Edge 134's speed, Reboot Chime, Altera
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Leo Laporte
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thoradin's here, Richard Campbell's here, and we've got a big shoe coming up for you. We'll talk about Windows 11. A lot of new features. Thank goodness for Paul's feature tracker. Also, the end of the Surface hub.
Richard Campbell
Aw.
Leo Laporte
But the return of the Microsoft Sculpt keyboard. That and a whole lot more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.
Paul Thurrott
This is tw.
Leo Laporte
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 928, recorded Wednesday, April 16, 2025. The rice is done. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest Windows news, Microsoft news. Come on, you winners and dozers, gather round, because here comes Paul Thurrott from therot.com. hello, Paul.
Paul Thurrott
Hello, everybody. Sorry.
Leo Laporte
He's apologizing. Apologizing.
Paul Thurrott
That's what I usually do when I meet people like, oh, you're Paul Thrott. I'm like, yeah, sorry up front.
Leo Laporte
Get dizzy.
Richard Campbell
And by.
Paul Thurrott
Disappointing, isn't it? If it isn't now, it will be soon.
Leo Laporte
I apologize for everything. Also here, Richard campbell from run isradio.com. hello, Richard.
Richard Campbell
Hello.
Leo Laporte
Last day in Madeira Park. Next week you'll be in. You'll be down under.
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Next week. Yeah. So we're leaving tomorrow. Gonna go see the granddaughter for a couple hours before I head to the airport, and then. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
It's good to get children used to you leaving.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Yeah. They're not around, and that's normal.
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
A child. We also, just the other day, we.
Richard Campbell
Needed a puppy as well. I. I mean, I didn't want a puppy, but sometimes you're outnumbered one to one.
Leo Laporte
Got a puppy. I saw.
Richard Campbell
So now we have a puppy. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Nice. Congratulations.
Richard Campbell
I had to take.
Leo Laporte
I had.
Richard Campbell
Had to take a tick off the puppy already, so. Yay.
Paul Thurrott
Oh, boy.
Leo Laporte
That's a little scary.
Richard Campbell
It's been a while since I have to think about ticks. So.
Leo Laporte
Do you have ticks in Mexico City, Paul?
Paul Thurrott
I have some ticks, Leo. Oh, I see what you're saying. No. Well, maybe. I mean, there's a lot of dogs. This is a big dog city.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think. I think the.
Paul Thurrott
I'm a friend to all the dogs on my street. I stopped by. They. They see me coming. They're laying on the sidewalk, and you can see the little telegram. Here he comes. You know, And I'm always like, don't get up. And they always get up, but you don't get up.
Leo Laporte
Don't get up.
Paul Thurrott
Don't get up. Okay, you're up.
Leo Laporte
You're so polite now you're humping my leg.
Paul Thurrott
Okay, that's fine.
Leo Laporte
We're not here though to talk about your travels, my friends. We're here to talk about Windows 11, the finish tracker. How's that coming along, by the way?
Paul Thurrott
Slowly. Leo, Glad you asked.
Leo Laporte
Still in?
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I think I'm going to keep it in notion. The only issue is it's. It's wide. What I want to do is embed it in my site, which I can do, but it's going to be one of it. Right now it kind of scrolls left to right, which I don't like. So kind of working through that, but I figured, I think the next time I do an update that you guys will see will probably be the week D. Let me just look when that is. Next Tuesday, right?
Leo Laporte
Not to be confused with week T. That's right.
Paul Thurrott
It was week B. Week D are the big update weeks. Preview updates are week D. So the Tuesday, the 22nd, I'll probably update it. But that's kind of the point. That's the beginning of the show, right. So if you're looking at the notes, you might notice that a. I spelled colors like a British person, which I will now fix. But also in the past, when we've talked about what's happened in the past week, especially in Insider program, I kind of just laid out like build by build and I thought maybe I'll do this like the feature tracker, just list the features instead. Because the important thing here is not really what exact build something was in or what channel it was in necessarily. Although that is important. But rather when do we think this is going to come to everybody? So I tried to do a little bit of that in here today. We'll see how it goes. I don't know. To me, the biggest thing is, and we learned last week that actually the biggest thing is of course the fourth item in my list. So I'm already doing great with this new format. Preview versions of Recall and Click to do are coming to stable on copilot PCs. Right. Patch Tuesday in May. So we should see that in the preview update next Tuesday. And we know this because they put it in the release preview channel, which has 23, 24 H2 builds and also Windows 10, which we're not going to discuss because, you know, who cares? Tied to this.
Richard Campbell
Still got Windows 10 on this machine. You know, don't burst into flames or anything.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, don't get too touched. I really like that phone Style squared off ui. I think it's got legs. So tied to this is semantic search, which I struggled to find a good name for. Sometimes they refer to it as semantic search, sometimes they refer to it as AI powered search or just Windows search with AI improvements or whatever. But the idea is that search that doesn't suck. Oh, so going back to Longhorn. Yeah, we call it Tiger search from OS X, Tiger from 2003, four whatever year that was. But yeah, this has been the dream for a long time, obviously. So semantic search is local AI powered, which is interesting. So it's Copilot plus PC specific, which will limit its rollout nicely and it will look for. It's hard to keep track of this. That's why I have a tracker. But it's because there are so many different features. But they started well, it doesn't matter how they started. So what should ship in stable very soon is image and file document search across local files if indexed and OneDrive. And then soon, in the future, maybe not soon, but in the future, third party cloud storage as well. And this past week in 24H2 dev and beta channels, they started testing Windows, setting search through semantic search. So in other words, you bring up search like window. I got to keep checking. It's Windows key plus Q&S also. So it's one of those is going away, it doesn't matter. But when you bring up Windows search and then you can just type in using natural language, something, whatever the thing is you want to change and it will recommend the right thing in settings and then you can go there from search results. So fairly basic. Richard last week I think mentioned the possibility, which I will now accept as a fact, that a lot of this stuff, and I mean that because it's very obviously once he said it, I was like, yeah, this is clearly what's happening. Setting the stage for a future where Copilot can control your PC in better ways, that today we use it to find a feature. Remember they added a search box to the top of Word and Excel and all those apps and you could type something in and it would say, here's where you go find that. You're like, okay, but how about you just do it? And so I think these are the natural progressions that these things go through.
Leo Laporte
So that's the equivalent of Siri saying, here's what I found on the web about that.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, passing the buck. Yeah. When AI evolves so quickly like it is now, you can go to one AI and say, how do I do this thing? Or Whatever. And it will say, here's how you do it or here's where you can go find that information. Sometimes it will say, I will just do that for you. And it's like that's the one you want, the one that just does it. So I think we're going to get there. Also Copilot plus PC only, but also Snapdragon X only for now is natural language in Narrator's image descriptions. Right. And so it can see people, objects, colors, text and numbers and images and then describe them to you using natural language. That will happen across all copilot plus PCs eventually. That one is the one I'm really not too sure on timing wise because it rolls out Snapdragon X only. That's the progression there. So we'll see what happens. Snipping tool was updated in Canary, but I see this on my dev computer. So there's a text extraction feature. This is the OCR functionality in this app, which is cool, but they're putting it right in the capture bar, which is that little UI that appears when you first run it and just to make it less clicks to get to it. So I think the idea here is that you took a shot or you open an image and then you can use just immediately go and get the text out of it very easily. So that is good. So that should be soon. That's an app. That one will happen quick. And then the last set is a bunch of stuff. So there's Narrator has a speech recap feature. Again, natural language, that weird phone link start menu integration where the phone link is like a little bar there on the side like a cancerous growth. Some more File Explorer updates. I feel like we get those every month now. The Windows Share feature we talked about earlier, where you can edit the image before you share it. Those are all in Release Preview. So that means we can expect those features next Tuesday and I should say in Preview. That's release preview 23H2. So we had previously talked about those features in 24H2. Sorry. Pretty identical looking set of features. So I think you could expect that again next month, right? In Patch Tuesday. Okay. That's most of it. I think that was pretty quick.
Richard Campbell
Wow.
Leo Laporte
I didn't expect that.
Richard Campbell
You know what I mean about this list of features is that this is a good set of tools to mature when you're not sure if you're going to have a screen and a keyboard. Like I immediately start thinking about how do you make augmented reality come true. It's these interfaces.
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah.
Paul Thurrott
Text. It talks to you, you talk to it. Yeah.
Richard Campbell
You don't need to find things you wanted to snip and extract from for you. Like what I've noticed in all those descriptions there is. I don't need a mouse, I don't even need to see something, but I don't really need a screen. Now think of this from the perspective of I'm looking through a pair of glasses with a camera on it at something else and saying, snip that text for me. Right?
Paul Thurrott
That's right. Yeah. This is, you know, it's funny, we've. I don't know, it feels like it's been 10 years, but in the couple of years now that we've been talking about this in the post Copilot announcement or whatever, I keep bringing up this notion of orchestration. This is my, I don't know, totem or something.
Leo Laporte
But orchestration, you need a swelling orchestra every time you say that.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. I feel like there's platform level stuff, for lack of a better term, super technical term for it, that needs to happen for Windows and then the apps that run in Windows to, in a sophisticated manner be controlled by AI because you can do screen scrape type stuff and you see some of that obviously. But yeah, real time, actual control. This is going to come up in the AI section as well because we're starting to see AI integrating with different AIs integrating with different, I don't know, productivity stacks, if that makes sense. Copilot plus Microsoft 365 is pretty obvious, but what about Anthropic plus Microsoft 365? It's not a thing yet, but it will be. Right? I mean this stuff is all coming. So there's a programmability or an extensibility, an automation ability or whatever that has to occur in these platforms. Well, Windows in this case, but across it's not just Windows. Right. Because agents are going to have to integrate with online services as well. Same thing for this stuff to make sense, for what Richard just described to really make sense, everything that we interact with in a kind of a secondhand way, Right. Through an agent or an AI or whatever has to support that capability. Right. For it to work.
Richard Campbell
Well, yeah, now you have to get the feature set done. But here, now you found a way to start maturing this feature set in the existing set of interfaces. And once it gets to a certain point you can now talk about other interfaces.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I mean we've said this a bunch but like Copilot is a good name because in this current era you have these tools which are traditional, which we're all very used to. Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, whatever. And copilot is this thing that kind of sits over there and works with you. You might ask it questions. You might say, hey, could you do something with this document? But those tools either have to evolve or be replaced with something that's more.
Richard Campbell
Goodness knows, you can't actually sort out the control panel. So better to do this.
Paul Thurrott
Yes, that's right. Yep. We can't. Look, we can't even get dark mode on a. On a window that File Explorer displays. But we're going to nail it with AI.
Richard Campbell
It'll be fine. Everything will be fine. I know. It'll be fine.
Paul Thurrott
I know. I have so much.
Richard Campbell
Just add another layer on top to fix everything.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. We get Sinofsky team to come back, do one of those architectural diagrams where it's like Windows is this little line at the bottom, and this is AI. That's the stack.
Richard Campbell
I was thinking more along. You just lay in shag carpet over the asbestos tiles, right?
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. And some future generation we'll pull up and be like, oh, my God, there were beautiful wood floors down here. What did they do? You know, why did they do that? Or someone painted.
Richard Campbell
I've Never heard the win32 API referred to as a beautiful wood floor before, but okay.
Paul Thurrott
Well, I was. Yeah, it's. No, the WIN API is a disaster. No, there's stuff below that, though. It's gross and it's slimy, but it's there.
Richard Campbell
Thunking is. Your friend Dave Cutler told me so.
Paul Thurrott
Dave Cutler was right about everything. Just ask him. So, yeah, because you mentioned it. Someone asked me about this. You know that Dave Plummer we were talking about that does these videos? He. I love him. I subscribe. I watch every video he makes. But he did one in Longhorn, and I don't know if we talked about this at all, but I very much wanted to watch this. I was super excited when I saw it. I was like, I'm going to learn something new here. And I didn't learn anything new. It turns out he left Microsoft in 2003, which is when this heated up. And his stories are as secondhand as mine. And this is not a criticism. I just. Because of who he is and what he does, I was like, oh, my God, there's going to be some information. But as a Cutler acolyte, he was, of course, kind of crapping on the other parts of Microsoft, because that's what Cutler did. These other people were children. They couldn't program correctly. Everything they did was.
Richard Campbell
He was very much of the we don't have to deal with bugs because we don't write bugs mentality.
Paul Thurrott
That's right. It's the prince from the Princess Bride who says, if I'm wrong, and I'm never wrong, you know, like, he kind of goes from there. Right? So. But. But he is Cutler, right? Cutler's a genius. And, you know, he is.
Richard Campbell
He and his immediate acolytes could actually qualify for that.
Paul Thurrott
Mark Lacosity falls into this category. These guys were just absolute geniuses. So Dave Humbler is a really smart guy, but he wasn't in the upper echelon of that part of the company. Right. So I can. I can handle Dave Cutler crapping on Jim Alchin or Longhorn, which he called shorter and hilarious. I like. It's okay. But for someone else like Dave Plummer to just sort of ride along and do the same thing, it's like, yeah, you might want to.
Richard Campbell
You're not that guy.
Leo Laporte
Sorry.
Paul Thurrott
You're not. Yeah, you're just not. You're not there and it's. And you're not right about everything. It's just, you know, it was a little tough, but anyhow, still goes to the office.
Richard Campbell
And he's in his 80s.
Paul Thurrott
He's amazing. He is a force of nature.
Richard Campbell
He's a force of nature.
Paul Thurrott
If he ever does pass away, he will disappear into a cloud of sparkles and there will be just like a. Like a black mark on the ground.
Richard Campbell
No one will arguably like Arthur C. Clarke. He will just go back to his original timeline.
Paul Thurrott
Yes. Yes. Where VMs actually made sense and we live in a different world. Okay. I actually forgot why I went off on that little Longhorn story, but there was a reason. I don't know. There are reasons.
Richard Campbell
We're bringing all the window stories together.
Paul Thurrott
But as I get old, they all kind of just blend together. So I transform from time to time and space to space. Just two more Windows related stories. So Microsoft Edge, remember when they were still using their own rendering engine, they used to do these performance comparisons. They put the computers next to each other, run time things, and we used to get that a lot. We don't get that anymore because now they're using chromium. Right, Right.
Richard Campbell
What's the point?
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, one of the points is that when Microsoft makes changes to their. To the rendering engine, they can just do it for Edge. So they could do their own thing, but they also kind of feed back into chromium. They did that thing with the text display only on Windows because it relies on Windows technology. But text rendering across all Chromium browsers now is better because Microsoft contributed to that. But they're all. I guess they're still doing literal web rendering performance work outside of Chromium, although they suggest some of the stuff will go back because they've done that in the past as well. And I guess in the latest version of Edge, if you haven't updated your browser or didn't update for you, you should do that.
Richard Campbell
Depending on when it updates a browser, it just sort of happens.
Paul Thurrott
This sort of happens. Yeah, it annoys you when it happens. But apparently it's noticeably faster web rendering. So 9%, I'm not saying is a huge number, but then again it is 2025.
Richard Campbell
Right.
Paul Thurrott
It's interesting that you can get that kind of a performance scan. And of course they've been doing the.
Richard Campbell
Performance at some point in indictment. Really now you find 10%.
Paul Thurrott
That's. Well, okay, so. And this is my problem with. Well, one of my problems with these Apple events every year where they're like iOS 19 is 47%, blah, blah, blah. And you're like, how awful was the thing you shipped last year that you could possibly. You don't get big double digit gains every year. What's going on? But I guess they do.
Leo Laporte
Is it only Edge or is this a Chromium speed up?
Paul Thurrott
Right now it's only Edge, but they.
Richard Campbell
Did say it might be in a branch.
Leo Laporte
They should contribute it back though, right?
Paul Thurrott
They do, they do. I mean, so the quote that they provided about this was our unique approach and focus to optimizing speed and the code changes we continuously make to Edge and to the Chromium rendering engine within it.
Leo Laporte
Good.
Paul Thurrott
Have led to real world performance improvements when using the browser and a variety of hardware.
Leo Laporte
Oh, don't say they're putting contributors.
Paul Thurrott
They don't say this particular feature. But they do, they have. So my guess is this will in fact feedback because it will. You know, they've been pretty good about that.
Leo Laporte
There's some incentive for them not to. Right. If they don't contribute it back, then you might not use Chrome, you might use Edge.
Richard Campbell
Yeah, but then you left on the fork. Now. Now you're raising everybody.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. You want to be careful.
Richard Campbell
Do that.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I agree. I agree it's bad form.
Richard Campbell
If you're suggesting the new version of. NET always has big performance improvements that are.
Paul Thurrott
That's another one. That's right. Yep. Every time.
Leo Laporte
But I should point out that Chromium engines based on the Blink engine is based on khtml. And I don't think Google contributes.
Paul Thurrott
You don't think there's a lot going on with.
Leo Laporte
I mean, that's what.
Paul Thurrott
The KDE desktop environment in Linux has benefited greatly from Google's work.
Leo Laporte
Somehow I doubt it.
Paul Thurrott
But you never know. I could be wrong.
Leo Laporte
You never know.
Paul Thurrott
I don't know. I've never heard that. But it could be. And then this one's just kind of fun. So there is something called the National Recording Registry that's part of the US Library of Congress. That'll be the next part of our government that gets axed once they find out it still exists. But they have, as they do every year, they induct songs, albums, artists, all kinds of things into this. So it goes into the Library of Congress. It's there. So this particular one is Happy Trails by Roy Rogers, the Chicago album, the Chicago Transit Authority, Helen Reddy, Steve Miller Band, Tracy Chapman, Celine Dion, all kinds of stuff. Hello, dummy. The comedy album by don Rickles from 1968. Is that.
Leo Laporte
That's in the Library of Congress. Wow.
Paul Thurrott
There are two Microsoft related things in here. One of which I found immediately confusing but then cleared it up. The first one is the window, what they call the Windows reboot chime from Windows 95. Which was this one. No, that's a donkey brain. I don't know what that was. You know that bloom, bloom, bloom. Yeah. Pleasant sound, right? So Brian Eno is. He makes a lot of atmosphere.
Leo Laporte
I love the little piano. Ding, ding, ding.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's a nice. It's nice.
Leo Laporte
Pretty.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. And then they, they redid it again in Vista and I'm sure they've redone it several times since then, but nobody cares anymore. But at that time, this was a big deal. So that was kind of a nice. That was, that was.
Richard Campbell
These were all distraction tools for the.
Leo Laporte
Fact that you were waiting to boot that one. Yeah, yeah.
Paul Thurrott
Well, they're all of a. You know, there's a family of sounds.
Leo Laporte
I found a. This is a YouTube channel evolution of all Windows startup and shutdown sounds.
Richard Campbell
Love it.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. What's the guy. Robert Fripp was the guy who did the Windows Vista sounds from Crimson.
Leo Laporte
What's King Crimson?
Paul Thurrott
King Crimson. Thank you.
Leo Laporte
He and Eno are buddies.
Paul Thurrott
Oh, that makes sense.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. But the other Microsoft related item that made it into the National Registry or the National Recording Registry is the soundtrack album for the game Minecraft. Wow. When I saw Minecraft soundtrack, I thought. You don't mean the movie that just came out. No, no, no, no. I guess There was a 2001 in Minecraft.
Leo Laporte
You have records that you could put on a. There are. So there's. Yeah, there's music.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Yeah. But if you go to Spotify or whatever service and search for Minecraft soundtrack, you will find this. And lot of it is made by. I think it's C4, C418 or something. But it's called Mine. The theme song is Minecraft Volume Alpha.
Leo Laporte
Oh, man, this brings me back. I hear this. I feel like I'm in the. I'm in the mines.
Paul Thurrott
This is a little bit like a Brian Eno kind of thing, isn't it?
Richard Campbell
Yeah, it's like, totally.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott
But there's a whole. Well, you know, there's an album of these songs, and so.
Leo Laporte
And now I can play it because it's in the Library of Congress.
Paul Thurrott
That's right. Honestly, to me, it does. It almost sounds of the same error as the Windows 95 music or theme, you know?
Leo Laporte
It does, doesn't it?
Richard Campbell
Well, it's certainly.
Leo Laporte
This one's called Wet Hands. It's very relaxing. It's one of the reasons I actually like Minecraft, because it's very relaxing.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. This. I told the story a million times, but I was. I walked into my son's room one day, and he wasn't playing, like, an action game. He was playing something that looked weird to me. And I was like, what the hell is this? And he says, this is Minecraft. I'm like, what do you. You know, what do you do? And he's like, you build things. I was like, okay. And then this. This thing floated by in this space or whatever. And he goes, that's my cousin Harrison. He just now works in security.
Leo Laporte
And Harrison's in there, too. Huh. So he had.
Paul Thurrott
They were. They were playing. They were doing something together.
Leo Laporte
And I was like, cool.
Paul Thurrott
I was just like, carry on. This looks cool.
Richard Campbell
This thing's good.
Leo Laporte
Oh, it's the best. I've spent many hundreds of hours in Minecraft.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Building crap.
Paul Thurrott
Well, I hope you enjoy the movie. It looks ridiculous.
Leo Laporte
You know, we have a Twip Minecraft server.
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott
Oh, yeah, right. Okay.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Club members have access.
Paul Thurrott
They never did this. But to this day, I mean, the best HoloLens demo I ever got was that first one where they did Minecraft in the room we were in. So, like, this Minecraft castle on it. But the wall was a Minecraft wall, you know, looked like Minecraft, and it was the real room, but it was all on the stuff, you know, and the wall broke open the bricks came out and these Minecraft bats came flying out towards. And everyone was like, you know, like. Like it kind of went right at you. And it was. I was like, yeah, this is amazing. And we never did anything with that.
Richard Campbell
Yeah. So never shipped it. Do you know how many Minecraft players owned a HoloLens headset?
Paul Thurrott
Zero. Not counting employees at Microsoft. Zero.
Leo Laporte
Wow. Wow. Oh, man. I always wanted that. I would almost go out and buy a Vision Pro or whatever.
Paul Thurrott
The list of things that almost happened with Minecraft is really interesting because, remember, they were going to do a really realistic graphics thing, but there was something, I think it might have been called Minecraft Live. They demonstrated it on stage.
Leo Laporte
It was a game. You could go around.
Paul Thurrott
Like, it was around briefly. Like you could go in the real world and Minecraft would be there. I used to play it.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott
Okay. So I remember the demo on stage because they were on stage. It looked like a chasm opened in front of them or something. Then it went down into the ground. I was like, oh, yeah. Like, you could tell, like, this is.
Leo Laporte
It was so cool.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. I mean, this type of stuff and.
Leo Laporte
It would be persistent. It was using that Azure location technology.
Paul Thurrott
Okay. Yeah, Azure, probably, or whatever they call it. I'm sure this was inspired. Inspired by what was that mobile game? You used to play this all the time?
Leo Laporte
It was Pokemon Go. That's why I picked it up, because I thought, oh, this will be great. This will be the next Pokemon Go for Minecraft.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
And they killed it, like almost like months later. They didn't.
Richard Campbell
Well, these days if you don't get 100 million users in two months, which is not important.
Leo Laporte
It's really true.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, There might have been. I don't remember. What if there was an excuse or reason. I don't know. Maybe there were people walking off of Piers. It was bad enough like Apple Maps debuted and people drive it in the middle of the desert because there were no roads there. Imagine you now you're walking around in the real world. I mean, you could walk into walls, get hit by cars.
Leo Laporte
I'm kind of sad. Pokemon, which was a kind of a Google spin off Niantic. The guys at Niantic were the Google Maps guys. And they just sold out for billions of dollars to the Saudi Arabian sovereign fund. So the Saudis now own Pokemon. Pokemon company.
Richard Campbell
I was an Ingress player for a while.
Leo Laporte
Ingress was their predecessor.
Richard Campbell
Yes, that was the predecessor.
Leo Laporte
I loved Ingress. It was a. Was too complicated for normal people.
Richard Campbell
Well, it was. Yeah. For us it became A game where, you know, it was very much an.
Leo Laporte
Insiders game, but you had to walk. The thing is, you had to get. And this was I loved about Pokemon too was you had to get out and do it. You had to walk around.
Paul Thurrott
The best steak I've ever had in my life. I mean, you'd hate it. You're more of a French guy, but you're not. This was this. This is. If you just had my love for.
Leo Laporte
You, you know, no AI in it.
Richard Campbell
I'm sorry for one eye cousins. Goodness knows.
Paul Thurrott
HP Sauce, as we call it.
Leo Laporte
HP Sauce. Ladies and gentlemen, let's pause for a moment to remember Steve and the Minecraft movie, which as it currently stands is the number one movie in all of the world.
Paul Thurrott
It will always be number one in my heart and I wish it would die in a fire. I don't understand why this movie's popular.
Leo Laporte
Jack Black pays Steve. That's all you need to know.
Paul Thurrott
That is all I need to know. I agree. That was my primary reason for ignoring it. He's a good looking guy.
Leo Laporte
I'm waiting for it. I'm waiting for it to stream it. I'm not going to a movie theater ever again. But.
Richard Campbell
It'Ll be fine on an airplane.
Leo Laporte
Exactly. Richard has those airplane movies.
Paul Thurrott
I have my Minecraft movie soundtrack. Take a nap. You'd be better off.
Leo Laporte
So relaxing. So relaxing. I'm going to download Minecraft and show you the twit build. It's really amazing.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Oh my gosh.
Paul Thurrott
Is there anything in it? Like, one of the promises of doom for a little while was that people would make maps of real places and you could play the Brick House.
Leo Laporte
Studios are in it.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, okay. See, that's cool. I like that kind of thing.
Leo Laporte
It started with Chad Johnson. Omg, Kraft.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte
They built that for years. The three or four, maybe five people were really devoted. And then I saved it, we had a copy of it and we put it back up on the server and then I don't, I don't want to run the server out of my house anymore, so. Well, only because I. I need all the upstream bandwidth I can get. This was back in the studio where we had so much upstream bandwidth, so. Very kind fella in our club whose name escapes him, trying to remember his name. But Anyway, Lion Admiral, 1981. Lion Admiral 1981. Took it over and he's running it. So if you want to get into our Minecraft server, we have a survival server that's set to like super tough too. Just join the club. Seven bucks a month ad free versions of all the shows and access to the Minecraft server.
Paul Thurrott
Wow.
Leo Laporte
See, I should mention that more.
Paul Thurrott
I know. I'm surprised this isn't more of a perk mention.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know, yeah, go into the let's Play channel in our discord and say add me because you do have to get whitelisted. All right, let's pause and come back. Much, much more of Windows Weekly on the horizon. But as soon as it gets here, we'll let you know. But Omen, what's that on the horizon? It's at the of the tunnel.
Paul Thurrott
Oh, that's not going to be good.
Richard Campbell
Might be a train First.
Leo Laporte
First a word from our sponsor, the wonderful folks at 1Password. Here's a question for you from 1Password do your end users always work on company owned devices and IT approved apps? I didn't think so. So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices? 1Password has an answer to this question. They call it ext 1Password Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign in for every app on every device because it solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM can't touch. Imagine your company's security like the quad of a college campus. There are nice brick paths between the buildings. Those are the company owned devices, the IT approved apps, the managed employee identities. And then there are the paths people actually use, the shortcuts worn through the grass that are, well, the actual straightest line from point A to point B. Those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non employee identities. Like contractors, most security tools only work on those happy brick paths. But many security problems occur on the shortcuts. 1Password Extended Access Management is the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices, apps and identities under your control and ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy, and every App is visible. 1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third party audits. It exceeds the standards set by various authorities and is a leader in security. It's security for the way we work today and it's now generally available to companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra and in beta for Google Workspace customers. Secure every app, every device, every identity, even the unmanaged ones at 1Password.com WindowsWeekly by the way, all lowercase 1P-A-S-S-W-O-R-Com Windows Weekly thank them so much for the support of Windows Weekly. You support us when you go to that address. 1Password.com. WindowsWeekly, all lowercase. On we go with the show.
Paul Thurrott
I've lost. Huh? Oh God. I'm sorry.
Leo Laporte
No, please. I'm just going to say to you what's up in the hardware sphere?
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, some stuff. What I was going to say was I've kind of lost track of the history of this. You know, before the pandemic, Microsoft was working on these Surface Hub devices. Right. Which are kind of a.
Richard Campbell
Which were a hit.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. At the time when we were all going into businesses or meeting rooms together.
Richard Campbell
And they were doing great projectors in replacing a whiteboard and doing it all in one.
Paul Thurrott
Before this they had, remember it was like a Pixelsense display. And now they use the term Pixelsense to describe Surface PC displays.
Richard Campbell
I mean the original Surface was that crazy table that Alex. Yeah, the big table that didn't work on stage.
Paul Thurrott
Right, right, right. And was the type of thing a hotel or a casino would buy, but not the type of thing a person would buy.
Richard Campbell
Right.
Paul Thurrott
And so they.
Richard Campbell
It was broken the moment you installed it.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, you know, it was by design, it was fine.
Leo Laporte
I remember seeing like on cruise ships, I saw them in hotels in Vegas.
Paul Thurrott
There were some cool demos for it. You know, I like the return to the sit down Pac man style machine where you could be across from someone in both. You know, when you switch players the screen was swapped so they could play whatever. Kind of resembled that to me. But Surface Hub, the first version, 50th 50ish and. And 80ish inch screens, I forget. But then they. Right before the pandemic. Yeah, they announced Surface Hub, I guess two and this is the one where it was like on an easel and you could string three of them together and have one big screen. It was going to be amazing. And then it was the pandemic.
Richard Campbell
Then the world ended.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah. So tied to this, I sort of forget the oss, but the original Service Hub had like a teams edition of Windows 10, I would imagine. And then of course in time they had a Windows based os. I think it was like Surface OS or whatever that they were going to use as they kind of evolved these things. But the original Surface Hub is now, well, 10 years old. So in October it's going end of life and there's no upgrade for it. You can't put Linux on it. There's no real plans for this thing.
Richard Campbell
It doesn't imagine it just bursts into flames either. It's just going to get no up updates.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, right. I mean, but you know, as software evolves and you know, we'll see. I mean it's. We'll see what happens. But I suppose given the nature of this device, maybe it's not as big of a problem as, say, with a PC. But you know, it's interesting it's been that long. I mean, to me it's just like, wow, okay.
Richard Campbell
I mean, the probable thing for a 2015 Surface Hub is it hasn't been turned on in three years.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, now that people are returning, returning to the office is now a thing. It's the hot new trend in offices actually using the office.
Richard Campbell
The other thing the Pandemic did is it get everybody a camera rig and experience with sharing software. Now the question is, do you need to go into the meeting room?
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, I think being in person is the point of this Return Office thing, actually. So maybe, I mean, which also begs.
Richard Campbell
The question, what do you need that thing for? Because that was always about somebody's not in the office and others are.
Paul Thurrott
Well, I mean, depending on the business, there will probably still be people around the office. But if that's not the case, it's still a big display, right? I mean, I suppose you could just use it as a screen, as a display or whatever. Yeah, remote your display to it.
Richard Campbell
The other thing about thinking about 2015 is like, think about how much better camera gear is or 3D sensors. Like if you could afford all those things in the first place and they were not cheap. Cheap you can afford. You're either out of business and you don't care or you want anyone.
Paul Thurrott
Anyway, I'm going to forget the details of this too, because again, pre Pandemic and it just kind of dropped off the face of the earth. But the original, like Surface Hub 2 2s, whatever they were called, we got a really good. It was one of the last. Yeah, it was one of the last things I did before the Pandemic, I think. But they did these in person demos where these things actually had the USB C ports all around the edges and you could plug in like a webcam. If it was oriented this way, you could pop it up on the top and they had lots of sensors and all that kind of stuff. And they would do palm rejection when you were writing on the screen and they get multiple people writing on the screen at the same time, et cetera, et cetera. It's cool stuff, but like I said, the OSS have evolved. Surface Hub 2S is from three, four years later, I think it originally ran on the same Windows 10 team version that the OG Surface Hub ran on, but you could migrate that to what's now called teams rooms for Windows, whatever. I don't know. So there's still, you know, this, this may be a business that kind of springs back to life for them just because of.
Richard Campbell
Well, the other thing is there's a ton of competitors now, right. There's all kinds of smart boards near Hub, like. Yep, Microsoft, Google killed their.
Leo Laporte
Google killed theirs.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, they had a silly name. What was that thing called? It begin with the J, I think.
Leo Laporte
I can't remember.
Paul Thurrott
I can't remember either. Jam something.
Leo Laporte
Jamboard. Yeah, it was jamboard.
Richard Campbell
Yeah, you're right.
Paul Thurrott
But yeah, so it was kind of like the Chrome OS version of this, you know, like a, like. And you know, that might meet a certain need too if they still made it. But this will always have a place, I think in big enterprises and you know.
Richard Campbell
Yeah, but I think they also want to get it from a conventional vendor. Right. Like Microsoft should get out.
Paul Thurrott
I mean, like an actual display vendor. Yeah, yeah. What a thought. Yeah, I mean that's probably going to be a lot. And is today a lot more common? Obviously.
Richard Campbell
There you go. Surface Hub, 385 inch with pens and smart camera, $32,000.
Leo Laporte
Jeez, forget it.
Paul Thurrott
The original one I think was just north of 20 when they announced. Maybe it was 18 at first, then it went above 20, but even the.
Leo Laporte
So they figured, oh, it's Enterprises, you know, they pay 10,000 for their Cisco Zoom Room. So they'll pay.
Paul Thurrott
I don't think it was like this. I don't think it was like a cynical, like, how much could we charge?
Leo Laporte
It really did cost that much.
Paul Thurrott
I think they were expensive, you know.
Richard Campbell
Well, yeah, 85 inch screens are big, expensive.
Paul Thurrott
I mean like even surface PCs, like the surface Studio, everyone sees that and says, yeah, okay, but I just want the screen. And it's like, okay, well the PC is $3,500. Just. The screen is going to be $3,300, you know, like it's the most expensive component by far. It's more expensive than all of the other components. Like it's really expensive. But yeah, yeah, just have I.
Leo Laporte
You spend that much money though, you hate to hear it's at its end of life, you know.
Paul Thurrott
Well, at least you didn't have like a four or five year period where you couldn't even use it. So it, it's fine.
Richard Campbell
What are you gonna get back to? Like, why would you buy one of these when everybody has a camera and a screen and sharing software and like.
Leo Laporte
It'S turned out to be no.
Richard Campbell
Kind of an absolute concept.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Richard Campbell
So it's. It beautifully solved a problem that was becoming irrelevant.
Paul Thurrott
That's right. That's the Microsoft story in a nutshell. So I guess. I don't know.
Richard Campbell
No, it was a boardroom piece. It was cooler than a projector.
Paul Thurrott
Right.
Richard Campbell
It was that you wanted that, that. That Tony Stark sort of interactive effect.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Yeah.
Richard Campbell
You know, one would argue now you should go the meta way and everybody puts on a. On a. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott
We should all sit in the same room with Boba Fet helmets on our heads and world.
Richard Campbell
Because that's not dystopic at all.
Leo Laporte
Oh, what a world.
Richard Campbell
What a world.
Paul Thurrott
I know someday I can't wait to. We'll be sitting on the couch watching a movie, my, you know, my wife and I. You and your wife or whatever. And you won't even. You'll be talking through a microphone. You know, you'll actually get up to go to the bathroom and be like, oh, I forgot what you looked like. What happened? I'm over here, honey.
Leo Laporte
I'm on the call.
Paul Thurrott
I am your father.
Richard Campbell
Where startups get too much money, right? Where they're getting an a round of $25 million. And so consistently, I have a CEO coming at me going, how do I build the ultimate boardroom? Like, we're going to go get this exotic wood table and so forth, but the hardware, like, I need it to be special.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
What does Putin use?
Paul Thurrott
Because that looks cool. I would imagine that in those scenarios, whatever he's using gets updated every two weeks. You know, the problem is they spend all this money on something and you want to use it for years, as you would, and it's out of date. It's pretty quick. But that's technology. I don't know.
Leo Laporte
There you have it.
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott
Intel has made their first major move under their new CEO. This one's kind of interesting. They sold 51% stake, so a majority stake in Altera, which is their fieldgate programmable array business that they bought for a lot more money than it's worth now, several years ago. Altera was actually founded in 1983, which is. Is pretty amazing, by the way. Went public in 1988. Intel acquired it in 2015 for 16.7 million, based on a 51% stake worth 4.46 billion. We're saying that this thing is now worth about 8.75 billion.
Richard Campbell
Nice.
Paul Thurrott
So intel once again has the touch of Midas to them. But these components are super important and today they're used in cloud data centers. Intel still owns the other 49%. They're going to remove those earnings from their earnings report. But they still have an ownership stake and they'll still be able to take advantage of. I think they did some sort of. What are those? I already forgot the name of the chips. Not the mainstream chips for PCs, but the high end chips which were for workstations and now are for data center. They integrate with these type of chips. So you have a standard powerful Intel CPU that is kind of monolithic, but it could be attached to these. It's a weird thing to say, like f. What do you call these things functions? Field array or field programmable.
Leo Laporte
Oh, fpga.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, fpga. We need a better term for this.
Leo Laporte
But programmable gate array.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Not Gatorade. No, Gatorade. By the way, here's Putin's setup. I just thought you might want to. Richard, when they ask you, next time, just, you know, yikes, tell him this is what you need.
Paul Thurrott
That's unimpressive. Also, is he in a Hilton? What is this?
Leo Laporte
It looks like he's in. You're right, a Hilton ballroom. That's pretty funny. There's a couple of computers under the tv.
Paul Thurrott
He calls down and he's like, I plugged my ethernet cable into the port and it's not doing anything. You know, like, yeah, it's a Hilton. That's how it works. It doesn't.
Leo Laporte
It's a Hilton.
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott
You have the worst WI fi on earth. You should attest.
Leo Laporte
That's pretty funny. You're right. It looks like a hotel ballroom.
Paul Thurrott
This is so weird looking.
Leo Laporte
Now who knows?
Paul Thurrott
Okay, I don't know why this bothers me so much, but when Steve Jobs announced the iPad in 2010, he positioned it as this thing that was going to sit between a phone and a PC. And the way he said it was something like the question has arisen as if it came up out of a swamp. Like Steam emerged. It's like the question has arisen, is there another device we could sell to everybody?
Richard Campbell
Oh, yes.
Paul Thurrott
But Steve Jobs was very upset with the reaction to the first iPad. Because people, this is when we started talking about consumption devices, right? This is a term we never really used before. And he had this list of things that it was better than PCs or phones at, at the time. You know, email, web browsing, reading, blah, blah, blah, whatever, most of which are consumption activities. And so for the second iPad, he said, this is the post PC era, we make most of our money on post PC devices. This is the future of the computer. And they updated their iwork apps at the time and they made sure there were a bunch of third party kind of creation. But, you know, iPads today are still kind of consumption devices for the most part. I know they have iPad pro, but the iPad OS is limited dramatically and on purpose not to harm Mac sales. But now that they have iPad pros that cost over a thousand dollars, oh.
Leo Laporte
My setup costs more than an apple laptop.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So you could throw together an iPad air or pro of either size screen with, with their keyboard and their pen, and that thing costs more than a MacBook air. So the question has arisen, leo, is there room for ipados to improve so that it actually could work as well as a computer? And my answer to that for a couple years now has been yes, but they haven't done it. So every year WWDC rolls around. Every year I'm like, maybe this is the year, maybe they're gonna do it. The iPad pro, any iPad is so limited that if using final cut pro, whatever app it is to render some video and you get an email and you switch to mail, it stops rendering. It has the most powerful processor imaginable. It's the same thing they use in their computers. I mean, I know there are more powerful versions of the chip, but this little thin, wonderful, portable device could be so much more than it is. And now Mark gurman has a report that they might actually be doing it this year. He's very vague, but he says they're going to. Part of this stuff they're going to announce in two months is improvements to ipados to make it more like the Mac.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, multitasking, things like that.
Paul Thurrott
God forbid. I last year said, look, you forked iOS into iPadOS, fork it again into ipados pro and put that stuff, make it for iPad pro only, or maybe iPad air and pro, whatever, that's fine. Most people who buy a normal iPad or a mini or using it to watch movies and read books and play games, like, you don't have to do that stuff over there. But if you're going to spend as much or more on an iPad as you would on a MacBook air, you know, this is overdue. So supposedly it's happening. I guess we'll see. I don't know.
Leo Laporte
I'll be the test bed for this.
Paul Thurrott
It's funny, I want to use this so bad.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Why?
Paul Thurrott
Just for. Because, well, this is the dream, right? So this is the one thing that can do everything thing. It's never been done effectively. Maybe there are exceptions, but a folding iPhone or phone that could turn into a small tablet gets there. But one device that you travel with where you attach a keyboard and you work normally like you would on a laptop, but then you take that thing off and you can watch, play games, or you can do whatever you want without that stuff on it. Cool. And then the battery life is amazing. Right.
Leo Laporte
It's all day for sure.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Apple's the one company I think could get this right. You can take something complicated by Windows, like Windows, and chop off parts and try to get something simpler, which they technically did for iOS. I get that. But now you have iOS, it gets more and more sophisticated every year. It just needs a couple of things. And then you get the. The stuff that's important, but you don't get any of the legacy deadwood. And so there's a. I don't know. This is kind of a dream. We'll see. I mean, they've never done it so far, and I think it's artificially limited at this point.
Leo Laporte
But there's an interesting change in the user base at this point where people use their iPhones to the exclusion of everything else.
Richard Campbell
Like, that's their main primary YouTube device.
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
Leo Laporte
And so they're very used to that. The interface, the applications, the way it works. Maybe it makes sense for Apple to say, okay, we're going to embrace this change and help people.
Richard Campbell
I don't know why they're hesitating the customer you've already got on a Mac and move them to an iPad. Like, why are you sad?
Leo Laporte
Same price.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. That was kind of my point. Once the prices of the iPads rose to the point where. Where they were the same or more, the excuse for not doing it goes away.
Leo Laporte
I'll be very interested. I mean, I have. They put the M4 in the iPad Pro before.
Paul Thurrott
That's what I mean. Like, you gotta be. I know. Incredible. So I feel like if Steve Jobs had not passed away, because, remember, so the iPad2 was 2011. He was actually out on hiatus because of health reasons.
Leo Laporte
Right.
Paul Thurrott
Came back to do the presentation. It was so important to him. They did that special cover that they still use, which is amazing. I mean, I don't know the dates off the top of my head, but it took them a very long time. So he passed away that year. He passed away that October. So I feel like if he had stuck around, they would have pushed the iPad as a piece of computing. I really think he was very Hot on this post PC thing, right? Tim Cook is not a visionary, he is a bean counter. I think he looked at this and said, you know, what would be better than replacing the Mac? Mac is selling people both. So that's my. I'm just, I mean I'm projecting here. I don't know that this ever conversation ever occurred.
Leo Laporte
We talk about this all the time on MacBreak Weekly. We don't know. It's inconceivable.
Paul Thurrott
It doesn't matter. Yeah, I don't think that word means what you think it means, but I don't remember the dates. I'm not the big Apple guy. But over time they introduced a keyboard cover that didn't a touchpad on it. It was like, well you'll touch the screen but we also have this stupid Apple pencil. The thing Steve Jobs made fun of and said no one will ever want. And then they eventually added the trackpad with the support and they, you know, but it didn't have keyboard shortcuts or it didn't have, you know, it was always a little bit limited and then just the OS now is limited with background tasks and specific multitasking features. Whatever.
Leo Laporte
I do think though that a generation that's grown up on the iPhone, I couldn't completely embrace it and say plus.
Paul Thurrott
Once they do their folding devices, I.
Leo Laporte
Mean then you can carry it and it's nice.
Paul Thurrott
I mean look, I've tried every version. We all have, right? I know you guys have both done this like back when I think this might have been a Sony or a Palm TX or something. I remember what the thing was, but a little Palm device, right? One of the later ones as they got kind of nice little fold out keyboard, little thing, you kind of stick it on there. I'm on a flight typing my thousand word editorial. But whatever, I'm living the dream. I'm flying through space like Thor and then there's a little boop boop in the plane and the little Palm thing went and lost the connection, lost everything I wrote. It's gone. So I mean I've tried like we talk about. Jerry Purnell used to love those little Windows CE handheld PC things. That was the size and shape of a mobile keyboard. So the screen was like this, you know, like a Hummer view outside. And you know, you hunch over it, you do whatever. Because I think there's a class of people, we used to call them knowledge workers or information workers, people who would travel for work, who they want the lightest thing possible but they also wanted to do as much as possible. And you try to.
Leo Laporte
I feel like a MacBook Air is pretty cool.
Richard Campbell
The Air is what I was thinking. It's the definitive machine in that class and for a long time, literally the best computer in the world. Julianne fries with it.
Leo Laporte
It was so sharp.
Paul Thurrott
My daughter just got the M4 version of the.
Leo Laporte
That's pretty spectacular MacBook Air.
Paul Thurrott
And the reason she wanted to do. She had a Surface Pro. I don't remember, nine maybe. And she loved it. She liked the pen. She's a student, so she would. She drew and took notes and all that stuff like a kid would do, I guess. But this thing got like two and a half hours of battery life. She was freaking her out. And I was like, well, you can get a new one of these. I guess you could get the Snapdragon thing. I mean, that would be pretty good. But I'm like, I got to tell you, you get this. If you get it back, repair, it's going to last forever.
Richard Campbell
Yeah. And you're not going to think about carrying your charger with you because you don't work long enough to use up the battery.
Paul Thurrott
That's incredible.
Richard Campbell
So you'll be home before.
Leo Laporte
She's probably exaggerating as a Windows guy to say that.
Paul Thurrott
No. Last year I bought the M3 version and I would say one of the big achievements of the Copilot PC is they got into the ballpark of this. But if the MacBook Air I had 15 inch, the bigger one, it's about 15 hours. But real world battery life, which is nuts. The best Snapdragon, 11ish. 12 maybe. Maybe 8 to 12 depending on the machine, depending on conditions, whatever. Fans. There's no fan in the MacBook Air, but the one she got, she has a smaller one. So she says she gets 18 hours of battery life. I'm not sure how she rated that, but she's overjoyed by this.
Leo Laporte
It's what she does. It really is dependent. I don't get nearly what you were saying because of what I do on my MacBook. So it's really.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So just the normal way that I use computers. That's what I got on that computer. It's impressive. Most of the PCs I review get like six or seven hours if you're lucky. But it also comes. And Richard was talking about these cameras and sensors and stuff earlier. It has an. I think it's 8 megapixel. Yeah, just goit crisp. Like just super nice camera. So the iPad air I have is like an okay camera. I don't even know. It might. It might even be 720p. I don't know what it is. It's like, okay, it's nothing special. You know, the screen's like tiny. It's really thin. But the one, she has a score. It's really nice. Like you could really see the difference.
Leo Laporte
Alex Lindsay. It's funny, he's been saying that the microphones now on the laptop are so good that he often doesn't send a standalone microphone out in his zoom.
Paul Thurrott
So that's fascinating to me because I would say in the PC space that's the one thing that's still lacking. They've totally caught up on webcam. That stuff's awesome. Five megapixels, very common. You're starting to see eight as well. But the microphones are garbage. And I do the same recording test every time to try to figure out some setting. There's all this AI nonsense you can do and whatever and it just doesn't. I've never found one that's any good. You need a microphone. Like it's to me. I would never do a podcast on the screen. The built in one, unless it was an emergency or whatever. An emergency podcast.
Leo Laporte
We wouldn't let you. To be honest.
Paul Thurrott
You're very. Yeah. You would very clearly be like, I don't know what you think you're using. It sounds like you're under the ocean or something. But this is not working. So. Yeah, no, it's very clear that it is not clear. Okay. Anyway, wwc. We'll see if they actually do it. I hope so. I'm curious on the flip side of this equation, Google has laid off hundreds of employees in their newly consolidated platforms and devices division. This is where they brought together Android and Pixel into one group, along with, I don't know, Chrome and the Nest devices and Fitbit and all that stuff. Right. So I don't think this is as bad as maybe it sounds at first glance. Only because we all knew this was coming. They actually asked people to agree to leave because they were consolidating and some number did. But I think these are the ones. The ones that did not. You fools. You could have taken the money and runs.
Leo Laporte
Told you to leave.
Paul Thurrott
They're like, they'll never let me off.
Leo Laporte
I'm.
Paul Thurrott
I'm so important. What happened?
Leo Laporte
I told you to leave, but you didn't. You wouldn't. We tried. That's pretty funny.
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Google's feels like a stumbling drunk. They just.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
You just really wonder what's. What the heck's Going on up there?
Paul Thurrott
I, Yeah, I don't know. I, I, I don't know.
Leo Laporte
I don't know.
Paul Thurrott
I really, I just, I started using the latest Pixel again, which I have to say, I love. The camera's wonderful. It's the most welcome thing in the world. Going back to that, like, when you take a photo, it could be of anything. It could be like a drink in a bar or sunset or whatever. And it's like, you're like, every time, you're like, oh, my God, look at this. I know I'm going to get used to it and stop doing this. But every time I, like, look at this picture.
Mikey
Look at this, look at that.
Paul Thurrott
You know, it's amazing. But then you look at the battery life and you're like, oh, yeah, they're right. This is down.
Richard Campbell
Nothing's free.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, nothing's free. And then the watch thing is. I want to physically harm it. I hate it so much. Part of it is just the normal notification thing where it's not set up properly yet. So it's notifying me too much about stuff. I know I'm going to get on top of that. And the way I'm going to do that is by turning off notifications entirely because it's driving me insane. But, But I swear to God, five, six times yesterday, this thing was. And I don't mean it didn't go bing, it went like, or whatever. And I look and there's nothing there. I'm like, okay.
Richard Campbell
Just making noises.
Paul Thurrott
No notification. There's nothing. I don't know why I did it. There were at least five times. I cannot explain.
Leo Laporte
It sounds like my rice cooker.
Paul Thurrott
I can't.
Richard Campbell
Oh, Lord.
Paul Thurrott
We have a. If anyone has any Samsung appliances, they might. Oh, God.
Leo Laporte
Are they.
Paul Thurrott
Like. It's so. Yeah, it's. It's unbelievable. Like, so we have one at home and we have one here. And they sing different songs that, you know. This one's a little more of a, you know, a Mexican traditional. It's a trumpet sound. I don't know, it's just, you know, it's Mexican.
Leo Laporte
But do they really. They have. Oh, see, that's interesting. So it's not actually specific.
Paul Thurrott
It's definitely a different song, I can tell you that. I don't know why.
Leo Laporte
Interesting. What do they do in Canada? Do you have any Canadian.
Paul Thurrott
Oh, Canada.
Richard Campbell
And the chicken dance. That's what we did.
Paul Thurrott
Actually. There's nothing here that couldn't be turned into something that makes a lot of noise. So they. That's just the.
Richard Campbell
It's it's the. It's the washer and the dryer and the rice cooker. And we've got a Japanese water boiler, too, that plays us on when the hot water is hot.
Leo Laporte
Wow.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
I used to have a Japanese water purifier that would have a rigamarole.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. This is like, okay, so maybe this is an Asian thing, but it's like, we want your electronics to make you happy. Right. They were probably among the first to try to make them into people like things. Right. Even though it's a white square that doesn't look like a person. Although I guess I am a white square, depending on how you look at it. But. But yeah. So I think, like, these, like, play little happy songs, so, like, maybe it makes you happy. Whereas I'm always like, is there a button where I can turn this thing?
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott
Can I gouge it with, like, a.
Leo Laporte
We have a German dishwasher, and all it does is make a very annoying beep.
Paul Thurrott
Oh, yeah, of course.
Leo Laporte
We're done. We are done. Tom opens the dishwasher.
Paul Thurrott
I was driving slowly through a town in small. Some small town in Germany, and there was an old man with a canyon. He's walking, like, two seconds, like, two miles per hour or whatever. And I'm like, obviously, I'm going to let this guy go. Even though I could have just driven through the intersection. There's no one else there. And he looks at me, and he, like, shook my cane at me. And I was like. I was like, go. And then he hit the car. He's like, no, you have the right of way. He didn't say it.
Leo Laporte
Follow the rules.
Paul Thurrott
We're following the rules. And the rules are.
Leo Laporte
I appreciate that, because I hate it when you come to a stop sign and it's obviously this person's right away.
Paul Thurrott
Well.
Leo Laporte
And he says, it's okay. Go ahead. And it's like, this is how accidents happen.
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Follow the rules.
Paul Thurrott
Listen, I live in Pennsylvania, so I have more rules. I have. No, there are rules that nobody follows. What I don't like is uncertainty in Pennsylvania is all about uncertainty. Are you gonna go? Oh, you want to go? Why don't you go? I'll go. Oh, no. Oh, you're gonna go? And it's like, guys, it's a freaking intersection. Let's go. One of you.
Leo Laporte
First person here goes first.
Paul Thurrott
In Mexico, it's dystopian. It's a fight every time. It could be a person. It could be in a bike. You could be a car, bus. It doesn't matter, as long as you act aggressive and you always have the right away.
Richard Campbell
There you go.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's very different. Anyway, Sam's like, right away. I don't know who's most talking about anymore. But yeah, I don't know. There it is.
Richard Campbell
The rice Cooker song.
Paul Thurrott
Little watchers used to do this, right? You would have like, I don't know what time climax or some old fashioned watch. And they would always play little songs. Why is there a song built into this thing? I can't even tell the time. What do you like?
Leo Laporte
But now it's Pavlovian. My mouth just started watering because the rice is done.
Richard Campbell
The rice is done, right?
Paul Thurrott
That's amazing.
Leo Laporte
It plays Twinkle Twinkle Little Star when it starts. And according to Wikipedia, it plays a tune called Amaryllis when it's done.
Richard Campbell
Okay.
Paul Thurrott
Did Brian Eno do this music? Because that would bring this whole thing home.
Leo Laporte
That would bring us full circle.
Paul Thurrott
That would be amazing.
Leo Laporte
Full circle. All right, let's take a break because the rice is done and I gotta.
Paul Thurrott
Sounds like a Nintendo game.
Leo Laporte
A Zojirushi rice cooker is the best thing. It's amazing that ever happened to me.
Paul Thurrott
I'll let Lisa know you said that.
Leo Laporte
But she agrees, by the way.
Paul Thurrott
She's like, I'm a dissing number.
Leo Laporte
We both look at it, we go, it makes perfect rice. Every time it's like, you don't have to think about it.
Richard Campbell
You're moving to New Zealand. You're leaving the rice cooker.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Nice.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott
You can have the house. I just want the rice.
Leo Laporte
I want the rice cooker.
Richard Campbell
That's.
Paul Thurrott
You can have everything in it. I just want the rice cooker.
Leo Laporte
All right, let's take a little break. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell, wonderful to see you both in your native habitats for the time being. Our show today, brought to you by US Cloud. Let me tell you, the name does not tell you exactly what they do. Sounds like a cloud service, right? No, it's the number one. And I mean it. The best. Microsoft Unified Support replacement. Now, we've been talking about this for some time now. I hope you know about US Cloud, the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. They support 50 of the Fortune 500. And there's three reasons. In my mind, there's three reasons. First of all, of course, it's a big money saver switching to US Cloud. Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier support. But it wouldn't be better if it was Just cheaper, right? You want better support. Well, it is better. Faster, twice as fast. Average time to resolution versus Microsoft. And it's better. They've got the best engineers. They actively recruit the smartest, best, most experienced engineers. So you're getting the best team working for you. Faster time to resolution for less. But now they're going to live up to their name because there's another thing they do that I don't think Microsoft would ever do this. They save you money on Azure, right? That is something. Microsoft would be very happy that you continue to spend more on Azure every month. But US Cloud has a new offering. It's called their Azure Cost Optimization Services. I mean, honestly, when's the last time you evaluate your Azure usage? It just grows on you, right? If it's been a while, you have some Azure sprawl, I'm sure a little, you know, a little spread, little, little spend creep going on. But there's good news. Saving on Azure is easier than you think. With US Cloud, they offer an eight week Azure engagement. It's powered by VBox. In those eight weeks, it will identify key opportunities to reduce costs. Reduce costs across your entire Azure environment without reducing capability. You'll get expert guidance and access to those engineers. I talked about US cloud senior engineers. An average of over 16 years with Microsoft products. And at the end of the eight weeks, you get this beautiful interactive dashboard that will identify rebuild opportunities, downscale opportunities, unused resources. You can take that money and put it in the bank or, or continue to save. My suggestion, invest the savings in Azure into US Cloud's Microsoft support. That's what a few US Cloud customers do and completely eliminate your unified spend. So you save again. Sam gave us a great testimonial. He's the Technical Operations manager at Bede Gaming. B E D E Bead Gaming. Of course, they use a lot of azure. He gave us Cloud 5 stars. He said, quote, we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure. But once we got to 40 or 50,000amonth, it really started to add up. Yeah, that would, wouldn't it? It's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure. Stop buying more Azure than you need. Identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Visit uscloud.com right now. You can book a call today. Find out how much your team can save. I'm telling you These guys are the best. Uscloud.com book a call today. Get faster, better Microsoft support for less. I mean, you can't lose uscloud.com and if they ask you, please do me a favor, say, oh, yeah, I heard about you on Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard and Leo said it was great. US Cloud. Thank you, USCloud, for supporting this fine effort. We call Windows Weekly. I'm gonna go get a little rice. And now I wish I had some rice.
Paul Thurrott
What is this?
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah. I read an article by a woman who grew up in a Chinese family, and she said she bought these. These dried Chinese sausages. Put two in the rice cooker when you cook the rice, and it flavors the whole thing. And then Doc Rock, who's from Hawaii, said, in Hawaii, what we do, get the. He says, get the zojirushi. And when you have leftover piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Paul Thurrott
Nice.
Leo Laporte
You put it in with the rice in the rice cooker and it flavors the whole thing.
Paul Thurrott
Oh, God.
Leo Laporte
Doesn't that sound good?
Paul Thurrott
That sounds fantastic.
Richard Campbell
When's the last time I had Kentucky Fried Chicken? Well, that's the problem.
Paul Thurrott
I have it all the time here, really. But not here. It's terrible in Mexico, but I really like Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Leo Laporte
So I see here something that says this just in. And then that's all it says. Is there a breaking news?
Paul Thurrott
There is. So Microsoft stopped making their own keyboards and mice and peripherals right under their Microsoft brand. They sold some Surface stuff, but in doing that, they got rid of the keyboard I'm using right here. I love this thing. The sculpt ergonomic keyboard.
Leo Laporte
The Ergo keyboard, yeah.
Paul Thurrott
But in case. And Microsoft announced Incase was going to bring these things back from the grave or whatever, and then it never happened, but it just happened. So the sculp ergonomic keyboard, or desktop set, I should say, is available from Incase. Designed by Microsoft. Right. It looks identical. In fact, let me see how identical it looks. Yeah, it's so identical, it doesn't even have a copilot it key on it. It has the same, like, layout as.
Richard Campbell
The thing I'm looking at right now. The sculpt keyboard is a cult. Like, there are believers in this keyboard. They buy them whenever they find them. Buy as many as they can.
Paul Thurrott
I used to have three of them in a closet.
Leo Laporte
You're in the cult.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I love it.
Leo Laporte
80 bucks. That sounds like the same price, right? That's about what it was.
Paul Thurrott
This is. That's not the. That's. Sorry, that's not the right one. It's not.
Leo Laporte
This is designed by Microsoft.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's a different one. I mean there are other ones.
Leo Laporte
Oh I see the whole line of.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, the whole line of these things. So it's the sculpt ergonomic desktop set. So it's keyboard, mouse and 150 bucks which was about the same price. I think my only issue with it is that it was a proprietary usb. A dongle. And it still is.
Leo Laporte
Here it is. Here it is.
Paul Thurrott
And I wish it was a slash Bluetooth something. I thought it was going to be slash Brutus, but whatever. I will buy one of these immediately.
Leo Laporte
It's wired only. Is that it?
Paul Thurrott
No, it's wireless. It's just. But it uses a dongle.
Leo Laporte
Well, that's silly.
Paul Thurrott
Yep. But it works great.
Leo Laporte
This is it, right? 150 bucks.
Paul Thurrott
Yep, that's it. I'm using it right now while I'm using the Microsoft one.
Richard Campbell
But yeah, one of the vintage ones.
Paul Thurrott
I can't show this to you effectively but I have a USB A to well C to A like on it with a cable. So I put the dongle in the end of it and it's stuck into the front of the Thunderbolt dock I use. Plus it brings it closer to the keyboard so there's less interference. Whatever. Yeah, yeah. I love this thing. I love it so much.
Leo Laporte
In case. In case makes. I've had other in case stuff. They make a lot of accessories.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, they're pretty well known and actually yeah. If you go to their design by Microsoft menu thing, which I think you did.
Leo Laporte
I did. They got a bunch.
Paul Thurrott
There's a bunch of stuff. And this was not the case fairly recently. So. So they had a couple of things I think for a while but now it looks like they got a whole thing going. So you can get just the keyboard for 120.
Leo Laporte
They do have a Bluetooth keyboard but it's a square regular everyday.
Paul Thurrott
No, I don't. I wish this thing. I thought they were going to update it. In fact I thought part of the update was it was going to have the copilot key. That was going to be one. Right. And that would be also Bluetooth. But I guess. No, it's still the same. Whatever. It took long enough. I'm glad they're making it. It's better than, you know, it's better.
Richard Campbell
Than get a bank a couple like just.
Paul Thurrott
Well, not at 150 bucks. But I'll definitely. If. If I ever thought these things were going away. Which happened. Yes, I. I did that Before. And then I went through them.
Richard Campbell
So. Yeah, no, that's the thing is I brought. While they're still in stock, you know.
Paul Thurrott
To bring it, you know. Yeah. Yep.
Leo Laporte
Breaking news.
Paul Thurrott
Samsung, you get a little song.
Leo Laporte
Okay.
Paul Thurrott
Yes, sure.
Richard Campbell
And my clothes are dry.
Paul Thurrott
And I guess this doesn't. Yes, right. And your rice is done. So Notion does this thing where there's like a weird scroll Barry thing over on the right and I keep clicking it by mistake and it scrolls all the way down to the bottom of the document.
Richard Campbell
Don't do that.
Paul Thurrott
It's the first little bit of. Yeah, okay. So AI, we can go through some of this pretty quickly, but.
Leo Laporte
Oh, wait a minute. I gotta run. My clothes are dry. I'll be right back.
Richard Campbell
This goes on for hours until quite a song.
Paul Thurrott
No, the Samsung. Right. Is this. Is this a Samsung thing? Because they go on for a lot. They go on for a long time. Yeah, no, it's like we've got to get it all out. It's like we got it. We've already taken the clothes out of the dryer. Yeah, you know, I know. I gotta get through this. Sorry, it's. There's no way.
Leo Laporte
It's an Austrian song called by Franz Schubert. That's why it's so long.
Paul Thurrott
It's an art. It's a complete aria.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's the whole damn thing. Oh, I bet you we triggered a lot of people. Now, Anthony Nielsen says we're going to get a copyright takedown from Samsung. I don't think so. Really? If we listen for that, I'm going to be very.
Paul Thurrott
Whatever anyone thinks of the song, their stuff is pretty great actually. The reason we buy it.
Leo Laporte
I mean, that's why. That's why. I mean, that's why I know the music. I got the thing.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it works well.
Richard Campbell
Keeps drying my clothes.
Leo Laporte
All right, let's talk AI, because this is dumb.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, we need smart over in the Apple part of the fence there. On the other side of that fence. A lot of hand wringing over Apple intelligence. And they'll get it right eventually. Something. I don't know. There's been a.
Leo Laporte
There was an article in the New York Times saying Apple is failing.
Paul Thurrott
Well, this is that trip, idiot. So I saw that. I'm like, yeah, I know who wrote this. And I was like, yep. So look, this is the richest company on earth. They're doing great.
Leo Laporte
They're back at the 3 trillion.
Paul Thurrott
They're fine. You know, they're going to be only.
Richard Campbell
Only 3 trillion.
Paul Thurrott
They've reorged. They've Moved people around, whatever, they'll get it right. But I guess the new thing is. So if you're in the developer beta stuff, you might have seen this and I think there's a whole beta now, but iOS, iPadOS, macOS, 18, 15, point, whatever, five. They're looking at actually improving Apple intelligence by using on device data about you. But it's Apple, so they'll do this in an Apple safe, we respect your privacy kind of a way. But I think this is the little conceptual hurdle I think people need to get over with AI, other than the obvious is it real or not kind of thing. But I, I've told this story before too, but this guy complained to me that he enabled Cortana and then it asked him to give him permission to look at his calendar and his contacts or whatever. And I was like, yeah, that's how it works. It can't do anything unless you tell it about yourself. And obviously that's going to even more true of AI because there's so much more data. But yeah. So I think Apple wanted this to be the most closed system thing imaginable, but they're coming around to this notion that, look, you're gonna have to. If you're gonna use this thing, you're gonna have to.
Richard Campbell
They were trying to solve this a year after they said they had it solved.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, I'm not sure. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what they.
Richard Campbell
I mean the normal Apple pattern here is when they announced it at wwdc, it's gonna ship in three months. It's already working. We're just putting the finishing touches on it. They announced something they just didn't have. They even showed a demo or something.
Paul Thurrott
Apparently they didn't have have having sat through the Longhorn demo of 2003. I hear what you're saying.
Richard Campbell
Listen, I'm used to Microsoft presenting fiction. I am not used to this version of Apple. Tim's Cook, Apple presenting fiction.
Paul Thurrott
Okay, well, you're putting me in the awkward position of defending Tim Cook and Apple, which I have to say, I.
Richard Campbell
Don'T know everything about that.
Paul Thurrott
I think maybe I just won't even do it. I feel like they were. We knew from the beginning it wasn't going to be immediate. And then we learned.
Richard Campbell
I felt like I had to make an announcement and then we get it figured out.
Paul Thurrott
It would be a.
Richard Campbell
Here we are staring the next WWDC in the face and they still haven't figured.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I would imagine whatever the specific announcements for this year's show are, that the central premise is going to be we announce something and then we ship it in September and that's the end of it. I, I, I think they're going to go for that.
Leo Laporte
They're not going to preview anything they can.
Paul Thurrott
I don't think so. Because that did not, it was not received well. Yeah, it was not received well. Although, you know, to be fair to Apple, with the exception of this conversational Siri nonsense, which again, if you ever use Siri, I don't know what you thought was going to happen. I don't know what miracle you thought this was, but I think they've delivered by now everything they talked about except for that one thing. I mean it's fine. I don't think it's changed anyone's life.
Leo Laporte
Well, that's the question, the question we keep asking on MacBreak weekly is does it matter? Does Apple, Apple need, they made a mistake promoting something they couldn't deliver. Fine, yeah, yeah, but is anybody going to not buy an iPhone? Because Apple intelligence is not that intelligent.
Paul Thurrott
No, but it may drag people away to other services. Right. So Apple, like there are two things Apple could do. They could just open up their OS entirely and allow third parties to integrate at various parts of the stack, which you know, they don't want to do.
Richard Campbell
And aren't doing in the Apple way. Not at all.
Paul Thurrott
Not their Apple thing. I mean they don't like that. Or they could do what they did. But look, every Time Someone uses ChatGPT on an iPhone or Gemini or something and maybe then you oh, I can pay for that. Oh, and you have this other thing I might want to use, I mean, you're moving over to a place where maybe the iPhone isn't the important thing anymore. And so I think from that perspective they felt like they had to do it. The problem, I hate to use these kind of terms but I think it's just like lazy. But it's like table stakes at this point. They can't not have this because everyone else does. And I have to say to their credit, doing it in this kind of Apple privacy respecting way I think resonates with people regardless of its efficacy or whatever. I mean efficacy of AI, not efficacy of privacy protection.
Leo Laporte
Well, there's even some question that it's deferential. Actual privacy thing they're using is not it really until you can be used safely and it could be used unsafely. It could be, it can leak information and it cannot leak information. And with Apple not really being forthright about how exactly they're doing it it's unknown, I guess.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
Richard Campbell
But it sure sounds like there's an internal battle going on here too.
Leo Laporte
It does, doesn't it?
Richard Campbell
Different teams are working on different things and it's gone awry. It's very. Feels like a very bomber. Ask Microsoft.
Paul Thurrott
The thing what this reminds me of.
Leo Laporte
Apple.
Paul Thurrott
I think it was the year after Steve Jobs passed away, or if it wasn't, it was within a couple years. They shipped the first version of Apple Maps and it was a disaster. I just referenced this. The people would drive through a desert and there'd be no road or whatever. It wasn't very good. Now they've improved it since then, but Tim Cook went down to Scar Forestall, who was responsible for that and said, you need to apologize. And he's like, yeah, I'm not doing that. Says, well then you're fired. And this time around, no one's getting fired, you know, And I think maybe it's because the decision to do what they did at WWDC last year came from on high. Like, I think this time Tim Cook's not going to fire himself. I mean, he may not have come up with this idea, but he okayed it. You know, he was part of that.
Leo Laporte
Question about where John Giandre ended up.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, the guy. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
But he might be in a roof having lunch, if you know what I mean sometimes.
Paul Thurrott
Right. So I think what will my guess, because this is what happens in all companies. This has happened at Apple too. You won't hear anything about him and then one day you'll find out he has quietly left Apple and maybe he wanted to spend more time with his family. Maybe he wanted to become an invest like a VC guy or something. Whatever it was, was moving on to.
Richard Campbell
Brass band, you know.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Yep. Is that a Jim Alin reference? Is that what that was?
Richard Campbell
That's what that was.
Paul Thurrott
Very nice.
Richard Campbell
Okay.
Paul Thurrott
Very nice. Yeah, yeah. So whatever. Anyway, he still has a title.
Leo Laporte
He's a senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy. But he doesn't have the role. He doesn't have the operational role anymore.
Paul Thurrott
That's right. Well, they wanted to put it on someone who can actually ship, like the guy from Vision Pro. Yikes. I'm sure I'll be fine.
Leo Laporte
Well now you're right.
Paul Thurrott
Sure it'll be fine.
Richard Campbell
We're all fine.
Paul Thurrott
So Adobe and do I have the right link for this one? I do not. Oh yeah, I know I do. Good, good, good. So Adobe, I have to say, they've jumped in with two feet on this AI stuff. They've done it in an almost Apple like way in the sense that because they have this huge library of content that you can license legally and know that it's not taken from anybody or whatever, they've trained their models on that not. And they indemnify their customers against any complaints about anything that's created with their AI. So that's. That's amazing. Right. And they did not announce too many thing any. Well, they didn't announce anything specific, but they just made an announcement ahead of the Max show. And I think they. I don't think Max is a show they have once a year. I think Max might be a show they have up to two to three times a year. But the next Max is being held in London and end of April. April, a couple of weeks ago, I guess. And they're going to discuss this in more detail, but they talked about how they were going to bring agentic capabilities across their products. So Acrobat Express and then all the creative cloud stuff, especially Photoshop and Premiere Pro. And I gotta say, this feels really smart to me. These tools are complex.
Richard Campbell
You have to be, you know, sell yet another version.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. And it's also how you can expand your audience because this will make these tools more accessible to less proficient professionals.
Richard Campbell
Have you played with the podcast tools that Adobe has? No, they're astonishing.
Leo Laporte
Well, I mean the number one over and above audition. What else do they have?
Richard Campbell
Oh yeah, the new podcast AI tools. This does a transcript of the text of the podcast and then you edit the text and it edits the audio for.
Leo Laporte
I love that. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott
I was thinking, I mean, yeah. So I mean Adobe, in my brain, I always go right to Photoshop and then Premiere. But obviously Acrobat PDF, that stuff is humongous. And they'll do all that, summarize, blah, blah, blah, whatever, generative AI. But the idea, like I'll do things like just something. It's like the Excel example I use where I use Excel once a year. Right. So every once in a while I have big letters and what I want is like a photo that's behind all of those letters, but not in the background. Right. So it's only in the letters, you know, and there's a name for that. There's a technique to do it and it's complicated and every time I have to do it, I have to look it up and I never remember what it is. But the notion of speaking or typing or however you do it and having it tell you, you know, it's like the thing we were Talking about in Windows or an Office where in the beginning it will say this is how you do it. And then with these agents you'll say I want this to happen and it will just do it for, for you. That will make that kind of thing much more accessible and it might make people who might not otherwise have paid for these products say okay, actually now I can use this thing. Whereas I think for a lot of people they're overwhelming or they're expensive or both or whatever it might be. Maybe this opens this up to more people. It's kind of interesting. So I'm curious, I'm kind of looking forward to.
Richard Campbell
And this is one of the dreams all along, right? Is making these tools easier to. To use.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Yep. I think they'll do pretty good. Adobe, this has been like the one non dramatic AI thing happening. Generative AI is controversial for a long time.
Richard Campbell
I just felt like Adobe was a place where software went to die.
Paul Thurrott
Yes.
Richard Campbell
But they've hung onto a few pieces and they've the ones that make them enough money and then they switched over to cloud. Not with some. Without some resentment.
Paul Thurrott
How anything related to PDF is still a business is. Is unbelievable to me. But let me see if I can find this number. Six Adobe Acrobat. Three trillion PDF files in circulation. 650 million active users.
Richard Campbell
What a dozen other editors for PDF and so forth. Like the format's not going anywhere. I don't know much Adobe makes on it, but at least it's a gateway drug into their creative crowd.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it looks like it's pretty good somehow, but yeah, it's amazing to me. It's been a week, so Obviously there were 18 OpenAI announcements. I'm not going to even try to go through all these. But they've announced by my account at least 5 models since we last talked. They're going to retire GPT4. Sorry. Soon they have 4.1 models. They have 03 and 04 mini models. Now if you are a user, even a free user, you have an image library. So if you used ChatGPT, which used to be be just that standalone tool, Dall E. Right. But you can do it just in chatgpt now. I guess it will actually store your image library so you can go reference the things you've done in the past, which to me sounds like duh. Microsoft Designer already does that. There are rumors that OpenAI is going to create a social network now because I don't know why. Okay. And then I referenced this earlier in the show and Brad had a really good Saying for this, that I reference again later in the show called it's something like AI is removing the moat. And what he meant was that AI is what's going to bring together all these disparate ecosystems where you can kind of mix and match and do whatever you want. So in this case, cloud or anthropic announced that their cloud models now integrate with Google Workspace. And what that means is you can ground this thing on your data, your work data as a company and of course it's all the permissions and all the stuff you would expect there. But you can now ask it questions about the document library that you have associated with Google Docs, the emails that you've sent, the schedule. This expanded out in every direction imaginable, meaning every AI, every email, every calendar, every set of documents that's in the cloud, storage, wherever. You know what I mean?
Leo Laporte
Does recall look like nothing at all?
Paul Thurrott
It takes screenshots. It's fun. I don't know. Would you. Problem man. It's cool. I don't know. Yeah, it's. It's kind of amazing.
Richard Campbell
I'm also thinking about this GPD4 thing and thinking they're. They want to retire that to save themselves money. Like really? GPT4 looks like it was the peak.
Paul Thurrott
Of the, like, inefficient, inefficient giant, just.
Richard Campbell
Grab as much land as you can kind of mindset. And now it's tuning and processing efficiency and organization. But which is.
Leo Laporte
Here's the question. Is it getting better or is it just differentiating and changing? Changing. Is it actually getting.
Richard Campbell
How do you measure better?
Leo Laporte
Well, I know, I know what is.
Paul Thurrott
Better on the Flowers for Algernon scale. Are they still on the upward side of the slope or have they.
Leo Laporte
They're not getting dumber.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
So they're getting more ubiquitous. They're doing more things.
Paul Thurrott
I think I said this before, but to me, one of the big successes of OpenAI and ChatGPT specifically is how ubiquitous it is. Yeah, I, going back in time, I would rate. We're in the industry, so we have kind of a skewed view of where things are because we see things early and we use things that maybe aren't quite mainstream. But I remember a friend of mine asked me if he should get an ipod. And this was three, four years in, and it was like, wow, okay, I guess this has hit this is normal. He loves music at tapes and CDs and cars and stuff. I was like, I think I want to get one of these. He's like, do you recommend this? I was like, yeah, these things are great. The number of normal people I know, meaning non technical, not in the industry, who use ChatGPT and actually pay for it is kind of astonishing to me.
Leo Laporte
It just comes up, asked me, can it do text now and images? And I said, yeah, it could do text now and images. I said, let me make an action figure for you, Lisa. Lisa.
Paul Thurrott
Yes. Oh, nice.
Leo Laporte
Yes, it can do text now, so it's better in that respect. But being able to make an action figure.
Paul Thurrott
She's really ripped. What happened?
Leo Laporte
I asked her to ask it to really beef her up.
Paul Thurrott
Toned.
Leo Laporte
Toned. The toned.
Richard Campbell
This action figure meme is killing me.
Leo Laporte
Like, we're burning forests to do this. You understand?
Paul Thurrott
I know, but look at. That's a cute image. And then it will be in two seconds, we'll be on to the next thing. It's fine.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So that's my question. Is it getting better? I guess it's better at text.
Paul Thurrott
I think it is getting better because it's getting more diverse and it does more types of things. It rips off more forms of art. I mean, that's just clearly an evolution.
Leo Laporte
It's better at ripping off our ability.
Richard Campbell
To feel is getting better all the time. A couple of weeks ago on Net Rocks, we talked to Dr. Jodo Burchell specifically about. About how to measure the quality of different LLMs. Like, exactly.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's the question. Yeah.
Richard Campbell
You've got a working app running under GPT 3 + right now.
Paul Thurrott
Right.
Richard Campbell
If I switch to 4, how do I know it's better?
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
Richard Campbell
What does that even look like? And she went. She's, you know, one of the experts in the space. I'm very much of the machine learning person.
Paul Thurrott
The AI version, the Windows Experience Index or whatever they called it. The.
Richard Campbell
Yeah, that's a bunch of test suites. Like, these are the things you can test.
Paul Thurrott
Benchmarks. Yeah, that's what we need, more artificial benchmarks.
Leo Laporte
They have benchmarks.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I know, but like, so now we're going to do what we do with CPUs and GPUs. We're just going to like write these things to the benchmark.
Richard Campbell
Totally. 100%, you know, and oddly enough, it is a machine learning model, so it's particularly designed to get good at benchmarks.
Paul Thurrott
Right.
Leo Laporte
That's one of the questions is it's.
Paul Thurrott
Probably good enough it could just lie and output the, you know.
Richard Campbell
Exactly.
Paul Thurrott
Just artificially.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Paul Thurrott
It's like when they use a Samsung to take a picture of the moon and it's somehow perfect every single time.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that was amazing, wasn't it?
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, interesting. I mean, I think, you know, for the people using, it's like, who cares? I just want a picture of the moon. You could have just downloaded it from basketball.com.
Richard Campbell
Had to work there. It had to realize that you were taking a picture of the moon and then had to decide what phase the moon was in.
Paul Thurrott
You have no idea. The image recognition technology.
Leo Laporte
Burning more forests as we speak.
Paul Thurrott
Hey, they're not going to burn themselves.
Leo Laporte
That's true. That's true. I'm thinking of doing a section, a segment on our intelligent machine.
Paul Thurrott
How many forests have to die?
Leo Laporte
What? You know what, What I did this week to burn three forests.
Paul Thurrott
So maybe that's the measure we're looking for. It's like number of trees that had to die for this operation to occur successfully.
Leo Laporte
Do you really want to think about that? Because it really is kind of. It's.
Richard Campbell
Well, we've been looking for a way to destroy civilization with a meme, and apparently this is it.
Leo Laporte
Faster and faster, better and better.
Paul Thurrott
I want it to be efficient, but I also want it to be funny.
Richard Campbell
Yeah, you get a good. So now we're trying this with the action figure meme. There you go. Get five more memes like this. Maybe we can get there.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. How many megawatts does it use to do that?
Paul Thurrott
Right, Right. I don't know. And then Meta, which I think we can all agree is the most trustworthy computing technology firm on Earth, says that they will start training their AI models using EU data for the first time. Just kidding. They've been doing it all along, but now they're actually going to. They're going to.
Richard Campbell
Now they're willing to admit it.
Leo Laporte
Now we admit it.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, because they're the best. Love those guys. In fact, if you, Leo, ever want to start a meta podcast, definitely.
Leo Laporte
No, no, just.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, just throw it out there.
Leo Laporte
It's funny you say that, because at our editorial meeting yesterday, one of our staff said, are we going to cover Meta's keynote? And I said, nope.
Paul Thurrott
My only request of such a podcast would be that everyone had to get a perm that was on the show. That would be the importance.
Leo Laporte
I don't know why, Because, I mean, they're doing interesting stuff, but I just have no interest in covering, like, who I o. We're going to do Build. We should do. Right, we'll do the Build keynote. Yes.
Richard Campbell
The Satya keynote's at 9am on Monday.
Leo Laporte
So we're going to do that. We're Going to do Apple's keynote in June because that's going to be of great interest. What Apple, of course, what Apple says about what excuses Apple gives.
Paul Thurrott
I can't wait to see how they massage the Apple intelligence story.
Leo Laporte
But yeah, and by the way, I should mention it for people who are saying, oh, good, Apple has now really tried to take us down a bunch of times for doing the Apple keynotes.
Paul Thurrott
I feel like it's become a kind of a cute tradition you guys have. It's. Yeah, it's fun.
Leo Laporte
So we stopped doing it on YouTube because we had a lawyer, an actual person say, you know, we're gonna ding you. So we stopped doing on YouTube and then they did it to us on Twitch and we thought, you know what, we can't do this anymore.
Richard Campbell
Right.
Leo Laporte
So all the keynotes now are going to be in the club. Only we're doing in the club. Twit Discord. The advantage of that is people will be able to. To participate. The disadvantage is if you're not a member of the club, you won't see it. So this, all of these keynotes we will stream. Mike and I are going to do the Apple one. If you guys want to do the Build one, I think you're probably going to be at build, right?
Richard Campbell
Yep.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. But if you want to do it with us, we can, but we'll do that in the club as opposed to in public. If you're not a member of the club, this is another reason to join. Now.
Paul Thurrott
This is like when the guys from MST went off and did their own, you know, went kind of went off.
Leo Laporte
Right.
Paul Thurrott
And they would, you, you'd have to have like a DVD of the movie and then you would play their soundtrack somehow simultaneously.
Leo Laporte
And it was like, copyright's a pain.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's hard. That stuff's hard.
Leo Laporte
And honestly, this is fair. It really should, because we're doing journalism, we're covering it and we're reporting on it.
Paul Thurrott
You feel, you feel like there's some kind of a fair use argument to be made there. I mean, obviously, like, I don't even understand the argument otherwise.
Richard Campbell
Yes. And we even say, hey, if you.
Leo Laporte
Want an uncommon commentated version of this keynote, Apple's streaming it live. You can watch it there.
Paul Thurrott
There's plenty of places to see that. You know, I don't know.
Leo Laporte
To date, nobody else has complained, but Apple has so vociferously that we decided, well, why take the chance? Because honestly, if we got kicked off YouTube, that would be problematic.
Richard Campbell
Is an issue.
Leo Laporte
We stream on all those platforms, including meta, by the way. Facebook and LinkedIn. And meta. Meta and everywhere. And Meta. Meta. We don't stream on Instagram because we can't figure it out. TikTok stream on TikTok streaming.
Paul Thurrott
Hello, TikTok. We missed something.
Leo Laporte
What? Did you get all the AI in?
Paul Thurrott
Yes. No, I just was looking at the notes. I screwed something up and then I missed the story and I gotta clean it up before you come back.
Richard Campbell
Gonna be all right.
Leo Laporte
Aren't you happy? Ladies and gentlemen, you winners and dozers, you are watching the fabulous Windows Weekly. We do this every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. And yes, you can watch it live on in our discord, but on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok x.com, facebook, LinkedIn and something else that I can't remember did. I left.
Paul Thurrott
Oh, you finally missed one.
Leo Laporte
Ah, damn it.
Paul Thurrott
I thought this was yours. This was like this. Your superpower. What happened?
Leo Laporte
Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick X.com and TikTok. There we go. 8.
Richard Campbell
Twitch.
Leo Laporte
I mentioned Twitch. So if you want to watch live, you can, but obviously it's a podcast, so really there's no. The only reason you would watch live is so that you could be in the chats on these respective platforms. And I have this wonderful unified chat interface so I can see all the nasty things everybody's saying on all the different platforms.
Paul Thurrott
There's no better form of feedback than live feedback.
Richard Campbell
There you go. The best.
Leo Laporte
I remember we've mentioned this before. When I taught Regis Philbin how to tweet, he was so excited about it for about a week, and then he realized that people were saying not everybody was saying nice things. I'm not doing this anymore. You got to have a little bit of a thick skin to be in the public.
Richard Campbell
You have to no other way to do this.
Mikey
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Leo Laporte
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Paul Thurrott
Can avoid the void and reach the.
Leo Laporte
Right buyers with LinkedIn ads. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Get started at LinkedIn.com results, terms and conditions apply. All right, back to the program at hand. I think this would be a good time for Paul Thurat to break out his Xbox chops.
Paul Thurrott
Paul, this is a big week for Xboxing. Big week. Yeah, big week. So there is an Xbox app on mobile, which on the face of things sounds kind of ludicrous because you could do almost nothing with it. And part of the problem is that of course Microsoft doesn't want to put or can't put on iOS I guess paid stuff through there or couldn't because of the app store rules and blah, blah, blah, whatever.
Leo Laporte
30%. Apple took chunk.
Paul Thurrott
Yep. But that is going away and they're not saying what happened if anything. So they are going on iOS and Android allow users to purchase games, meaning Xbox ecosystem games for PC or console.
Leo Laporte
That's fantastic.
Paul Thurrott
Subscribe to game pass which these are paid things like normally Apple or who or Google would get a 30% whatever, you know, and I don't. Then they didn't address if there's been some kind of an agreement or a change on the back end or I don't know. But these things are changing. So that's actually really cool. That's unexpected.
Richard Campbell
And what did he mean when he said this is an Xbox?
Paul Thurrott
Well, as you know, everything's an Xbox now. It's not confusing at all. In fact, they've made it simple.
Richard Campbell
Well, the fact that I don't know Xbox games on my phone speaks to everything. Might just be an Xbox.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, but it also speaks to something happened, I don't know. And that thing is not. Microsoft agreed to pay the fee, so I guess we'll find out. That's kind of interesting.
Leo Laporte
They didn't need the 30%. They're not.
Paul Thurrott
There's no way they're reading the 30%. That's too much money. Or even if it was 50, whatever this is. No way. So we'll see. We'll definitely hear more about that one. The thing I forgot to put in the notes or didn't see when I did the notes is there's a stream your own game feature that Xbox has been testing for consoles. It's now available publicly. It's not every Single game you own. Unfortunately, there's a licensing thing there, I guess. But there are over 100 Xbox games that aren't available on Game Pass, but are available to stream if you own.
Leo Laporte
If I own it on my Xbox, I can then not play it on my iPad.
Paul Thurrott
Or you're still. So you stream it on your Xbox, but you don't install it.
Leo Laporte
Oh, you don't install it.
Paul Thurrott
So in other words. Yeah, you go to that same interface that you would use for cloud streaming. Like cloud. Microsoft calls cloud gaming because cloud streaming is too obvious. And whatever games you have in your library, you've paid for digitally. Right. Are there. So that's cool. And then they're adding, I guess, 19. I don't know if they added them already. They're coming soon. But there's a big list. There's over 100 now, so that's interesting.
Richard Campbell
Got an idea.
Leo Laporte
That's cool.
Paul Thurrott
And actually I should say. Sorry, it's not just your console. These work on Samsung Smart TVs, Amazon Fire TVs, Meta Quest headsets. Yep.
Leo Laporte
So Xbox app or.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, wherever Xbox can stream, I guess. So that's good.
Leo Laporte
Oh, that's neat.
Paul Thurrott
I hadn't seen. I just saw that when you were doing the ad. So I'm not completely up on it, but I know they were testing this and apparently now it's available in stable. So there must be a new system update or whatever. Yeah, there is. So. Yep. And there's a couple other small things. But that's big. I mean, that's a big one. That's good. It is the second half of April. So now we have. Am I doing things out of order? I think I am. Let me look at this again. Yep. So now we have a new set of Game Pass titles coming across console, PC and Cloud. And there's an Activision game in there, guys. The original version of Modern Warfare 2 is available, and that means you can stream it if you have cloud gaming through Xbox. God, there's so many games names. Xbox Game Pass ultimate, which I think is a first for that game. You can. It's PC.
Leo Laporte
I want to play Crime Scene clean.
Paul Thurrott
I know, I saw it. That's crazy.
Leo Laporte
What the.
Paul Thurrott
It's like the Dexter kind of game or whatever.
Leo Laporte
That's not a game, that's a job.
Paul Thurrott
Neither is mowing a lawn, but that's a game too, right?
Leo Laporte
There's a lawn mowing game.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, there's a lawn mowing simulator.
Richard Campbell
Some people find that stuff fun.
Paul Thurrott
I know, it's crazy.
Richard Campbell
You know What? Far Cry 4, you know, before. You know.
Leo Laporte
That's great.
Richard Campbell
Shark.
Paul Thurrott
Grand theft auto 5, you know.
Richard Campbell
Well, the greatest game of all time at this point, right? How many? How many mil? How many? Millions and millions, I believe it's what.
Paul Thurrott
Number two best selling game of all time, I think after Minecraft. Or it's right up there. Either way.
Leo Laporte
Cool.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So, yeah, the 20, this is.
Richard Campbell
Oh, and Dredge, I played.
Paul Thurrott
He's right. Wait. Oh, sorry. My Laurent wrote this as the more recent game. I'm sorry, maybe I'm wrong about the game. This is Modern Warfare 2 2. I know, but the more. I guess it's the more recent version. I'm not actually sure looking at that somebody out there will notice.
Leo Laporte
Can you tell from the album art? I mean, does that.
Paul Thurrott
I don't see, that's what I. That's the reason I thought it was the. Let me look it up.
Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, where is it? Oh, there it is.
Paul Thurrott
It's the.
Leo Laporte
It's the MIA with a skull on it, man.
Paul Thurrott
I know, but I thought that was the old one. No, I guess it's the new one. I'm sorry. So. So Modern Warfare 3, the new one, and Black Ops 6, the latest, are on, you know, game pass, et cetera. So Now Modern Warfare 2 is coming there. That's actually pretty. Okay, so that's good too. That suggests that it must be the full game. So they must still have multiplayer that works, et cetera. So that's interesting. That suggests. So I have, you know, Call of Duty installed on a couple of PCs. I would imagine that will become available. That means I'm gonna get another 130 gig update. That's great. Thanks, Microsoft.
Richard Campbell
Excellent.
Paul Thurrott
Congratulations.
Richard Campbell
Good. We're all fine.
Paul Thurrott
You figured out a way to make me dread Activision games coming to game pass. That's fine. Anyway, that's a good one. This is a good set of games.
Richard Campbell
What if some of these titles end up making an iOS version and now it's coming through your iOS device? Maybe there is a way for them to make Money. When the iOS version is available, you can buy it.
Paul Thurrott
I actually wonder if the future of Call of Duty isn't the mobile version. And in the same way that you can play against PC and PlayStation, maybe.
Richard Campbell
This first story here about Xbox on mobile is a setup. It's a setup you're preparing the landscape for being able to facilitate those games.
Paul Thurrott
There's definitely something going on. That's the thing.
Richard Campbell
It's bizarre to me that everybody's on board for.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So we'll See, we'll see what comes out of this. I think there's. Yeah. Something's going on that's kind of interesting. The latest Doom game is coming out in mid May, so actually about a month from now.
Richard Campbell
Sorry, why is there a new Doom game?
Paul Thurrott
Why? Because they have to complete the trilogy. I don't know. The new games are okay.
Richard Campbell
New Half Life two game and then the world really has gone insane.
Paul Thurrott
Well, I. I mean the new Doom games are modern and different and whatever, but this one looks like it's more of a back to basics type thing from a playability perspective, which honestly I think is pretty smart. Yeah. But Microsoft is coming out with some Dune or like themed console and then some controllers. So if you're really into Doom and want everything to look like that, I.
Richard Campbell
Know someone who will buy this.
Paul Thurrott
I think we all know someone who will buy it. Yeah.
Richard Campbell
Yes.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Interesting. So that's kind of cool. And then. Is there more? There's more, right? Yep. See at the. Oh, if you're not comfortable with Xbox exclusive games going to the consoles, you might want to block yours. Sea of Thieves is going to Battle. Net, which is Blizzard, which is part of Activision, which is part of Microsoft. So it's not that bad, I guess. But Battle.net is that console or just PC? I think it's probably just PC. Right. Battle.net? i'm not really sure. I think so. And then I've looked at my own. I'm like. And then Meta will start training. It's like. No, that doesn't seem right. And then Sony is raising the price of their consoles and a lot of places all over Europe, Australia and New Zealand, probably because of the tariffs. Right. I think we just blame everything on that now, obviously.
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott
So if you hadn't bought one by now, good luck. It's going to get more expensive.
Richard Campbell
I don't understand why it's only in certain locales though.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. I don't know why they're actually.
Leo Laporte
It might have to do with tariffs.
Paul Thurrott
Maybe you might actually have to do a tariffs because they're the processors and the chipsets, the graphics are all from amd, right? Yes. Which is US based.
Richard Campbell
You're not. Okay. So they're buying the parts from the us I don't know that be the tariffs.
Leo Laporte
So it's Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Richard Campbell
Yeah. This makes no sense. You're talking about a Japanese company.
Leo Laporte
They don't have tariffs with Japan, presumably.
Paul Thurrott
I love. It's like a Japanese company selling a product that. Yes. Is made with Some American company components, but also a lot of other components.
Richard Campbell
And the American components in countries that.
Paul Thurrott
Are not the United States.
Richard Campbell
States, yes. Yeah. When the United States puts on tariffs, it's for their imports, not their exports. So why are we raising prices again?
Paul Thurrott
Well, like the Trump administration, you obviously don't understand how trade deficits work, so let me explain it. No, just like a friend of mine, ex Microsoft guy, I think, on Facebook, said something like. Yeah. He said. Yeah. So I went and I bought a bagel. So now I have a $5 trade deficit with the bagel shop. So I'm going to have reciprocal tariffs. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Make them pay.
Paul Thurrott
Now they owe me 1845. That's how trade tariffs work.
Richard Campbell
So.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott
Smart.
Richard Campbell
It's going to be fine. Everything's fine.
Paul Thurrott
Everything's fine.
Leo Laporte
Everything's fine. That's Canadian, Richard. That's good. I like it.
Paul Thurrott
That's why you don't get it.
Richard Campbell
Playoffs. Everything's fine.
Leo Laporte
The Oilers, are they going? Are they on their way?
Richard Campbell
The Oilers are going. Yes.
Leo Laporte
Yes.
Richard Campbell
Bloody McDavid. But look. And the Canucks are not in, so I pretty much enforce for the Oilers because I am not cheering for the Leafs.
Leo Laporte
Never.
Paul Thurrott
I'm pretty sure you've just described different kinds of sushi. I don't even know what you're talking about anymore. Canuck.
Leo Laporte
When I was a kid, I had one.
Paul Thurrott
Is that like a kind of oyster? What is that?
Leo Laporte
Those hockey games where you had sticks and they were attached to a player and you'd spin the stick and the player.
Paul Thurrott
Oh, yeah, of course.
Leo Laporte
Then you hit the puck. I loved that game.
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
Leo Laporte
And it was always the Maple Leafs versus the Canadiens.
Richard Campbell
Yes, of course.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. I've only saw, like, the soccer version was, like, the way you spin the players around and. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Foosball. Yeah. This was great. It was a really fun hockey game.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Really enjoyed that.
Paul Thurrott
Air hockey. The air hockey game, though, was good, too. The way that would actually hover above the table a little bit. Like, you know, like, that's. That's pretty.
Leo Laporte
It took a little more energy, though, than this one.
Paul Thurrott
Plus, you could hit right in the forehead with that thing if you did it right. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
It was fun, though. If you really spun the player fast, you could hit the puck out of the. Out of the. Into the wall.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, of course. That could have been my skull.
Leo Laporte
Hey, it's time for me to say a little something. Something about our great club, Club Twit. We want you to join. Club Twit. Seven bucks a month. And now we've added the $84 a year plan. Why should you join those legitimate? I mean, if I'm asking for your money, here's why. The primary reason is even though we have ads, they are not sufficient to pay for everything. So we have to make up the gap. And that's why we created the club two years ago and that's why we continue to do the club. And it's been great. We have had to cut back. You know, you notice we might have shut down the studio and laid off people and things like that, but we, but we're doing our part to, you know, tighten our belt. And thanks to our club Twit members we're able to keep, at least keep doing these shows. I hope you appreciate them, I hope you like them. If you join the club, you get ad free versions of all the shows. I hate it when somebody charges you for something and then still plays an ad. So you don't get the ads. You don't even get this, you know, solicitation. You just get the shows pure and simple. You get a custom URL just for you with the ad free versions of the shows. You also get access to the club Twit Discord. A great hang. It's kind of my favorite social network now because they're smart people. You know, it's kind of a self selecting crowd of smart interest. People who right now are doing mostly just playing foosball it looks like in the club. But it is a great place to hang out. There's also special events that we do. I mentioned we're going to be doing keynotes from now on in the club like wwc, dc, build, Google, I O. We also have Micah's crafting corner that's coming up. We do that every month. Micah, I think he's building Lego succulents right now. But you don't have to be doing Lego. You could do any craft. Join Micah tonight. Six pieces p.m. pacific, 9pm Eastern for just a chill hang. Friday, it's coffee time. YouTube coffee star Liz Happy Beans joins coffee geek Mark Prince and me to Talk Coffee at 1pm Pacific on Friday. Again, these are all club exclusives. The AI user group on the fourth Friday of every month we talk about how we use AI hands on tech. Stacy's book club is coming up next month. The WWDC keynote. We'll add the other keynotes into that. So that's all special stuff for club members only, which I love. I love. But the biggest reason to join the club is for the animated gifts. No, the biggest reason to join the club is because you will get the warm and fuzzy feeling that you're helping create these shows, put them on the air and we really appreciate it. Now I should say we did bring back the annual annual fee and we are right now in the process probably. I think we're going to ask for a little more in the club starting soon because costs are going up. But what we're going to do is guarantee that if you subscribe now that this price stays so you won't get an increase if you're already a member. New members only. Okay, new and returning members. So don't give up your club membership. And if you're not a member, sign up now to get to lock in that $7 a month. I think it's a very, very reasonable amount. You get an awful lot, I believe. We hope you do too. Twit TV Club Twit. Now back to the program already in progress. We start the back of the book portion of the program with Paul Thorots Tip of the Week Paul Imagine you're.
Paul Thurrott
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Mikey
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Leo Laporte
Oh, you're muted. Did I mute you? No, you muted?
Paul Thurrott
Nope, I did it self CENSORING here. Last week I wrote these back to back articles about kind of of like I didn't. It wasn't really meant to be a theme, but it was kind of like this notion of alternatives to these big tech, you know, monolithic platforms, you know, yada, yada, yada. And I wrote this thing that I wrote, whatever. And I was like, okay. And then I. It triggered this memory and ended up writing a second one. And in the early 2000s when I was working at Windows IT Pro, I think a lot of Microsoft guys who were involved in it kind of fell into this trap a little bit. Especially back then where you started thinking like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna manage my home. Like I like it's the workplace. I'm gonna have like a managed environment, maybe active directory if it was that long ago or you know, intune, maybe if it's more recently or something. And I'm gonna, you know, my family is all gonna sign in with these like accounts and blah, blah, blah. And they try to do that. You know, you try to. You go through this, right? And so I went through various premium.
Richard Campbell
This is what I did, kid. My children came to me saying, apparently I need to speak to my administrator.
Paul Thurrott
Right? Yep. So, you know, like, okay. And I. And look, if you think about the history of this stuff, like in the early, very early 1980s, VisiCalc drove Apple to sales into businesses, right? Where this thing was personal computing. And then the success of Windows and office in the 90s, I think kind of turned it in the other direction where people wanted to get these computers at home and so they could run some of the same software they had at work. I remember my wife owned a PS1 like IBM, those little crappy computers they sold at Sears. And so she could have WordPerfect, right. Which is what she was using at work, like DOS version of WordPerfect. And you know, we've been doing this ever since then, like, you know, and look, as we call it in certification now. But one form of insertification that we certainly get from Microsoft is they made a switch. I'd have to think about the exact. I think it was Office 2000 where they were targeting businesses, not individuals by this point. So it kind of went from enthusiasts to mainstream individuals and features, features, features and then businesses and then enterprises. And so, you know, when Microsoft does this stuff in Office or Windows where they're pointing you in certain directions. Yes, that's terrible in all kinds of little. But a lot of it has to do with this kind of centralized control or whatever. Over users, which as an individual, it's like. I don't know, it's weird to me. Apple didn't.
Richard Campbell
You didn't even mention Windows Home Server. Like that was a good couple.
Paul Thurrott
No, that was. Well, I could go through the whole lineage there. I had an active server domain with literal Windows Server whatever, Vert Standard edition probably. I did small business server sometimes with multiple machines. I had Rack mounted stuff. I did Centro, which was the. The medium business server. I can't remember what they should. Under what name that was enhanced.
Richard Campbell
The ebc.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah. And you know, and of course all the home server permutations, including the stuff that came afterwards, which was essentials, like home Windows Server Essentials, I think was the name of it, maybe at some point or whatever those things were. I went through every version of this. Every version. But you know, the thing is we've always had alternatives. You know, you could have bought a Mac at any time in this thing. You could. There's a whole ecosystem there, obviously. But I feel like right now we're in this golden age of these solutions. Right. And I don't think we talked about this last week, but when you look at stuff like Notion. Right. So Notion just came out with Notion Mill, which is actually my app. Pick in a minute. Proton has that whole suite of stuff. Slack, you know, whatever. You know, you can kind of mix and match now. Alternate web browsers is something that comes up all the time. Opera just updated their browsers.
Richard Campbell
On the contrary, hardware for a home server now is a synology or.
Paul Thurrott
Exactly. And that's by the way, that was my end game. Well, it will be my end game. I went to a WD nas, which is basically unmanaged. Really. But the next thing I do will be a synology. NAS for sure. Yeah, of course. And it's simpler and it does what you want. And I would call that more of a prosumer product than like a business product. Right. Like a, you know, Microsoft looks at things from a certain way, you know, and anyway, the theme there is just like, you're not an enterprise. So like, why are you acting like one? Like, like why.
Richard Campbell
You know, why are you doing this to yourself? Yeah, So I only did it when I was down to just managing she who Must be Obeyed. And listen, that's a failure path. Stop. Oh my God. It's not going to work out for you.
Paul Thurrott
No, same. I. Yeah, I never fully pulled the trigger on this. I think I. It was an understanding. Like I did. I had this thing and it was. And I Had different things running for many, many years. And for a lot of it, it was really just for me, me, which was stupid, but it's just too much. You know how it is. Like your wife walks in your room and you're like. And she's like, I can't print or I can't. You know, like, you just, you don't want to have these conversations. You know, it's like, I just want to get life. I want to get. I have to get going.
Richard Campbell
Get rid of the network printer. What are you doing? Like, you need a scanner. Here's a USB one. Plug it in, it's yours. I don't want to know about it.
Paul Thurrott
Exactly. Same. Yeah. No, right. So at home in Pennsylvania. That's right, same. She has all this stuff upstairs. I don't even know what it is.
Richard Campbell
I don't even care if I need to print something. I never do. I walk up with a USB key to her machine.
Paul Thurrott
Oh, I just email it.
Richard Campbell
But yep, life is too short.
Paul Thurrott
Exactly.
Richard Campbell
It's just too short.
Paul Thurrott
It's just not worth it. So. And on that note, so Notion Mail just came out. So they've been working on this for a while. They bought a company. They Notion Calendar now. Love Notion. I think I just asked this last week or the week before, when is Notion going to start charging me? And this is the answer because Notion mail requires Notion AI to do anything thing. It's a front end for Gmail only. I think it's. They don't say this, but I think it might always only be a front end for Gmail. It's AI powered, so it does all kinds of cool views and stuff. But if you want to do your own customizations to it, you have to pay for Notion AI. I'm not going to, but it's interesting. I don't really. You. I mean, this is the. Notion A is not something you pay for to use in mail. It's something you pay for to use across Notion. Right. So Notion is the app, but it's also with Calendar and now Mail. So they're starting to build this little suite. You know, it's interesting to me that they don't have their own email service. Right. They're going to just use Gmail. Gmail's free. I mean, you know, it's hard to argue with, but you would have to pay for Notion AI for this to make any sense. And you know, if you use Notion.
Richard Campbell
As much, still aren't doing. And it confuses me.
Paul Thurrott
It confuses me too. I feel like at some Point. I'm going to try to add a page or a note or whatever they call it. They're going to be like, oh, you hit the limit. You have 1 million notes and you have to pay. You go over a million, you got to pay. It boggles my mind that this.
Richard Campbell
I don't know why they haven't pinged you and said, here's a free license. Tell us how to just remind everyone how awesome we are.
Paul Thurrott
There you go. Well, that would be another. I would be okay with that too, but I just. I don't know. I guess at some point if I end up paying for Notion and this Notion AI is part of that thing, I'm paying for it and thus it makes Notion Mail makes sense. I guess I would look at it, but for now they have a web client and a Mac client. They will have an iOS client soon. They've never said anything about Windows or Mac. I can tell you the web app is installable. It's a pwa. So you can have a sort of app, but you're not going to get that offline. Whatever experience, obviously. Well, maybe not obviously. I shouldn't say that. I'm actually not even sure. Maybe you can. I don't know. It's certainly a possibility, but I don't know. I think just only working with Gmail is a little self limiting. But maybe that was smart on their part. I'm not really sure. Something to look at anyway. Especially if you use Gmail.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. My frustration is I signed up to Notion Mail with a non Gmail account and it won't let me use that. I have to. It says, well then you have to be signed in with your Gmail account. And you can't combine them. No. Oh God, very frustrating.
Paul Thurrott
That's not good.
Leo Laporte
No, it's not. I'd like to try it.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. You can't have two. You can't have two accounts signed into the Notion app, can you? I bet you can't.
Leo Laporte
No, I can't figure it out. Every time I try to do it, it says no, no, you have to be using your Gmail account.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. This is a hard computer science problem.
Leo Laporte
It's fine. I didn't really want Notion Mail, so I'm okay.
Paul Thurrott
But how would you would you know?
Leo Laporte
I don't know. That's the thing. I want to see what the AI integrations do and all that stuff. And I pay for Notion.
Paul Thurrott
Notion has a good vibe to it. Kind of a minimalist kind of look. You know, I've been trying.
Leo Laporte
I set up a Local wiki that I'm serving from the house and I'm trying to move everything over to that.
Paul Thurrott
But it's a local wiki. What do you.
Leo Laporte
Well, I mean it's also on the net.
Paul Thurrott
No, I know, but you're hosting it yourself.
Leo Laporte
You mean I'm self hosted wiki.
Paul Thurrott
So what's the software? What's.
Leo Laporte
I can't. I can't remember. It's a. I'll tell you in a sec. I mean it's the.
Paul Thurrott
What's the. Is this on Linux or like.
Leo Laporte
It's on Linux. I have a little server and it's running in the background and I have a. You are a domain. I guess you could go there. Laporte wiki. And then you would see my wiki but you wouldn't be able to use it because you have to have a long.
Paul Thurrott
Right.
Richard Campbell
There you go.
Leo Laporte
But the theory is I should be able to replace pretty much everything I do with notion with my own self hosted stuff.
Paul Thurrott
Yep. Yep. And there's probably all kinds of. I know. Notion. That's the thing that they created.
Leo Laporte
Something bugs me.
Paul Thurrott
It's very sticky.
Leo Laporte
It's sticky, but it bugs me because all the data is on their server. It's not.
Paul Thurrott
Which is part of the quest. Right. So whether it's Obsidian or. There's a bunch of these. Any type. I think is one. There's a bunch.
Leo Laporte
But yeah, no, I. You know, I started moving stuff over. It's just. I have a lot to move. I have a lot of notion. There's a lot in notion. I've been using it.
Paul Thurrott
It's like trying to move between music services. If you made a couple of playlists, you're screwed, man.
Leo Laporte
You know, they're tools to do it, but it's ends up being a pain in the butt.
Richard Campbell
Nothing.
Paul Thurrott
No, but the tools stink. Like they're just. It's so many mistakes every time. It's really. It's bad.
Leo Laporte
Here's my laporte family wiki with us.
Paul Thurrott
There you go. Yeah.
Leo Laporte
That's how I.
Paul Thurrott
It's a mirror. Oh my God. Oh no. Okay.
Leo Laporte
That's how I know it's mine. But yeah, I for. I forgot my password. So I can't remember what I. I can't remember what software I use is. It's some. Some. You know, it's. I think it's a docker. It's a Docker container running it.
Richard Campbell
Yeah. I always have to leave notes for myself of how to fix a Docker thing.
Leo Laporte
I know.
Richard Campbell
Because I'll never remember. I Never remember.
Leo Laporte
It's easy to set up. I mean, that's the beauty of it. It's really easy to set up as.
Richard Campbell
Soon as anything goes wrong.
Leo Laporte
If anything goes wrong, you don't know what you did. Yeah.
Richard Campbell
Yeah. And I always figure it out and get it working again. And I just have to write a note to myself and read it there. It's like, hey, dummy, read this.
Leo Laporte
Oops, I got the wrong two factor. I'm hoping, like, somewhere I'll see what. What it is. Yeah, I got it. Go back. That page does not exist.
Richard Campbell
Nice.
Leo Laporte
What? That page exists. All right. Anyway, anywho, I think it's time for Richard to run his radio. Sorry to bog down the show with my stupid wiki. Go ahead.
Richard Campbell
Tech support problems. I did a show with my friend Barbara Forbes. Been on before.
Leo Laporte
Wiki js. Sorry, it just said it. Wiki js, Which Barbara Forbes. Tell me about. Tell me more.
Richard Campbell
Well, it's from a talk she did called how not to hate PowerShell, which I thought was hilarious. So don't use it. No.
Paul Thurrott
PowerShell is awesome. No, I'm.
Richard Campbell
PowerShell is great.
Leo Laporte
Why would you hate it?
Richard Campbell
Well, here's how you do this. And one of the things it's pointed to is how sophisticated organizations are getting with PowerShell. What's happening is that senior people are building more and more sophisticated PowerShell scripts to the point where nobody can maintain them. They're just too complicated. There's too many moving parts. And so you get in a situation where the juniors try to do something, they get into trouble, the senior has to bail them out, and eventually it's like, don't touch it. Just leave it alone. Which is exactly the same track we get into in traditional software development all the time.
Leo Laporte
Right.
Richard Campbell
And so we fight against that with good documentation, practices, simplification, like keeping stuff organized so that other people can maintain it. And that's just not a thing that administrators necessarily think about. So it's just become this odd reality that PowerShell's now at a point where they're having the same problems that software developers have. And where.
Leo Laporte
Because this software, it is software, right?
Richard Campbell
Right. Yeah. And so just the other one we got into was, you know, they're getting good enough with the tool, they're starting to do really challenging things, and often trying to get to that 100% perfect solution that is incredibly complex, where the 80% solution was simple to maintain, easy to understand, and the 20% you have to do by hand is not that much work. So why do you care? Right. So it was just trying to strike that balance. Sort of, what's a reasonable thing to do with these scripts? And how do you make it so that the team can take care of it? And so as much as it was sort of a gag going in, it turned into a really solid conversation about being responsible inside your organization.
Leo Laporte
I like it. I might have to listen to that one.
Richard Campbell
It's a keeper. I really enjoyed it. And it's like one of one of those things where we just run around. It's like, wait, this is actually important and profound.
Leo Laporte
How did that happen for all programmers? And I mean, this applies to. To all tools, really.
Richard Campbell
Without a doubt. Again, we get into this problem every time, right?
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Runasradio.com for the latest Runaz episode 980 I am excited about this Whiskey of the week.
Richard Campbell
Yes, yes, yes, yes. We'll call this the MVP series. Right? Because these are all the whiskies that I got while I was at the MVP summit.
Leo Laporte
Somebody brought you something. Nice.
Richard Campbell
This looks like this is from fellow MVP John White from Hawaii. Hawaii. And it's called the 12th Hawaii Distillers Distiller Reserve. And so a little bit about Hawaii. We should probably do this. So this, if you didn't keep, weren't keeping track. There's 137 islands in the Hawaiian chain.
Leo Laporte
What?
Richard Campbell
Wow. It's more than you think. Most of them, of course, uninhabited. There are eight main islands. And really we're just going to talk about one, the big one, Hawaii itself. It is.
Leo Laporte
Which is not where Honolulu is or any of the big city stuff. That's Oahu.
Richard Campbell
Yeah, that's Oahu. This is Hawaii proper, which is the third largest Polynesian island. Which begs the question, what are the first two? The first two are the north and south islands of New Zealand. They're all considered Polynesian islands.
Leo Laporte
And is that where all of the Polynesian diaspora came from originally was New Zealand, do you think?
Richard Campbell
No, no. The Polynesians got to Hawaii before they got to New Zealand or became the mountain Maori. Oh, there's pretty clear evidence that the Polynesians arrived in the Hawaiian islands in the 1100s and didn't get to New Zealand until the 1300s.
Leo Laporte
Oh, interesting.
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
They were a seafaring tribe, though.
Richard Campbell
They were. And they traveled absolutely everywhere. There's an argument that they made it all the way to South America and the genetics seemed to support that.
Paul Thurrott
Wow.
Leo Laporte
Do they know where they originated?
Richard Campbell
The Polynesian island, the original Polynesian islands are adjacent to the Philippine Sea and that that area in Indonesia all of those smaller islands.
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's very cool.
Richard Campbell
It's amazing and extraordinary. People navigating with. With simple products. They had the chicken, they brought the.
Leo Laporte
Chicken with them, they brought the chicken.
Richard Campbell
With them, they spread the chicken around. And one argued that they also were the reason the pineapple propagated as far as it has. But that's getting into really old history. The big Hawaiian island is not heavily populated because it has massive volcanoes on it, including. Including Kilauea, which has been erupting since 1983. And you. You go to watch that volcano do its thing. Mauna Loa, which is the largest volcano on Earth, is actually the largest mountain on earth. If you measure from the sea floor to its top, it's bigger than Everest. And it's more than half of the total Hawaiian island of Hawaii itself. Supposedly the island is named for the. The legendary Polynesian navigator creator Hawaii Aloa, who supposedly discovered the island I mentioned in the 1100s. And it was run as a kingdom more or less for centuries. The first Europeans to arrive was likely James cook in the 1700s, who also died there in an altercation with the natives. Although ultimately the crew was able to settle things up and leave successfully. And then of course, in 1898, it was annexed by the United States as a territory Hawaii. And in 1959 became the 50th state state. So while it's the biggest island by a long way, it's more than 60% of the total mass of all of the islands combined. Only about 13%, about 200,000 people live on that island, really in two main population centers. Hilo in the east, which is the state, the island capital, and sort of the rainy part of the island. And then on the west is Kalawa Kona on the slopes of one of the volcanoes. And that is where the distillery is. Is. So the 12th Hawaiian distiller is called that because it is the 12th distillery built on the Hawaiian Islands. First one on Kona since the 1950s.
Leo Laporte
You don't think of whiskey in Hawaii.
Richard Campbell
No, nor should you. And we can debate whether this is whiskey at all. Oh, so Dave Puckett created it. He was actually comes from a family of distillers, but didn't want to be a distiller. He actually worked in construction his whole life, living a big chunk of it in Hawaii. Hawaii. And as he was getting close to retirement age, started experimenting with distillation in the early 2000 and tens.
Leo Laporte
Oh, it's brand new.
Richard Campbell
Yeah. And. And only set up the shop licensed in 2017. Oh now is this whiskey, it sure looks like whiskey, doesn't it? Except that it is honey.
Leo Laporte
What it's really mead.
Richard Campbell
This is mead. Exactly. This is distilled mead. So really what they would call, call honey shine.
Leo Laporte
Ah.
Richard Campbell
So arguably we are talking about the very original, original alcohol. Because if you take honey and you heat it up to a certain amount, not particularly hot, maybe 120 degrees or so with a lot of water. Typically you want to mix five to one water. That helps break down the honey and be and suspend the sugars properly so that it can can be digested by yeast. But you have to cool it down a bit and give it 120. It would kill the yeast off. You need to be about 9590 and the yeast will propagate and ferment. Because in the end all of these alcohols are made by a yeast consuming sugar. The question is what is the sugar source? In this case, honey is one of the original sugar sources. So there's evidence now that going in that of evidence of, of a naturally occurring alcohol by water and honey being combined with yeast going back 20,000 years.
Leo Laporte
Wow.
Richard Campbell
Before agriculture, before even pottery, we had some forms of alcohol in this way. There are documents from China from 7,000 BC showing making a form of mead out of honey and water and rice. And of course Pliny the Elder wrote about his preferred drink being a form of mead in ancient Greece. Greece and played a big role in early England as well, particularly around in Wales. In fact, when you research mead for a little while, you find out there's over a hundred names for a honey beer, a mead type thing, because so many cultures developed it themselves in so many ways. I'm kind of surprised.
Leo Laporte
I mean Hawaii is known for sugar cane.
Richard Campbell
It is now. But you know, it also had its own set of peasants and so had a lot of honey available to it. Which begs the question, why isn't mead and honey related liquors more popular than they are today? And there's a pretty simple reason for it. Because the sugar cane and grains are cheaper and easier to grow. Honey is an inconsistent product. In the end, it's bee vomit. And bees are fairly difficult to manage. They don't produce when you want them to produce. They only make some much they can abruptly die and their product is inconsistent. So making a consistent product from honey is very challenging. And so it as soon as we had simpler ways to do it, we did. And so that's why you just don't see a whole lot of it around. That being said, this is what 12th Hawaii does and actually they make a set of products. So there are sort of root product is true Honey Shine, which is a honey ferment made with yeast that's passed four times through there still, which is a kind of column still. And that's it. It's not that particular sweet, but it is a 50% alcohol. It's a moonshine essentially, but it's called Honey Shine. You take that same product made that same way and you combine it with a bit of Kona coffee. So domestically grown coffee. And you get their Kona coffee spirit.
Leo Laporte
Oh, now I'm. Now I'm interested. That sounds good.
Richard Campbell
And then they vodka. So their vodka is again the same approach, but a seven time distilled. So a much higher alcohol combined with a local purple potato, which is some of the original Peruvian type potatoes to make a distinctive vodka. And then the fourth product is this distiller's reserve. So back to the Honey Shine. But when they were making it, they switched to a whiskey yeast which has a bit of a stronger flavor. And then what really made it whiskey ish is they age it in Kawaii wood, which is a dimension domestic wood of Hawaii. Actually. No, it's an invasive wood. It's originally from South America.
Leo Laporte
Most of the stuff on Hawaii I found out is invasive. It's not native.
Richard Campbell
It's pretty invasive. And so it was brought from South America in the 19th century. It's pretty much adapted to Hawaii. They're not trying to eliminate anymore. But it's not an oak. It's actually a cousin of mesquite.
Leo Laporte
Huh. Doesn't give a mesquite.
Richard Campbell
Kawaii wood is very popular as a smoking wood.
Leo Laporte
Right.
Richard Campbell
But if you get the bigger trees, you can cut barrels from it. And that's what they're doing at the 12th Hawaiian Distillers Reserve is they're making domestic barrels which they toast very much the same style as a bourbon barrel and then do aging with it.
Leo Laporte
So they make a Honey Shine, which is clear is the only difference between the Honey Shine and the whiskey, the barrels.
Richard Campbell
And they use a different yeast.
Leo Laporte
Otherwise a whiskey yeast.
Richard Campbell
Yeah. So different yeast. Yeast.
Leo Laporte
And does that give it a different character, the yeast?
Richard Campbell
It plays a role.
Paul Thurrott
Right.
Richard Campbell
Remember. But remember, generally if the sugars are all digested, which typically they are, by the bacteria, you don't have a lot of sweetness there. In fact, often in traditional meads, they'll add additional honey after the fast.
Leo Laporte
It doesn't taste like honey. Yeah, there's no sweetness left there.
Richard Campbell
Now this having a taste of this. So it smells like bourbon. It's sweet, right? You would swear it's corn. It's got that same kind of sweet sweetness, and it is 45% alcohol, but really no burn on the mouth at all. It still smells sweet and tasty. There's a little spice to it. That's gotta be wood. And it's a different kind of. It's not the oak wood. Yeah. It's got that kind of interesting wood flavor to it. It heats up as it goes down. So you've definitely drank something. Again, at 45%, it's not incredibly high, but. But this is really cool. This is a neat drink. There's two problems with it. The first is it's 85 bucks.
Paul Thurrott
Oh.
Richard Campbell
The second is it is available nowhere outside of the Hawaiian island.
Leo Laporte
Awesome. You've got to go or go to the MVP summit.
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
Richard Campbell
To get a bottle of this. So this is the bottle I've got that John brought back for me. And thank you so much, John. I'm really delighted with. This is batch 30, and it's handwritten on the bottle, so I don't think that's a fake print. I think they just don't make that much of this. Apparently, they have an awesome tour. It's well worth going.
Leo Laporte
I want to go to the Big Island. We haven't go to the Big Island.
Richard Campbell
Go to Kona, which is where you want to go anyway.
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
Richard Campbell
Take in the nice weather. And I think you should take a little spin by. If you're lucky, you're gonna bump into the distiller there and.
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah.
Richard Campbell
See Dave. And then go home with a bottle of Distillers Reserve. You'll not be disappointed. And the fun I would have with this. My intent with this is to feed it to my whiskey knowledgeable friends, because I defy you to think this is honey.
Leo Laporte
Wow. How cool is that?
Richard Campbell
Yeah. It's just so bourbony, like you can't even imagine.
Leo Laporte
Love it. That looks like a real treat.
Richard Campbell
I'm delighted. I'm delighted to try something new. To have spent time reading Mead production and just sort of dig into this oldest of the alcohols, which only makes sense because you need the sugar to produce the alcohol, and it's the original sugar.
Leo Laporte
I might want to try the coffee spirits. And I've got to try Honey Shine, because I just wonder what that tastes.
Richard Campbell
Dr. Yeah. You might want to just come home with one of each.
Paul Thurrott
Okay.
Leo Laporte
You sold me. Richard Campbell. Thank you for another great treat. Wow.
Paul Thurrott
Look at this.
Richard Campbell
I like the direction this whole thing's going where people are now bringing me things I've never heard of and I to go tell the story, be blown away.
Leo Laporte
Oh, the joys. Now if they ever make an avocado whiskey, I hope you'll let, I mean.
Richard Campbell
A lot of sugar in there.
Paul Thurrott
It's a little, it's a little bland. It's also curiously green.
Leo Laporte
Richard Campbell is@runasradio.com that's where he hangs his hat and his podcasts, including Run as Radio and dotnet Rocks with Carl Franklin. And if you're at a summit and you happen to have a bottle of something interesting, bring it to him.
Richard Campbell
I will tell its story, I promise.
Leo Laporte
Hey, Mikey.
Paul Thurrott
He likes it. He likes it.
Leo Laporte
Mikey likes.
Richard Campbell
You don't always like it's going to be not. Oh, you've heard me say terrible things about some bad whiskeys.
Leo Laporte
But sometimes it's good, even if it's bad to know.
Paul Thurrott
No, I didn't mean it like that. No, I just, I mean it would be fun for someone if you gave them something and then you actually liked it, you know?
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah. No, and this one wowed me. I have already tasted the one for next week, which is actually Tasmania.
Leo Laporte
Oh, and well, you're going to be down under, so that's when I will be down.
Richard Campbell
So the timing is impeccable. I did this deliberately, but I might bump it out too if I find something while I'm in Sydney. But we'll see what happens. But it was a, it was a punch in the face.
Leo Laporte
That's what I'll tell you, Mr. Campbell. Have a safe trip. Enjoy that long flight to New Zealand.
Richard Campbell
I got upgraded already, so I'm lucky to.
Leo Laporte
Are you on Qantas or.
Richard Campbell
No, no, United.
Leo Laporte
United. Okay.
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
Leo Laporte
Well, have a safe trip. We'll talk to you next week in Sydney. In Sydney, Paul Thurat. He is@thurat.com that's where he hangs his hat. His books are@leanpub.com and that includes the Field Guide to Windows 11, of course, Windows Everywhere. Together they make the dynamic duo that hosts Windows Weekly. We do it every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch it on those eight different streams or better yet, just get a copy of it after the Fact@Twitter TV WW. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player get automatically. There's even a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. It's a great way to share stuff little clips of the show and help.
Paul Thurrott
Us stuff the word. Time to figure out. Sounds like an illicit drug thing, but it's nice.
Leo Laporte
Share your stuff.
Paul Thurrott
Whatever you want to share.
Leo Laporte
Share your kit. Paul and Richard, have a wonderful week.
Paul Thurrott
You too.
Richard Campbell
Thank you.
Leo Laporte
And we'll be back here next Wednesday, all you winners and dozers for Windows Weekly. Bye Bye.
Mikey
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Windows Weekly (Episode 928: The Rice is Done - Edge 134's Speed, Reboot Chime, Altera)
Release Date: April 16, 2025
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell
In Episode 928 of Windows Weekly, hosts Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell explore a variety of topics centered around Microsoft's latest developments, Windows 11 features, AI integrations, and more. The episode is rich with insights, discussions, and notable quotes, providing listeners with a comprehensive overview of Microsoft's evolving ecosystem.
Overview:
Paul Thurrott discusses the progress of his Windows 11 feature tracker, a tool designed to monitor and report on the latest updates and features being rolled out to users.
Key Points:
Notable Quote:
Paul Thurrott [02:47]: "Preview versions of Recall and Click-to-Do are coming to stable on Copilot PCs."
Overview:
The trio delves into the integration of AI within Windows 11, focusing on features like Copilot and semantic search that aim to streamline user interactions and enhance productivity.
Key Points:
Notable Quotes:
Paul Thurrott [07:31]: "Semantic search is local AI-powered, which is interesting. It’s Copilot plus PC specific, limiting its rollout nicely."
Richard Campbell [10:15]: "You don't need to find things you wanted to snip and extract for you."
Paul Thurrott [11:01]: "AI integrations need to happen at the platform level for seamless control across applications."
Overview:
Discussion on the latest performance improvements in Microsoft Edge, emphasizing the shift to the Chromium engine and subsequent optimizations.
Key Points:
Notable Quotes:
Paul Thurrott [17:05]: "The latest version of Edge should have about a 9% faster web rendering speed, which is notable in 2025 terms."
Richard Campbell [17:47]: "Are you willing to wait for the edge updates as they roll out automatically?"
Overview:
Microsoft announces the end of life for the Surface Hub, a device designed for enterprise collaboration and meetings.
Key Points:
Notable Quotes:
Paul Thurrott [34:35]: "The Surface Hub is being discontinued after ten years, reflecting changes in work environments post-pandemic."
Richard Campbell [35:12]: "The pandemic got everyone a camera rig and experience with sharing software, reducing the need for devices like the Surface Hub."
Overview:
A segment highlighting Microsoft's inclusion in the National Recording Registry with iconic sounds and soundtracks.
Key Points:
Notable Quotes:
Paul Thurrott [20:38]: "The Windows reboot chime from Windows 95 and the Minecraft soundtrack have both been inducted into the National Recording Registry."
Overview:
Paul Thurrott reminisces about early HoloLens demonstrations, particularly those integrating Minecraft to showcase mixed reality capabilities.
Key Points:
Notable Quotes:
Paul Thurrott [24:06]: "The best HoloLens demo I ever saw was Minecraft integrated into the room, creating an immersive experience."
Overview:
The discussion shifts to the broader implications of AI within Microsoft's ecosystem, emphasizing the need for cohesive integration across platforms and services.
Key Points:
Notable Quotes:
Paul Thurrott [11:07]: "AI orchestrations need to happen at the platform level for seamless control across applications."
Richard Campbell [12:31]: "We need programmability and automation to make AI integrations truly effective."
Overview:
Paul Thurrott praises Adobe's proactive approach to integrating AI within its suite of products, ensuring legality and originality in AI-generated content.
Key Points:
Notable Quotes:
Paul Thurrott [79:12]: "Adobe has integrated AI into tools like Photoshop and Premiere Pro smartly, ensuring their models are trained on licensed content, which protects users from potential copyright issues."
Overview:
The hosts discuss Microsoft's advancements in the Xbox ecosystem, particularly the introduction of the Xbox app on mobile platforms and enhancements in cloud gaming.
Key Points:
Notable Quotes:
Paul Thurrott [96:35]: "The Xbox app on mobile now allows users to purchase and stream games without the typical app store fees, which is a major victory for gamers."
Leo Laporte [99:39]: "The seamless streaming across devices like Smart TVs and VR headsets enhances the flexibility and reach of Xbox's gaming ecosystem."
The episode concludes with personal anecdotes and discussions unrelated to the main topics, such as experiences with rice cookers and travel stories. The hosts reiterate the upcoming features and updates to watch for, ensuring listeners stay informed about future developments in the Microsoft ecosystem.
Notable Quote:
Leo Laporte [141:37]: "You are watching the fabulous Windows Weekly... Join the club for ad-free versions and access to exclusive content."
Summary:
Episode 928 of Windows Weekly offers an in-depth exploration of Microsoft's latest endeavors, from enhancing Windows 11 with AI-powered features to advancing the Xbox ecosystem through mobile integrations and cloud gaming. The hosts effectively balance technical insights with engaging discussions, providing listeners with a thorough understanding of the evolving landscape of Windows and Microsoft's broader technological innovations.