Campbell]

Old Irish saint.

[Leo Laporte]

In building his church.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is like something you hear in a pub at night in Ireland, you know? Why is this? His hands were employed.

[Leo Laporte]

He ceased not praying with joy. Old saint begant his Lord did please.

[Richard Campbell]

So they named the whiskey after him.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it brought you to tears. Now it's killed bacon a whiskey for years. How about that? How about. That is crazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm pretty sure that's the woman from the chorus, so. That's amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the true story, by the way. That's why he became a saint, because he built his church on his knees, crying the whole time. Which, honestly, I probably would have done, too.

[Richard Campbell]

True enough. Well, that's kilbeggin. And like I said, if you can get any special editions, feel free. The. The blended is fine. It is a classic Irish whiskey. It's just.

[Leo Laporte]

They're a little sweeter, right? They're a little.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they tend well.

[Paul Thurrott]

Mo.

[Richard Campbell]

Most Irish whiskies are triple distilled, so they take a little more of the character out of it. It's just as an easy drinking lighter whiskey. This is a double distilled, which makes it unusual for Irish. They tend to age in the bourbon cask when the bourbon imparts a certain amount of sweetness as well, so. Yeah, but no peat. No, not a. Not a thing. Not a thing. In Ireland. That's a Scottish thing. You know what the Irish. You got wood neat, Pete.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was gonna say good taste. What do you mean?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I kind of like why I like ir. Irish whiskey. There's no risk of smoking.

[Richard Campbell]

You kind of can't go wrong. And look, it's rarely my first choice just because it's not as easy to find. Right. If there's always Jameson and Bushmills. That's going to be on everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Tell them more. Do a tealing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Legit is red.

[Richard Campbell]

Red Breast 12 is one of my very favorites. I've talked about the green spot and the yellow spot. There's blue spot and red spot as well. Much harder to find. Fabulous whiskeys. Yeah. You know you want.

[Leo Laporte]

And the Clonakilty ain't bad.

[Richard Campbell]

Kilty was lovely, but much harder to find.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we. We do the red breast. I think we've.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

My brother in law is a big Irish whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

If you're going to have a nice Irish whiskey. The one that. And plus they have age Appalachians. People feel good when you pour them a red breast 12.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they feel good, don't they?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're bringing out the good stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

That's it. Well, actually 12. The 18 still in the back of the.

[Leo Laporte]

You turned that Clonakilty or what? No, the Kill God Kill Gob. The Kabba.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

By saving it in your closet. Closet for 13, 14 years. You made that an old whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

Saved it. Forgot that it was at the back of the room. It's like. Oh. When I was looking at what whiskey to talk about, I'm like kelpang. And that rings a bell. Did I have one of those? And go digging around.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you gonna do any more Dot Ray network tours? That would be fun.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh boy. Last one was 2013. A lot of work. They're a lot of work. Five shows a week, you know, and I'm, you know, latter half of 50s these days. That's hard on the body.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know. We used to do a lot of stuff like that. In fact, you know, we did. Paul knows this a 24 twice we did 24 hour New Year's marathons.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And it was great. Patrick Delahanty, who has a nice Irish name I think in the discord in the. In the club Twitter New Year's Eve played each of the shows each of the hours. So we actually redid it in our club for New Year's Eve 2024 20.

[Richard Campbell]

We did a. We did a long weekend dotnet rocks where I think we. We streamed 16 hours a day, three days in a row.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you just like a marathon or a telephone, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was fun. Lisa said it was fun for you. It wasn't fun for anybody else.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, then I guess we won't do those anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, and we. And we, you know, we. We had different guests for each of the hours, so in theory, we were making a whole bunch of shows. And in the end, we had to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Throw a bunch of them away.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Because they were too.

[Richard Campbell]

And they got stale, man. They got way too old.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, this is not stale. This is made fresh like bread. Every Tuesday or Wednesday, I should say. 11:00am Pacific, 2:00pm Eastern, 1900 UTC. You can watch watch us do Windows Weekly. As with many of our shows, live on eight different streams, Club Twit members get to watch in the club Twit Discord. But there's also YouTube, Twitch, TikTok. At least for another couple of weeks. I don't know what's going to happen on January 19th. There's also Kik x.com LinkedIn and Facebook. So 8.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm pretty sure half of those you just made up.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't even just say random words now.

[Leo Laporte]

Are people watching in the Somebody.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're making a Vine.

[Leo Laporte]

It's chats in all of them. So we get chats from Facebook and so forth. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. So anyway, that's. That's how you can consume the show live. Honestly, you'd be nuts to do that. Although we do love having that live audience. You can also download it and watch after the fact, because it is a podcast, after all. First place to go, the website, Twitter, tv, WW for Windows Weekly. There's a link there to the show notes. There's also a link there to the YouTube version of the show, the video, and of course to a couple of podcast players. Any podcast player should have Windows Weekly, both audio or video.

[Paul Thurrott]

You choose Skiboodle Vera. Did you see Patrick's? We're streaming on skiboodle and Castfast with a K. Of course. I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, he's our web engineer. If he says so, it must be true.

[Richard Campbell]

Must be.

[Paul Thurrott]

He would know. That's all I'm saying.

[Leo Laporte]

Go to the website. TakeTheSurvey TWIT TV survey. We'll keep it up for a couple more weeks. You get a chance to let us know what you think, who you are. We really appreciate that. When you do that, it helps us out. Of course. Join the club if you're not already a member. Twit TV Club Twit. You'll find Paul Thurat at his website, thorat.com. become a Premium member. There's so much good stuff there. It's such A great site. In his books, Windows Everywhere and When the Field guide to Windows 11 are available at leanpub.com where you set your own price, they're also automatically updated. You probably don't update Windows Everywhere because that's more history.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually, I am going to be updating that soon. This year at least.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. With Net9.

[Paul Thurrott]

I ended it with the release of Windows 10, so I think I'm going to continue that part of it. But there's a bunch of Net stuff I want to get in there. Waiting Rich's book nuts. There's some. There's some. There's some intro material. There's a bunch of new stuff. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice. Yeah, very nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hopefully. Hopefully.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard Campbell is of course, @dotnet rocks.com. he also does the fabulous show with Carl Franklin.

[Richard Campbell]

Rocks.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. I said the wrong thing. You'[e-mail].

[Richard Campbell]

I am at Runners Radio.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what got me confused.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm also Net Rocks.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there's a dotnet rocks dot com.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Why not? And there is also now what a skaboodle.com.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

I am literally right now trying to sign up for the service. I don't know what's happening from the closet dot com.

[Leo Laporte]

Something like that. Yeah. What is it? What is the new domain?

[Paul Thurrott]

Skaboodle.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no.

[Richard Campbell]

I just registered with something weird I found in my closet.

[Leo Laporte]

Something weird I found in my closet.

[Richard Campbell]

Did I get that right? Let's see if it's got the redirect working yet. It hasn't had much time to process. Propagate. So something weird from my closet dot com.

[Leo Laporte]

I love that. Eventually we'll take you to the playlist so great that we've made. Kevin King's done a great playlist of all of your whiskey recommendations and that's on YouTube. And so eventually that as soon as it propagates, we'll send you there. That's an easy way to do it. Something weird from my closet dot com.

[Paul Thurrott]

Excellent.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a lot of typing, but you only do it once.

[Richard Campbell]

But you know all the words, right? It's not a.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, unlike skaboodle.com.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Give it a day to propagate and I.

[Paul Thurrott]

You literally just almost walked into a tagline. It's like words you know from people you probably shouldn't trust.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't trust those people.

[Richard Campbell]

Hey, where did you know from? Questionable Folk.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

You shouldn't be listening. Thank you, everybody for joining us. I apologize for the music, but I do thank Suno AI. Because it's pretty amazing what it can do.

[Richard Campbell]

Amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is unbelievable.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's freakish. We will see you next Wednesday on Windows Weekly. Thanks, Paul. Thanks Richard. Thanks everybody.

[Richard Campbell]

See you.

[Leo Laporte]

Have a great week.

[Paul Thurrott]

Pour a drum of that old whiskey Long on the shelf Years gone by.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S all the change in myself Dusty.

[Paul Thurrott]

Bottle hidden well out of sun now we'll drink to the memories and toast to the night at T Mobile.

[Richard Campbell]

We'll give you four free 5G phones.

[Paul Thurrott]

And four lines for only $25 per.

[Richard Campbell]

Line per month with eligible trade ins.

[Paul Thurrott]

And no, it's not a contest.

[Richard Campbell]

It's every day for a limited time. Everyone's a winner on America's largest 5G network.

[Paul Thurrott]

Minimum of 4 lines for $25 per line per month with autopay discount using debit or bank account. $5 more per line without autopay. Up to $830 off each phone via 24 monthly bill credit plus taxes, fees.

[Richard Campbell]

And $10 device connection charge for well qualified customers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Contact us before canceling entire account to continue build credits or credit. Stop and balance on required finance agreement to bill credits and if you pay off devices early. CT mobile.com this just in. Hot off the bench press. Planet Fitness has added new strength equipment. Save $28 or more when you join today and you can be one of.

[Leo Laporte]

The first to try it out.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're raising the bar with new bench benches and our new hack squat will have you actually looking forward to leg day. Plus we're still repping all of the best in class equipment we've always had with most clubs open 24 hours so you can work out your way on your time.

[Richard Campbell]

So let's do this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Join Planet Fitness today and save 28 or more. Just $1 down 15amonth. Cancel anytime. DLN's January 10th. See Home Club for details.

[Leo Laporte]

Hi, I'm Chris Gethard and I'm very.

[Paul Thurrott]

Excited to tell you about Beautiful Anonymous.

[Leo Laporte]

A podcast where I talk to random people on the phone. I tweet out a phone number. Thousands of people try to call, talk to one of them. They stay anonymous. I can't hang up. That's all the rules. I never know what's gonna happen. We get serious ones. I've talked with meth dealers on their way to prison. I've talked to people who survived mass shootings. Crazy funny ones. I talked to a guy with a goose laugh, somebody who dresses up as a pirate on the weekends. I never know what's gonna happen.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a great show.

[Leo Laporte]

Subscribe today. Beautiful anonymous.