WW 936: Liquid Aero - Microsoft Build ditches Seattle, Washington

Summary

Windows Weekly (Episode 936: Liquid Aero - Microsoft Build Ditches Seattle, Washington)
Date: June 11, 2025
Hosts: Paul Thurrott, Leo Laporte
Guest: Richard Campbell (Joining from Stockholm, Sweden)

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1. Introduction & Guest Update

Paul Thurrott opens the episode by welcoming listeners to "Windows Weekly," introducing veteran Microsoft insider Richard Campbell from Sweden. The trio plans to discuss recent patches from Patch Tuesday, reflections on the concluding developer conference season, and delve into Microsoft's new UI feature, Liquid Aero.

Notable Quote:
Paul Thurrott [00:00]: "Coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust."

2. Richard Campbell’s Safari Experience

Richard Campbell shares his recent experience on a game drive, describing it as a blend between a traditional safari and a controlled game reserve. He highlights the well-maintained environment where animals appear content and natural despite being in a fenced area.

Notable Quote:
Richard Campbell [03:04]: "In between is this thing called a game drive."

3. Patch Tuesday Highlights

The hosts transition to discussing the latest Patch Tuesday updates released on June 10, 2025. Paul Thurrott summarizes significant patches, particularly focusing on Windows 11's 24H2 update, which introduces several new features aimed at enhancing user experience and integrating AI functionalities more deeply into the OS.

Key Updates Discussed:

• Drag Tray Area Enhancements: Improved file dragging interface.
• Copilot Integration: Reintroduction of the Windows key + C shortcut for Copilot.
• Taskbar Tweaks: Visual indicators for running apps and notifications.
• Share Pane Upgrades: New image resizing and editing options.

Notable Quote:
Paul Thurrott [09:43]: "Patch Tuesday, yesterday. Let's go to work. What happened?"

4. Developer Conferences Overview

The conversation shifts to the end of the developer conference season, highlighting Microsoft's Build, Google's I/O, and Apple's WWDC. Richard Campbell expresses disappointment over Microsoft deciding not to host Build in Seattle again, citing challenges related to homelessness and open drug use that disrupted previous events.

Notable Quote:
Paul Thurrott [32:06]: "It's one of the, I mean, I keep looking back on that week going, that is one of the craziest weeks."

5. Microsoft's Internal Challenges & Leadership Insights

The hosts discuss internal issues within Microsoft, including recent layoffs and employee dissatisfaction despite the company's financial success. A pivotal moment is Richard Campbell's reference to an interview with former CEO Steve Ballmer, where Ballmer reflects on his tenure and regrets not capturing the consumer market more effectively.

Notable Quote:
Steve Ballmer [53:35]: "Everything Microsoft is doing now, I started. And he said, but no one's ever going to give me credit for that."

6. AI Integration: Microsoft vs. Apple and Google

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around AI feature integrations across major tech platforms:

• Microsoft:

  • Copilot Plus PCs: Enhanced AI capabilities in Windows 11, including AI-driven features in the Photos app (Relight) and semantic natural language search.
  • Microsoft Store Updates: Incorporation of AI to improve search functionalities and user experience.

• Apple:

  • Liquid Aero: Introduction of a unified UI across all Apple devices, emphasizing consistency and aesthetic enhancements. Hosts debate its effectiveness and visual appeal, comparing it to former Microsoft UI overhauls like Aero Glass.

• Google:

  • Integration of AI across consumer services with a focus on scalability and user engagement, contrasting Microsoft's enterprise-centric approach.

Notable Quotes:
Leo Laporte [26:15]: "Does that mean the other one was Unnatural language Search?"
Richard Campbell [14:13]: "Especially for 24H2."

7. Xbox Segment: Rumors of a New Handheld Device

In an extensive segment, the hosts speculate about Microsoft's rumored handheld Xbox device, potentially developed in collaboration with Asus and powered by an AMD Z2 platform. They discuss the implications of merging PC-like flexibility with console gaming, considering factors like developer support, hardware profitability, and market reception.

Key Points Discussed:

• Hardware Specifications: AMD Z2 platform, portable design, similar to Steam Deck.
• Software Integration: Modified Windows OS optimized for gaming, compatibility with existing Xbox and PC games.
• Market Strategy: Addressing profitability challenges in hardware, leveraging Microsoft's enterprise and cloud strengths.

Notable Quote:
Leo Laporte [95:23]: "One of the things you've been talking about is the potential for a new kind of Xbox..."

8. Closing Remarks & Teasers for Future Content

Paul Thurrott and Leo Laporte conclude the episode by promoting their "Club Twit" membership, encouraging listeners to subscribe for exclusive content and community access. They tease upcoming segments, including a hands-on look at new Windows Share features and stories about unique whiskey distilleries.

Notable Quote:
Paul Thurrott [126:20]: "I think this is a good path."

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Summary of Key Insights:

• Microsoft's Strategic Shifts: Moving Build away from Seattle reflects broader challenges in managing large-scale events amidst urban issues. The continual enhancement of AI features in Windows 11 underscores Microsoft's commitment to integrating AI across its ecosystem, aiming to bolster both enterprise and consumer experiences.

• AI Competition: While Microsoft leverages its cloud and enterprise infrastructure to embed AI, Apple and Google pursue consumer-centric AI integrations. Apple's Liquid Aero, while aesthetically significant, faces scrutiny over its practical impact compared to Microsoft's utility-driven AI enhancements.

• Xbox's Future: The potential introduction of a handheld Xbox device indicates Microsoft's ongoing efforts to innovate in the gaming hardware space. Balancing hardware profitability with game revenue remains a critical challenge, with speculation pointing towards a PC-like, flexible gaming experience.

• Internal Corporate Dynamics: Despite financial success, Microsoft grapples with internal dissatisfaction and leadership reflections, particularly regarding strategic decisions that have impacted its market positioning and employee morale.

• Apple's Evolution: The introduction of Liquid Aero represents Apple's attempt to unify its diverse product line under a consistent UI framework. However, reactions are mixed, with debates on its necessity and execution compared to Microsoft's more functional AI integrations.

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Final Thoughts:

Episode 936 of "Windows Weekly" offers a comprehensive exploration of Microsoft's recent strategic changes, AI integrations, and the evolving landscape of developer conferences. The discussion underscores the complexities of balancing enterprise strengths with consumer engagement, all while navigating internal corporate dynamics. Additionally, the speculative insights into Xbox's future hardware ventures highlight Microsoft's ongoing efforts to redefine its presence in the gaming industry.

Listener Recommendation:
For those interested in the intersection of technology, corporate strategy, and AI advancements, this episode provides valuable perspectives and in-depth analysis.

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Note: This summary is intended for informational purposes and reflects the content of Episode 936 of "Windows Weekly" as transcribed above.

Transcript

[Paul Thurrott]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thoratz here. Richard Campbell is visiting from Sweden. We'll get the latest on his safari last week. We'll also find out about Patch Tuesday. It was yesterday with lots of patches. And Paul summarizes his thoughts about the developer conference season. It's coming to a close. We had Build, Google, I O and of course WWDC from Apple yesterday. Paul's thoughts on Liquid Glass, among other things. Coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Leo Laporte]

This is twit.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell. Episode 936, recorded Wednesday, June 11, 2025. Liquid Arrow. It's time for Windows Weekly. The show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft, which may make you wonder, why do you call it Windows, since Microsoft is so much more than Windows these days? Well, it's for historic reasons. And speaking of historic, here's Paul Thurrott.

[Leo Laporte]

Also, who cares about the rest of Microsoft?

[Paul Thurrott]

Thurrott.com? well, Lisa was asking me for both Mac Break Weekly and Windows Weekly, which both have had the same name for like almost 20 years.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Can we change the name to reflect.

[Leo Laporte]

This isn't kfc, Leo. We're not changing the name.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know what the problem is? Ad agencies, they see the name and.

[Richard Campbell]

They go, well, nobody cares about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Those guys.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have an enterprise show.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, that's our enterprise. Yeah. But no, it's Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. So we did an interview on Net Rocks with the Imagine cup finalists. So These are all 20 something cool kids.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So great. And they're like, you make a podcast called.netrocks, like, do you care that much about the. It's just like they're baffled.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, how old are you?

[Paul Thurrott]

Framework?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Who. Who cares? And I realized, like, the fundamental thing here is, like, it is so much easier to learn a language in a platform today than it ever has been.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. They're not attached to it.

[Richard Campbell]

Why would you attach to any framework?

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just not a thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Yes and no.

[Richard Campbell]

In some ways, Paul's not comfortable. Everybody be supportive.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, I like net.

[Paul Thurrott]

Shut up from.net rocks. A show about a framework. Richard is in Sweden. Where in Sweden are you?

[Richard Campbell]

Stock. I'm in Stockholm.

[Leo Laporte]

Proper.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sunny Stockholm, actually. You're having a heat wave today, aren't you?

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's raining. No, it's not nice, though. I got wet rushing back to get.

[Paul Thurrott]

To the show, so thank you for rushing back.

[Richard Campbell]

Did you have a. I missed you guys so much. I can't even tell you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, actually. Yeah. How was the safari?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, dude, like, okay, first off, not actually a safari. So this is the middle ground between a safari, which is a couple of weeks and you may see things, you may not, and a zoo where you see lots of animals, but they're sad, bad, Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we don't want that.

[Richard Campbell]

In between is this thing called a game drive. And so a game drive is. I am in this big resort. It's like a spa place with a pool and nice meals and all that sort of thing. And then they attach to that is like 10,000 hectares, like 20,000 acres of fenced off land.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

With all these animals on it. Now, these animals are not native to the area. They've been stocked.

[Leo Laporte]

It's Jurassic Park.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And they do.

[Leo Laporte]

They.

[Richard Campbell]

And they do game drives. But before they go out, the game drives, like the rangers go out and they just forbid food. So you kind of know where the animals are going to be.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, I got to show you these pictures. Like, I got astonishingly good pictures of everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, how cool.

[Richard Campbell]

Lions and elephants and hippos and rhinos and zebra and wildebeest and giraffes and cape buffalo and like on one hand was slightly offensive. It's like this is completely staged. On the other hand, these animals did not look sad, like they were doing their thing. No.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because they're in the wild. They don't know that it's a fenced off wild.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But they, and they, you know, but they were doing their thing and they're well fed. Like they're, they're comfortable.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can come and do the same thing. In Petaluma, we have a place called Safari west and that you can see the chickens. No, no, they actually have just like this. It's. It actually was named like one of the top glamping destinations in the us Glamping.

[Richard Campbell]

It's similar.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's as big as this. But it's similar to this where you, you stay in comfort.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then you'd get in a jeep and drive around and see the wildebeests. So not as good as what you did.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I just walk outside as a squirrel sometimes. Squirrel, similarly.

[Richard Campbell]

And you guys already know what my wildlife is around my place when I'm at home. But this, I really, I mean, I wouldn't.

[Paul Thurrott]

What's the name of it? Give it a plug.

[Richard Campbell]

The one we went to was. The one that I went to was called Aquila AQ I A Q U.

[Paul Thurrott]

I L A which is an Eagle is Latin for eagle.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Recomm by the locals, because the locals go to it. And yeah, if I go back there with my wife, I will take her there, but I won't go back on my own. Like, I've done the thing right. But I love it.

[Paul Thurrott]

On the website it says Big five Safari and Spa.

[Richard Campbell]

That's it.

[Leo Laporte]

Part of this for the man, part of it's for the woman.

[Richard Campbell]

Ladies.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Why would I want to. Oh, spa.

[Paul Thurrott]

This looks great. So what fun. How long did you spend there?

[Richard Campbell]

I had two days there and the whole two days there was the. The male lion was gnawing on a chunk of horse the entire time. Like, every time we went by, he was still there gnawing on the. On the chunk of horse. But yeah, and. And also you can get a massage, like, legit.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think that sounds perfect.

[Richard Campbell]

It was. I was enjoyable and. But the bandwidth was shocking. So it's like, I can't do a show from here.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you know what? I. And Paul will back me up. No, he gets a vacation. Why should he have to do a show every single place he goes?

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I'm. Part of it is I get the sense that people think this is fun, that wherever I go, I try and make a show work. I do enjoy trying to make the rig.

[Leo Laporte]

I like that you're trying to make that a reality. And I'm like, trying to live up to that ideal.

[Richard Campbell]

But as it's true, because it wasn't our original deal, like, originally, I said, hey, I travel a lot, I won't do the show then. And then we started experimenting with gear and we were able to make a show. And then people seem to like it, so I do it. And believe me, like, I have drank every single South African whiskey you can think of now at this point. So I've been collecting data.

[Paul Thurrott]

You get some benefit to that.

[Richard Campbell]

I have a bottle in the bag that's going to make it all the way home. Like tonight's. Tonight's whiskey is a different story. But, you know, I'm. I'm at work. This is my job now, admittedly, like, I was there for two weeks. I did two conferences. I did a conference in Johannesburg, in a conference in Cape Town, more or less back to back. And then with the extra week there, I had reached out to some local community. So I spent a whole day with some univers students, which were fantastic. Like, just an amazing group of kids, nice and interested in everything. So I did a. They weren't able to get to the conference because it's sold out and they usually get comp tickets. So I did the keynote but instead of doing the 50 minute keynote that I did at the conference, I did a three hour version.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh wow.

[Richard Campbell]

I just dove into deep because they were younger so it was a lot of assumptions. So I went and told more history and sort of walked through the things. But we spent the entire morning on thinking about how development is evolving right now. And then in the afternoon we talked about startup culture and how to build a company and how to find a partner and what it takes to raise money. And they just, they were amazing, amazing students. I was so impressed by them.

[Paul Thurrott]

I go back in a second to have you.

[Richard Campbell]

So it was a great day and I was delighted. So, so much fun to just like the chance to help folks that really want to do more.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Isn't it nice to meet somebody who's excited?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And it was like this was an entire classroom of.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like you attract people who are like you and I, you know, I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, yeah, it was a great trip. We're glad you're back. I'm so glad you had a great time.

[Richard Campbell]

And so I flew back through. I flew Johannesburg to Istanbul which is like 10 hours and then up to Amsterdam. Stayed for a couple of days with my friends in Alkmaar.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Hung out with their little 18 month old little Julie and I'll tell more stories about them. And then I, I got up to Stockholm today and tomorrow is back to keynoting. So do the thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

What's the event you're going to speak.

[Richard Campbell]

At Dev Sum two day show. Yeah, I'm emceeing the opens on both days and I'm doing my futures talk with her.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's so great.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm a little jealous. I confess. It's been a good life.

[Richard Campbell]

I think I really have a lot of fun. And now and then I'm getting home and I'm six weeks at home, which is more than she can stand. Like I expect somewhere around, somewhere around the three week march she's gonna be like, don't you have somewhere to go?

[Paul Thurrott]

Like go, go, go.

[Leo Laporte]

I was the only person who you kind of do. Huh. It's like, do you want to come to Seattle? No, I'm good. Have a good time.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway, I've been a long. I went away long enough. She's actually missing me. So I sent flowers today.

[Paul Thurrott]

So that's a good move. Very smart.

[Richard Campbell]

Flowers should arrive before I do. But I do have some gifts that I picked up in South Africa. So I found a nice collective that was making some interesting jewelry and I.

[Paul Thurrott]

Picked up some pieces. Very thoughtful. That's good.

[Richard Campbell]

I do the best I can, man. I gotta. I. I get to have all this fun and the least I can do is like, share around.

[Paul Thurrott]

Lisa picked something out she likes at Costco, so I'm gonna probably.

[Richard Campbell]

That's legit.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right. Patch Tuesday, yesterday. Let's go to work. What happened?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, nothing really. Honestly, I'm not even sure why we're talking about it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Forget about moving on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Big nut. Big mad there. No, actually this was a big one. So I'm losing track of these things. Someone should make a tracker. Oh, yeah, wait, I think you do that. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

What is your tracker address, by the way?

[Leo Laporte]

No, I don't have it live yet. I'm still going back and forth on how I want to do it because I just want to do it once.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're doing it in notion, right?

[Leo Laporte]

I am probably doing it, but I've been trying some other things too. Yeah. So I think this is the second month in a row we had a really big major update. This time all the updates went out at the same time. So 22, 23, 24 H2.

[Richard Campbell]

Are they still pushing 22?

[Leo Laporte]

It's supposed to be over October. I know, I thought so too.

[Paul Thurrott]

But right up to the end. Right up to the bitter end.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Almost all the. Well, that's not true. Some of These features are 24H2 only. Some are across all three. Right. You know, I'm just looking at this list. This is like stuff we've all talked about a million times. So the drag tray area. So when you drag files around File Explorer, you'll get that pull down thing at the top like you do with Windows and Snap. Except it will give you a list of app or I guess a grid of apps or a line of apps that you can drag to and then share via that way. The Windows key +C keyboard shortcut is back for Copilot. Used to be Cortana, then it was Copilot, then it wasn't and now it is again.

[Richard Campbell]

Everybody wants to put Cortana behind them.

[Leo Laporte]

Bunch of things for the taskbars. Little things going on there with the little. It's called the pill. The little indicator underneath it is there when the app app is running. It's not just pinned. And then if there's a notification, it gets bigger and it turns red or pink or whatever. Just some graphical changes there. When you share images, the share pane that comes up now has resizing and editing options. I got to add this to the notes still, but that's tied to my tip, so we're going to get to that much later in the show. A bunch of stuff for copilot plus PCs. So click to do has come to the EU a month late, I guess, right? Yeah, a month late. Ask Copilot available in Click to Do. New text actions in Click to Do. If you are using a smart pen, there is a shortcut button that you can. Or shortcut you can use for the pen. So you can do like a double click action or whatever. You can set it to wherever you want so that it runs Copilot, because God knows Copilot has to run all the time.

[Richard Campbell]

All the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Copilot's one of those. Sorry. I'm sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, I'm saying, like Copilot all the time. Like you can't get away from it now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The Xbox app used to be an example of an app where if you ran it once, even by mistake, it would always just start up with your computer every single time. And I hate that behavior. The Xbox app now has a toggle. You can turn that off. So it doesn't do that. Copilot needs that badly. Because when you run Copilot and then turn it off, it just sits there in the tray, like, lurking like a. Like a serum.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm here to help.

[Leo Laporte]

I really want to help you. Oh, did you need me? Did you need me? Oh, I'm here.

[Richard Campbell]

Any chance.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you know, you love irritating the Windows search improvement stuff. I'm going to call this semantic search because I think we need a name for this. You know, all this. All this stuff. Like, all this stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

I can't even tell you how many products have claimed semantic search over time. But okay, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. Look, we're still solving the problem that Steve Jobs solved in tiger back in 2005 seconds.

[Richard Campbell]

Certainly Apple's trying to solve again, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, no, I know. Yes. And by the way, so I didn't write that in the notes, but later on when we talk about some of that stuff, the other question, giggling the whole time. Well, no, it's like, are we just going to solve the same problem over and over again? Is that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, because we didn't solve it that well last time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's our industry. We just never get it right. So I. Yeah, that's the thing.

[Richard Campbell]

And our whole industry based on another failed attempt.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, you know, you got to give them credit. They're like the little engine that Couldn't. They're trying, but they just. I don't know. We'll get there someday. Okay, so that's. I think that's most of it. So patch Tuesday. I would say this is a big one. So if you haven't.

[Richard Campbell]

Especially for 24H2. Right? Like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Do you remember the keynote at Build several builds ago with the blind guy that used the cameras to describe what was in front of him? And now it's a feature in 24H2. Any image. It'll just explain it to you.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, I'm going to call that progress, Paul. Like, it's there.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the narrator feature for.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, narrator feature, full stop. It's like it's now a part of the operating system, although eventually. But it's still in insiders.

[Leo Laporte]

But other problems are harder to solve, like sets. The ability to add tabs to every single application for some reason.

[Richard Campbell]

Don't get crazy now, Miss.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, we can describe things to blind people.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's it. Yeah, we get that, Bill.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's a weird world we live in. I was just, just before the show because Brian Wilson has passed away sadly. I was looking at cnn, right? And so there was a story in there.

[Richard Campbell]

So let's not be too sad. Like, guy lived an intense. Yeah, yeah, no, I did a long way.

[Leo Laporte]

But I mean, the tragedy there in a way is that a lot of his life was wasted to mental illness and he was being controlled by this manager type, whatever he was. But. But okay, Brian Wilson. Genius, right? Absolutely. And super talented. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. As I'm on CNN.com looking for something about Brian Wilson. I saw this story about something like insert name of company adds this feature. Insert name of feature using AI. And it's like this is just the headline for everything, right? And so I think this one might have been something like Meta is making an AI. It's like a. It's like a mad lib. You could just fill in the blank. It doesn't matter. Whatever the company name is, whatever the AI feature is, whatever, who cares? But I think it was video editing or something like that. Or video something or something generation something. I don't know. And I was like, you know, we have to be saturated on this stuff now. Like every app we have does this now. Like everything does. Like every. Like you could generate like a cartoon image of yourself using Notepad. I mean, it's like, not really. I'm kidding. But. But it's like it's gone.

[Richard Campbell]

But you're not far wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's. It's getting close. Yeah, it's. It's really weird, like, how common this is. So I don't know, at some point it's like we're just going to fill in all the holes and everything will do everything. And then collectively we as a people are going to be like, is that it? Like, is that. That's the whole thing? Huh?

[Richard Campbell]

That's all we got.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess we're done. All right. Anyhow. Okay. But we're not there yet. That will be July's patch Tuesday. So looking forward to that. Several updates to the Windows Insider program, as you would expect. The biggest one, I think, was yesterday. Microsoft added the new Start menu finally, which they've been talking about. And you could kind of manually enable if you knew the trick. If you're in the dev or beta channel in the Insider program, you could just get it and so the phone Companion sidebar actually debuted last month in patch Tuesday, although rolls out over time, so you may not see it everywhere or anywhere. I see it in some places, but not others. I just brought up this computer. It does not have it. So hilarious. But it's not tied to the new Start menu. But if you have the new Start menu, there's a little toggle up in the corner so you can turn that companion sidebar on and off, like on the fly, without going into Settings, which is not its biggest new feature. But it's kind of cool. But the big thing here to me is when I go back to my original assessment of Windows 11 when it first debuted in mid-2020. Well, the final release or the public release was in October. To me, the biggest thing about it was how unfinished it was. And the Start menu was so stupid that if you went up to the PIN section and deleted every icon there, it would just be a big blank piece of nothing. It wouldn't reflow.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, at least that's honest.

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, okay, I don't think that was the reason, but I just, to me is like just really lazy software. And over time they. They did little subtle things that didn't address what I just said. They. You could have more space for pinned and more for recommended or what the bottom thing was called. But they didn't really address the over the auto flow or whatever you want to call that. And now they have. Right. And so there are multi. Now there are. They could have three sections. You could have the PIN section recommended. And then I think it's just. Is just apps which could be organized different ways you can turn these things off. You can. It will auto flow automatically. If you do, it will just like it actually. And it's cheap. We always say this. It's like, this is what Microsoft should have shipped four years ago. And it's like, yeah, I mean, I guess so, but I'm not. They weren't really there yet. Right. I mean, like, let's be. Let's be fair, but. But also let's be critical because what they did ship was terrible. But I think this is.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's the Internet just going to.

[Leo Laporte]

Be a lot dated. Yeah. I think this will address most people's complaints or whatever about the Start menu. Unless you just hate Windows 11, in which case I can't really help you there. But you know what?

[Richard Campbell]

Linux is there for you.

[Leo Laporte]

It is there for you. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

DHH did a whole rant where it's like, I've switched to Linux and I'm so much happier. And I'm like, who is it? Yeah, David Hanneman Hansen. Like, DHH Basecamp, the guy who killed IE6?

[Leo Laporte]

Like, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I'm not his biggest fan or anything, but I respect what the man has done. And he's been right a few times.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Well, I mean, well, if you don't want to be annoyed, that's.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's a pretty good start.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

He said some really stupid things too.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah, you know, part of the course. Like, what are you gonna do? Who has not.

[Leo Laporte]

Who hasn't as recently as in the past 15 minutes? This is life. Right? So anyway, I. I do think the new Start menu is a big improvement. And I think having.

[Richard Campbell]

They're working. They're working on it. Like, they're genuinely. There's clearly more than one person. It's not just an intern. They're really trying to make it easier.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not just someone who's used a Mac and has no idea what the Start menu is for.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we're getting so. I mean, first we had the salvage out of Win eight, and then we had the we want to be Mac 11. Now we're going somewhere else.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Well, now that Apple's doing this Glass thing, they'll probably go back to Aero glass in Windows 12. So we can. You have that.

[Richard Campbell]

You're jumping ahead. I'm glad you're talking about it, but we're jumping ahead.

[Leo Laporte]

People are going to be like, oh, God, please do that. Oh God, please don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

But we will get there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

My first reaction, though, I have to.

[Leo Laporte]

Say, my first reaction was how Did I read it?

[Richard Campbell]

Arrow?

[Leo Laporte]

No. They copied Windows phone in iOS 7 and now they're copying Windows Vista. Like you're going backwards.

[Paul Thurrott]

This might be a good place to take a tiny little break before Paul goes crazy with Arrow crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

It's fine. Everything's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything's fine. It's okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's gonna be good. Anyway, there's a lot to unpack. You're watching the right show for that Windows Weekly, our show today brought to you by those good folks at US Cloud, the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. I've been talking about them for some time now. I hope it's starting to click with you. I mean these guys are the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. They are now supporting 55.0of the Fortune 500 and there's a good reason, because these companies are, you know, cost conscious and switching to US Cloud can save your business, can save their business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier support. But saving you 30 to 50% would be meaningless if it were worse support. But that's the support beautiful part. It's not only less expensive, it's better Support. It's faster, 2x faster on average, time to resolution versus Microsoft twice as fast. And they'll also, I think I like this about US Cloud. They don't make their money on you buying Microsoft products, right? So they will tell you the truth about Microsoft. For instance, US Cloud and I don't know if Microsoft would do this, has a new offering they call their Azure Cost optimization services. Now, you know, if, if you're honest with yourself, how often do you evaluate your Azure usage, right? It's probably been a while and you, you might have some Azure sprawl, a little spend creep going on. Doesn't look good, not on anybody, certainly not on your bottom line. The good news is saving on Azure is easier than you think. With US Cloud they offer an eight week Azure engagement is powered by VBox. It identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. Oh, and this is the other part that's great about US Cloud. You're going to get access to their senior engineers and these are people with an average of over 16 years with Microsoft products. They remember Aero. So these are the best, the pros from Dover. So you get for much less money, you get better service, better faster service and you get this amazing Azure engagement. At the end of the eight weeks your interactive dashboard will identify, rebuild and downscale opportunities, unused resources. You can reallocate those precious IT dollars towards needed resources or and I might suggest this. You can make the savings go even farther by investing those savings in US Cloud's Microsoft support. The savings go on. That's what a few other US Cloud customers have done. Completely eliminate your unified spend. Now you're looking really good. Is this a good idea? Well, ask Sam, the technical operations manager at Bead Gaming. B, E, D, E. And he said, we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. I mean, 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 you get to 40 or $50,000 a month, it really started to add up. Yes, Sam, it does, doesn't it? Sometimes that's why people don't look, I don't want to know. Well, would be nice to know. Stop overpaying for Azure. It's so easy to do this. Identify and eliminate Azure creep, boost your performance all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Just one more reason to visit uscloud.com and book a call today. Find out how much your team can save. Uscloud.com to book a call today and get faster Microsoft support for less. Faster, better, less expensive. That sounds good. Uscloud.com we thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly. And now, well, let's not abandon Windows 11 yet.

[Richard Campbell]

It pays the bills.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it pays the bills. There's some other new features coming in the Windows Insider build. Yes, talk about.

[Leo Laporte]

There are. Yes. So in addition to that new Start menu we talked about last time, two new AI features are coming to the Photos app. Probably two of 20. Really? I mean, they're just kind of rolling these out over time. These two are both for copilot plus PCs. And the way they've been doing this is if you're in the Insider program, I think this is the beta channel. You'll get it first on Snapdragon based PCs and then probably a month from now you'll get it on x86 based copilot plus PCs. But the first one is Relight. This was actually announced back. I think it was ahead of Build as part of when they announced the Surface devices, the kind of refresh of stuff. So just an image editing feature and then wait for it, semantic natural language search. Where in this case they actually call it that. So I guess, I think.

[Richard Campbell]

Does that mean the other one was Unnatural language Search?

[Paul Thurrott]

It was their best attempt at the time. Best they could do.

[Richard Campbell]

How natural is it?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, it's like a baby's butt how natural do you want.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's a little too natural. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. There's a major update to the Microsoft Store coming. If I could find my article about that. Where is this? I don't have it. I think I linked to the wrong thing, but that's okay. So this one's kind of interesting. I think this one is available across channels. If it's not all channels, then it's probably beta and dev, but I think it's everyone. And they keep kind of screwing with this. But the big part of this underneath the covers, because they rewrote it last year to be faster, which was necessary, they're adding that search experience. Right. Which in this case they're not calling semantic search, but same thing. The idea is you're going to see this kind of. I'm going to call it semantic search. This natural language search feature kind of appear everywhere. Right. Someone had asked me one of my Friday articles, you know, how do I find apps that are specific to copilot plus PCs? And I was like, surely the Microsoft Store, which has an AI hub, will have a section for that. And they do not, which is killing.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm trying to figure out what is a Copilot plus PC at this point. I mean, I know it's Snapdragon, but it's. There is an AMD machine that qualifies and.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And then intel. And then it's just Lunar Lake for Intel Qualifies.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. So I. One of the review laptops I have in now is intel core Ultra Series 2, whatever the number. And I was like, obviously, this is Lunar Lake, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And I was, you know, setting it up and everything. And then I moved over to, I don't know, it was paint or something. And I was like, wait, where the. There's no. None of those features are here. What's going on? And it turns out this is an Arrow Lake chip. So Arrow Lake doesn't qualify. Yeah, it's the generation that intel would have done after Meteor Lake had Microsoft not come to them and said, hey, by the way, we've given this special treatment to Qualcomm. If you want to jump on board, you got to do this, this, and this. And they were like, you know, and a major contributor to Intel's problems last year, getting this thing out the door. So Lunar Lake is the one that has the good MPU we integrate and actually better graphics, too. So the Arrow Lake is more powerful as a processor. So it could be good. Better in certain circumstances for sure. But the graphics and ampu are not as good. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

The adjacent stuff that matters.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You could add. And it doesn't rely on integrated RAM either. And that's good or bad, depending how you look at it. But in the good news department, you could theoretically upgrade one of these computers, assuming the PC maker allows that. Right. So that's a possibility. Anyway. This stuff is so confusing now. I'm just. I can't even get a think straight when it comes to this. But anyway, so there's just a lot of updates graphically to the store layout, blah, blah, blah, whatever. It's not really that big of a deal. But the big deal to me is just the search bit. And of course they're doing that. They're doing that everywhere as they would. And then notion keeps scrolling down to the bottom for me, for some reason. It's very strange. And then there was a Canary build on Friday and we don't know why. We don't know why Canary exists. We're not really sure what the point of it is. Am I not bringing up the right thing?

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, the fact that they called it Canary Build is like, this is the one that could die at any time. That's what that's supposed to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. A lot of the stuff that's in here is stuff that's just been elsewhere earlier. Right. So the energy saver improvements.

[Richard Campbell]

Not what it should be.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. There's phone mirroring capabilities in Phone Companion, but that's elsewhere. There's taskbar tweaks like I talked about for the pill thing at the bottom. Those are elsewhere. Like I. I don't know that there's anything unique in this build. Maybe once or twice this year there have been a few unique features in Canary, but they're. Honestly, it's a pretty short list. It's kind of. It's kind of too bad. Okay, now what else? What else? And that's it. I think that's it for Windows 11, believe it or not.

[Paul Thurrott]

Amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. So when did you do it?

[Richard Campbell]

When? Windows 12, Paul. When?

[Leo Laporte]

So, moving on to WWDC Y. Fine. No, yeah, it's a good question. Yeah. So if you look at the schedule. Right. Someone asked me this too, you know, as people would. Right. Like when. When's this going to happen? It seems like maybe this would be a time. We are roughly one within one week, four years ago of when they announced Windows 11.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And then they shipped it in October. So if they were going to ship it this October along with Windows 10.

[Paul Thurrott]

Going out of support, they could call it Windows 26.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

That's apparently stylish.

[Leo Laporte]

Now it will be 20, 26 edition or, you know, it's back, baby. Look, give that. Say what you want to say about Apple, but the version number of that thing is 26. It's not 6.2 or whatever, you know, whatever. Windows.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, they don't have those obscure. I mean, maybe internally they do and they kept the, they kept the geographic. You know, it's Tahoe. Anyway, we'll get to that.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want to. Yeah, we will get to that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, let's talk about Build.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, let's talk about developer shows because we're hitting the end of the season, so every year we have a run of shows. Yeah, Build IO, wwdc. And you have a chance closer together.

[Paul Thurrott]

This time than they usually are.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Google doing IO the week of Build and all the awfulness that happened to me at Build was a, a wonderful happenstance.

[Richard Campbell]

It's one of the, I mean, I keep looking back on that week going, that is one of the craziest weeks. And the layoffs on top of that. Just like, what a weird.

[Leo Laporte]

The whole thing was nuts.

[Paul Thurrott]

Apparently Microsoft said, we're never doing it in Seattle again.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's part of it. So. And not because of the, not because.

[Paul Thurrott]

Of protesters, because of the homeless.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, so I, I mentioned this in passing.

[Richard Campbell]

This was fewer homeless in, in San Francis. That's where we're going.

[Leo Laporte]

So I've yet to be assaulted by homeless person in Seattle. That did happen to me in San Francisco. But I, I mentioned this, but it was quick because the other stuff was way more important. But twice I saw a homeless person in some stage of disarray get out into the middle of an intersection in the crosswalk and just yell up at the, at the building. And you know, in one, one case, I actually, I was walking by him and I sort of looked up and I looked at him and I was like, I don't, I don't, I don't see it.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know what you, what are you yelling at?

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah, this is fentanyl.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's mental illness.

[Leo Laporte]

Seattle's always had kind of a tough, it's really tough. Seattle is like the Clippers to the Lakers. You know, it's like with San Francisco, it's like we've always aspired to be just like San Francisco, but they forgot maybe not do the bad stuff and that, that I, yeah, Seattle is such a beautiful city. I love it so much. And it's like San Francisco. I go there. And I'm like, there are things about it that are just whatever. So, yeah, Microsoft. There was a private exchange between Microsoft and the Visit Seattle organization that does the conference center stuff that was basically like, yeah, we're not coming back next year also, we're not coming back ever. So all of the holds we had on future years, you could forget about them. We're not doing it. And it was because they've been complaining about this homeless person thing and the open drug use and whatever else for years in Seattle has done nothing about it. Like, nothing. And so showgoers and Microsoft executives too, go there and they walk between the Arch Convention center and like the Hyatt grand, which is probably where, I think Richard was probably there, where a lot of those guys stay. And it's, you know, two, three blocks, not that far. But it is, it's like this fallout hellscape of, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, has that too. Weirdly, it's right next to City hall in San Francisco.

[Richard Campbell]

And to be clear, it is not, not that bad. Nobody's in danger.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's kind of disgusting. Is that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's not as tidy as it could be.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I, I saw a homeless person defecate on the sidewalk in San Francisco. I haven't seen that yet happen to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Me in San Francisco.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, this, you know, there, there are things I, you know, not a.

[Paul Thurrott]

Fan of, but we call them unhoused. Paul, I hope you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I'm sorry. I will continue to be insensitive to everyone who has a problem. I'm sorry.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's, you know, it's a very difficult problem.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But it's not justification.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, I don't blame Seattle. I mean, they're not doing what Beijing would do, which is bring out bulldozers and just bulldoze them away.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And this is not a real reason to pull out of a car.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the thing. So ridiculous. That was kind of, in some ways is the point. I, I wonder. Well, and I guess we are wondering now openly if this wasn't a little bit of a cover. Because I read this thinking this will be how they communicate. Like, we wanted to keep doing this. Actually, we don't think it makes any sense. Here's why. So here's one of the problems, though, with Seattle, like our not being in Seattle. For Microsoft, it gets dramatically more expensive for Microsoft to host this show because when you're in Seattle, their employees are all there. So they would have to ship and house thousand something plus employees in some other city, which they are currently deeply against.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Like they, they are super tight with their travel budget. So we know. Yes, as if these shows weren't already struggling. And let me be clear, they are. Like they're not the shows they should be.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like they now they just made it harder for no real reason.

[Leo Laporte]

Part of that internal email or whatever it was that got leaked said that Microsoft had told Visit Seattle, that organization that I guess runs the convention center, that their expectation was that build 2026 would have 4,500 plus paying attendees. I know from my sources at Microsoft that they barely cracked 3,000 this year and only did that by lowering the price.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I don't know, I wonder if.

[Richard Campbell]

They decrease their attendance by lowering the price too much. Like that price 1125, like that's crazy cheap. That just sort of says, wow, we don't think our show's that good.

[Leo Laporte]

Well also I can tell you from experience, they cut corners pretty dramatically. You know, the old convention center is called old for a reason. And I mentioned the one day of meal that I got for free from my press pass or whatever. Usually you were taken care of all week as you would be.

[Paul Thurrott]

But you know what would be an interesting idea is take the money that Microsoft will have to spend to move it and put it towards the homelessness problem.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now somebody in the chat room is saying it's really about a new tax. Is what, what is that? Mr. Met saying that? Do you know? Have you heard anything about that?

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know about that, but I don't know. I, I, I know, I, Look, I, we're not going to Seattle. I'm just, I'm just, I'm just saying this is what happened, that's all.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you remember a few years ago, Seattle did propose was charging a special tax for the big companies, Microsoft and Boeing that no other company would.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Paul Thurrott]

That failed.

[Richard Campbell]

So you've been successful in our state tax.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, congratulations. You win the lottery in reverse. Yeah. So okay, so the Microsoft shows there's.

[Paul Thurrott]

A new business tax in Washington state. Mr. Met says right.

[Richard Campbell]

So like it. So Microsoft should come out and say, hey, this new tax is driving us out. We're off to Vegas.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just be honest.

[Richard Campbell]

San Francisco.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they haven't been dishonest. They never said anything. This was private. They never announced. They could not give them a chance to actually say point one. So Microsoft's complaints about the homeless to Seattle were not meant to go public. That was leaked to a radio station. So. And it was probably Leaked, because that radio station, like anyone who was probably a reporter, a pundit or whatever in that area. This is a big issue in that area. And that was the point of it. It was like, look how bad this is. Now Microsoft's not coming here, and they're right here. It was not. I don't think it's something Microsoft would. We'll see what they say.

[Paul Thurrott]

Could it have been the protests or.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, because that's going to happen anywhere. Although, yeah, actually, Mary Joe, Seattle's a.

[Paul Thurrott]

Little more active than many.

[Leo Laporte]

So I had this exchange.

[Richard Campbell]

San Francisco, Come on, that's not going.

[Paul Thurrott]

To be any better.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Okay. So I had an exchange with Mary Jo yesterday, and we were talking about this, maybe the assumption that they're going to San Francisco. And I said, yeah, it's not like they're not going to have protests in San Francisco. And she says, you're telling me that those employees are going to travel on their own dime to San Francisco to protest and lose their job? I don't think so. So. And I was like, you know what? That's actually pretty smart. Maybe that's true. It's super convenient to protest when you just have to get out of bed and drive into Seattle, you know, but if you actually had to travel somewhere and potentially stay at a hotel or whatever it was, maybe it'll be more. I don't know, maybe they wouldn't do it as much. But that said, absolutely, there are going to be protests. I.

[Paul Thurrott]

So Google was in public, but of course they're in Mountain View, which is not really suburban.

[Leo Laporte]

But they also have a risk of protest. Right. And so this didn't get widely publicized, just like the thing with Microsoft didn't. They had a lot of security there and they were on the Outlook just like Microsoft was for employees, because their employees have also protested whatever, you know, deals they have with governments and militaries, whatever. And the one thing that I saw with Google that I didn't see with Microsoft, and I had made this point back in, I guess, April, whenever that the 50th anniversary protests occurred. When I said, you know, look, say what you want about Microsoft, but I feel like I could be wrong, but I feel like this is a company these people could work with and they would. Microsoft would give them a venue to voice their concerns publicly, if that's what they wanted. They don't want them to disrupt the keynote, obviously. But you said 30. Well, you know, have some, like a space somewhere where they could be and let people go see it and take Pictures and they could have a bullhorn and do their thing. Now this is in Seattle, not Microsoft campus. So that's what happened. But on the Google side, wherever that facility was in Mountain View or whatever, Google did give that to employees, by the way. So employees were able to go out and pick it and, you know, do their little protesting. And so I'm not saying one was right and one was wrong, but that, and I don't know for a fact that Microsoft, they didn't approach Microsoft and say, hey, you know, we feel like we need to be able to voice this. And Microsoft said, no, I don't know. I just don't know. But I've not heard that. And my knee jerk reaction a couple months back was they seem like the type of company that would have been open to that, you know, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't know since. Since the show, I would have said.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm feeling like used to be.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing. There was a story right after Build or right at the last day of Build or something somewhere around there where Microsoft is now filtering email for certain terms so that if it's a blast email that goes out to everyone in the company or to large groups, they actually won't let those through automatically anymore. And so terms like Palestine or Israel or whatever are on that list. Right. Because one of the little subversive things these guys were doing was constantly spamming these internal mail lists with their, you know, complaint or whatever. So again, I'm not here to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Times have been tough. This has been a bad month at Microsoft from the employees I've talked to.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

At the same time as a record quarter and the highest valuation of any company in history.

[Leo Laporte]

Right? Yeah. Right. So I don't know what to say to that. This is not a fair comparison in some ways, but I think you'll understand what I mean when I say it. I'll write a story or Laurent will write a story and I'll just make something up. Microsoft fixes the whatever problem in the new Outlook and the response you invariably get from a dozen or more people is great, but when are they going to fix whatever my thing is? Or someone releases this thing for this thing and they're like, okay, but what about this other thing? It's like, that's not what the story is about. The story's about this thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Don't worry, when they fix that thing, I will write that story.

[Leo Laporte]

If that was part of it, it would have been part of the story. That kind of thing. The thing I'm trying to separate because the numbers are so big is how or whether Microsoft being what you said they are, which they are the most valuable company in the history of the earth. A stunning quarter nailing it, just spending 20 billion whatever on AI every month and not even feeling the impact of it financially. And yet not only do they have layoffs, but they have layoffs that came suddenly, without warning, without any sense of justification or, you know, it wasn't performance based like the old things. Like how do you rectify this? We've already, I know we've discussed this a lot, but it's hard. Like I, I'd like to know or be at least have an idea. Oftentimes you can look at something and say, well, this is probably why I, I got nothing. And if the, if these, if the thought was we don't get enough buy in internally on this AI stuff, maybe we should threaten them. It's like that's the, that's where the wheel landed when you spun it. What are you doing? That's crazy to me.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I've literally been saying terrorism. Like you're just scaring people.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And oddly enough you succeeded. They're scared.

[Leo Laporte]

They are scared and it's unfair. They shouldn't, Those people should not be scared. No, this is the, that's terrible.

[Richard Campbell]

What were you thinking? Right, as if the world wasn't scary enough.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think thinking is the thing they're not doing, you know, or at least thinking clearly. Oh no, it isn't there. Never mind. So yeah, I mean Apple or Microsoft and Google, those shows happened concurrently. It was weird. It was an explosion of news. If you look at those two companies, and we'll look at Apple later too. But yeah, I have to say looking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Back, it was a lot.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a lot. But it was also mostly AI hyper specific to their audiences. Right. Which makes sense. I mean that feels obvious as I say it out loud, but the Microsoft advances are all around obviously. Cloud power and productivity, that kind of stuff. These are Microsoft's strengths. Google has a much stronger hold with consumers through all the services they have. They have like billion plus users and they can throw AI features at stuff that impacts people at scale. Microsoft does too. But I don't think anyone cares if like Purview gets like an AI, you know, feature or whatever or you know, we're going to use AI to determine some kind of a policy on identity or whatever. It's like, yeah, that's really exciting. But you know, it's like Photos is getting like you can turn a picture into a video. It's like wee, you know, it's fun like so I think the thing that Google has that Microsoft doesn't is just it's more interesting to people like individuals and thus it's more interesting to people that want to write news about those things and actually have readers. And you know, that's the kind of, you know, that's the world that we live in unfortunately or whatever. It's worked out for Microsoft. I mean it's financially like Richard said, they're going gangbusters but from a. Can you pull like an exciting news thing out of there for it? Like what would my wife be excited about other than me being gone for a week? Like about build, you know what I mean? Like I can't, I don't know that there is a, you know, maybe someone could come up with something. I don't know. But the Google thing, I was like there might be parts of this keynote you might want to watch. And I said to her as a normal person, non technical because you know she uses Android and she reads on a tablet or whatever and does her thing but it's like this might actually benefit you in your day to day. Whereas I think the Microsoft stuff would. That would be true if you were like an IT admin or someone working in a Microsoft oriented shop or whatever. Absolutely. There's a lot of those people. But it's not interesting for, you know, it's not, you know, the fun photo stuff even though Microsoft does that too. It just doesn't, you know, just doesn't kind of have some reach.

[Paul Thurrott]

They need a place to see. Apple uses their WWDC conference as a keynote for real people, not for developers.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well Google this too, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, somewhat Google does but Microsoft definitely doesn't. Do they have a venue where they could.

[Leo Laporte]

So this should have been my tip. I'm going to throw this out right now. In fact, you can Google this easily. The acquired podcast did a follow up three hour interview with Steve Ballmer. I watched it twice. It is fantastic. I can't really stand those two guys. But the Steve Ballmer is amazing and this was a. An incredible. It's on YouTube, it's an incredible and probably elsewhere. It's an incredible reminder of what this guy did and to the tune of, I think a lot of people don't even realize it was him and there was so much that came out of this. But in the past he and Bill Gates have both said when asked what is your biggest regret if you could have done Anything differently, the two of them, at one point or the other, both said separately, I would have gotten phone. Right. And I was like, both times I was like, no, nope, nope, no, no, that cannot be your biggest regret. It cannot be. And he on this show said what? I actually do think it was his biggest regret because I see this, this was repeated again and again in that Steve Sinofsky book. I keep talking about where Microsoft targeted enthusiasts and then individuals and that kind of went to retail and became the big thing from the 90s. But then businesses of different sizes and ultimately enterprises and, and all that stuff. And that was. Steve Ballmer did that. I mean, but what he said was when we got into this, my intention was not to drop consumer and completely lose that even though this enterprise thing was going gangbusters. It was to do both. He's like, I always felt like we could have done both. And everything we did on the consumer side once we embraced enterprise was just half assed. And I was like, yes, that 100%. Because Microsoft at that point in time was personal computing. They could. I'm not saying it wouldn't, you know, Apple and Google and Amazon, this stuff would have happened to some degree. But the world would probably be a different place if Microsoft had just tried, you know, and they really, for all kinds of reasons. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And still aren't. Right. Like if we get, well, now you.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, how are you going to get it back now? You know?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we talk about OpenAI's monthly users compared to copilot monthly users and it's it, you know, OpenAI has got the consumer market.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And Microsoft does not. And the enterprise market is moving very carefully into using LLMs and so the adoption rate is slow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And you know, look, I. There are going to be businesses that see and those that do not see the balance, the benefit rather of these AI features. Right. Some will embrace it and be like, oh my God, this is amazing, here's why. And some will be like, you know, we keep trying and I just don't understand the point.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean that's not what's holding enterprises back. It's the system mints going, I'm supposed to have my data state in stored or I don't even know how to do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, but if it was amazing enough, this would be like getting Macs or iPads or not iPads, iPhones or whatever in the enterprise where C level execs would come down and say, look, we're doing this.

[Richard Campbell]

No, we're doing this. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't Care what you say. We're doing it, so figure it out. So no, we're definitely at the product.

[Richard Campbell]

Phase where we're there. We want this to be amazing, so go try stuff and find something amazing for us.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And Microsoft's key advantage in this space, aside from the obvious like scale, they have just the sheer reach they have in the Fortune 500 and the biggest companies in the world, et cetera, is that thing that's getting them into trouble with teams in Europe, which is we can make this a feature of the thing you're already paying for and make it more valuable. You could view that cynically as kind of a form of lock in. But I think the reality is most people that use the Office Suite, which we're not supposed to call the Office Suite or Microsoft 365, whatever, and when I said people, but most, you know, businesses, I don't think any one of them are like, man, I'd love to drop this boat anchor and move on from this. I actually think most businesses are like, yes, obviously we're using this. It's the standard. It works great. Everyone loves it well and more saliently.

[Richard Campbell]

And all the alternatives scare the snot out of me. So I'll stick with what I know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So when Microsoft approaches this, it's not like we're going to come up with this Zoom AI thing. It's like, okay, well, well, Microsoft 365 has gone gangbusters. We'll add it to there and this is how we'll improve these products going forward. You'll get more value out of this. This will help us raise prices as we're going to have to do as time marches on. But it will make this thing that is already invaluable and kind of a no brainer for so many companies. Even more invaluable and more of a no brainer, if that makes sense. Anyway, the Steve Ballmer stuff is amazing. I'll just real quick on that. I, I should have put this in the notes. The other thing that there's a lot in this, it's three hours long. It's an amazing. Him talking is amazing. Those two idiots being like, oh, I didn't even know that product existed. I wanted to strangle them through my screen. But he is amazing. And one of those things that comes up is, well, you were CEO for X number of years. Bill Gates was CEO for X number of years. Why did you have to move? What was the point? Did you want to move on? And he's like, no, I did not want to move on. But he's like, here's the thing. I was good for Microsoft's bottom line financially, but not good for the stock price. And one of the reasons I wasn't good for the stock price is because I was always the guy saying, we need to spend money on this to win it and we need to invest and invest and invest. And I was the one who built up these big businesses that might be the next big thing for Microsoft. He was part of the reason that Microsoft became more of a multi product and definitely an enterprise company. And he said, look, I could not have gone. He goes, everything Microsoft is doing now, I started. He finally said it explicitly. He's like, I did all of this. And he said, but no one's ever going to give me credit for that. And if I went to Wall street and said, look, I know I've been spending money. I know I'm the spend, spend, spend guy. I got the religion. I got it. It. I fixed my ways. Not going to spend money anymore. Just believe me, you know, it wouldn't. He's like, it would never. No one would ever. I had to leave. He's like, there was no way the perception of this company was going to change unless we made a change. Even though I was the one pushing the change we made, you know, and I. You got to watch this thing. It's. It. He is. I miss him so much.

[Richard Campbell]

He's so great.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he really is. I miss him so much. Yep, He's.

[Richard Campbell]

He was way. He was a lot of, of fun. Just like a much more interesting thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's one for you.

[Paul Thurrott]

I had no idea that he was considered a great.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's the thing. It depends on who you talk to. Right. But you know, he was, you know, he wasn't perfect. I don't mean it like that, but as far as like a leader of a company who was actually like literally a cheerleader of that company.

[Richard Campbell]

And he's also the. He's also the guy who kept the company together. Like he brought in as a CEO to get through the consent decree and he did it.

[Paul Thurrott]

It.

[Leo Laporte]

His comparison of running a company like Microsoft to running a sports team like the Clippers is astonishing and awesome and instantly believable and real. And again, I keep saying this, but you got to just listen or watch or whatever you do, but it's. He's amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

But on Satya Nadella.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's what. So, no, I'm not sure I was ever a huge fan. So honestly, this guy to me comes off as really robotic. I have a hard time, you know, like I have weird hearing as it is, but there are certain sounds like we'll be in a restaurant, maybe there'll be a lodge area with lots of people and there'll be someone 28 people over cackling like an idiot. And there's something about his or her voice where it's on some timber or whatever where it hits me and it's like painful. And his voice. Yeah, his voice is like that. It's like a. It hits me sharp. Like it's. There's something about when he talks. I'm like, oh God. It kind of bothers me. I think that's the thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Problem though, Paul.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I know, I know, I know. What was the rationale for him? This is the guy who ran Bing. Why do we think he would be an. Okay, There's a theory out there right now, internally and externally, that the person really running this company is Amy Hood. I'm just going to throw that out there. But.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I would agree with that post pandemic. She definitely got control of things during the pandemic.

[Leo Laporte]

But here's the thing. This guy, the one thing Ballmer says and he wasn't, he likes Satya Nadella. He said Satya was one of two or five people that early on Microsoft felt internally like maybe like you always have to have these contingency plans for a CEO for leadership. Right. Succession plan. Yeah. Some of it is long term. Like, look, I think I'm going to be here for X number of years. We're going to try to do this in the meantime and then we'll move on to something else. Some of it's, I walk out in the street, get hit by a bus. And so you have these lists of people who could kind of fill in. And I guess Satya was on the short list for longer than I would have thought. But the one thing he said though, and I was like, okay, this actually makes sense to me. He's not an engineer. This guy does not have an engineering degree. The big selling point for him. No, no, Right. But the big selling point for him was we need to bring back someone like Gates who was an engineer, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You're visionary, technical person. Yeah, I don't think he's. I don't think he's a visionary in the slightest. In fact, I'm developing a theory that Satya Nadella. I said, oh. I said this to someone from Microsoft last weekend. I think Satya Nadella is a high stakes poker player who Constantly is betting his family's home on a last ditch chance to win some, you know, bet. And sometimes he's right and sometimes he's wrong. Who spends $68 billion on Activision and then proceeds to fly Xbox into the ground? Like what, like how do you, how do you take that amazing regulatory victory and just screw it up, you know, So I don't know. He also talks, you know, when does someone mention Windows Phone? Windows Phone was never going to succeed, but he was pushing for Microsoft to make their own phone for several years and the board kept saying no, kept saying no, kept saying no. And then they said, well, they bought Nokia after you left. He goes, I know. He goes, I have to live with that. And I wanted to, like, by the time we bought that company, we had to do it to save our platform. It was going to die otherwise. We should have done it earlier. Like, we should have done, you know, the right thing earlier with it. He was trying to do that, I guess, for several years. Anyway, anyway, I look, like I said, no one's perfect. I don't mean it like that, but this is a very revealing interview. And if you're mixed on this guy or if you love him and miss him, or you hate him, whatever, I don't care. Watch it. I think you'll be, you'll come away with something excellent. It's, it's pretty impressive.

[Paul Thurrott]

Before we get to Google and Apple and I know I'm dying to hear what you think of Liquid Glass.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean aeroglass. Oh, Liquid Glass. Sorry, sorry.

[Paul Thurrott]

I want to take a break, if I may. And we will continue in just a moment with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. I'm so glad you're all here, you winners and you dozers. This is Windows Weekly for June 11th.

[Leo Laporte]

See that?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's there. We got a special clock now, you know. To the millisecond. To the millisecond where we are in the show, our show today brought to you by 1Password. Over half of IT pros say that securing SaaS apps is their biggest challenge. With the growing problems of SaaS sprawl and shadow it, it's not hard to see why. Thankfully, Trelica by1Password can discover and secure access to all your apps, managed or not. Trelica by 1Password inventories every app in use at your company, every app then pre populated app Profiles, assess the SaaS risks, letting you manage access, optimize, spend and enforce best security practices across every app your employees use, even the shadow IT apps. You can manage shadow it. You can oh, this is good too. Securely onboard and offboard employees and of course meet compliance goals. Trelica by1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance. And it's just one of the ways that extended access management helps teams strengthen compliance and security. 1Password's award winning password manager is trusted by millions of users in over 150,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. And now they're securing more than just passwords with 1Password Extended Access Management, of course. 1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. 1Password exceeds the standards set by various authorities and is a leader in security. Take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged shadow it. Learn [e-mail] Windows Weekly that's 1Password.com Windows Weekly all lowercase. Thank you 1Password for your support for Windows Weekly. On we go with the developer conferences.

[Richard Campbell]

The great recap.

[Paul Thurrott]

The great recap. We kind of did this last week.

[Leo Laporte]

It's going to be great. It's going to be. It will be a.

[Paul Thurrott]

It takes a while for the dust to settle in us.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the thing. Right. So. Well, we'll get to this. The Apple thing was especially interesting. People are so divided over this with Google. There's been a two year long kind of vibe with them where like they're behind. Like they're not somehow they're behind, you know, and I feel like IO was kind of a show of force for them. It was really hard to understand to keep on track of it. That said, Android is usually kind of a big deal at the show. Android was not a big deal at the show. They sort of announced Android 16 before the show, but it wasn't ready yet. And actually today it just finally came up. But not really all of it because they're going to ship more. They do this quarterly updates and there's three really big features. The desktop mode that's based on Dex, the material. What's it called? The new material Expressive design. And then those live notifications which are like the live notifications you get on an iPhone with dynamic island and so forth. We're all coming to the platform this year, but not today. So you know, there's that kind of weirdness. Okay. And you know, Google is one of those things. Like Google is the ultimate ADHD company because when they're on it, when they, when they want something, they can focus and it's unbelievable and they lose the script on Other things all the time. So like they haven't released a speaker in 17 years. They don't really do the home stuff that much anymore. There's like, like they kind of just drift away. You know, they're, they're weird like that. But you know, I, I wondered like a lot of people did like why would you do this? The week of build you could do this show anytime. You, it's your place, like you could go, you know, it could be anytime. And I can't explain that but man, it was a, it was a tough one, you know, because the people who material you was the previous one. I think this is material expressive or.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, M3 expressive.

[Leo Laporte]

M3 expressive. Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, it was. I'm never going to catch up on the Google stuff. Like I'm never. Every single day there are multiple stories where it's like we added the thing I was talking about earlier, you know, AI feature to AI or app service, whatever it is. And you like, like, you know, businesses, consumers, and it's just like a matrix of all the stuff they do which is vast and is. Looks like the Milky Way probably and there's so much of it and it's just like. Yep. They're just filling it all in and it's astonishing. Like I like the stuff that they're doing is really kind of incredible. And if anyone like actually seriously believes like they're behind on AI, you know, I feel like you're not really paying attention but fair. I think they're, I think they're doing, I think that, you know, I think they're going, yeah, full stop. It's kind of amazing, the Apple one. I would just like to have a moment of silence here while I collect my thoughts. It's like I don't like they had.

[Richard Campbell]

To make a call on Apple Intelligence and they did. They moved away.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think they did it well actually, because I do too.

[Leo Laporte]

I came away.

[Richard Campbell]

I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

What they've done now is they've gone on a, a tour, interview tour where they elaborated on the point that Siri version two was what was not working. And so they post postponed it. But I thought what they did that was smart and well, of course we'll see how it works. But presuming it works is, is just kind of sprinkle AI throughout.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

In a useful way.

[Leo Laporte]

I think this goes back to a year when everyone's like, oh they're behind, they're never going to cat. You know. And then they, they announced what they did and they're like, yeah, but this stuff's not going to be available for the iPhones. And you know, then they kind of slow boil or release it over time. If you go back and rewatch that keynote from a year ago.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And compare it to where they demoed something that was in fiction, never came.

[Leo Laporte]

Out, but they never existed in the first. They claim that's not true. They claim they. That that software did exist. Yeah. This is that it was.

[Paul Thurrott]

V1 was working, but not well enough to release it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was. But you know what?

[Paul Thurrott]

This is a problem with AI. If the AI is right 50% of the time.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. Then it's wrong. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have to trust it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But by the way, again, there's a cynical view which is very easy to adopt and then there's a view where you're like, well, they're being mature here. They're being. Look, they have a couple of billion, 2.5, whatever the number is, billion users. We have this incredible ecosystem with cross device capabilities. We are promoting privacy. This has to work. And it has to work in a way that the Google stuff doesn't have to work or OpenAI doesn't have to work. These are companies that just stole. I mean, Google has search results and all their stuff, so they have data. But like OpenAI, all these other companies, they had to steal the data.

[Paul Thurrott]

What's interesting is they're using OpenAI models in many cases. Like for instance, they have this really crappy image playground where everything comes out looking terrifying. And they finally said, yeah, we're not doing it, so we're going to have that be OpenAI doing that, which is the right thing to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

But most of what they're doing, and this is why I want to withhold judgment till we see it, is on device using Apple models.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, okay, here's the thing. So they just announced an on device SDK or API, whatever it is, so any developer can access.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love that too.

[Leo Laporte]

The neuralink.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

Microsoft's been doing this for two years. I mean, this is not new. Like Google has been doing this for two years on copilot plus PCs. That's what that is. Oh, okay. And it started before that when they had Windows Studio effects and other NPO features. Good.

[Paul Thurrott]

So do a lot of app developers use that?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no one does. Because the problem is on Windows, that market is relatively small. So like Snapchat or Qualcomm will be like, oh yeah, we're where like 15% of premium laptops that were sold in 2024, great. But what percentage are you of the billion whatever user base? Like, yeah, less than 1%. So who's going to do that? I will say a year ago at Build, when Microsoft announced what was then the Windows Copilot runtime, I was like, all right, well, I need to try this. We'll see what it looks like. I didn't get a chance to look at it. No one did until January or February, I guess it was 2025. So that took them seven months to ship a preview that's still not public, by the way. And then they announced the update to that. It's called the Windows AI Foundry. And that one's actually more interesting because in that case, what you have is a combination of on device and cloud based AIs. The on device AIs are a combination of AIs that run against the CPU, the GPU and or the MPU. And so you as a developer can pick and choose and use the models you want for whatever your needs are. Right. And so obviously the big use cases, there are things like creator apps like video editors, photo editors, that kind of stuff. But the problem with this stuff, this is going to be the problem for Apple as well. You just said, like, Apple is sprinkling AI all over their ecosystem. And you're right, that's 100% right. But there isn't a single feature that would cause anyone to go buy an Apple device to get that feature. Right, Right. So when you say stuff like, well, I can make whatever they're called, genmojis. And now people in my contact list in the new version of iOS can take my genmoji and have it make reactions where they're editing me and you're like, okay, so look, that may be fun. That might be something lots of people do in the future, I don't know. But I can tell you no one's buying the new iPhone to get that. Like, that's not a thing. And this is the problem we see on Windows as well. And this is the killer app problem we talked about. We've been talking about this for two years. Like, what's the killer app? There is no killer app. There is a. We took a killer app and we shattered it on the floor to a thousand pieces. And there were a thousand little things. And depending on your needs, there may be one or five or 100 things that are nice, but not.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but that's not. And that's not when they came in on the door and we talked about this last year, Apple had to at the. The point in the hype cycle for AI last year, Apple felt like they had to say something, they had to do something.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. They were pressured, in effect.

[Leo Laporte]

But I also feel like, look, in the same way that the. Like, the iPhone appeared and it killed everything else. Right, yeah. The only thing that survived out of that, the cockroach, was Android, which they had to change completely.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because of the iPhone.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It was going to be like a thing with a keyboard.

[Paul Thurrott]

They went back to the drawing board. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They were the only ones that were like, nope, stop it. Change everything. We're not doing that. Every other company on Earth, everyone's like, oh, Microsoft failed because the iPhone, you know, Microsoft. What about Nokia? What about RIM and BlackBerry? And what about Motorola? What about the companies that only did that one thing? They all failed, too. So sometimes these things come out of the blue and they blow you away. Apple was actually early to the game with what they call a neural processor, an mpu, and capabilities built into the devices that took advantage of it. They've been doing that for several years on the S. That's true.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just.

[Richard Campbell]

And because they've needed to. Because they don't own enough cloud to do it any other way.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, this is before there was any cloud AI. I mean, this is. I mean, they've been doing this for many years. Like. Like, so all of a sudden, this cloud thing happens with a chat bot and there's a breakthrough. And, you know, look inside of Apple, but outside for the rest of the world. We all saw it. Everyone looked at. This was like, oh, my God, actually, this is real.

[Richard Campbell]

100 billion users in two months.

[Leo Laporte]

This is really good. So that put Apple in the spot, maybe that RIM and Palm and whatever companies you want to name back in 2007 were in. Where. Where at first you're like, well, we got this. We're. Us, We're. Look at us. We're great. We're not gonna fail. We got everything right. We have a history of coming from behind and doing our little secret sauce thing and getting it right eventually. And by the way, that could still play out. I'm just saying.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, I think this is a confidence issue. Last year, if they'd had the confidence. So we said, hey, we're looking at this. We don't think it's good enough yet. We'll let you know. We got something better. They didn't do that. They said, hey, we've got it. Here's the thing. You'll get it soon. And now, a year later, and the momentum's off. Like, people aren't that impressed with AI. Like now it's easier to say, we're willing to wait.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we could be like, we told you so.

[Richard Campbell]

They could have been there. But that's not what happened.

[Leo Laporte]

I know, but we're not used to.

[Richard Campbell]

Apple blinking on the confidence equation. And that's what we just saw, 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

But I. But they still can say, look, here's the we. We announced, whatever the number was, 28 things. We released 27 of them. I'm not saying they're all awesome, but we also did give Siri this pink, purple glow thing, which is pretty fun. It's pretty fun. It distracts you from how stupid it is, but it's fun.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, still doesn't understand what you're.

[Leo Laporte]

Saying, but now it's ridiculous. But I mean, but this is the ultimate hand. Like, look at the purple and pink. It's still, it's still. It just did it to me. I think it was today or today, yesterday. It popped up and I'm like, what are you doing? Shut up. Like, I, you know, I never want. It always comes on when I don't want it. It never.

[Richard Campbell]

Not when you do.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I never do.

[Paul Thurrott]

But anyway, I think they fell for the general consensus that the AI should manifest itself as a chat bot. And they didn't have the chat.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the one thing. See, they're not doing that right. They're not going to do a chat.

[Richard Campbell]

Now that they've learned they wanted to.

[Paul Thurrott]

They thought that was the way to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

They were going to do a phone, too. Actually, I shouldn't say they're not going to. Going to. But what they've said publicly in those interviews you were referencing that kind of provide a little more color on the Siri thing was like, look, the Internet happened and we had Internet stuff in the Mac, but we didn't make a search engine. There's all these examples because I think, and by the way, this is actually credible on their part. I'm extremely critical of Apple, but they do look at things and where they do feel like they can provide value, they pursue it. And when it comes out, it's usually pretty good. Those are examples of that is not what happened at the time. But they looked at those things and said, we're not going to do this. We're not going to have an app. Well, again, they might actually be doing it, but the plan for last year was not. And it all culminates in an Apple AI chatbot. It's like, no, they're doing what Microsoft is doing. But to phones and their devices, which is adding AI everywhere and hopefully it makes your life a little, you know, better for users.

[Paul Thurrott]

That makes more sense. I mean, and you can always chat with Claude or ChatGPT or somebody else if you really want to.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the user doesn't care where any of that stuff runs, actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, they don't care.

[Richard Campbell]

I would argue this Apple, Apple has stayed loyal to their core business style, which is that they're a hardware vendor that makes exceptional hardware and the software is an ancillary point they provide.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the value. Yeah. But you do get more value from Apple the more you spend. I know that sounds like. Like, why wouldn't you?

[Richard Campbell]

But their walled garden works well.

[Leo Laporte]

But they're really good at that.

[Paul Thurrott]

They really good lock in. They know.

[Richard Campbell]

But I would also argue this is not what Microsoft's done. You know, Microsoft used to be a software company.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

They're now an infrastructure company, like Jason.

[Leo Laporte]

Just before the show started, someone in my family, my extended family, texted my wife and I, and I texted my wife back and I said, said, please, God, give me the strength. And then I wrote, sorry, that was for chat GPT, like, because people are just like, like, it's like a therapist now. You just talk to it and it's like, Paul, you sound like you're down.

[Paul Thurrott]

What do you think of Liquid Glass?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not. So honestly, I. I realized that was the big thing up front. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And if that's how they started. Yeah. If you look at, in my opinion, the most important story, and I think you agree at the end, but Liquid Glass was the first thing we talked about.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, look, I actually think there was a lot of good stuff in this keynote. Like I said, it's really easy, especially with these highly produced things they do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Apple makes a hell of a show, by the way. There's no protesters if you record ahead of time. Although there was a protester in Cupertino, an Apple employee who did stand up, a pro Palestinian protester, and was escorted out. But the thing is, nobody saw it.

[Leo Laporte]

But no one would ever.

[Paul Thurrott]

Unless you were there, because you're watching.

[Leo Laporte]

A video that they're watching there, you're not watching them watch the video. So look, I wrote a long, long piece about this. Liquid Glass, though. It was promoted as kind of the big thing. This unified UI across all of their platforms is actually, at least on iOS, well, you know, iPhone, iPad especially, but even on the Mac too. It's a very minor Change. There's stuff going on in liquid glass that doesn't require the glass effect. That is actually kind of cool. Like they have new UI widgets and things and you know, as you scroll down a page they kind of contract and get out of the way and like that stuff's wonderful. Doesn't require glass. Right. It's just not. They're kind of commingling these things. The way that it looks, I'm not 100% sold on. Like this is. Apple had this problem with Mac OS X. Microsoft later had this problem with Windows Vista where the first implementations are off. You know, like if you go into like Control Panel. No, what's it called? Control Center. You have like the glass clear style, whatever. You can't actually see some things. Like I've had things where like text jumbles up at the top, but it's all the same color and it's, you know, it's a beta. I mean, I get that, but I feel like iOS7 was like this at first. Like the first version was mostly there, but then over time they kind of refined it and it made sense, I think.

[Richard Campbell]

Not Wind Phone seven, like, I'm convinced.

[Leo Laporte]

But he didn't. When Craig Federighi was talking about this, he kind of said, you know, think about how much time has gone by, how much more powerful our processes are. And I thought what he was going to say is now we have the graphics capability to render the see through glass effect.

[Paul Thurrott]

That was the implication. I mean, Aero didn't work because it was sluggish on xp.

[Richard Campbell]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

That was the argument for Arrow. Yeah, for Arrow. Right, exactly. So it was like Microsoft, that was a tough time for them because people have been hammering them for not being as innovative in Windows as Apple was with the Mac. Apple has hardware accelerated graphics. They've got postscript or PDF based text rendering and whatever it was all the stuff they had. And it was like you have bitmaps, it looks stupid. You make an icon go big and it's all blurry on the Apple, it looks like a photograph. So they're like, all right, we're going to do all that stuff. And then they did. And everyone's like, oh, it doesn't run on my computer. You told us to do it like, you know, so I look, that was a temporary problem. They solved it with Service Pack and then with Windows 7, obviously, but. And they also made. The important thing to me though is just the glass effect got better, if you will. I actually think flat is better and opaque is better for this kind of interface. But, you know, if you think about a big screen, multiple windows, the idea that you might want to see what's behind the thing you're working on is a decent one. This is not something you do on the phone, you know, not that much. I mean, sometimes maybe I'm trying to think of an example. They had examples, but like some little.

[Richard Campbell]

Uniform they're unifying across all the platforms too, right?

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, that's why I said on iPhone especially, it's more of a. On the Mac. And if you're using an iPad with Windows for some reason, and yes, this becomes maybe more of a thing. Although if you look at the shots of the windows on the iPad, they are not see through, they're just windows. So I don't know. To me, it's not. I don't know, it's not awful, but it's. I don't. Aesthetically, this is subjective. I don't think it's an improvement over what they had two seconds ago. And all of the stuff that is cool about it related to, you know, toolbars and widgets and whatever you call these things that kind of contract and go away and come back. Whatever they do could have been done with any. It has nothing to do with liquid glass. Like, it's just like there are effects that occur. I don't have my iPhone here, but like you can press a button that is smaller than the tip of my finger and if you look at it from an angle, you can see there's a little glass effect. Great. I don't need that there. That's. This is. This is pointless. I can't even see it. So I don't know. I. I don't know. I think people were worried that they were going to turn the iPad into a Mac and that they were going to dumb down all their UIs to make it look like Vision Pro. And I think that making things consistent to whatever degree makes sense given the platform is fine. You know, I think it's fine. Like, it's the consistency. Although, you know, Microsoft Learned in the 1990s, like their semi or less intelligent version of this was make all the toolbars in the Office apps as similar as possible, because that will be familiarity. And then someone who uses Word can use Excel more easily. Not true. It's completely untrue. And people can handle different UIs, as it turns out, but it's one of those things that sounds right. So when you say, like, we want to make all our platforms consistent, it's like, okay, but sometimes the UI I see on a phone makes sense on a tablet, makes sense on my Apple TV maybe. Maybe even on a Mac. But a lot of times, no. Right. So I guess the trick is in the implementation. I guess we'll see. Plus you're basing your unified UI and the one thing no one bought. Maybe the UI on that thing is the problem. You know, like what? Did it occur to you that maybe that wasn't right? It's like everyone loves the Apple Watch, so everything's bubbles now. We're going to have bubbling UIs on all our devices. On a Mac you'll have giant bubbles. It'll be great. Like they didn't.

[Richard Campbell]

High resolution retina bubbles.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Retina bubbles, exactly. I don't know. I thought. I don't know. We'll see. I need more time with it. It's easy to knee jerk this kind of thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean I also. Did you install a developer?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I installed it on everything. I have it on my watch, my phone, my Mac and my Apple tv.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Do you like it?

[Leo Laporte]

I do that with the Google stuff too. I mean, yeah, it's fine. Like I can't say that any of them.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think a ui.

[Leo Laporte]

God, it's like I have. It's like I have a new iPhone in my iPhone.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, no. I don't think it's a big deal. It's a UI change. I do think what they did with the iPad is a big deal.

[Leo Laporte]

I do too, because this. And by the way, so I've been yapping about this one for years. Apple could have put a knife in Windows and especially in Surface forever. And I think under Steve Jobs would have. To me, the big.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually everybody debates Steve Jobs because I'm hearing a lot of people say Steve.

[Leo Laporte]

Would never have let. Oh really? Then you should go back and listen to what he talked about because he was talking about the post PC era, not the PC plus era. Like we're looking at PCs and this thing. And he. And by the way, go to the iPad2 launch and his visceral reaction to all of the. Everyone suddenly had adopted this term consumption device. And he was like, no. And he made sure that the iolife apps, whatever they were called at the time, these are going to be first class on the iPad. We're going to prove that this thing can be used to get work done.

[Paul Thurrott]

They did not do that though I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

Sorry to say that they did to some degree. And then he passed away because that year was the year he died. Right. 2011.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, I'm not saying we would have landed where we are. I agree that when you see things like a pointer in floating windows with the green and red and yellow buttons like you have on a Mac, it's like, well, I didn't mean make it the Mac, you know, but what they did. This is quick. Again, this is too early, but they appear to have pulled this thing off where if you want to use the iPad like it is today as a full screen device with apps, you can. That doesn't change if you have an iPad pro or a big screen, iPad air or whatever it is, you can add a keyboard and a trackpad, like a cover or whatever and you could use this thing like a Mac, but in a device that gets way better. Well, better, hopefully better battery life, but has like that hybrid capability where it's a laptop and the thing it was before, I mean, that's. To me, that's the dream. Right? That's what all these folding phones and folding laptops and whatever we have coming, whatever is about. It's like, is there a world, a version where I can replace two things with one thing that actually works really well for both?

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And so far the iPad has been really good for the consumption stuff and.

[Richard Campbell]

Not so good for anything else.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's okay. So now look, I. This is going to be like a lot of other things. People have been hammering at this for years. Some people are looking at it now and they're like, what are you doing? You're screwing up everything that's special about the iPad. But they're not, right? They're just adding something that you don't have to touch, pardon the pun. A year ago. Well, they've been kind of slow boiling features that make the iPad better for that kind of thing. So a year ago I was like, look, this is the list, what you got to do background processes. So if you're rendering a video, it doesn't stop. If, you know, huge, you get the best processor in the world and you can't do background, what are you doing?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it's because it's basically the iPhone. They were protecting the battery and that.

[Leo Laporte]

Was silly, but if someone's doing video.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They're probably on power, by the way. Just do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, I agree, that was huge. Default apps for opening file types and Leo, you might remember this, we had this thing about files. You're like files of the past. Like, not for this audience.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

You know.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, you need files.

[Leo Laporte]

You're working with assets in a Video or you're.

[Paul Thurrott]

You don't need a full finder, a full explorer, but you do need access. That's the point.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, look, there's always going to be this power user who points to this thing and says, well, it doesn't do this. Yeah, of course.

[Paul Thurrott]

I use files now all the time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, of course. Because now it's actually pretty good. Anyway, I listed out all the stuff that this thing needed. They didn't do one of them last year at wwdc. They did all of them. And listen, that's not how Apple does things. Usually what happens is, like, all right, this year you're getting a pointer. Next year you're getting this. Next year you're getting that. They usually do it like that. The fact that they just shut me the hell up, like, in one whack.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is I'm really excited.

[Leo Laporte]

Astonishing.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm a big iPad user and this, to me, is exactly what they needed to do. But I will point out the major distinction still between the iPad and Windows or the iPad and the Mac, is you have to install apps from the App Store on the iPad. There is no sideloading.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. So that's a big deal. Without worrying about whether that's ever going to change.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's never going to change. I can tell you right now, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Don'T think it matters.

[Richard Campbell]

We should jailbreak the iPad.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. But that's us. For most people, that might even be a selling point. Right. It's part of the platform promise that this thing, even though they don't really do that much to. To make sure these apps aren't doing anything bad. But whatever. It keeps it from being a full.

[Paul Thurrott]

Computer, though, because I. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't. But maybe that's better.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's like, you know, for its audience. I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe it's better and maybe that. But that's the audience that I think Steve Jobs saw, which was a much bigger mainstream audience than the technical people who maybe need, like, what I would call a workstation, because they're a developer or a scientist or an engineer or whatever you're doing, or a creator. Right. To some degree. Although honestly, a lot of people. Did you see all the podcasting stuff, like the audio?

[Paul Thurrott]

That was really surprising to me. I know. Damn.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, they're really going after that audience. I mean, it's interesting. So I. This is what I saw for the iPad so long ago, and I just almost. I basically gave. I never. I'm like, they're never going to do this. Tim Cook is protecting the Mac. I don't know what incentive there was to make it all happen.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now maybe I'm just thrilled because they've always great hardware and they never had the software to live up to it, and I believe they do now.

[Leo Laporte]

The M4 shipped first on the iPad.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Spend 1200 bucks on this thing and you couldn't render a video in the background. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, this is like a Ferrari, right. But with a limiter on the engine. It can only go 30 in a school zone or whatever. You know, it's like, what are you doing? So anyway, yeah, this was. They finally unshackled it and look, to me, the important point is if you don't like it, if you don't want it, if you love your. You have an iPad mini or normal iPad, whatever it is, and you don't want that, guess what, you don't have to use it. You actually get a choice in the beginning. You just turn it off.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, just. I mean, I think if you're using your iPad to read and watch movies. Yeah. You don't need this. But if you, you are thinking like, actually I might want to travel with this thing because it gets incredible battery life. You know what it's like to like when you're on an Apple device, you could watch a movie for like half an hour and then you check the battery and it's 100% somehow. And then you use like an Android device and all I did was check the time and it's on 83% in the same amount of time. You're like, what's going on? Like they do look at me and.

[Richard Campbell]

Look at me again because it'll.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. How dare you look at me. Now it's going to be 81. You're going to look again, buddy. Huh? You know, like it's, it's, you know, this is slightly different thing going on there.

[Paul Thurrott]

So that is maybe the argument for sticking with the App Store is that you can kind of get.

[Leo Laporte]

That's part of the cast. Well, we're assuming Apple does anything on the App Store, by the way, but I'm sure I. There's a lot of stories about how all kinds of stuff really seem to do much.

[Paul Thurrott]

We get through. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, look, that to me is. That to me was the most important thing personally. But if you look at all the products, well, most of the products there wasn't really much an up there. The workout buddy thing is like the cringiest thing I've ever seen. I don't care about vision Pro.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hey, good going. You just ran a half mile. Nice job.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. And then that's when I'm like, okay, how do we turn this off?

[Paul Thurrott]

Shut up, shut up.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I turn it off in a way that will cause this thing pain? Because seriously. Oh, stop. Apple devices.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sorry. Not everything can be a winner, Paul. Not everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, so now that Apple's event has. Has kind of come and gone, I will say, I mean, each of these events were so emblematic of these companies. They were all so. It was like Build was such a Microsoft event. Google I O was such a Google event. And the Apple event obviously was only Apple.

[Paul Thurrott]

Do you think the iPad now is a threat to Surface?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I do. In fact, yeah, I do. I think this might be. This is extreme. Maybe I shouldn't say it this way, but. But I think Surface has been able to coast for a while, in part because Apple never did this. Like, Apple had the power to kill.

[Paul Thurrott]

That thing and they never did.

[Leo Laporte]

The joke is, what was the Tim Cook line about? Yeah, we could combine a refrigerator or microwave, but no one ever wanted that. And it's like, well, you just did it, buddy. Also, that's one way of combining things. You could also combine a microwave and an oven. And then those seem to work out pretty good. So, you know, these things are sort of closer than you're making them sound. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think my Apple still has distinctions between the two lines. I think they can still sell MacBook Airs. And even though, I mean, they don't really care because they both are equally expensive, I mean, it's not like you save money by buying an iPad.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Well, I actually like that. It's not about the money. Right. Because you could get an iPad pretty cheap. I mean, you could buy a base iPad and a keyboard thing and honestly be pretty good, right? Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

If you want a Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's funny. The best screen they make is on the iPad Pro.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, if you want bigger than a 13 inch screen, you got to buy a Mac, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro. Both come in 15, 16 inch screens, right? Great. And they're going to be capabilities around expansion. The number of screens you can add and the things you can add. Those screens.

[Paul Thurrott]

I can use Emacs.

[Leo Laporte]

Emacs, yes. There's got to be an Emacs in the store or there will be soon. I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

That'd be interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. I don't know who said this, but someone had offered up this idea that a platform isn't real until you can create that platform on the platform. Like, in other words, you have tools that run on that thing. Right. So that's another thing that differentiates the Mac. I know there's like the Swift Playground thing, but to make apps like an X, like there's no Xcode on the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's right.

[Leo Laporte]

You still needed it, by the way. There could be, right? I mean, of course there could be. Why wouldn't there be a version of Xcode that makes iPad and iPhone apps and I guess watch apps or whatever. Or whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, there could be.

[Leo Laporte]

There could be very good reasons, by the way. I don't know. But yeah, I love that they did it. I did my take on the famous line at the end of Planet of the Apes. They finally really did it. Although I meant that in a positive sense in this case, because this is what I've been asking for since the iPad was the thing. Thing like this notion of this beautiful slab that is light and thin and gets great battery life and then I can click on and do actual stuff on it, but not deal with the bulk and crappiness and bad battery life or whatever of like a computer. There's a place for this, you know, so we're going to find out. But, you know, a year from now we're going to be like, what were we concerned about exactly? Like, it didn't change anything. Like it doesn't matter. I don't know. Anyway, so the three. Anyway, the three shows happened. We got by it. The summer doldrums can occur now. This is the week that would normally be E3. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Too soon. Don't bring it up.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, all three of the companies that are the big console makers, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, have or will have some set of announcements that would have been at E3 if E3 was still a thing. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Did I miss the story that Microsoft is shipping a handheld Xbox?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're going to talk about this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, all right.

[Leo Laporte]

Because there's a lot going on.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's the longest Xbox segment ever coming up.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, not by word count, but maybe by the amount of time we spent on this. We'll see.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're watching and you're glad you are, I bet. Windows Weekly, Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell, who's in Stockholm, Sweden. Is it past midnight yet in Stockholm?

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, It's. It's almost 10 o' clock. It's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's early 10 o' clock in June, so it's like noon is what it looks like there. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sun never sets. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Sun is literally overhead.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's. It's dark now, but it was a dark.

[Leo Laporte]

Really. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was in hell.

[Richard Campbell]

I pulled my curtain. So.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I was in Helsinki on the summer solstice and it really. It's weird how. How late the sun is still up.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you get this far north, it just keeps going. It's the same in Vancouver.

[Paul Thurrott]

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[Richard Campbell]

Seriously.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me check this pocket. Oh, mints. Really, I'm fine. Oh, I have raisins. I'm a mom. Wait, wait one sec. I've got cupcakes in the car. It's our best iPhone offer ever.

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[Paul Thurrott]

Cancel CT mobile.com you're watching Windows Weekly. Thank you for watching all you winners and you dozers. We continue on now with the much awaited the vaunted Xbox segment. I wouldn't mind an Xbox Steam deck. Is that what we're talking here?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So this has been one of those rumored things. There are still rumors that Microsoft was originally planning to have a first party, meaning their own device. As soon as this year, but that has been delayed. There's a lot of speculation about what's going on with Xbox hardware in house. That, you know, we had gotten that leak a couple of years ago about these refreshes that look really good to the Xbox series X and S. And then what they shipped was basically the same consoles, like slightly different, you know, maybe you got the white one in black or the black one in white and then a little bit more storage, whatever there is one of the things they were looking at was make going with ARM for the next generation. Right. And we know that makes a lot of sense. Yep. And especially for a portable device. Right. That's where that kind of thing makes sense. So for that to work though, that means that we have to get buy in from developers and you gotta get.

[Richard Campbell]

Games compiled to arm.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. So what I had, I developed a theory before any of this happened that Microsoft was going to combine Windows and Xbox as a gaming platform, meaning that the same exact game would just run in both. And that, you know, if you go and get like an Xbox logo for your app, which you have to get to sell that app in the Xbox store for the console that the next gen version of this, it will just, it will be a Windows game. Basically it's it. Which makes it a lot easier on developers when you think about it, because there's a lot of developers creating just Windows games and now maybe that opens up the console to this different kind of a thing. And I thought, you know, we've, we've seen what they did in Windows 11 on ARM over the past year with things like AutoSR and the Microsoft Prism emulator to emulate apps especially, but also games to run better. So you can run like an x64 game and not in all cases but at a lower resolution. But it looks fantastic. So to your eyes, maybe it's 1080p even though it's running at 720p or even less, improves the frame rates, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe this is the thing that will make this ARM dream come true if there's still still pursuing that. Phil Spencer has been talking about portable devices. They've been thinking about this for years. ARM would make a lot more sense on portable, but we're in this holding pattern. Right. This is the problem with Xbox right now. It's just been a tough couple years. Right. And so there's a lot of uncertainty. But Microsoft had a Xbox game showcase on Sunday. They announced a bunch of stuff. The next Call of Duty, there's a remake of the original Gears and then there's a future Gears of War game coming as well, etc. A bunch of stuff. But of course then they announced this Xbox branded, what they call a gaming handheld, not a gaming handheld PC by the way. It's a gaming handheld and it's got the Xbox logo on it. It's the first time Microsoft has allowed a third party to ship a. I'm going to call it a computer or a device that's not a peripheral with their logo on it. If you've been following gaming on Windows or especially in Windows 7, you know that they've been improving the Xbox app and the game bar dramatically. Both of them support a compact mode, which is explicitly for this new category of device. But I would have called it a gaming PC, but now we're going to call it a gaming handheld, I guess. And I think this might be a preview of how this platform is going to shift a little bit here. Because if you look at this business Microsoft, you could make the argument that Microsoft Games, or whatever that part of the company is actually called is really like Activision Blizzard and some other stuff. And the stuff that loses money is the worst part of it is the hardware. Right. This has been the big problem for them.

[Richard Campbell]

It's always been at least just a break even proposition. At best. It's the money in the games.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So Microsoft just look, if they've proven anything on the hardware front, it's that they can't make a profit doing it. It's true of Surface as well. Farm it out.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, neither can Sony. Like there's no money in the console.

[Leo Laporte]

Hardware, but they make a lot of the razor blades. Right. And companies like Sony and Microsoft or Nintendo are actually much better at cost reducing over time. So that they actually do make money on that hardware. Eventually somewhere in that lifecycle they've done that. Microsoft has never been able to do that. So yeah, I thought, well, you know, what if maybe the next consoles, they don't have to be made by Microsoft. Right. And when you see what do you.

[Richard Campbell]

Care if you're making the games.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And what do you care if you're an Xbox fan. Right. Other than the very basic comment that you want the platform to succeed for whatever reasons that you love it if the next console is kind of PC based, which by the way, the current version, the last version and the first version were all PC based.

[Richard Campbell]

But now maybe it's a momentary lapse of reason in the middle there was.

[Leo Laporte]

That weird power PC jumping the shark moment there. Although by the way, that was the most successful one. But okay, they've done a terrific job of bringing forward games from the past. So you have this library of backward compatible games. They have the play anywhere stuff. So your games work in as many places as they can do. Some of that is constrained by the publishers. But look, say what you will about this business, they've done everything they can to expand the concept of Xbox and the availability of the money you've spent, the games that you bought with that money, and they've done a great job with that. This will be a lot easier if this thing was a PC platform, to say, a lot easier. So this is very interesting to me. So this Xbox branded third party gaming handheld, right, made by Asus, runs on what's called the AMD Z2 platform. This is the version of their PC chips made for handhelds specifically for all the stuff. So they rely on like a small screen with a lower resolution than you would have on a 16 inch laptop with the dedicated graphics or whatever. You guys will know. I write about this, I talk about this all the time. One of the biggest things that's happened over the past, I say almost two years now is the integrated graphics especially. But the chipsets that are in just mainstream laptops have improved to the point where I now just play games on a laptop and not a gaming laptop, not a gaming laptop with dedicated graphics. But anything based on Lunar Lake is fine. Anything based on the AMD Zen stuff, Zen 5, depending on which chip you have, is either unbelievable or off the charts. Like just, it's excellent.

[Richard Campbell]

What about Snapdragon?

[Leo Laporte]

So the Zen stuff is really good and no. So the Snapdragon. Well, so Snapdragon, we're waiting on gen 2, better graphics and whatever platform improvements go.

[Richard Campbell]

So this is part of that still a year away.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. And Nvidia and MediaTek are rumored to be working together on something. Something that would have Nvidia dedicated graphics with am, with arm, which makes that obviously very interesting. Right? So, but again, if you're going to make Xbox be a PC, which no one has said, I'm just speculating here, then you want to go with the best chip. Now AMD does make the chip in the Xbox. They made the chip in the previous Xbox. They make the chip in the PS4 and the PS5, or at least the PS5, I don't remember on the PS4. They're good at this. This is, this is a strength, I can tell you on the PC side of just a mainstream laptop. That stuff is off the charts. It's it's fantastic. I play Call of duty at 2880 by 1800 on a laptop that does not have dedicated graphics. And it's 110 frames a second with all the graphics on full blast. It's unbelievable. Like it's really good. So the Z2 I can't speak to that. The Z1 was in previous gen gaming handheld PCs. The Z2 is the latest version. You know 16 I think 32 gigs of RAM, 512 or a terabyte of storage. Doesn't have Thunderbolt 4 whatever but it's a 7 inch screen. 1080p. I think it's 120 hertz on both of them. There's two models Xbox controller on the sides. Right. Kind of a standard form factor.

[Richard Campbell]

It looks good. It's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Looks pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm excited for this. I don't think this saves Xbox. I don't mean it like that. I don't think this is the, you.

[Richard Campbell]

Know the part of a new Xbox.

[Leo Laporte]

Not about the hardware. It's the tip of an iceberg of other things that are coming that's that might include such things as third party Xbox consoles. Next gen that have a. Just like Copilot Plus PC has a spec that you have to make sealed in the box from the factory to meet the spec. They will do something like that for Xbox and they could call it whatever you want to call it. But on the software side, Xbox certified, right? Yeah. Or the Windows Xbox or whatever you want to call it. Doesn't matter. Matter. The handheld OS is Windows 11 but it's been heavily modified. It doesn't boot into the desktop. It boots into. It's sort of like remember back in the day you could boot into Program manager but you could boot into Notepad if you wanted to. Right. So you boot into this into the Xbox app in compact mode. It has access to your other stores. So they showed off. Well their store, what's it called? The. Not Blizzard but Bethesda has a store or whatever it's called bell.net but they confirm later that Steam Epic games will be in there as well. So you have like a unified dashboard for all of your games wherever they are. If you have those subscriptions through Microsoft you get access to the game pass stuff, you get access to the game streaming stuff. Again I don't have personal experience with the processor but based on AMD in general, I'm probably thinking this is pretty good. Like on the device 1080p 7 inch screen, you're not pushing a Lot of pixels. It's probably going to be pretty good. And it's PC, right? It's not Xbox, you're not playing Xbox games. But I'm thinking this might be where the platform goes. And then you get this thing, you get to this idea where Windows has gotten better for gaming. It's not perfect. Still Windows, it's desktop os, but you have this highly optimized thing. They didn't mention Dave Cutler by name, but they talked about the. They referred to the architects from Windows who had worked on Xbox OS before modified Windows 11. Like, you know, that's that team. It's the same people, Right, that did the Hyper V stuff for the Xbox where this becomes the platform. Right. And so if you think about like what's good about an Xbox, what's good about Windows, you know, on the Windows side you kind of trade complexity for infinite graphics. If you can spend the money, you can keep upgrading and keep getting better graphics, better performance, et cetera. On the Xbox side, you turn it on and it just works. And so this thing. And it's acceptable, like it's good, the graphics accept good. So I think that this thing basically is like a middle ground. It's like something in the middle. It's still Windows. So it has the advantage of all the compatibility, which is fantastic for games. The thing you don't get, by the way on SteamOS because it's Linux based. Right. It's not exactly the same. Yes, it runs faster because Linux is smaller, but this thing runs faster too because it too is smaller. You basically get back like 2 gigs of RAM, which on a 16 gig system is meaningful.

[Richard Campbell]

Huge. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. So I think this is the makings of something. And so based on what I've been thinking so far, I was like, well, what if like you could imagine like an Xbox Series S is basically like a nuc. And then an Xbox Series X, whatever the next version is called, is basically like a little mini tower, like a dedicated graphic thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm sorry, but this makes sense to me. I'm going to jump ahead just for one second because there is a, a four terabyte of storage card that you can buy for your Xbox today. Four terabytes, right. That costs 500 bucks. $500 is more than you would spend on an Xbox Series S. It used to be more than you would spend or as much as you would spend on an X. I think now it's a little more PS5. 500 bucks?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. How much would it cost to add a 4 terabyte? SSD to a PC right now, 29 cents. Do you get it free in a box of cereal? Are you kidding me? Like, comes with a whistle. Yeah, I'm just. I mean, give it a break. So I'm. Look, like I said, I don't think this thing solves Xbox. I don't mean it like that, but one of the things you could do to help that thing as a business is back off of the hardware thing. Or at least even if Microsoft had to make it for some reason, you know, base it literally on standard PC parts. Like just, just make it a standard PC, you know, whether it's ARM or.

[Richard Campbell]

Have all that power for free.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep, just give it. Yep, just do it. So, you know, I'm getting ahead of myself in a way here. Like, we don't. I don't know what's going to happen in the future. We don't know how much these things are going to cost. We know they're coming this holiday season. We know there will be more next year and that these things will all run that os. I got a lot of questions from people who are like, well, I would like to run this on my PC. And I get that. But the thing about the PC, the thing about the PC that is so beautiful is, is that infinite expandability. So if you're like a PC gamer and you're not running 32 gig system right now, at least you're not paying attention. I don't know what you're doing. But saving 2 gigabytes of RAM and losing a lot of the stuff you get normally in Windows is maybe not the right approach. But there is a feature in Windows that nobody ever thinks about, which if you go into settings, there's a thing called Games. Gaming. Sorry. And then there's a feature called Game Mode, and it's just a on, right. And it optimizes your PC when you're playing by turning off things in the background, which at a very high level is what this new version of Windows does. The difference is this new version of Windows is more aggressive because it's a dedicated device and it starts at boot time. Like, this is something Windows 11 does while you're gaming. And then when you come back, you're like, we're back. Everything's normal again. It doesn't work 100%. I get phone link notifications from my phone while I'm playing a game. What? Like that should never happen. That's ridiculous. So that's a problem. But it's also not configurable in any way. If you go into settings and look at the feature I was just talking about, this is an on off switch. It's on by default, I believe there's nothing you can do to configure it, but you just turn it on and there's a webpage you can go. That tells you a little bit about what it does, but it only tells you a little bit about what it, it does. And it's mostly just around background processes and stuff. It's not a big deal. But there's no reason that game mode could not be expanded in normal Windows 11 to be more like this little thing. You could today emulate this, right? You could run game bar in compact mode, you could run Xbox app in compact mode, launch your games from there, play your games, access the game bar, everything happens kind of full screen. You could do it, you know, I mean, you're still going to get Outlook notifications and you know, whatever. It's winning Windows. But I do see a path for. I don't see Microsoft giving us this for anyone, but I do see them improving game Mode in Windows 11 to be more like this for those people that want that.

[Richard Campbell]

And it does get it. Make a case for eventually your PC is just a good gaming machine regardless.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, now that the iPad's going to kill the PC, this will be the last thing we have left. So it's really good timing. So I guess we'll see. Anyway, I'm excited about this Xbox.

[Richard Campbell]

IPad.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. The X Pad. I knew it. Gaming's pretty good in the iPad, but, but yeah, I, I definitely, I. I booted up right after this was announced. I think it was that same night I went in here, I turned on my Xbox for the first time and I. It could be two years. It can't be two years. It could be like. I don't know. It's been a long time. A really long time. And I thought what I was going to do was spend a day updating it. Right. But the thing was this has been plugged in the whole time. So it's actually been doing that thing in the background. I probably been sucking down all the electricity in the Lehigh Valley. So my Xbox that I never use can stay up to date. Because, you know, that's also another problem with that console, by the way.

[Richard Campbell]

So constantly needing updates.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and not super energy efficient, even though they keep working on that. Right. So, you know, Windows PCs and the chips that go in them and the software that runs on them, it have all been. I'm not saying they're great. But it's gotten better over time for sure. The Xbox has also improved, but they were starting from a much worse place. I mean, these things are designed to be boxes that are plugged in all the time.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Heat rooms. Yeah. And the best experience you can have as a gamer, unless you care about the environment more, in which case you wouldn't be a gamer, would be to not let it do that. Not let it be constantly connected. There's a stand, whatever they call the mode, you can turn that off, an energy saver mode, whatever. And then every single time you run the thing, you'll have to update all your games in the system because nothing will ever work. And that will be a good gaming experience. So you don't do that. You let it update in the background. But it's super inefficient. It just is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think that's another thing that moving to literally PC platform, not just PC chips and stuff, but like literally to a Windows PC platform, might be better efficiency on these devices. I use the NUC as an example, but there are AMD, Zen 5, whatever. The best chip you can imagine that costs no more than an Xbox Series X today with lots of ram, lots of storage that will run these games great. Like great. And that's before we even get into dedicated graphics. Like it's going to be great.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is a. This is a good future. Assuming my fever dream is correct. Because no one has ever said this. I'm, you know, I'm tea. Leaving it in a way. But anyway, so I'm excited. I hope you can. Okay. I mentioned the 4 terabyte RAM thing or storage thing that no one should buy. There's that.

[Richard Campbell]

Not that way anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, not that. Yeah, exactly. This is one thing actually Sony does do better rate because Sony, you can. It has to meet a certain performance characteristic. But you can just plug an SSD in that thing. Right. There you go. That's. That's what you want. Bunch of new game pass games across across all the platforms. Actually recognize some of these. That's pretty cool. Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 have both been enhanced on there. Warhammer 4000, EA Sports FC 25, which I assume is the soccer game Crash Bandicoot 4. It's all about time, et cetera. And then of course the Barbie Project Friendship, which I'm now going through with my daughter. I'm just kidding.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm a man.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, so nobody plays that.

[Richard Campbell]

Your daughter's not 9.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. My first solo Movie watching experience with my daughter was the shining. So she's not really anyway, I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And that's why we don't trust dad.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly. She's like, what does Redrum mean? I'm like, oh, man, you're going to love the end of this movie. All right, so Apple has been trying to prevent Epic and other developers from communicating with their developers, and they wanted to stay there. That ruling, they were denied that. So you can still play Fortnite in the App Store or the iPhone, iPad too. And developers are just kind of embracing this. And I think the Epic number was kind of interesting because everyone's, you know, people fall on either side of this debate. But for a lot of people it was like, well, you know, the App Store is safer and it's better and blah, blah, blah. It's like, okay, you're fine. I mean, so epic's own customers, 60% of them are still using the App Store. A lot of it is because that's when they got the subscription or bought the game or whatever it is. And you just use the thing you use, it's fine. But I don't think this is going to be confusing to anyone. I think it's going to save people money. Certainly going to save developers money. And we just talked about the PC versus a console. Like, one of the nice things that goes in the pro column for a PC is choice of game stores and where to get games and you can actually own them and no one's going to flip a Switch and take them away from you, that kind of stuff. So not that that's what's happening on the iPhone, but I think anything that opens it up a little bit and gives some choice is probably not a horrible idea.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Nintendo launched the Switch. I think it was Thursday or Friday last week. Right. Somewhere in there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thursday. And it was huge.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess it's huge. I will say, from my cave here in the dark, I have not noticed anything. None of you have gotten yet. Well, I walked into Costco for other reasons, and in the front there's this big Nintendo Switch thing. I'm like, oh, that's kind of interesting. They actually have these things.

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

So I just walked over to look at it. No, they have the controller, so you can buy the controller.

[Paul Thurrott]

I got excited, too. I did the same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I get excited. I just wanted to see.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a giant pallet there. Got tons of them.

[Leo Laporte]

There's no version of the story where I walk out of there like, honey, I just spent 700 bucks, you know, she like that's great, you're sleeping outside. But they sold 3.5 million units in four days. Wow, that's yikes. And the reason that's amazing. Yeah, it's better than any console in that period of time. And granted if they, they could sell zero now and it's over, you know, it's hard to say but it's definitely the biggest launch in that time period. You know, Asterix, Asterix. This thing is like half again as expensive as its predecessor. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean some of that's tariffs. I think they built the tariffs.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but, but real world, it doesn't matter. I mean the price of a hamburger is what you pay. Right. So you know, as far as you're like one might make the case maybe this will be cheaper next year. I should just wait. But no, like their fan base is so strong people. Yep, whatever. I'm going to stand in line, I'm going to do the whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

The one thing I've learned is prices just don't go down, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm not saying, I'm not saying it makes sense but you know, sure. They'll release a light version. I don't know. Sure. Anyway, I guess that's a big deal. And then I don't, I'm not sure like what I mean I do this on other devices like mice. This is a big thing on mice now. So I don't know if this is part of the Bluetooth LE standard or whatever, but you can. PS5 controller is actually going to support multiple Bluetooth Bluetooth connections at once. So you'll be able to switch between. I don't know if it's two or two or more but some number of devices which is something I do frequently. Well, I don't do frequently but I do do with certain things. Like that Backbone Pro controller does that actually that's really effective and like I said some mice and stuff so that's kind of an interesting idea. It's something. I prefer the Xbox controller because I have, you know, man sized hands but. Well actually PlayStation's pretty big now. Is it? Yeah, it used to be kind of, you know, like thin kind of weird but.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, that was a very refreshing Xbox segment.

[Leo Laporte]

I looked there's. I'm pretty excited by this and look, maybe it's colored by the fact that it's been a tough year for Xbox frankly. Yeah, like I was kind of, I kind of need some good news. I'm nervous about it and like I said, not going to save the platform but good it's good news.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, here's my good news. It's time to subscribe to Club Twit. This episode brought to you by Red Canary when cybersecurity threats hit fast, you need an MDR partner that moves faster. Red Canary delivers 24.7expert MDR support, total visibility and actionable insights. Plus, it helps you detect four times more threats so you can stay ahead without burning out. Red Canary clears the noise and has your back every hour, every incident. Get the backup you deserve. Visit redcanary.com difference to learn more. 25 years ago, a small group of.

[Leo Laporte]

Business and government leaders met in Washington, D.C. they envisioned the creation of an.

[Paul Thurrott]

Independent nonprofit organization with a mission to.

[Leo Laporte]

Help people, businesses and government mitigate the growing threat of cyber attack attacks. Today, the center for Internet Security embodies that vision. For 25 years, it's worked with a global community of IT and cybersecurity experts.

[Paul Thurrott]

To develop the CIS benchmarks and CIS critical security controls. These proven security best practices defend against common cyber threats and streamline compliance with industry frameworks, regulations and standards.

[Leo Laporte]

Today, CIS provides cybersecurity services, threat intelligence and critical resources to help public and private sector organizations alike strengthen their Cyber defenses. Visit cisecurity.org today. That's the letters cisecurity.org to find out.

[Paul Thurrott]

How CIS can help your organization as.

[Leo Laporte]

We create confidence in the connected world.

[Paul Thurrott]

Coming up. By the way, the back of the book, the tips, the picks, the brown liquor. But first, I want your money. Honey, if you're not a member of Club Twit, you're actually missing out. Club Twit is how we stay around 25% of our operating costs now are paid by club members. Thank you. I sincerely mean that, but I think we give you pretty good value. For money. You get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is fantastic. A great place to hang out and have fun. All the events are in there too. In fact, we've been doing our keynotes in there only exclusive to Club Twitter. You can go to the Twit plus feed and find our build and Google IO and WWDC keynote coverage. We also have special shows like our Chris Marquardt Monthly Chris Marquardt Photo Time. I submitted a geometric picture. We'll see some of those. That's coming up Friday at 1pm Pacific. Wednesday next Wednesday a week from today. Micah's Crafting Corner. I love that. 6pm Micah's chill and he's doing Lego. It's fun. Now we're gonna move this. Our AI user Group, we just noticed is on it's always the first Friday of the month, but that's the 4th of July and in some places that's a celebratory day. So I think we'll move it to the 11th. So just a little heads up. But that's just a sampling. We've got Stacy's Book Club, lots of events and by the way, ad free versions of all the shows. I probably buried the lead. That's a big reason that people subscribe, so they don't have to hear ads like, like this one. But really the main thing for me is it makes a big difference in what we can do and the capabilities we have. You know, thanks to the club, we're able to do so much more than we used to. We did, you know, tighten the belt a little bit. We shut down the studio and canceled some shows, laid off some people. But I think we're stable now, thanks to the club members. Thank you, I really appreciate it and we'd love to have you. $10 a month, $120 a year. You can pay more if you wish, but that's, that's the starting price. And thank you very much to all our Club Twit members. We really appreciate you and there's some great, great folks in the club. It's always fun to hang out. Twit TV Club Twit if you're interested. Twit TV Club Twit. Time for the back of the book. We kick things off with Paul Farat and your tip of the win. We.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a. Oh no, I am there. Okay, sorry, I was worried. I was muted. This is a small one and I was just trying to check different computers to see where I have it and where I don't. But Windows has had a share feature since Windows 8, right? And so in Windows 8 it was one of the charms. It worked with all of the modern apps that were in the store at the time. Windows 10, Windows 11, they've expanded it. Now it's more of a floating pane thing. You'll see it in right click menus and File Explorer, you'll see it in File Explorer itself in the toolbar bar. And I feel like sometimes I'm the only person that uses this feature. That one of the sub features of it is something called nearby sharing. And so if you have nearby sharing turned on on one laptop over here and one lap over here, as I often work on multiple laptops, you can copy over the WI FI network seamlessly just between the two. It's like A direct connection, which is really nice, but it also supports all kinds of stuff. This is expanded dramatically. So all the apps that make sense to share too, like if you, if you have text in the keyboard and you want to share it to Notepad or something, it will do that. If you have phones connected through phone link, you can share to the phone. If it supports that, you can also share out from the phone to the computer, et cetera, et cetera. So again, I believe that this might have been just added in the Patch Tuesday update that went out yesterday, but I actually see it on all three of the computers I have here and they run different builds, so I'm not 100% sure when it debuted, but if you right click and share an image, you get this new kind of a header in the share pane. And there's a couple things going on, but one of those things is the ability to edit it. And that actually opens like a window with editing capabilities, which I think is a little bit much, frankly. You can copy it to the clipboard and then you can just go paste it in another app. But there's a little link that this thing I wanted to tell people about. So it says the name of the file, it says how big it is, and then it says original and it's underlined like a hyperlink, the dropdown next to it. And you click that, you see original, low, medium and high choices. Right. And so instead of sharing the full resolution or full sized version of the original image, you could save it in different. Same resolution but different quality levels. Right. So if you use PowerToys, you might be familiar with the right click. Do I have it on here? It's probably over here. Let me just right click and see what it says. So if I right click an image on this computer that does have PowerToys and you have this PowerToy installed, one of the options you get is where is it? Oh, resize with Image Resizer. So Image Resizer is not about quality, it's more about the resolution. Right. And so this is actually something beyond that because what I found, I'm going to write this up as a tip. So low and medium, you can tell the difference and it may not matter. Right. It might be a silly meme thing you're sharing with someone, but the high choice is actually up to 10x size file size reduction. Like yeah, 10x. And I can't tell the difference in most of the images I've done this to. So like this is actually something I kind of wish I had a better way of doing just with it. I mean I use Photoshop or Affinity photo does this as well. But it's kind of a neat way. Like this image I'm looking at here on this computer is only 1.5 megabytes, but if I go the high version for this one's actually half, so it's 765 kilobytes, but you can't tell them apart. This is useful. So just something to know about. It's one of a million little features that Microsoft has added or is in the process of adding to Windows that no one knows about. So anyway, take a look. I think Share is the type of thing most power users especially be like, I don't need that. I know, you know, I use winget to show. I mean I use like I copy over the network with the command line, like. Okay. But for the rest of us, it's actually really useful. So something to look at. I'll do like a. I think I'll do a new episode of Hands on Windows about.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that'd be cool. Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Because there's a bunch of stuff, not just the thing I just said.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And then the app pick, of course is not for Windows because I have no idea what I'm doing. But one of the big stories of the past year has been the ARC browser and how some people love it.

[Richard Campbell]

And some people some alternative browsing ideas.

[Paul Thurrott]

I loved the ARC browser, but they deprecated it. They killed it.

[Leo Laporte]

So they had this idea for an AI powered browser that they wanted to do an ARC and it was just too much going on there and they were like, actually we didn't have to rethink this and restart from scratch. And so a lot of the people who love ARK were disappointed by this decision.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

But they announced, I think in late last year something called dia, which is the next browser.

[Paul Thurrott]

Dia de Muertes, de las Muerte.

[Leo Laporte]

De Muerte for ark. Am I right? So it's also fair to say, like other browser makers are building these kinds of things into their browser. But the fundamental thing that's happening here is that. So first I should say the first beta version is available on Mac. So if you have a Mac, you can get it now. Hopefully it won't be six months.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm running it now actually. But it doesn't have a lot of the features. Arcad.

[Leo Laporte]

Nope. Right. So a lot of that's going to come. But the fundamental UI difference, and that's a big thing because honestly there were a lot of UI differences. But if you had to pick one. It was that Arc subverted, if you will, or change the way that, like, new tab worked.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So Control T or Command T on a Mac would typically switch between browsers, but in that case, it brought up basically a command bar.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not doing that. So it goes to a new tab window, or whatever it's called.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, oh, I see. This is a new tab window, but.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S not a command bar. Right, right. So in dia, though, the address bar, or that search bar, whatever it is that you just saw in the. In the browser, in the new tab window window functions as an address bar. It does all that stuff, but it also is where you can do this AI stuff, so you can interact with AI. So there's a side pane you can put next to it, like you would put in any browser and, you know, summarize this webpage, do that kind of thing. But what this thing is going to do if you let it. You have to sign. You have to sign in for the. Well, no, they had accounts, I guess, technically before too, but you sign in. I don't know yet what they're doing with AI doesn't know who's the President.

[Paul Thurrott]

Of the United States. That's problem number one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So it's probably anthropic, whatever it is.

[Paul Thurrott]

It says in mid-2025, the government's officially led by Joe Biden.

[Leo Laporte]

What a world that would be.

[Richard Campbell]

It seems unlikely.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, maybe we're living in a different timeline than these guys.

[Richard Campbell]

We're definitely living in a different timeline.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, so the first thing I asked it, it hallucinated.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but the point of this is, as you browse around the web, it kind of takes note of what you're doing. So one of the things you could do is you could have, like, multiple browser windows open to, like, say, computers. Be like, which one of the computers I'm looking at now should I buy? And then it will go look at those tabs and kind of give you answers. Right. So it actually kind of prompts you in the beginning. You can tell it kind of the things you like, your interests are.

[Paul Thurrott]

We have the show notes open on the left, and AI is always there. Right. So on the right, I said, what would be a good name for this show? It suggests, among other things, the patchwork pod.

[Leo Laporte]

No, not the curl for the episode.

[Paul Thurrott]

Or Left of center. Center tech or cat on the command line.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think some of this put a.

[Leo Laporte]

Thousand monkeys on it, but they're not going to write a PowerShell script that's all I'm saying.

[Paul Thurrott]

It does ask you to personalize it. And I think maybe that's my mistake because I said I have.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's also day one, right. So presumably a week from now, as you use this thing every day.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, it'll get smarter.

[Leo Laporte]

It will, yes. So that's the kind of, the point of, of it now. The problem these guys face is that there's like 17 people in Brooklyn or whatever it is, and Google's working on this, Microsoft's working on this. Microsoft has a sidebar too, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Is this an agentic browser? Is that what they're trying to do?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The documentation that they provided with this release is not even negligible. It's non existent. But if you go back and look at the stuff they've said before and they've given example, they've shown ui like this is how we want this thing to work. Work. It's actually a really interesting idea. And it's turned out to be not a hugely unique idea actually, because like I said, other companies are kind of doing this too. But I think the difference here is that when ARC came out, yeah, we saw a couple of things that copied it, like Zen browsers, a Mozilla version of that thing. Right. But it wasn't like Microsoft, Mozilla or Mozilla, Google, Opera or whatever looked at that thing and said, all right, we're going to do the workspace thing. We're going to. You know, no one actually copied that stuff. But when they started talking about this Agenic, well, they didn't call it this at the time, but Agenic browser, everyone is like, yep, this is probably the future of the web. Treat the web like the data store that it is and then personalize it heavily, which is what you want as a user, and then have it do the thing you want, whatever that thing might be. Like the simple get me the best price on a flight to Mexico City to whatever, like I want to buy a shirt. And they'd be like, well, you know, yellow is not your color, buddy. Maybe you want to go with green or brown or whatever, you know, something like that. So again, it's day one, but. And we can't get it on Windows yet, but I'm really, really curious about this and we'll see.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, so it can't actually do anything agentic yet, it's just doing circuits.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's just, but just. It's just again, it's V. It's not even V1. Right. It's like first base beta.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, it's a very early beta.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's pretty, it's clean.

[Paul Thurrott]

I loved arc and it was very sad that ARC is gone. I'm not sure I really want a browser with AI built in, to be honest.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, what does that get me?

[Richard Campbell]

Just for the bytes and like what is the difference does it make?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think you're going to have a choice in a way.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Unless you want to go with like Sleuthnir or something.

[Richard Campbell]

AI is going to be in everything. I think it's the another Lynx anniversary. You could switch a link.

[Leo Laporte]

Links. Speaking of text based browser.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

That's an awesome reaction to everything that's going on. You're like, you know what command I'm going to boot into? You talked about booting into like some Windows thing. No, I'm going to boot into a command line. I'm going to type everything. Yeah, that's enough.

[Richard Campbell]

Nothing's going to type back.

[Leo Laporte]

All I need are words.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't care about W3M browser and Emacs. That's my str.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean we talked about. I think Bill Atkinson passed away. One of his great innovations, and he had many was the Macintosh had a black and white screen. It was not a grayscale screen. So he came up with a dithering algorithm that would take a color photograph, dither it so that it looked like a black and white photo, meaning a grayscale photo. Right. That looked beautiful. And you could do that for. Not for what you call it, for links, actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

That dithering algorithm lives on. It's a very good algorithm.

[Leo Laporte]

Everything he did lives on. The thing he did for overlapping when Windows, the clipping, which he thought he saw at PARC but did not. They did not figure that out. He invented this that became bitblit in Windows, everything. The iPad with its windows, floating windows. Guess What? That's the 21st century of the Bill Atkinson UI.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I don't want to say anything, but he's in a round wrecked right now.

[Leo Laporte]

So there, that's one of the great stories, right? He was like, we don't need round wrecks. He's like, what are you talking about? Steve Jobs said, no, they're everywhere. He's like, where? He's like, there, there, there. They walked around the streets like the parking sign, the everything. He's like, all right, all right. He's like, I'll do it. And God, he's just doing rectangles was amazing. It's crazy. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

He was Pissed that they didn't really recognize him for being able to draw a circle fast. Now you want rapid arcs and circles.

[Leo Laporte]

He's like, this is amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's like, yeah, yeah. But, you know, it really would be amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

You're using a text computer. This is. Is from the future.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, he was from the future. Brilliant.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That guy was a genius. And unlike a lot of these tech guys, like, you know, you knew him like, he's a good guy, He's a great guy. You know, that's what. That's the thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Genuine guy. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Anyway, I will try. I'm going to try DM in it right now. I do. I mean, I give. Actually, I give Ark a lot of credit because that's how I learned about Perplexity.

[Richard Campbell]

They.

[Paul Thurrott]

They use perplexity in their iOS app.

[Leo Laporte]

App.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that turned me on to it. They. They were very early on using AI and search. So I'll give them some. I'll give them a. But I wish a lot of people kind of burn.

[Leo Laporte]

They're like, I'm not going to try another one of their browsers after arc. It's like, guys, geez. Like, I mean, it's just, you know. Well, let's. Let's see. They're trying to move quick here. I mean.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, at least they're experimenting. Like, it's literally a different mindset and that's cool. That's hard to think about. Browsing different.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. DIA from the browser company. It is. You have to sign up for the beta and there's a wait list. Although, because I was an ARC user.

[Leo Laporte]

I was able to get. Oh, yeah, I was gonna say. I just. Right. I. They. They said you had to be an ARC member or whatever. I downloaded it without signing in. I just.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they just.

[Paul Thurrott]

Tried to use my ARC account and they wouldn't let me. I had to make a new account.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I just.

[Paul Thurrott]

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

[Leo Laporte]

I think it looks good. I mean, it's early, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, Mr. Richard Campbell, you're on Time Run as Radio.

[Richard Campbell]

One of the shows I grabbed about a month ago at NDC in Melbourne. I got really lucky and got a chance to talk with Liz Fong Jones, who's one of the original site reliability engineers. Like, essentially part of Inventing that space worked at Google, is now at. At Honeycomb. And so the conversation was all about telemetry and she just came at it from a really broad view of not. It's not about the tooling it's about the culture that you build, starting with the leadership, really. About having a room, room to fail, room to measure stuff in detail and, and to learn and. And to get better. And without those things, you know, no amount of telemetry is going to save you.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So it really. You need the. Right, you need the tools, but you also need the culture to make it work. So it was a philosophical discussion, but I thought a really powerful one for folks to just think more broadly about how they make things work.

[Paul Thurrott]

Runasradio.com and go.

[Richard Campbell]

And again, she's a legend. Like, without a doubt, one of the best.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Canada's still in the playoffs. Exciting times.

[Leo Laporte]

Yay. They.

[Richard Campbell]

They sure ate it on that last game. Six to one.

[Leo Laporte]

I just want to point out that you're losing to Florida. Come on.

[Paul Thurrott]

So weird.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, by the way, again, right? Yeah. Replay of last year.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's so weird.

[Leo Laporte]

It's crazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I don't speak whatever language this is, but Benjar Voder.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, just hit. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's Dutch. So. Okay, listen, listen. And use your translate feature. They will make an English version eventually. I was just in the Netherlands staying with my buddy Remy, and Remy owns a whiskey store now.

[Paul Thurrott]

So his favorite whiskey, his last name, Martin.

[Richard Campbell]

It is not.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, just checking.

[Richard Campbell]

But he lives in Alkmaar, little town in the Netherlands, and he had a favorite, favorite whiskey shop, been around for a long time. And the old guy wanted to retire and he didn't want to lose the whiskey shop. So they made a deal and now he owns the whiskey shop. And now over the few years we've been doing this, I've been at his place a few times, and we've always had unusual whiskey because he loves his whiskey. And so we'd always try something fun, and I would usually put it on the show. And that happened again, this time, only this time it's his store and the whiskey he brought me, which is an important part of this whole equation, is this. Glen Lossy, 26. You've never heard of Glen Lossie?

[Paul Thurrott]

Never have.

[Richard Campbell]

Nobody has because it's just like one of these invisible distilleries. It's been a long, A long, long time. It's a spay. It's on the A9941 with a bunch of other distilleries as well. Literally. Glen Elgin is on the other side of the road from Glen Lossie. It's been around for a long time. It was created by John Duff in 1876, and John Duff went to where he first worked in Glendronach, which is further to the east. And then after he made the Glenlossy distillery, he helped build it with his partners. He then left for South Africa, very coincidental, and tried to make the whiskey industry work down there and he failed. Oh, and then when he gave up on South Africa, he moved to the America, to the United States for a while and tried to make it work there. It didn't work there even there. And so he came back to Scotland and just a few years later and almost immediately built another very famous distillery, the Longmore Distillery in 1893, which is just further up the same highway and then next door, built in 1898. Benriac are really the best known of all the distilleries he's built. So this guy made a lot of distilleries and Glenlosse is one of them. But. But in 1876, when he was building it, when it went into production, they never made a retail whiskey, ever. That distillery was built to make blends. And from day one it was providing whiskey to go into Hague and Dimple, although there are other blends since then now it's went through the normal rough patches at every distillery. Went through. We've talked about it over and over again. Scotland so shut down over World War I, and when they went to start back up in 1919, they didn't have money to get to finish repairs and so forth. And so were sold to the distillers company dcl. During the. During Prohibition there was a fire and it was burned down, but it was rebuilt and then going back into operation after World War II because again, they shut down for that and business was good in the 60s, so they flew right around. In fact, it did some expansion and then by the 1970s built an additional sillery right next door. Mattock Moore, at that point it was owned by dcl, had become the Scottish Distillers Corporation, but then that became United Distillers, which then of course in the 1990s got acquired by Diageo. So they are a Diageo. The only time you'll ever see Glenlossie on a label is either the Flora and Fauna bottlings that are done by Diageo and they only have done a few times for Glen Lossie, which I've never had, there's a 91 edition in a 2004 and a 2019. The usual place you find Glen Lossie is custom bottlers and there are a couple of websites out there that will literally keep track of every Time a custom bottler does a bottling from a given distillery. And there are hundreds for Glen Lossie. You name the bottler. Ad Radley, Black Adder, Caden Head, Douglas Haig, Duncan Taylor, Gordon MacPhail, Murray MacDonald. All of them have done bottlings of Glen Lossie. And this particular one is done by the Maltman.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think you chose it because it's the Maltman 26.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, well, and it's a 26 year. And it's a single cask from a single. A single cask of Glen lossie and it's 26 years old. Now, the distillery is a big distillery. 2 million liters a year. Yikes. And it's a Speyside distiller get never a public run. 8 wooden washbacks, 3 pairs of stills. 15, 16,000 liters on the wash still, 13,000 on the spirit still. They use a conventional pear shape, no additional domes or anything like that. It looks like early on they did an addition to their spirit stills called the purifier, which is literally a mechanism on top of the lye arm that causes additional reflex. And it's because they didn't put onion bulbs in the stills. So sort of an inexpensive way to increase reflux to make the whiskey smooth. Smoother. And they did that with their new still in the 70s as well. So they all three of the spirit stills have them. And I did make a note here because I know it would be important to you too. They use cream dust.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, thank God.

[Richard Campbell]

They also have one of the largest rack house sets in the whole of Scotland. 250,000 casks. 60. 50 million liters of whiskey being aged in the rack houses around Glen Lossie.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

And because they're on by Diageo, there are barrels from all kinds of distilleries there. They do not do any tours of any kind. They have. No. They've never had a visitor's house. They don't do any of that stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

They don't even have a website. They just.

[Richard Campbell]

No. And they don't even have a website, which is why I had to point you to Remy's site, because that's all there is. There isn't any. Anything else.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is a secret whiskey distillery.

[Richard Campbell]

They do. And they, starting in the 1970s and expanded with now being owned by Diageo in the 1990s, they do what's called residue processing there for more than 20 distilleries. So this is both draft and potale. Now, giraffe is the stuff you get. That's what's left over from the mash after you extract the sugars from it, from your washbacks. Right. That's sort of. It's the remains of the mash. And they process 100,000 tons of draft a year. They also process 8 million liters of pot ale, which is what you're left over in the stills after you finish distilling. So it's the remains of the alcohol, it's all the excess. All of that stuff is processed. They call this dark grain processing into animal feed. High protein animal feed.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

So nothing's wasted. They also have a biogas processor. They do some energy generation, so forth. Like it's very contained, temporary site for having no visitor site, no public brands. I just love that there's this great big dark distillery essentially for the rest of the world. But inside of Diageo, it's an important still. And so, like I said, most of these bottlings are custom bottlings. This Maltman bottling is a unique one. It says 26 year old. So it was distilled in 1997, bottled in 23.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

And they have 387 bottles from a single cask, which should give you pause. What's weird about that number? 387. It's too many. Normally. If it was a thing from a single cast, it should be under 200. Why would it be 387? Like, how is it even possible? It's from a Sherry Hogshead, where the bourbon casks are 250liters and so you're lucky to get 200 bottles from it. Sherry hogshead are 500liters. And that's why there's 387 bottles of which there is virtually none left. Although if you. I think Remy has one, these are very popular. Look, I'm not a big fan of old, old Whiskey. Like a 26 year old.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, this is really old.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're.

[Richard Campbell]

They tend to be expensive. This one's like €350. Yikes. Which is not hugely expensive for a 26. Like you can even spend a thousand dollars on a 26 year old whiskey. But they also get really oaky. Like they're not great. This is not that whiskey. This was amazing. Just big fruit notes, no burn, no chalkiness. Just like, my God, what am I drinking? Very, very dangerous whiskey. Whiskey should not be this good. Like you will get yourself into trouble. And if that sounds exciting to you, like I said, there's a couple of bottles left. There's only 387 bottles of this stuff. But meantime, my friend has decided he wants. He's going to take care of this whiskey shop. And one of the things he's doing very deliberately is only shelving these custom bottlings. His whole point is, like, if you want the Balvini 12, you can go to any store for that. But if you like Balvini, he's got a custom bottling of a Balvini for you. Or maybe you want something from Macallan. He's got a custom bottle of Macallan. He's just chosen unusual whiskey so you can just have an experience. You'll go there and have a whiskey you wouldn't have anywhere else. And this Glen Lossie is one of them. Just an exceptional whiskey and a very odd distillery, like one unlike almost anything else you'll see.

[Paul Thurrott]

Should I buy some right now? Will it change my life?

[Richard Campbell]

You know, I don't know if you can get it to America. They're not. They're not shipping in. They're only shipping in the eu.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think that's what they said. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Sad to say, say only ship. That's not a class.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just the rules.

[Richard Campbell]

But that was a fun drink to have with my buddy and really pruned whiskey to write about. I have some South Africans with me, so those will come in later weeks. And still on the ride for unusual drink.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I thank Remy for that. Amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

The only thing better than owning a whiskey shop is having a friend who owns a whiskey shop.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, everything's coming up 26 this time. Thank you, Mr. Richard Campbell in Stockholm, Sweden. He's far away, but he's near and dear to our hearts. You'll find [e-mail] that's where Runners Radio and.net rocks his podcasts live. Thank you, Richard, for making the trek. Paul Thurrott'[e-mail] T H U R O ott.com make sure you become a premium member for all the great goodness. And his books [e-mail] including the Field Guide to Windows 11 and Windows Everywhere. And we look forward to the hands on windows covering this new share feature. That's cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Mr. T, Mr. C. Thank you for being here. And a special thanks to all our club members who made this show part possible. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. I mentioned that because you can watch us live if you want. Club members watch Inside the Club, Inside our Discord. The kind of behind the velvet rope access that only club members can Enjoy. Otherwise, you, everybody else, you can watch in seven platforms. YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, ToK, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. But you don't have to watch live. We have on demand versions of the show on our website, Twit TV, WW. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. Great way to share little clips with friends and family. Spread the word. Or subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get automatically as soon as the show's done. And if you do that, please, please, if your podcast client allows reviews, leave us a five star review. That would be very nice. Thank you everybody. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. We will see you next Wednesday for Windows Weekly.

[Leo Laporte]

Bye.

[Paul Thurrott]

Bye.

[Richard Campbell]

Hi, Zoe Saldana.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Richard Campbell]

Seriously.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me check this pocket. Oh, mints.

[Paul Thurrott]

Really, I'm fine.

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Oh, I have raisins. I'm a mom. Wait, wait one sec. I've got cupcakes in the car. It's our best iPhone offer ever.

[Richard Campbell]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Richard Campbell]

We'll even pay off your phone up.

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[Paul Thurrott]

Via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days credit score send and.

[Leo Laporte]

Bounds due if you pay off early or cancel. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret.

[Paul Thurrott]

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