← Windows Weekly (Audio)
Windows Weekly (Audio)
WW 941: K... and Q - The AI factor in those Microsoft layoffs
02:38:21
The AI factor in those Microsoft layoffs
Loading summary
Transcript618 lines
- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell are here. There are a lot of new features in the latest Windows Insider version of Windows. Paul will list them all, every one of them. We'll talk about why Microsoft laid off all those people. Is it really AI? Or maybe it's not the acquisition of Windsurf and which didn't happen. And Cyberpunk coming to the Mac five years late. All that more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 941 recorded July 16, 2025. K&Q. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello all you winners. It's Paul Thurat there. Mr. Thurat from now Mexico City of thurat.com and leanpub.com over to. Oh, I'm supposed to do the switching, aren't I? Paul's saying yeah, I'm here. What about, what about you am I looking at?
- [01:21]
Paul Thurott
I don't know.
- [01:22]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I forgot. I'm the button pusher. I'm the captain now. Also to Paul's left is Mr. Richard Campbell there of Renasradio.com. he is in British Columbia. So it's a North American show today.
- [01:36]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [01:36]
Leo Laporte
Yes. Three countries, all three countries united in brothership and high tariffs. It's exactly, exactly what we're looking for. Oh boy, oh boy. Hey, you keep your soft lumber to yourself, buddy boy. Okay?
- [01:53]
Richard Campbell
We're just put new tariffs on steel, so. Ooh, wait for grumpy noises from an orange man.
- [02:05]
Leo Laporte
Today on the program we shall be talking about such things as Windows 11 ad blocking. No. Microsoft 365 maybe, I don't know, Xbox and Whiskey. Notice I say that correctly. Whiskey. But let's start with windows. Mr. T. Yeah, I'm sorry I'm a little perky today. You obviously still jet lagged from your, your long journey.
- [02:34]
Paul Thurott
I've been here for a week, so no, I'm not sure how to approach me. Having good news?
- [02:43]
Leo Laporte
Oh no. What do we do?
- [02:45]
Richard Campbell
Is not very distressed.
- [02:47]
Paul Thurott
It's a little. It's a weird feeling. Oh, geez, right, sorry. I just clicked on a link and it opened in the proper browser, which is not the one I want. Anyway, so Microsoft has a tech community blog that's, you know, typically aimed at IC pros, etc. It's interesting how often they reveal information through this blog. It's kind of innocuous, whatever, so sometimes you'll see a headline you'll think, well, that's no big deal. Whatever. It's like we've updated the install Media for Windows 11 and also for Server 2025. Big deal. Except this is a big deal. So what they have decided to do finally, and I've always kind of wondered about this, is ensure that the install media has all of the Inbox apps updated fully. Right now that sounds obvious, but if you think about the typical, you know, path that someone would follow installing Windows, especially if they know what they're doing, you know, they would get through setup, get to the desktop, and then you have three or four avenues for updates at that point, right? You want to go to Windows Update and install those updates. You want to go to the Microsoft Store and install the app updates. You should go to winget, the Windows Package Manager command line, and find fully update things. Because there are things that are not updated those things immediately, but will be updated through winget. And depending on the apps you're using, they might have their own updaters like Microsoft Edge. So part of the problem with the updating process with Windows is that Microsoft updates their install media, the back end, the ISO essentially that they're using. However, you obtain it right through the Microsoft Media Creation tool. If you just download the ISO, if you're in it, you have other places you can go to get ISOs for Windows. It's not clear to me. I tried to find this out. I know they update those ISOs essentially from time to time. Obviously when there's a version upgrade, they do it then, but they update it midstream sometimes, but not maybe twice a year or something like that. So what they're going to do now is, and they started this with the June 2025 and Windows 11 version 24H2, they're going to update it every single month. And what that means is that 36 built in apps in Windows 11, all the famous ones, you know, Notepad, Paint, phone link, photos, weather, et cetera, et cetera, will all be up to date for that month. So you may, you may still have a couple of app updates, but instead of that giant scroll of, you know, that takes a really long time to get through, you can have this ISO or this install media that is completely up to date. Now for end users it especially, that also means you have to keep your install media up to date, right? If you want the benefit of this. And so for most people, for individuals, if for some reason you needed this, you would get it at the time, you would then be up to date, you would use it you wouldn't think about it. If you're like me and you're maybe a little more compulsive, you keep a copy of the ISO, you keep a copy of the USB media. I'm not aware of a way to slipstream that or automate it. So unfortunately you're pretty much looking at a monthly download then in the case of the media creation tool, a monthly media creation. But this is actually good news for users. It's more secure. This is the primary point, but it's also a big chunk of that first hour, maybe even hour and a half of what I do. Sorry, what I do when I install Windows. Right. It's not everything. You still have to go to Windows Update, you still are going to want to go to Winget, you know, and actually you still want to go to the store. But again, instead of the what looks, you know, feels like 100 app installs or app updates, you should have a just a handful depending on a little bit more streamlined. Yeah. So it's good like I, you know, I mean other than the overhead of you have to as an individual keep your stuff up to date.
- [06:52]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [06:52]
Paul Thurott
I'd rather do it offline like that than wait while Windows does its thing. Because that's one of the weird things about Windows. If you run an app right away, depending on the app it will either be completely out of date or in the case of something like the Xbox app does this. It will say hey, there's a newer version of the app when you go get that first because we're not going to run until you do. So you know. Right, that's. That's on you.
- [07:12]
Richard Campbell
So I mean I'd like VS code and I think what is it the, the Azure storage manager are really good about popping up a bar that hey, there's a new version. Do you want to install now or.
- [07:24]
Paul Thurott
When you're finished and full? Visual Studio does this as well, which I really like because one of the options is install on close.
- [07:31]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, install on close. I really appreciate. So I do get around to my installation. But you don't interrupt me, right?
- [07:38]
Paul Thurott
No, it's really good. Really good.
- [07:40]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [07:41]
Paul Thurott
App updates, you know, like these Inbox apps or modern apps are small, they're usually really focused. I mean it's not. Is mission critical but. But you want them up to date for security vulnerability reasons. Right. Like there are a lot of. This is. Microsoft described this almost as like a zero day protection of sorts. Right. Because these are vectors for attack.
- [08:00]
Richard Campbell
So yeah, I mean and to be clear, interrupt Me, if it's really that important. But most of the time, it's just not that important.
- [08:06]
Paul Thurott
I'd rather be interrupted than have it. Just do it. You know, you ever turn on Windows and start doing something, it's like, oh, sorry, time to go.
- [08:13]
Richard Campbell
Then when they. What it gets me is Android. Like, my Android phone renders itself unusable until I finish a system update. Like, hey, you know, now I can't unlock the car and the, you know, the radio won't turn on. And like, all of this stuff, it's like I have to complete a system update that it couldn't complete on its own for some reason.
- [08:32]
Paul Thurott
This is one of the random areas where Windows is somehow much more sophisticated than these mobile platforms. You know, they've gotten better, for sure. Apple, because of the foundation at the time of Mac OS X and how they built iOS on top of that, literally had replaced every single file on your system as part of those version upgrades. It took forever. And so they're better than that. But I, and all platform makers, Apple, Google, Microsoft, are doing this thing where they've separated out parts of the system, you know, kind of componentized it so that they can be updated individually, typically through the store or, you know, however, it doesn't matter how they do it. But outside of the whatever it might be, monthly, cumulative update type system, whatever they have, they're all very similar in that regard. But.
- [09:19]
Richard Campbell
But, yeah, I.
- [09:20]
Paul Thurott
When does this. Actually, they do too many updates. This is the. The dark side of this sword, if you will. They've gotten so good at it. They're like, oh, we can just do it all the time. And actually, that's kind of disruptive. Yeah, okay. And that's the end of the good news. No, I appreciate that you led with that.
- [09:42]
Leo Laporte
Only 10 minutes into the show and already we've only gotten back.
- [09:47]
Paul Thurott
Welcome back to the darkness now. Back to normal. You're welcome. All right, so last night, Microsoft posted an update to the Copilot Vision feature, which is a part of the Copilot app in the Insider program. So if you're in the Windows Insider program on any of your PCs, it doesn't matter what channel, you can download this app update and you'll get two new features for Copilot Vision. The first one is full desktop support. So it has supported through, I should say, Copilot Vision. So Copilot Vision is a way for Copilot, the app, to integrate with other apps on your computer. So you can point at an app window and say, okay, we're Doing something with this. And now you can do it for your entire desktop. Right. So whatever you have visible on screen, it can interact with the whole thing. It doesn't need just the, the app window itself. And then there's also voice integration. So Copilot voice is that way that you can speak to Copilot instead of typing a text prompt. Right. Natural language, et cetera, et cetera. Copilot vision now works with that.
- [10:51]
Richard Campbell
Interesting. I'm getting excited about a sort of complete suite here that.
- [10:56]
Paul Thurott
Yeah.
- [10:57]
Richard Campbell
Starting to see a transformation of the operating system.
- [10:59]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. And you know, from a timing perspective, this is part of the chaos of the updating we were just talking about. Right. I mean, this is, this is part of it. But yeah, I mean, in keeping with everything AI related Copilot and all of the features in Copilot and all of the other things in Windows 11 that are AI related are being updated very quickly. That's the nature of this thing. It's brand new still for a lot of people, you know, for everyone or whatever. And it's capabilities, capability. So, you know, when Microsoft integrated copilot into Windows 11, about almost two years ago now, about 18 months ago, not a lot going on there. And you know, just like the Copilot Plus PCs when they first launched from a AI perspective, it was like it's kind of a non event. But in both cases those things are getting better. Much better. Right. As that's happening. That's happening pretty quick.
- [11:53]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [11:53]
Paul Thurott
I want to add something to the notes here because I realize I forgot something. Okay. So that's for everybody. If you're in, if, if you're in the Insider program, if you have a Copilot plus PC and you are using, you're enrolled in the Insider program in dev or beta. Remember, dev is tied to 24H2 and beta is tied to 24H2. Yeah. What's that? Yeah, beta's 24.
- [12:23]
Richard Campbell
Fair.
- [12:24]
Paul Thurott
I was looking at the notes. Make sure I wrote that down. Right.
- [12:26]
Richard Campbell
I just love that that's actually the right order. Right. It's like, you remember when these were supposed to be different? Like at this moment they are different.
- [12:33]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. Right. And with the exception of Canary, which we'll make fun of later, they all kind of.
- [12:38]
Richard Campbell
I think there's a different team that has the keys to Canary and nobody knows who it is.
- [12:42]
Paul Thurott
Canary is. It's like, it's like a silo and they're all by themselves and every once in a while someone opens the door and they're like, hey, did we add anything to the other channels recently and they're like, yeah, there's 118 new features you don't have. And so we'll get to that. We'll get to that. Because there's a big update if you are in Canary for some reason. So despite the fact that these are essentially testing features for different versions of Windows 11, they're both testing, sorry, exactly the same feature. So it's three of them. Click to do is getting a new image action called Describe Image, which seems fairly straightforward. The administrator protection feature, which I think might be the single biggest security change to Windows since UAC maybe. I mean, this is a big one. So if you think, if you approach the security initiatives that Microsoft has done over the past 20, 25 years from a. From the standpoint of an individual UAC, big impactful in the sense that you saw it and were annoyed by it, but was high.
- [13:40]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Highly disruptive.
- [13:41]
Paul Thurott
But now we live with it and it's fine. I mean, there were other things.
- [13:43]
Richard Campbell
Well, it got less disruptive, you know.
- [13:45]
Paul Thurott
Yes.
- [13:46]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, they gradually did suck.
- [13:47]
Paul Thurott
They calmed it down. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, apps were updated and things to be better about, whatever those things, whatever those protections are, that was a trustworthy computing era change to Windows. This is the new Windows Resiliency initiative, you know, era, or the. What do they call the Secure Future Initiative, brought more broadly at Microsoft. Right. So this, this is for individuals, is that thing. And what this does is protect against the use case, which is 99.99% of all people on earth who set up one account on a computer, it is by nature an administrative account. And then they use it and they stop thinking about it. But you're running everything at that elevated level.
- [14:25]
Richard Campbell
Yes.
- [14:25]
Paul Thurott
And so one of the pieces of advice over the past forever is that you then set up a standard account and you sign in with the standard account and then you provide the administrative account. Privilege is, you know, through your pin probably now, but a password, whatever it might be when you need to elevate a process for some reason. Nobody does that. Right. And I don't mean nobody literally.
- [14:45]
Leo Laporte
No.
- [14:45]
Richard Campbell
And this is why they're changing. You know, I did this to, to VPs that wanted assist Admin account, where I created an account that had the word admin in it and they just gave it no privileges at all because they never logged in with it.
- [14:58]
Paul Thurott
That's right.
- [14:59]
Richard Campbell
So it's like, listen, I get that you want an administrator account. I can't apply it to your main account. So I'm Going to give you another account for that.
- [15:04]
Paul Thurott
That. Yeah. And then we get that you're the lord of the manor.
- [15:07]
Richard Campbell
That's right.
- [15:07]
Paul Thurott
And then, you know, but then I.
- [15:09]
Richard Campbell
Would deliberately give it no permissions so that just to find. Because I immediately know if they tried to log in with it, they go, hey, this didn't work.
- [15:15]
Paul Thurott
I know there are well intentioned technical people who do do what I described, that standard account type of thing, right. And I think for a lot of people, because you're trying to do the right thing, right. Maybe it's a little bit of a pain, you know, and you're like, I don't know, whatever. Look, this might be foisted on you by your IT admin staff, right. Depending on how you're doing things. But as an individual, it's unusual, right. People don't do this. So administrative protection to me is the most obvious feature in the world, which is basically it's going to mostly run everything at a lower elevation level, regardless of the fact that you are an admin. But when you have to elevate because certain tasks that you perform in Windows do required elevated permissions, you'll go through a Windows hello, preferably Windows Slow ess, whatever authentication. So it is like uac. It's an interruption but you know, you're doing a facial recognition thing, maybe a fingerprint recognition, a pin, if that's all you have. But it's a different kind of interruption. Whether it's more.
- [16:16]
Richard Campbell
You bring up the salient point that those, the caliber of the interruption has gone down. It's not now it's a passkey or it's a, or it's a UV key or it's a pin.
- [16:30]
Paul Thurott
Right.
- [16:30]
Richard Campbell
There's a lot, it's a lot less difficult.
- [16:33]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. I mean when, well yeah, when UAC was first implemented, which would have been Windows Vista to. Oh no, I'm sorry. UAC was always just a checkbox. It was just like a check. It was like a. You were running as an admin. Right. But if you needed to elevate as a standard user Until Windows 8, you were typing in a password or sending a request to someone to do it. Right. But they were, you know, they were doing a password. Like it's. It's a lot of, you know, especially if you're doing good password policy, it's a lot of work. So this is a lot more seamless, it's a lot more secure. It, it is that kind of combination of, you know, can we make it as easy to use but also as secure as possible. So you try to hit that kind of compromise somewhere in the middle. So I'm eager. This is one feature, this. I think this just happened yesterday or the day before. But I really, really want to test this feature. I'm very curious about this. And then the other change is relatively minor, but there's. When an app shows a permissions dialogue. So for example, when you're a notepad and you've got text in there and you go to close the tab, it will say, wait a minute, do you want to save the window? You do want to save this first, right? Like a confirmation dialog of some kind. There is a system dialog type where it actually grays out the window. It's modal. So you can't do anything else in the app until you've dealt with that dialogue. And now they're making that the default for all apps. I think you had to program it a certain way to make it do this. But now those permission dialogs will always be modal, will always be centered on top of the window you're looking at. Will darken the rest of the window to give you that kind of visual effect. And you have to deal with it before you move on. So they're doing that in that build as well.
- [18:15]
Richard Campbell
You know, I think there's another angle on this, which is that for sysadmins, we've been going through this process of hey, live in a domain user account and only log in with your administrator privileges when you need to.
- [18:28]
Paul Thurott
Right.
- [18:29]
Richard Campbell
This protection approach allows. What it really says now is hey, you can live in a sys admin account. It just doesn't have any sysadmin privileges until you need them. But it saves you from logging out, logging in, right?
- [18:41]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, right. That's a good point. So it's, it's automatically lowering the elevation level of most processes you're working with. You don't see these things, you know, behind the covers and only in those times when it has to be elevated. Whereas before everything was just elevated. Right.
- [18:57]
Richard Campbell
It was just a presume elevation. It was just once upon a time in a mini count med, you had to men privileges. Now an admin account means you have the possibility of admin privileges, but only when needed and with additional step of.
- [19:10]
Paul Thurott
Explicit use case like you are confronted.
- [19:12]
Richard Campbell
By privileges when your whatever your action you're taking, request them.
- [19:19]
Paul Thurott
Yep.
- [19:19]
Richard Campbell
Which is another way to get to this other thing that administrators are really struggling with, which is just enough permissions.
- [19:25]
Paul Thurott
Right?
- [19:26]
Richard Campbell
Right where we were now, we were now making multiple Admin accounts. Oh, you want to do work on Exchange or we have an account just for Exchange or. Oh, you want to do work on backups. We have an account for backup. Like we know. We're trying to stay away from super user accounts. This is a solution to that. I'm in a super user account. It's just not that super.
- [19:45]
Paul Thurott
Right.
- [19:45]
Richard Campbell
It only gets the permissions it's supposed to get when you need them.
- [19:50]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. I mean, we're almost 25 years after trustworthy computing when that started.
- [19:55]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [19:56]
Paul Thurott
A big part of that effort that we wouldn't see as individuals. Right. It's not something that concerns normal people or whatever, but behind the covers, Microsoft's apps and third party apps are all being updated to be kind of more granular on a elevation level, if that makes sense. So rather than the whole thing just having to be always admin, you must.
- [20:13]
Richard Campbell
Be a God for this app to run.
- [20:15]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, you can instead. Well, the system does this for it, essentially. It will elevate when it has to and when it does, it's going to prompt you somehow. Right. UAC would be the standard way to date, but now that we have administrative protection, I'm just see how this change. I think we're probably. I guess we're still going to see both, actually. I'm not sure. Does this mean the end of uac? I don't know. I'm curious to test this.
- [20:41]
Richard Campbell
I think it's just an advanced version of uac. I mean, you think about it, it's the same exact action, except with fewer dialog boxes.
- [20:48]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. Yes. From the user's perspective. Right. It's a. It's a different authentication process, but it is an authentication process of a sort. Well, actually, UIC isn't technically an authentication process. It's just a. Hey, are you sure? Hey, are you sure? You know that kind of thing. And it does get in your way and if you don't address it, whatever's trying to happen will just not happen. So I mean, it's. There's some security to it there, of course, but. But yeah, this is. I like this. I like how explicit this is. Again, I didn't think of this 15 years ago, so I'm not like some genius, but I look at this now and I think, yes, this is the way this should be. Like, this seems smart to me.
- [21:25]
Richard Campbell
No, it's. It's very, very clever. And we're coming at does address all of the issues while also and in some respects by lying to the user.
- [21:36]
Paul Thurott
Yep. I'm all for lying to the user, especially when the user is me. So that's fine. Oh, man, this is going to be a tough show for me because I can't get this thing to load blanks now in my default browser. Goddamn it. All right, so I'll do those. I'll try to batch those ahead of time going forward. But anyway, I didn't have this in a. Notes.
- [21:55]
Leo Laporte
If you want, I can read you your notes.
- [21:57]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, actually, could you read me the URL so I can type it into my browser?
- [22:01]
Leo Laporte
Really, I will if you want me to.
- [22:03]
Paul Thurott
No, no, it's just, you know, I'm simple. I expect things to happen when I click on them.
- [22:08]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, normal.
- [22:10]
Paul Thurott
It's okay. This is what I get for doing this. At the last second, I had changed stuff in the on this system because I used it for hands on Windows and I did an episode where default. It doesn't matter. Okay, so in addition to the dev and beta channel updates I just mentioned, there were also updates to the release preview. So, yeah, these are particularly interesting because it's release Preview, right. This means they're coming soon to stable. So based on the timing, this was released on July 10, which was probably end of last week, Thursday last week. We can expect that Next Tuesday, the 22nd will be when we see these in preview for stable, and then the first, the next Patch Tuesday, which is probably what July 12 is when these things will go live. And I think I mentioned this recently, but I think I get straight here. I think it was April, May were humongous updates, June not so big. And this one's kind of in the middle in the sense that there's a lot. Well, there's actually two, I should say there's two different builds. One for 24H2. Yeah, 24H2 and 23H2. The 24H2 release preview update is pretty humongous, but mostly small stuff. So on the Copilot plus PC front, there are improvements to recall if you live in the eu. And that means you'll be able to export snapshots, share them with apps and websites that you trust, using a unique kind of export code that is generated when you say you want to export it and can only be used one time and will never be repeated again. This is the first baby step to that thing we've been talking about, which is like recall is or is not interesting. I mean, whether you want to use it or not, whatever, whether you think it's a security nightmare or whatever, you're wrong. But as far as Functionality goes, this is okay on apc, but really what you want is something that gives you your history across all the devices that you use. Exporting is not live syncing over some encrypted cloud service or whatever, but it's a way to get the data out. I think that was actually the point of it. If you think about the DMA and what they're trying to protect here, this is really about you not locking your data into a single vendors software. Basically that's what it's really for. But it's. I don't think we're going to see a lot of third party apps that work on recall data. If you use this thing, you're just going to use recall. But okay, fine, click to do more improvements there. There's a practice in reading coach text action. It's kind of a tough turn of phrase, but there used to be exhaustive reading comprehension reading help tools built into Edge. Those have been scaled back a little bit. But this is interesting to me because it suggests that maybe this is going to become more of a system level tool, which it should be. Right. That you should get these reading tools wherever you're reading. It shouldn't have to just be that one web browser. That's interesting to me. Also a read with immersive reader text action which is basically giving you that capability that's in the browser at the Edge browser where you can get that distraction free ad, free experience for reading. But now it's in click to do so you'll get it for anything. Right, so this is going to be like a full screen experience. Yeah, that works with everything. It's cool. And then the third action for Microsoft Teams. And so this is the first Microsoft 365 action we've seen for click to do. And basically what you have done is selected a thing. It's probably going to be text in this case but you can then send a message based on that text. Or it would work with an image too. Right. Or schedule a teams meeting. All of those things I just described do require a copilot plus PC but because that's where you get clicked to.
- [25:50]
Richard Campbell
And so is this only in the release preview or is this the release preview? It's in the release preview, yeah.
- [25:55]
Paul Thurott
So it will be in stable in preview next week and then three weeks. Yep, it's imminent. That's right.
- [26:01]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [26:01]
Paul Thurott
And you just said this. I mean it's fascinating watching how quickly these AI features improve. I mean think about what I just described. I mean text actions are the latest in a Long series of things that date back to copy and paste to. Com and olay. And you know, I have information here, I want to do something with it over here, right? And click to do is interesting to me because it's system wide, it's not app dependent, will work with anything. It started off small, it's text and image actions, the obvious ones, right? You select text, summarize, rewrite, whatever. But now they're kind of building it out and it's. Yeah, it's getting really interesting.
- [26:40]
Richard Campbell
And you know, as these features start to grow, suddenly you're like, hey, I want a Copilot plus PC. I want these features. Or yet it's still a laptop.
- [26:51]
Leo Laporte
I don't want looking at my desktop, right? Well, there's got to be howls from the security.
- [26:58]
Paul Thurott
This is click to do not take off one thing, but both of these features you don't have to use. So in the sense that all PCs will likely be what we now call copilot plus PCs within a couple of years, you don't have to use this, right? I don't have it on this computer anyway. So I mean, in my experience, half the time I try to use it, it's not available for some reason I have to go switch it on. But. But yeah, it's not. Click to do is not on by default. There is an icon for it now, so you can just enable it. The way it was going to work in the past was that you would do whatever the keyboard shortcut or click, you know, key plus click to get it to come on and then it would say, hey, oh, you want to use this? Cool. Say yes to this agreement, whatever. Right now it's just off and there's an icon and you can explicitly just turn it on. So yeah, if you don't want it, just, you don't have to use it. So yeah, the recall stuff and the click to do stuff, those are Copilot plus PC. Everything else that's on this list is for everybody, right? So improvements to the Settings app where you can use natural language, right? This is actually. I'm sorry, that's a copilot. Sorry, that one is Copilot plus PC. In fact, that one's a little weirder because in its initial release it will only be Snapdragon X, but AMD intel will get it probably the next month. It's usually pretty quick, Quick machine recovery. This is now, by my count, the 117th way in which you can recover and or fix something that's wrong with your Windows PC. But it's okay, it's okay. This one's good because it's automated. So if you, if something's wrong with your computer and you're like, I don't know what's going on, maybe it's a bad driver. You don't, you don't have no idea. And you come up and it won't boot. Normally this thing kicks in, does its thing. It basically goes into the Windows recovery environment, brings it back to a last known good configuration and you'll be up and running. So it's good. You don't have to worry about this. You can kick it off from Windows, but typically the experience will be you get it during boot. The big news here, of course, is that tied to this update is the end of the blue screen of death.
- [28:56]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [28:57]
Paul Thurott
And now we're going to have the black screen of woe. And it's no, no, no, it's whoa. No, it's whoa.
- [29:05]
Richard Campbell
Black screen of much suffering.
- [29:07]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's the black screen of don't want to be you. So it's just, it's black now, not blue. But it's also kind of a different layout, different look. Windows 11 style, whatever. They got to make it pretty. It doesn't matter. Start menu improvements for admins. Not going to worry about that one too much. Stat improvements. This is something, I was so delighted by this feature because it reminded me to disable this feature. I hate it so much. If you open like if you open a window that's floating. Yes. You have to disable it on this computer. So and you move it around just like even a millimeter, this little bar drops down, you know, like, oh, what's going on there? And then you drag it up and it comes down further. It's like it's inviting you to drop it in there. And then it gives you these little snap layouts. You can use Snap suggestions, I guess we'll call that for snap layouts. And I hate it. I never want that. I never once wanted to use this feature. I have never found a suggested layout to be something I wanted. It's terrible. I hate it. So now it will describe what this little drop down thing is because I think a lot of people like, what the heck is that thing? What is that? That's crazy. So now it has little text descriptions of all the things and what it's doing and it says, hey, this is what it's doing. And you're like, nice, thank you for reminding me. I'm going to turn that off and you can Turn that off. So if you go into. I think it's settings system multitasking under Snap, drop that thing down.
- [30:27]
Richard Campbell
Never ever wanted snap features.
- [30:30]
Paul Thurott
I do use Snap, by the way, but. Okay, but I use it like a normal person. But you know, if I just want a side by side thing is the typical configuration, keyboard shortcuts, the dragging stuff I don't like. No, but that's me. Maybe you love it. I don't know.
- [30:43]
Leo Laporte
Sometimes you need to do it.
- [30:45]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm usually I'm doing it right now on this screen. I have the notes and discord or snapped, you know.
- [30:52]
Leo Laporte
So yeah, I mean obviously you could always use, I guess you could always use the shortcuts. I'm just thinking that sometimes it's just easier to say, oh, I'm going to arrange this by. With the mouse to get the way I want.
- [31:02]
Paul Thurott
I should be super clear about this kind of thing because there, there's like the real insertification, there's the things we don't like, you know, but then there's things like this where this is a feature I don't need. And I would argue to you, not to you personally, I mean to any person using Windows 11. Look, there are these features in Windows that you wouldn't know how to use if Microsoft didn't promote them in some way. So for example on the taskbarability, yeah, there's a search box there, there's a task view, there's widgets, you know, whatever, so they're there. None of those things have to be there for you to use them. But because they're there, you might mouse over it, you might click it, you'll discover it. If you use Windows Search all the time from the, I'm going to call it the Start menu really. But this from the taskbar, you don't have to have the button there. You can use keyboard shortcuts, you can get to it from start, you don't need it. So this snap thing, by having a description, it's letting you know the function exists. You might think it's the greatest thing in the world and use it every single day and love it. Great. You may decide you don't want it like I did, but whatever, now you know about it and now you can get rid of it. So that's fine. You know, save some on screen real estate. You don't need it, but it's fine. I have no problem with this.
- [32:08]
Leo Laporte
It's about discoverability. This is always the challenge, especially for Microsoft. There's so many features. How does powder remember the charms thing? You had to know to drag your mouse to the right hand corner.
- [32:19]
Paul Thurott
It was worse than that because you had discovered accidentally. Right. It was the only way to discover.
- [32:23]
Leo Laporte
It's like what's that?
- [32:24]
Paul Thurott
But the problem is you might have triggered something inadvertently and you don't know how you got that. And you're like wait, yeah, how do I get it back? You know? And that's bad ui. I mean it's just bad ui.
- [32:35]
Richard Campbell
I don't know how I got it. I don't know where it went and I don't know.
- [32:38]
Paul Thurott
I can't bring it back. Yeah it's like a one way dead end street. I don't know how I got here but now I can machines up to something. Yep. It's. Yeah. Anyway, this is fine. I know people see this stuff and like what are they doing? Like they're boom. But no actually this makes. It's fine. This is good. Windows Search improvements in Settings. This is not a big deal, but it is so Microsoft that to configure every setting that's related to search you had to go to two different locations in the Settings app. Now they're all in one location. So fantastic. So just right when it doesn't matter because we're going to have natural language search anyway. They have finally made that more logical. That's fine. Small improvements to the touch keyboard that doesn't matter too much. I should mention too that Windows 10 is also getting a release preview or did get a release preview update. This is just fixes to the underlying code that's going to Enable the Windows 10 Extended Security Update enrollment screen. Right. That you're going to see. That's going to be a lot of fun and then some fixes across the board. But yeah. So kind of a. It was a lot of stuff but from a. Especially if you don't have a copilot plus PC day to day. It's not. There's not. Not a lot of major stuff going on there. But you know, the quick machine recovery stuff. Great. I the copilot. I not copilot. Sorry. The. The click to do stuff has emerged as this almost genius use of a. Like really smart. Like just interact with the screen. Like I really like it. Like I actually think that's nice.
- [34:08]
Leo Laporte
All right, let me take a little break because I can break through this.
- [34:11]
Paul Thurott
Quick if you want. Well actually you know what? If you don't mind, let me just. I. Maybe I will burn through it quick because it doesn't matter. Right. I'll Just say this really quickly. The Canary Channel also got an update. I think that one might have been Friday. It's. There are no new features. If you've been paying attention. It's everything. Not everything. It's many of the things that they've given to or provided in other channels of the insider program. So they're bringing it up once again.
- [34:36]
Richard Campbell
We don't know what Canary is actually for.
- [34:38]
Paul Thurott
What am I? Yep, it's crazy. All right. That's it.
- [34:43]
Leo Laporte
All right. Still some more to talk about in the new Windows 11 updates. We'll get to that in just a second. But I. I'm sorry. I'm so excited. I can't. I had to have to interrupt you. Now. Why My eyes. Why did you go full screen? Let me push my button. There we go.
- [34:57]
Paul Thurott
What are you doing on my screen?
- [34:59]
Leo Laporte
I am very excited. I've been running up and down the stairs from the attic because the guys are here with our new mattress. I'm very, very excited. Our Helix is here. This episode brought to you by Helix Sleep. So I don't know if you know this, but I did a little. A little search on the AI. I said, AI, how often should I replace the mattress? And this actually surprised me. It depends, but every six to 10 years, depending on your mattress. If you start to feel it sag, that kind of thing, people will keep a mattress for 20 years. In fact, when I mentioned that, somebody in our discord said, mine, I haven't changed in 20 years. Yeah, you might not be doing yourself a favor. You might want to get a new mattress. You will be amazed. I mean, first of all, the mattress is more than for just sleeping. A good night's sleep is pretty important. But there's movie nights with your partner, morning cuddles with our kitty cat, Rosie, or your pet, your wind down ritual after long days. I like to lie in bed and read. And of course, it's all dependent on that thing called your mattress. And there are things their mattress can do to you that will ruin a good night's sleep. Maybe you're waking up in sweat puddles with back pain, or you feel every toss and turn your partner makes. It is what we call in the business a classic mattress nightmare. Well, no more, my friends. Not for me anyway. And I suggest not for you. The Helix sleep changes everything. Oh, it is so sweet. Oh, man, I wish I could take you in there. They're putting it in right now. They took the old mattress. They took the old thing that. I call it the. The recliner, whatever the no more night sweats, no back pain. You know, it's really. Lisa sleeps pretty steadily. I'm the one who's tossing and turning. She loves it. No more motion transfer. Get the deep sleep you deserve. A good night's sleep is about health. It's about cognition. It's about everything. Your whole day depends on how your night went. One buyer recently reviewed the Helix with five stars, saying, quote, I love my Helix mattress. I will never sleep on anything else. Tonight's my night, baby. Time and time again, Helix sleep remains. Wait till you hear these awards. The most awarded mattress brand Wired said, best mattress for 2025. Best top tip, top good housekeeping bedding awards for 2025 gave it premium plus size support. So, you know, I'm a little heavy. It's nice to have that extra support. GQ Sleep Awards 2025. These are all this year. Best hybrid mattress, wire cutter for 2025. Featured for plus size. Oprah's. I didn't know Oprah had the O wards for daily sleep. The o wards in 2025. Best hotel, like feel, you know, why some. I mean, some hotels. Okay, it depends What Hotel. Motel 6. Maybe not so much. But you go to a fancy, nice hotel, they change your mattresses a lot. That's why they feel so Good. Go to helixsleep.com twit for 27% off site wide during the 4th of July sale. Best of web offer extended. That's helixsleep.com twit, for 27% off site wide. Exclusive for listeners of Windows Weekly. Ends on July 31st. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. And if you're listening after the sale ends, still be sure to check them out@helixsleep.com twit if. If I could, I would take a camera with me and go right now and lie on this mattress. I am. In fact, you know what? Keep doing the show. I'm done. I'll see you in an hour. I'm gonna go take a nap. Helixsleep.com we thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly. Back to you, my friends. Fellers.
- [38:45]
Paul Thurott
Yes, let's see. This time, I laboriously copied in all of my stories so I could get to them from the browser. Okay, So I don't remember when this happened. Earlier this year, it might have been late. Last year, Microsoft started testing what they were describing as a simplified system tray daytime display. Right? So if you look down in the corner of your taskbar, it says the. The time and the date when Windows 11 first arrived, there was a notification bell there. By default, it would change colors based on whether or not you had notifications. I think in Windows 10, I don't think this came to 11, but there would even be a number there. Remember telling you the number of notifications, because that was something nobody ever needed. But anyway, they were like, look, we can simplify this thing. I think part of it was they kind of want the Windows 11 taskbar to be a little more symmetrical. They got the one widget's icon over the left, but they. This thing is kind of overloaded on the right. It's. Yeah, you have ocd. It's gonna be a little bit of.
- [39:38]
Richard Campbell
All the stuff that I need to know that. That part.
- [39:41]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. So, yeah, right. I, I thought that was fine. But they took it out of the Insider program at some point and someone, Zach Bowden, actually Windows Central, asked Brandon LeBlanc over at the Insider team, hey, what's going on with this? Is this, this thing was pulled. Are we going to bring it back? And they're like, nope, we're not bringing it back. He said, the feedback we got was not pleasant.
- [40:07]
Richard Campbell
Oh my.
- [40:09]
Paul Thurott
And I believe in a later part of this quote or this, whatever you call it, thread on X now, or Twitter or whatever was, well, why not make it an option? And he said, Because 12 people enabled, it's just not worth the support cost of doing that. So anyway, that's gone. So there you go. If you're wondering about that, you probably.
- [40:32]
Richard Campbell
Wonder where it went. That's why it's gone. There's 12 sad people in this world.
- [40:40]
Paul Thurott
A couple weeks ago, IDC chimed in on PC sales from the second quarter. It was, it was good news, actually. But I held on to this because I like to commingle the data from Gartner and idc. And so once Gartner jumped in, I, I did that. So PC sales grew.5 point. Is it. Yeah, 5.2% in the second quarter, PC maker sold 65.8 million units. That's good. That kind of growth, honestly, in this kind of a market, really good. But that's the problem. Because of all of the economic uncertainty this year tied to tariffs and whether or not they're coming and what's going on there and blah, blah, blah, whatever. Plus, we know that we're getting into this Windows 10 upgrade cycle. Businesses are actually starting to move to Windows 11 and appreciable members. I think we. Last week we probably mentioned that Windows 11 usage overall has finally surpassed that of Windows 10 et cetera, et cetera. But this has artificially skewed the sales and both companies are saying, actually the second half of the year is not going to be so great. So if I remember correctly, PC sales overall last year were not much more than flat. I can't remember the exact.
- [41:55]
Richard Campbell
But also.
- [41:56]
Paul Thurott
Come on. I know, right?
- [41:57]
Richard Campbell
Like this. What did you think was going to happen? Like, we've. We've been at saturation for a while. We've gotten through the crazy that was the pandemic. Like, the idea that you would predict any of this to me seems absurd.
- [42:09]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, I. I was thinking about this actually earlier today just because I happened to see this article that I was quoted in, because I talked to the guy. But it was about 1995 and Windows 95 and what an incredible industry event that was. Right. And the thing I was trying to communicate to him at the time we talked was 1995 was this kind of nexus of timing for all kinds of things. Computers had gotten more powerful and with Windows 95, simpler to use that. That was going to trigger some kind of an upgrade cycle of which we had never seen before. The Internet happened, right. So we had the Web. So all of a sudden we get on Netscape and soon Internet Explorer and, you know, it's just really good timing. You know, the Mac was in the bucket, was. That company was about to go out of business. They were doing nothing. It's just a lot of factors, you know, that made it such a big thing. And if you've been following along for the past 20 years, 30 years, sorry, you'll notice that there haven't been any big Windows events in a while. Right. Like, we're not. We're not the big platform anymore from enthusiasm perspective, whatever. So there was an event for Windows XP. There were events for Vista and 7 and 8, actually 10, 11. Subdued. We're also doing updates all the time. We keep talking about this. The notion of a major version of Windows triggering anything is unfathomable. I mean, we have, well, three right now different versions of Windows 11, all of which have all the same features. It doesn't really matter which one you're on. And so the way that PC upgrades have gone because of all that stuff and then others I'm not mentioning is you. You buy most people. I mean, not me, but most people buy a PC just when they need one. Right. And they need them less and less. Most people. Right.
- [43:51]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. No lifespans on machines are only getting longer.
- [43:54]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. And yes. So I. Whatever anyone's predictions were for the Windows 10 to 11 upgrade cycle. I don't know what to say to this. I remember a year ago and maybe even further back, there were some of these analyst organizations were estimating, oh, this is going to be. This is it. This will be the biggest thing we've seen a long time. It's like, why, like, what are you talking about? Like, why would it. Like that's not what's happening. Right, right. If anything, individuals have kind of fallen into lockstep in a way behind businesses in this regard. They only upgrade when they really have to and they do it begrudgingly.
- [44:29]
Richard Campbell
You know, most of them, the usual is coming out of warranty, right? It's, they're keeping machines for four to five years. We, we used to turn them in two, now we turn them in four or five. In some cases. Especially when we had some economic wobbles. I heard lots of folks say, oh, we're buying extended warranties to extend these strategies another year before we start on.
- [44:50]
Paul Thurott
But even, I mean, you know, most people, just individuals probably don't even think in those terms. Right? I mean like they're just using it. I coincidentally, right before I came to Mexico, one of my sisters texted me and said, it was like, oh, sorry to bother you, but you don't have a. Do you have any extra computers? I'm like, no, I don't have any extra computers. I have 28 laptops in my office. But you can't have any of those. No. I was like, of course. But in talking to her, my first question was like, what are you using now? Exactly. And she was using a. It was a Surface Pro 7. Wow. And she's like, actually it was my brother in law who initially raised this complaint. But she was saying like you click on something and then you like wait, wait, wait. And then it like happens, you know. And I was like, okay, but I think that's what people do, right? You don't, yeah, you don't think about it until it's become a problem so often that you're like, okay, I have now how much these stupid things cost. You know, you don't even want to spend the money. So anyway, look, 5.2% in a legacy market like this. Yeah, 2025, that's fantastic. Now granted, by the end of the year if we're lucky, this will just be flat and not negative, but it will probably be be flat or flattish I would imagine. So we'll see what happens. But no changes to the top 5pc makers if you care about this kind of thing, Macintosh, 9% market share. So that hasn't really moved the needle too much. And then this is kind of a competitive thing. But I, I bring these things up from time to time because you know, Apple, we talked about a bunch when they were doing stuff. Google has, I guess, fewer platforms than Apple, but. And they're going to have even fewer soon, right? So Google has Android phones and tablets and IoT and all that other stuff, but. And car and whatever else. And then they have Chrome OS for laptop type devices. Chrome OS started off super simplistic, almost ridiculous, has gotten much more sophisticated. It's actually pretty good. And then last year there was this news that they were going to start replacing key parts of the platform with the corresponding parts from Android because it's so much better supported by hardware makers because there are so many more Android devices. That actually makes total sense. But of course this leads to this speculation like, okay, so Chrome os, like is it going away? Like what's going on? And then you get this contrary information. So Google has gone back and forth over what the right big screen OS is, right? We've had tablets that run Chrome os, we've had tablets that run Android and we now have foldables. Those are all Android. Sometimes it's Chrome os, sometimes it's Android. Last year I think October ish, they announced Chromebook plus, which are these like kind of copilot plus PC type PCs. Before they were copilot plus PCs with better spots, et cetera. Now they have an ARM based version. It has a Copilot plus PC capable NPU by the way. Interesting. So Google I O comes around in May. Google doesn't talk at all about Chrome os, talks a little bit about Android. But they did an Android event before the show, nothing about Chrome os. But then they did the thing afterwards and it was just a couple of new features, no big deal. You're like, oh, what's going on here? It turns out they are in fact merging these platforms, right? And so for Android, nothing's changing. Android is Android. It will still be used on whatever platforms it's used on. Chrome OS the first time it just was blurted out in an interview. So the guy who currently runs Android, and I guess Chrome OS now, Google president Samir Samat, who you would have seen at IO, he was a big part of that, just told someone in passing, ask something about the laptop the guy was using and blah blah, blah. And he said, I just asked because we're going to be combining Chrome OS and Android anyway. And then they just kind of moved on. It's like, wait, wait, wait, wait. What, what's happening?
- [48:29]
Leo Laporte
Got two headlines.
- [48:30]
Richard Campbell
It's all the leadership for Android and Chrome OS turned over. Like, it just seemed like you don't need two and you don't have the political clout to protect them both. So it's inevitable.
- [48:41]
Paul Thurott
So this is actually smart to me because Android is Android, right? So Android is. Whatever it is they subdivide. They subdivide it into different things. You know, IO, IO, iot, car, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Okay. But they have Chromebook on the Chromebook side. They have Chromebook and Chromebook Plus. Different. They're kind of different tiers. By putting Chrome OS or those Chrome OS features on top of Android and calling that thing a Chromebook, they get all the benefits of all the hardware compatibility and popularity, blah, blah, blah, that stuff under underneath the covers. But you still get all those things that Chrome OS brings up people really like, like the desktop version of Chrome and all the simple management features the schools rely on and all the other stuff that's part of Chrome os. It's good. So it, unfortunately, because of the way he said this, everyone's like, what's going on? You know, there was a flurry of activity like, what's going on? And so he got into Twitter X or whatever and he said, okay, sorry about that. Super excited that you guys are really happy about that, are interested. And he acted like they had sort of said this already. And if you read what he. And I'll read it.
- [49:43]
Leo Laporte
And I want to give credit to Lance Ulanoff who got the scoop. He was writing for a tech radar.
- [49:48]
Paul Thurott
And it was his laptop and Samir. It was weird because.
- [49:51]
Leo Laporte
And Lance is a great guy. Old friend.
- [49:53]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, yeah. He's been around forever. But no, he didn't drag it out of him or anything.
- [49:56]
Leo Laporte
No, he just worded it out. I see that laptop.
- [49:59]
Paul Thurott
He was using Apple devices on Mac. Yeah, yeah. And he said, I'm just curious because you're in this ecosystem, like, whatever. It was bizarre the way it kind of came out, because it had nothing to do with IO or any of that stuff or whatever. But technically, everything this guy says is true.
- [50:16]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [50:17]
Paul Thurott
But no one got almost any of this out of the original announcement. So what he said was, we're building the Chrome OS experience on top of Android. We're going to, we're doing so to unlock new levels of performance, iterate faster, and make your laptop and phone work better together. I was like, hold on a second. So I played. I pay Attention. I'm like, I wrote about this. I don't remember anything about laptop and phone working better together. But you know what, if you go to this June 2024 blog post, actually it does say that it's like a little throwaway thing.
- [50:49]
Leo Laporte
Oh, interesting. Doesn't describe it. Yeah, interesting.
- [50:53]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. So the net result here is that if you do care about Chromebooks or Chrome os, whatever, nothing bad is going to happen. It's all going to work as it does. One of the nice benefits of Chrome OS is you can run, if you want to run Android on it as well. And that gives you access to command line, obviously, but also graphical apps that lets you do things like run Visual Studio code. Right. Which runs on Linux. So it turns it from this kind of almost kiosky little laptop thing into something a little more powerful.
- [51:24]
Leo Laporte
I just actually bought. I'm really liking it. The new Lenovo Chromebook plus that they announced with the.
- [51:29]
Paul Thurott
Yeah.
- [51:30]
Leo Laporte
Oh, so you have one tops for. It's got an NPU. It's a weird. It's a MediaTek processor.
- [51:37]
Paul Thurott
Right. So the two milestones, an OLED screen.
- [51:41]
Leo Laporte
It's a gorgeous screen. Yeah, really nice.
- [51:44]
Paul Thurott
So last year when Qualcomm and Microsoft announced the first copilot plus PCs, I was like, okay, this platform's real. This is amazing. This is going to benefit Windows. I can't help but think this would benefit Chrome OS even more because this thing is a more of a lightweight system, et cetera, et cetera. Like this is. There's not a lot of legacy backup end stuff you have to worry about. Like, I'm surprised they weren't doing anything and nothing happened last year when intel did their IFA announcements. I guess there are three things. In September, they. The first person that came on stage that wasn't from intel was from what company? Guys, do you remember Google? To talk about their exclusive arrangement for the next year on or for whatever period of time for the next gen of Chromebook plus whatever. They were going to be on Intel Core Ultra, not on arm. And I'm like, oh, that's interesting. Okay, but now or a couple months ago.
- [52:35]
Leo Laporte
Oh, sorry, I pressed. You forgot.
- [52:37]
Richard Campbell
I'm sorry.
- [52:38]
Paul Thurott
Okay. A couple of months ago, pushed the wrong button.
- [52:41]
Leo Laporte
I'm sorry.
- [52:42]
Paul Thurott
A couple of months ago, MediaTek announced these, what I would call Copilot Plus PC Snapdragon X class CPUs specifically said, we're going to put these things in Chromebooks. And I'm like, here we go. This is going to be really interesting. So that one that Leo has is the first of those. This is to the Chromebook world what Copilot plus PC is to the laptop world. Windows. Right. So it's got that npu. They're going to be. There's not too much there yet, but.
- [53:06]
Leo Laporte
They'Re going to be doing 16 gigs of RAM.
- [53:08]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, yeah. There's a solid.
- [53:09]
Leo Laporte
It's only 750 bucks. It's not, you know.
- [53:11]
Paul Thurott
No. Right. So for a premium PC, a good premium like Windows Laptop would be closer to fifteen hundred dollars.
- [53:19]
Richard Campbell
Sure.
- [53:20]
Paul Thurott
You can get a Chromebook for like one hundred bucks or something if you want to be.
- [53:23]
Richard Campbell
You're just not going to like it.
- [53:24]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, you're not going to like it at all. But. But yeah, that kind of. That, those specs, that level of components and so forth. It's a good price and there's not a lot there yet. Like Google does most of their device side AI first and phones because of the volume. But this is the beginning of the on device stuff. So when you think about the Copilot plus PC type capabilities, those are the things you want to look for on Chrome os. Like they'll happen over time, but you.
- [53:52]
Leo Laporte
Know, through Gemini or whatever, somebody's asking about battery life. I haven't tested it yet. I just got it. But they're claiming 18 hours. They're claiming massive battery life.
- [54:01]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, it should be really good. Yeah.
- [54:03]
Leo Laporte
And. And fingerprint reader, which is kind of.
- [54:06]
Richard Campbell
Nice on a Chromebook.
- [54:07]
Paul Thurott
Oh God. I can't stand. So, yes. I can't stand typing in pins, especially on Mac and Chrome os because it's six digits.
- [54:16]
Leo Laporte
I'm just saying.
- [54:17]
Paul Thurott
Oh, no, you can put it down.
- [54:18]
Leo Laporte
To 4Mac actually you can set it up with a Pixel, which is cool.
- [54:21]
Paul Thurott
Yes. So. Right. With Apple devices you can unlock your Mac or your phone or I think your iPad too. Maybe with your watch you can do that on the Google side as well. Right. So if you have a Pixel watch or a Samsung watch, whatever it is, you can do that kind of thing. That's convenient because the manual sign in.
- [54:40]
Leo Laporte
Stuff is not automatically. So I'm going to scan the QR code it's putting up on the screen on the phone and then.
- [54:50]
Paul Thurott
And if I'm not mistaken, Leo, I think you get a year of Gemini AI.
- [54:53]
Leo Laporte
You do. And two terabytes of drive.
- [54:56]
Paul Thurott
Yep. It's good stuff.
- [54:57]
Leo Laporte
It's a good deal.
- [54:58]
Paul Thurott
Yeah.
- [54:59]
Leo Laporte
I didn't get it for me. I got it for my daughter who's a Chromebook user. She refuses to use a Mac. She's Like Sameer Samat.
- [55:06]
Richard Campbell
But it's also impressive to be productive with.
- [55:09]
Paul Thurott
Yeah.
- [55:10]
Leo Laporte
Oh, she writes books with it. I mean, it's really. She got her master's degree with a Chromebook.
- [55:16]
Paul Thurott
And most people who are like the. The Windows or Mac bigots, you know, are like, what are you doing on there? Like drawing crayon pictures your mommy can put on the refrigerator. It's like, it's a little more sophisticated than you think, you know. I don't know.
- [55:28]
Richard Campbell
I will say I got a Chrome OS tablet that did not last the pandemic. That battery blew up on it. But. And there was some workarounds. Like in order to run Signal, I had to run the Linux host and. But there were workarounds.
- [55:40]
Leo Laporte
I'm actually. I can also use it, the Pixel tablet to set it up.
- [55:44]
Paul Thurott
There you go. Um, I. The one little. Well, Chrome OS has not really exploded in use outside of schools or whatever for some reason. But. Okay.
- [55:55]
Richard Campbell
The problem most people think of when they think of a. Of a Chrome OS device. Cheap, that's what they.
- [56:00]
Paul Thurott
Right.
- [56:00]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, no, getting maybe cheesy. Right.
- [56:02]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. Well, they were. They were horribly underpowered and terrible in the beginning, but they've gotten a lot better.
- [56:08]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [56:08]
Paul Thurott
Depending on.
- [56:09]
Richard Campbell
Depending on the one. They're still horribly underpowered ones too.
- [56:12]
Paul Thurott
Oh yeah. No, if you want. If you want one that stinks, no problem.
- [56:15]
Richard Campbell
You can still get that there.
- [56:18]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, yeah. The problem for Chrome OS now though, is iPadOS. Right. Like all of a sudden, iPadOS is awesome. That's why if you want like a device like, but also PC like capability thing, I mean, I connect. So the thing I'm looking at here, which is, you know, it's kind of similar to what I have back home, is I have in this case a Thunderbolt dock. And then I'm using a laptop and I was using an external display, like a big one. My wife's using that now, so I have a smaller external display. And just before the show I did a second external display because I'm an idiot. And so I've got this thing arrayed here. Whatever. I plug my iPad into this. I'm like, I wonder what will happen. You know what happens? It works. And it's like, yikes. And you know, you do have to go into Settings and say, I don't want the screen to be mirrored, I want it to be extended. But once you do that. Yeah, I mean, I can't get this mic to work and I can't get. What was the other thing? Oh, the Web. The external webcam. But the iPad is a terrific web camera. Most iPad guys are going to have AirPods or whatever, so who cares? But I mean, this is like the uncomfortable reality that even I could get work done on this thing. And it's like, other than the fact that I actually have to see Windows to write about it, like, I could in fact do everything I do. I have really good versions.
- [57:39]
Leo Laporte
You keep your iPad next to your Windows PC and then it's perfect because you can look back and forth and you can. You don't.
- [57:45]
Paul Thurott
You know, it would be perfect is if I could use it as an external display, which I can do with a Mac and screw everything. I hate these stupid wall gardens. But okay. It's okay.
- [57:54]
Richard Campbell
It's okay. Fine. We're all fine.
- [57:57]
Leo Laporte
I do use a USB monitor as an external display phone.
- [58:00]
Paul Thurott
I have to say that, like, yeah, I mean, it's incredible that you can do that.
- [58:03]
Leo Laporte
But this chromebook drives two 4k external displays, right? So you can have a massive setup. It's got a good camera with a shutter.
- [58:11]
Paul Thurott
This is going to be Atmos audio. It depends on what you do, right? So on the Chromebook, one of the ways you're limited is if for graphics editing, there's a web version of Chrome. I'm sorry, of Adobe Photoshop, which you have to pay monthly for to get. But you can get it, and that does work, and it's pretty good. But the Photoshop that's kind of native to iPad and then Affinity photo too, which I have because I paid for it but have never used it is even better. And that is rather incredible. Like the tool that it's not exactly the same. I mean, to be fair, but the tool I use in Windows is on the iPad in many cases, but not on Chromebook. But it depends, right? Like, I can use clipchamp on Chromebook anywhere. It's a web app, right? It just depends on the. It depends on what you're doing, right? But, oh, man, Apple really threw a hand grenade in the room when they do this. It's crazy. Like, I don't know. We'll see. I like Chrome os, but I don't know.
- [59:10]
Leo Laporte
It's nice to have choice. I don't. I mean, I don't think they threw a hand grenade as much as just give. Give us some choice. This has a touchscreen too, by the way, for the price you're getting. Getting in many ways very similar device to that iPad. I mean, I love.
- [59:24]
Paul Thurott
But it's the. The apps is the thing, right? And. And also the OLED screen.
- [59:29]
Leo Laporte
Really?
- [59:29]
Paul Thurott
That's beautiful.
- [59:30]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's light. It's £2.
- [59:33]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, that's.
- [59:34]
Richard Campbell
You know, I was just. I was just looking at that Pixel tablet with. Especially with its base. Then I was looking over at the. My Polycom Teams phone, which is just a source of hate and loathing for me, and thinking it would fit in the same spot, it would be more versatile. It'll run the team's Android client, which can't possibly be worse than the Polycom One. Just cannot.
- [60:00]
Leo Laporte
I'm sure it's updated more frequently anyway.
- [60:02]
Richard Campbell
Oh, no. This thing's perpetually rebooting for something. I don't know what. The one thing it's not doing is trying to do things to make it easier for me to make a call.
- [60:09]
Paul Thurott
Right. I'm never going to do this on Windows Weekly because you guys are so particular about audio, video quality, whatever, and would notice immediately, but I think sometime next week I'm just going to plug the iPad in and do like a first ring Daily show with Brad. And I bet he doesn't even notice. You know what I mean? I bet it just works.
- [60:27]
Leo Laporte
When he got the first release, the developer release of IPADOS 26, did his whole podcast on it because it now has background.
- [60:36]
Paul Thurott
Oh, right, exactly. And he made that article available to everyone because that's actually really interesting. What's that called? Like five colors. Is that the number?
- [60:44]
Leo Laporte
Six colors. Six of them now.
- [60:45]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, six now. Sorry.
- [60:50]
Leo Laporte
Five fingers, six colors. That's how you remember it.
- [60:53]
Paul Thurott
Okay. Yeah.
- [60:54]
Leo Laporte
I actually don't want to give this to Abby. I'm kind of. It's too late, though. I've already promised. But this is a nice laptop. I'm very impressed.
- [61:03]
Richard Campbell
Now I have to power. Laptop or nice tablet?
- [61:06]
Leo Laporte
No, this is the laptop. So this is the Chromebook plus and the Pixel tablet. I'm sorry, I don't really recommend it. I've had it. I love it. I bought it because I thought the dock thing was so cool, so slick.
- [61:18]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [61:19]
Leo Laporte
But the speaker doesn't play with that.
- [61:20]
Paul Thurott
It docked, so it makes me crazy. I hate.
- [61:22]
Leo Laporte
It should, but it doesn't.
- [61:24]
Paul Thurott
And it's like a. I think it might be 16 by 10, but when you flip it in portrait mode, it's like.
- [61:29]
Richard Campbell
And in the end, most of the time, I just want to speak my Sonos anyway. Yeah, the Sonos app.
- [61:35]
Paul Thurott
Oh, I speak to my Sonos all the time. I'm like.
- [61:36]
Leo Laporte
I hate. Honestly, all mine's showing is right now is the security cameras all the time. That's all it Does.
- [61:43]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. It's like a dashboard.
- [61:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's a dashboard.
- [61:46]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [61:47]
Leo Laporte
Okay.
- [61:48]
Paul Thurott
And then just because there are probably still some lingering Windows Phone random news.
- [61:53]
Richard Campbell
This is such a random bit.
- [61:54]
Leo Laporte
You've I want a Windows Phone. Are they bringing it back?
- [61:57]
Richard Campbell
No, no, no.
- [62:00]
Paul Thurott
So you would have better luck making your iPhone look like Windows 95 than you would making any phone look or work like Windows 95.
- [62:09]
Leo Laporte
I can make obsidian look like Windows 95.
- [62:11]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, I don't recommend it, but it's a hoot. I like having 16 colors. It's fine. So the history of this, there's a part of this I actually didn't know, but HMD was a company formed of former Nokia employees that wanted to bring back the phones. So when Microsoft dumped all that stuff, they were like, all right, we're going to do this again. We're going to bring them back, right? And of course it's Android phones, right? And they started in China, then they went to Europe and the rest of the world. They came to the United States through Verizon. And I think when I say T Mobile, you know, their phones were okay. I like the vibe of the company. Like HMD stands for Human Mobile Devices. Like, cool. And if you go and read like all their, you know, rah rah rah stuff, it's kind of fun. They brought back the little Nokia candy bar phones, right? Those little fun little phones like from the, all the movies in the late 90s and early 2000s. Running the same OS as before too. Right? They actually got that. That's pretty cool.
- [63:10]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but I gotta say. Yeah, but yeah, because of the tariffs, Nokia has announced that hmd, which makes them.
- [63:17]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, that's the, that's the, that's the point. It's. Sadly, if you live in the United States, these were hard to find to begin with. Now they are not possible to find. So there's some left in Amazon and things like that, but they, they're exiting the US quick.
- [63:30]
Leo Laporte
Although maybe that's not a good idea.
- [63:33]
Paul Thurott
So, you know, I, I can't speak for everyone but I in the United States, other than those candy bar phones for like 10 seconds 20 years ago, they weren't really much of a presence in the United States. So I used to travel to Europe a lot and I was always struck by Nokia advertising everywhere, like giant billboards, like building size billboards, like they were everywhere. They were the, the biggest thing in the world. So when this company announced that under Steve Vanilla that they're going to adopt Windows Phone. So this probably was 2011 somewhere in there. This was the biggest thing in the world. And what they did to support Windows Phone was incredible across their first. Well, for them, first party apps, back end services and hardware peripherals. Right. They had all the fun little speakers and the color cases and all. They were awesome. They just brought this whole kind of legitimacy to Windows phone for about 15 seconds because it didn't last long and they never recovered. And Microsoft had to buy them, essentially buy them to save Windows Phone and then they ended up killing it anyway. And we all know how that went. So this is like getting stabbed in the back after you've recovered from being stabbed in the back. I guess depending on how you look at it. But I appreciate that HMD tried to do this. They're still around. I mean if you live in Europe you can. I'm sure they'll still have new phones or whatever. Maybe they're great. I have no idea. But not here, not in the United States.
- [65:01]
Richard Campbell
So no.
- [65:02]
Paul Thurott
Sorry.
- [65:05]
Leo Laporte
Sigh no, I, I actually owned quite a few Nokia phones.
- [65:10]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. I think I owned, I almost owned every single one of the Windows phones anyway. Yeah.
- [65:14]
Leo Laporte
I love the Windows phones.
- [65:15]
Paul Thurott
I don't know if I've ever told.
- [65:16]
Richard Campbell
You this story from the early 90s. Well, for the late 90s I got, I had one of the Nokia candy bars when text messaging was still relatively new and like 25 cents each or.
- [65:28]
Leo Laporte
75 cents each came in a cereal box.
- [65:32]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. And the local telco gave us an API to be able to send text messages. Wow. So I was, I was trying to use. I wanted to stop carrying a pager. Right. So we built this little interface for certain classes of error message that would normally trigger a pager message to send a text message instead to. I tested it on my phone first. Anyway, little bug, little, little bug. I sent, I, I ran it. It sent me a text message and then back then it literally pop up and say message. And you would click on it and it would pull in the one message and then you had the. You could delete it. So I delete it and it goes oh message. And I pull it up and it's the same message and I delete it. I go back and look in the code. It's like 32,767. Oh, we got to read them one at a time. So doing Friday night.
- [66:27]
Paul Thurott
Oh boy.
- [66:28]
Richard Campbell
So I call tech support for the telco. I get tier one. He has no idea what I'm talking about. But I've scared him enough. He kicks me up to tier two. Tier two flips around with me for a while. We're talking APIs and so forth. They're all vaguely confused, it's not in the book, and so on. He finally pushes me to tier three. I've been on the phone for half an hour now, right? I get to tier three and he goes, hi. And you can hear it, you can tell it's tier three. He's like, what are you. Why are you calling me? It's like, hi, I've been messing with your. Your SMS API and I may have it. He goes, oh, it's you.
- [66:58]
Leo Laporte
You knew all about it.
- [67:01]
Paul Thurott
You are responsible for 99 of the text message.
- [67:04]
Richard Campbell
He had been staring at this number and going, what am I going to do about this? So I'm like, okay, what do you want to do? And he's like, I'm going to delete them all from my end. You're going to have to pull up the next one. Everyone you've read you have to pay for, but the rest are gone. Will go away.
- [67:21]
Leo Laporte
Goodness. Oh, my goodness.
- [67:23]
Richard Campbell
Okay.
- [67:23]
Leo Laporte
Because you would have had to pay for those. Each.
- [67:26]
Paul Thurott
Do it again.
- [67:27]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, they charged you at the point that you refetched each text.
- [67:31]
Paul Thurott
So, yeah, the good old days when you had to pay for texts. Yeah.
- [67:34]
Richard Campbell
But the solution. And the solution, there was no interface controls or anything like that, right. So it was literally, be more careful next time. That was.
- [67:42]
Paul Thurott
Jeez.
- [67:43]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, when I. You knew you got the right guy when he's immediately angry with you.
- [67:47]
Paul Thurott
It's like, okay, to this day, I cannot type on a phone, like to save my life. I type amazingly quickly on a regular keyboard when I got this stupid. So you do a lot of the reading into it thing, you know, whatever. But in the early days, like on those phones and then like the first flip phones, which was just a numeric keypad. There's a name for this, but you could type on it, you know, 1, 2, 3. So type words, right? So there was no chance I was ever going to learn this. I had a hard enough time going from like keyboard and mouse to play video games to a controller. Like, I, I can't do these things. Geez. Can't even use my hands correctly. So I don't think you would mind me now saying who this was, but we were at build 2003, that's how long ago, and I had one of those little candy bar things. There's no way I was ever typing a message on this. And Brian Livingston, who I was working on what became Windows Vista Secrets, sent me this text. I swear To God, it was 500 words and it was like, all right, so I'm going to go to this, I'm going to this meeting, we're going to do this, we should meet lunch. And then blah, blah, blah. And then it went a whole thing and at the bottom he goes, is this okay? And I'm like, K. And it was the first text message I ever sent with the letter K. Nice. And like I, I just, you know, I just couldn't, I just couldn't do it.
- [69:03]
Richard Campbell
Arguably, it's also the perfect text message.
- [69:06]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, well, it answered the question. I mean, I.
- [69:08]
Richard Campbell
Yes, it's funny that you should say.
- [69:10]
Leo Laporte
That because I just read a study that said it is the most hated text message.
- [69:14]
Paul Thurott
Okay. K. Well, yes. I mean it's, it feels dismissive, but in that era at least you could argue that nobody.
- [69:21]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I send you one letter.
- [69:24]
Leo Laporte
They didn't know he was.
- [69:25]
Paul Thurott
Yet he was living on the bleeding edge in that sense. I mean, I don't know.
- [69:30]
Leo Laporte
That is so funny.
- [69:31]
Paul Thurott
Yeah.
- [69:32]
Leo Laporte
K. All right. K. Let's take a break and when we come back, more of this nonsense called, yes, Windows Weekly. K. Actually, we're going to talk about Microsoft 365 and AI. But first, a word from our sponsor. The wonderful folks at Bitwarden love the Bitwarden and they love you. You know what they Bit Warden exists to make your life better. It really does. That's why they're open source. That's why, you know, they do so much to protect you. Bit Warden is the trusted leader in passwords, pass keys, even in secrets management. It's consistently ranked number one in user satisfaction by G2 and software reviews and people like me, people like Steve Gibson, who's also a Bit Warden fanatic. With more than 10 million users across 180 countries, over 50,000 businesses, Bit Warden is just fantastic. Now they want to make, because it's summertime, they know maybe you're going to be hitting the road. They want to make your travels safer and easier. So they've got some ideas for you. For instance, add your passport number to your Bit Warden vault for easy access to tax free shopping.
- [70:51]
Paul Thurott
Huh?
- [70:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it fills it in automatically. Actually, I'll go a step farther. I keep my passport image, a scan of it in my Bit Warden notes. It's secure there because it's end to end, encrypted. No one can see it except me. But if I should lose my password, passport. It's really nice to have your passport in there. And I do that with my driver's license, my Social Security card, All my secrets. Our secret inside Bit Warden. You can use it for sharing too. If you and your partner are both Bit Warden users, you could secretly share your hotel or locker code with your travel partner. Keep it safe and give them a copy. I do recommend turning on autofill for credentials because that will keep you from auto filling on pirate sites or sham sites. You may not recognize that that is a fake Amazon login, but Bitwarden knows and will not fill the credentials in. Now some general tips for everybody traveling if you're in an airport or a hotel, don't and you're going to use the WI fi and I know it's you know you want to take proactive steps to help secure your data. Protect against cyber threats. Using Bitwarden is a good start. Only connect to the official airport hotel WI FI network, right? Be extra careful on that one. Prevent your device from automatically reconnecting to that public WI fi as soon as you're done using it. Forget the network and your device's settings. That's really important. And of course, as always, everywhere but especially on open WI FI access points. Avoid downloading files or clicking unfamiliar links, and don't access sensitive personal or work accounts when connected to public wifi. Summer also means students are spending the majority of their time online, right? They're out of school, they're learning, they're socializing, they're gaming, they're doing other activities. With that comes what many accounts. And with that many accounts comes what many passwords. Even if a student, and it would be an unusually smart student, knows the security risks, even if they know that convenience often takes precedent. So help your student. Help them set them up. It's free for individuals because it's open source. With your password manager, Bitwarden, it generates unique, strong passwords, one for every site. Students don't have to memorize it. Bit Warden keeps track of it. They can use it from any device. And it's free because it's open source forever. Unlimited passwords, unlimited devices, pass keys. It's all in there. And by the way, there is a side benefit because you know at some point your student, with any luck, is going to go out into the world and support themselves and maybe even get a cybersecurity job. Those are really in demand right now. And potential employers will ask your student about their security. So if they have a solid understanding of password management, if they say, yeah, I use Bitwarden, it's open source, and they're going to be impressed. That's Going to help them get that job and get them off the family dole. It's really easy to move to Bitwarden if you're already using another password manager. Good for you. But you really ought to try Bitwarden.
- [73:57]
Paul Thurott
It's the best. Best.
- [73:57]
Leo Laporte
Their setup only takes a few minutes that you can import easily from most password management solutions. I moved over in just a matter of minutes. Steve did the same thing. Bitwarden's open source code can be inspected by anyone. I think that's really important. It's regularly audited by third party experts too. And they meet SOC2 type 2, GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA. They're compliant. They're also ISO 27001:2002 certified. That means they adhere to the highest security standards. Your data is safe with Bitwarden. And because it's end to end encrypted, even Bitwarden can't see what's in your vault. It's yours and yours alone. Get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan. Or get started for free across all devices as an individual user@bitwarden.com Twitter that's bitwarden.com Twit thank you Bitwarden for all you do for us and for supporting Windows Weekly with Paul and Richard.
- [74:56]
Richard Campbell
Happy Bitcoin user, huh?
- [74:59]
Paul Thurott
So are you.
- [75:00]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I am.
- [75:01]
Leo Laporte
I don't. I don't like to use our hosts names in vain, but it's not. I know Paul's not. He's got that weird proton thing. He's all over.
- [75:06]
Paul Thurott
But bit warden's fine. I like, I've used it.
- [75:10]
Leo Laporte
Better than fine. Better than fine.
- [75:13]
Paul Thurott
It's fine.
- [75:13]
Leo Laporte
Best.
- [75:14]
Richard Campbell
Great product. Great product. Very happy with it.
- [75:16]
Paul Thurott
With regards to the K thing, I. I don't know why, I just thought, well, I do know why actually, but whatever. We were sitting at a bar, my wife and I, and we met this couple and the guy's name was Q. I'm like, Q. No, really, I'm like, you're kidding me. I looked at his wife and I said, so what's your name? R. And she goes, no, my name is K. And I'm like, I can't talk to you two people.
- [75:39]
Leo Laporte
You meet such interesting people.
- [75:41]
Richard Campbell
I can't do it. So good.
- [75:42]
Paul Thurott
I can't do it. It's crazy. Yep, K, Q. K and Q. Wow. Her name was really K, but his name was something else.
- [75:51]
Leo Laporte
It was K. A Y.
- [75:52]
Paul Thurott
It was a long name with a Q in the beginning.
- [75:54]
Leo Laporte
That's pretty funny.
- [75:55]
Richard Campbell
Nice okay.
- [76:00]
Paul Thurott
Okay. Well, since we're going to talk about this every week now, forever. Microsoft layoffs. So a lot of questions about the rationale, the cause, et cetera, et cetera. Brad Smith, Microsoft president, the guy who got them out of all their antitrust problems back in the early 2000s. Right. Helped push through the Xbox. The Activision Blizzard acquisition is at a Microsoft event in Redmond to talk about an initiative called Elevate that nobody cares about but is now in front of the press. So of course all they want to talk about is the layoffs. So I'm sure he had some questions about the Elevate event. I don't know, I wasn't there. But somebody asked if AI was a predominant factor in the layoffs and he said that AI efficiency gains were not.
- [76:59]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's a relief.
- [77:00]
Paul Thurott
That AI productivity boosts somehow led to this. He said, no, that's not, that's not what happened. But then in a follow up interview with Todd Bishop at GeekWire, he did say, I'll just try to quote this as close as possible because I want to use his words, that it was the capital expense spending over the past few years that raised pressures internally to rein in operating costs, those costs that were more about the number of employees than anything else. So Microsoft's capex spending, as we call that, is going to be at least $80 billion. The most recently conc year, we don't know, end of this month we'll get those, the exact number, over $20 billion a quarter. Rounding up, I'm going to say 100% of those expenses are related to AI. Right. Because they're building out this infrastructure. It's probably 99 something percent whatever it is, but most, it's, it's AI. So actually AI is to blame for the layoffs, if you want to look at it from that perspective, in the sense that because their operating expenses have grown so much because they're investing so much in AI infrastructure that to cut costs in that area, the number of employees is the big bucket way to save money there. I would just say maybe don't spend as much on AI, but I'm a simple man, so whatever. I mean, look, I think it's fair to say Microsoft is perhaps overly big from an employee count perspective, like a lot. They're not alone in this, by the way. You'll see a lot of stories about this from other tech companies, but over the years they've just added levels of management between the top and the bottom. And it's a little, you know, a Little topic.
- [78:41]
Richard Campbell
The problem I got with this is 15,000 people, even though you're paying them 200 grand each and you're not right. It's $3 billion. It's not enough money.
- [78:52]
Paul Thurott
Well, I'm not disagreeing because I, I think, I don't know if you and I independently or we did some show, we kind of talk through the math of this. There isn't a straight one to one argument you could make. Cost. Right. The only thing I would say to that, and I'm not a money guy, is just that Microsoft, at least until last quarter, not, not the quarter, we don't know about the last quarter we got a report for. So the first calendar quarter of 2025, calendar year 2025, this might not have been true, but before that they were essentially paying for that infrastructure cost, that 20 billion plus with, I'm going to say cash. It's not really cash, but in other words, it came right out of, they had enough profit to pay for it and not notice it. Like they didn't have to take money from anything to make that work. I think that's starting not to be the case. And this is one of the many reasons I'm really curious about what happened in this most recent quarter. But those costs are a one time thing, right? Like once you've spent $20 billion in one quarter, it's not a subscription. Right. I mean you can stop maybe not fully because whatever, there's obviously with infrastructure there are ongoing costs. But I mean, I think the problem with employees, and this is a little simplistic, is that they are an ongoing cost, if that makes sense. And then they're an enduring cost in the sense of health insurer, you know, insurance benefits and all that stuff. Right. So.
- [80:18]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [80:18]
Paul Thurott
I'm not disagreeing. I mean actually I'm positive you're correct. But I, I, but I'm not a, I'm not, I'm not the, what do you call it, the CFO of Microsoft. Like I don't have a full understanding of their expenses or whatever. They're probably a little more complicated than mine. I don't know.
- [80:37]
Richard Campbell
Without a doubt they're not. And I mean, I do have a couple of other insights. One is that they changed HR leaders in March.
- [80:47]
Paul Thurott
Yeah.
- [80:48]
Richard Campbell
And by all accounts this new HR leader, Amy Coleman, is much more of a numbers person. So there's been a lot of looking at the organization right from, you know, do managers have enough direct reports, all of that sort of stuff. And so they've been going after that by the way.
- [81:05]
Paul Thurott
I mean, sorry to interrupt, but that might be tied to what we just talked about in a sense. Like when you remove layers of management. So you, you, you've taken people out of the equation. You've laid them off, let's say. Right. So there's a savings associated with that. Wall street loves it, whatever. So there are these kind of soft benefits, I guess. You know, the Microsoft stock price went up because of whatever they're doing and great. You know, we, we paid for our layoffs or whatever. You know, that's not how it works. But whatever. When you remove layers of management, when you re. Remove friction between a decision and an action in a organization inside of Microsoft, there are also cost, I should say. Well, yeah, cost benefits, I guess, if that makes sense. Like it's not just the expense of the employees who are holding up the process or whatever. It's the. You're able to move more agilely and make things happen more quickly. And there might be financial benefits to that as well. Maybe. He says, not being a money guy.
- [82:05]
Richard Campbell
No, I'm with you. And I don't, I don't disagree on that. And that they're definitely doing that. You're also seeing. Satya seems to have a real fixation on small teams get things done more than the big teams. So there's also been a wave of these quote unquote little tiger teams, six to eight people pulled from their regular workflow to work on a project.
- [82:28]
Paul Thurott
And that must be wonderful for those people in a way. Right. You get out from under the infrastructure of the company, which humongous. And you get to act like you're in a little startup. You know, they're, they're probably benefit just for the individuals, I mean, alone. But yeah, if that's true. Is it.
- [82:45]
Richard Campbell
Also, I also bumped into someone who got laid off in March, got rehired into a new role before her time period ended and got laid off again in May.
- [82:56]
Paul Thurott
Yes.
- [82:57]
Richard Campbell
And then got rehired again.
- [83:00]
Paul Thurott
Wow. Yeah. I wonder if it would have been less expensive for the company just to leave that one alone, you know? Yeah, it's kind of hard to say, but it's crazy.
- [83:10]
Richard Campbell
It is a little nuts and I do think a lot of the. In some ways I'm also wondering, I would be interested to see the stats just around how many people have actually gotten pulled back in because some of this is putting pressure on managers by moving people off of them and literally eliminating your role. Even those people are valuable and if they hustle, hassle can come back in you know, there's a lot of 60 day earn ins going on.
- [83:33]
Paul Thurott
There's also the people who basically consult with Microsoft after being laid off and are still in that way involved with.
- [83:39]
Richard Campbell
The company and yeah, and apparently they're bashing a bunch of that apart too. You can't have all contractors.
- [83:47]
Paul Thurott
Right.
- [83:47]
Richard Campbell
So. Right. There does seem to be. I do get the sense that this new HR leadership is shaking things up across the board.
- [83:56]
Paul Thurott
Okay.
- [83:57]
Richard Campbell
But I'm not going to disagree. I do think that the way they're going about it has been unusually cruel and it is very demoralizing.
- [84:04]
Paul Thurott
That's right. Yeah. Very poorly done. I, whatever anyone thinks about any of this stuff, the, the way they've handled this is poor. And it, this is not an isolated thing. This has been going on since they finalized the acquisition of Activision blizzard, which I isn't 100 tied to that, but just timing wise, that's all.
- [84:23]
Richard Campbell
Post pandemic. Pandemic. Post pandemic behavior has changed. The way they do this. And I think I sent you the link to that article about the pact has changed.
- [84:34]
Paul Thurott
Yes. The implicit, what he's talking about, like the implicit understanding as a Microsoft employee, this is the situation, this is what you can rely on. That's gone and that creates a great uncertainty.
- [84:48]
Leo Laporte
You'd get a gold watch after 50 years. Those days are long gone.
- [84:51]
Paul Thurott
Well, so my, by the way, this dates back literally to the beginning of this company was like, look, we're not going to pay you as much maybe, but for a period of time, stock options, big thing obviously through the 90s that kind of slowed down at one point. But the overall benefits package and then you do own, you know, you do get stock grants and so forth. That's big. But I was this in that article too. There's a problem with Microsoft stock prices so high that it's actually expensive for the company to do this now. And it's a problem for those employees that maybe would have left naturally but are like, I mean this thing went up a thousand percent this year. Why don't I just hang around and do nothing for a year? You know, like there's a whole cascading series of effects or whatever that are kind of.
- [85:38]
Richard Campbell
Well, and one of the arguments for the pact was the 10 years of bond bombers, time where the stock price did not move meant, you know, we had to be the sort of kinder, gentler thing. But now that the price is on the move, Satya could go out into that whole you've got to be a high performer or you're out kind of mindset and, and push and push and have higher expectations on your employees.
- [86:02]
Paul Thurott
His transformation to the dark side is complete.
- [86:05]
Richard Campbell
I have to agree with you, actually. Yeah, no, I think exactly that's what's happening. He finally has a thing. He's got AI in his teeth. This is his win, this is his legacy. And if he has to kill people on the way, get ready to die.
- [86:17]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, yeah. It's gonna be a lot of collateral damage here. But I, I mean, again, very high level because it's me speaking here. But when I think about the over hiring that occurred during the pandemic, which I keep saying, I keep thinking too should have been understood to be temporary. Right. Like this isn't going to last forever. You know, people aren't going to be playing games to the level they did before. Whatever. I almost, at first the layoffs or whatever that were occurring across the industry seemed vaguely commensurate, but I feel like now they're actually cutting a lot deeper. And I think it's tied to what you said earlier, this new. Like someone looking at this with fresh eyes from a different perspective. Because when people come into companies at that level, they impact it in ways that we don't really think about too much. Right. As individuals or fans of the company, if that's what you are. But. And that, you know, Microsoft maybe emerges on the other side of this as a. It's never going to be small. Right. But a smaller company, not on that same trajectory of growth. Employee ranks wise, but hopefully nimbler. Right. And faster moving, whatever. And I do think AI is going to play a role in this more directly in the sense that AI already is being used in the hiring process at Microsoft, for example, they don't really talk about that too much, but it will be used in decision making across the board.
- [87:37]
Richard Campbell
Well, and there's been a joke that these, these firings have been so random. Maybe AI is doing it, but that may not be a joke.
- [87:44]
Paul Thurott
I do feel like hallucinations.
- [87:46]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah. But I also get that, that this new HR lead is using more empirical data of presumed optimal management structures to make changes.
- [87:58]
Paul Thurott
Did they. Where did this person come from? Do you remember or no?
- [88:00]
Richard Campbell
She was hired, she was brought, she was promoted. Kathleen Hogan headed the job since Satch became CEO. So the, the old HR lead moved as soon as Satch took charge. So Hogan had had it from literally when Satch started. And this is the first change. And it makes sense because we just changed Satches. I guess we need to change hr. Yeah, we did.
- [88:21]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. There was late night kidnapping. He looks just like the original.
- [88:25]
Richard Campbell
10 years on dark. Satch has arrived and he needs a day. A dark HR leader.
- [88:31]
Paul Thurott
Oh boy. Okay. All right.
- [88:33]
Richard Campbell
But the, and the goal here is that he believes he needs to compete aggressively. Like you said, the pact has been broken. We're now a leading tech company and you will be leading employees. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
- [88:49]
Paul Thurott
Yep. That's a actual quote from a memo that he sent out. So that's good. Yep. So that's not the only drama this week. OpenAI, everyone's favorite company tried to acquire or was going, was in early May going to acquire a company called Windsurf, I think for four. Was it 4 billion or $3 billion somewhere in there, something like that. Windsurf makes a code editor, an AI code editor. So it's a competitor for GitHub Copilot. Right. A competitor to cursor or whatever. This is one of the pieces of that puzzle that OpenAI does not have in house. So they were going to acquire this company and get their little code editor. Right. Problem is Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI, I guess. Right.
- [89:40]
Richard Campbell
For now.
- [89:41]
Paul Thurott
For now. And yeah, that's definitely shifting sands. But they also have this sort of right of refusal to these kind of deals. And the Windsurf guy, there were two deals that Open A was. OpenAI was trying to make recently. One went through and one did not. Both of which had to go to Microsoft. One was Jony Ives company. Right. I think, which is IO. Microsoft okayed that one. Because Microsoft is never going to, in their words, make a consumer AI device.
- [90:12]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [90:13]
Paul Thurott
So they don't.
- [90:14]
Richard Campbell
And they can if they want. It's just not going to go well. History is very clear on this.
- [90:18]
Paul Thurott
Yes. So they were upfront about that. We're not doing it. Okay. No problem. Windsurf, the guys from Windsurf had issues with their IP being given to Microsoft or having that company have any insight into the way they do things. And what they wanted was an exception where they could work with, be part of OpenAI, do their thing and never have that go back to Microsoft. For that to happen, Microsoft has to approve that. And Microsoft said k no, but they said no. And they can do that. So the little exclusivity period that they have between the two companies where it was or wasn't going to happen, expired. The second it expired, Google hired their CEO, one of their co founders and some of their top R and D staff and then paid. I think it was 2.4 billion for a non exclusive license to the windshield.
- [91:07]
Leo Laporte
Technology basically hollowed out the company.
- [91:10]
Paul Thurott
Yep. Now if you think about the other 99% of the people are working at Windsurf and we probably don't think about them at all, but if we did for one second, what we would realize is they all just got screwed. Because if OpenAI purchased them, they would all holders essentially gotten some money.
- [91:26]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [91:27]
Paul Thurott
Would have financially benefited. So one day Google announced this. They were doing this and I think it was two days later a company I had, I sort of vaguely understood existed Cognition, which makes AI agents and does is in this space purchase Windsurf. We don't know the number, but one of the points they made was we're going to make sure all of our employees benefit from this financially because they didn't from the Google thing and their shares will vest more quickly now. So this, this, these things were definitely happening together. It's just that they were announced a couple of days apart. I didn't consider the fate of the typical Windsurf employee. When the Google thing happened, it was just like this only happened because Microsoft was like, yeah, screw you, you're not doing that. This would compete with GitHub Copilot.
- [92:16]
Richard Campbell
Well, you also put yourself in an impossible situation trying to protect IP like that. Like it will fail. If we say yes, it will fail. We might as well say no.
- [92:24]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. Or look, regardless of the way these things are created, if you look at anything that Google has done in Gemini, if you look at anything that OpenAI has done with ChatGPT, there is that corresponding thing in Copilot just every time. So. Oh, oh, you have a memory thing. Oh, we have a memory thing now. Oh, you have a notebook thing. Oh, we have a notebook thing now. Oh, you want to make like audio pipe. Oh, we can do, we can make Audio Pocket like it's. This is the world we're in. Right. So as AI is happening, you know.
- [92:51]
Richard Campbell
Fast, this is the battle that is going on.
- [92:53]
Paul Thurott
Yes. We, we want to make sure. And this came up recently, I don't know what you call this. It's like you, as you have a bullet list of features of your product and some of them are those things that just are to answer the complaint checklist items. Yeah, you want that for copilot. Like you don't want a big customer yours to go to chat GPT because they have that one feature that your employees really want and Copilot doesn't do it. Right. So yes, if whatever Windsurf does, that's unique in this space that maybe copilot GitHub copilot doesn't do. Microsoft would do it. And then of course Windsurf would be like, what the heck, guys? You told us we weren't sharing ip and it's like, oh, they did it. They reverse engineered it or something near Microsoft. I don't know, you know. So, yeah, huge problem anyway, not going to happen. So I also feel like this, we're careening toward this future where OpenAI and Microsoft openly cloud and the whole thing just falls apart.
- [93:45]
Richard Campbell
Like, well, they have to follow. You knew this was inevitable, but I.
- [93:49]
Paul Thurott
Feel like it's escalating. Right.
- [93:50]
Richard Campbell
And so you're watching it happen.
- [93:52]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, this is. I keep.
- [93:54]
Richard Campbell
The tide is going out. The tsunami is coming.
- [93:57]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. I compare it to relationships. So it's like we're gonna stick with this until the kids are out of college and we're splitting up after that, you know, like, they can't stand each other. They sleep in separate bedrooms now. You know, like they're really upset with each other and, and they make. It's like the one where like the, the guy is chewing and his wife's like, oh God, I could kill him. I can't stand this sound of him chewing. Like, you know, like there.
- [94:16]
Richard Campbell
Can you eat more quietly, please?
- [94:17]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, it's like, could you eat in the other room or something? I don't want to look at you. I'm trying to digest food over here. So, yeah, tied to that OpenAI was recently, you know, what was it? Perplexity last week, announced and released, I guess for some people who pay 200 bucks a month, a browser Comet, I think it was called, is called. And OpenAI is doing the role of Microsoft in the 90s. They're like, hey, we're working on a web browser too, you know, and smart. Because that may or may. Look, they may not have written one line of code for all I know, but what I do know is that if they came up with this thing today, it would instantly have millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions of users. And the reason is Chat GPT is such a good brand and is so successful. And the rationale for this is smart. It's exactly the same rationale for Google making Chrome back in the day, which was in whatever year that was 2010 or whatever. We cannot trust the companies that make these things to make them so that our web services, our websites or whatever work as efficiently as fast as possible. We have to do that work ourselves.
- [95:19]
Richard Campbell
We have and have the same priority why? Google's always going to optimize for Gemini. Microsoft's always going to optimize for Copilot. And it's just a browser. It ain't that hard. What you've got is the real problem, which is a brand that people care about.
- [95:34]
Paul Thurott
Based on my difficulty making a simple text editor, I might disagree with you. But okay, fine, I Browser, whatever. But yes, I presume they'll use Chromium.
- [95:43]
Richard Campbell
Right? Like that's the logical thing to do. It is an open source.
- [95:46]
Paul Thurott
It would be hilarious. Of course they do. It's beautiful. So Google, Google deserves OpenAI in the same way that Microsoft deserved Google. It's like this company comes out of nowhere, kicks you in the nuts, laughs, and then releases a version of everything that you make. And I, I, it's, there was this period of time we kind of forget this, but because I used to always write it from this perspective, I'm going to pretend I don't Remember exactly, but 202005 to maybe 2015 where Google was just coming up with stuff that Microsoft did, like Google Workspace as we call it now. Google Docs was like, oh, they have a word processor. Okay, we have one too now. You know, like they would just do the, you know, they would do the same thing. They, they approached it from their kind of googly, you know, web based perspective. But that's what makes this stuff so fascinating. Like the web browser, you know, we're getting a handle on what these things might be like. Oh man. What was the. I heard a really good. Oh, crud. I can't think of this example. I'll get to it in a second. But a couple of days after this story about the web browser this had actually happened back in late June, it somehow it escaped my attention. Turns out OpenAI is also working on what's described as, but is not really an office productivity suite.
- [97:00]
Richard Campbell
Nice.
- [97:01]
Paul Thurott
It's like, are you trying to antagonize Microsoft? I mean, do you like. If you, is there something that they dominate? Can you think of one thing you're going to do that.
- [97:13]
Richard Campbell
So next you'll be building an operating system.
- [97:16]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, I mean if you think about Google Docs from day one, it was recognizably a word processor to toolbar and menus and text formatting and all this.
- [97:24]
Richard Campbell
Stuff that ran in a browser.
- [97:26]
Paul Thurott
It's. But it ran in a browser. That's, that was the Google thing. Now you're not going to see a download. Well, maybe you are. I don't know. This is more described as features that will be added to Chat GPT. There are some building blocks in there right now. Canvas and projects. Data storage is kind of a problem. Like, there are enterprise customers that want to do more with Chat GPT, but they don't offer their own data storage service. Right. They have to go through whatever. Microsoft, probably. So this will be an OpenAI approach to office productivity, not a word processor.
- [98:02]
Richard Campbell
And there's a logic to this. I mean, irrespective of the antipathy and competitiveness, there's two ways to address a revolution. You either take the existing products and AI ify them, or you take the AI and you productize it.
- [98:16]
Paul Thurott
Richard, I swear to God, if we were sitting together, I would hug you right now. Because 100%.
- [98:21]
Richard Campbell
No, seriously, I'm pretty sure there's already an AI image of this shot of us hugging.
- [98:26]
Paul Thurott
You are literally channeling my brain. So there you go. Yes. Literally, the name Copilot means two things side by side. The other thing, the one thing, is the legacy app, the thing, the word processor that dates back to the 1980s in this case. And one of the ways you can add AI to it, because you're not going to rewrite it from scratch, you're going to have this thing on the side they interact with. You can build it into the product, but it's still a thing on the side. Right. They're not. It's not AI first or AI native, it's a copilot. But that's not how OpenAI thinks of things. They're just AI. They don't. We're not going to build a word processor. And so one of the great examples that's just not great because I came up with it just because it's simple and it's obvious, is that thing I talk about where every January I have to make this chart in Excel, which I never use, and I always forget how to use it. And I spend all this time and sometimes I can't get the colors right, and I'm like, screw it. And this was the type of example I saw in one of the articles about this Chat GPT office productivity stuff, which was the CEO of a cto, someone, a cfo, whatever it was of some company heavily engaged with Chat GPT who said, look, I had to become an Excel master. And I. We have all this data and you crunch the numbers. And what I want to do is show a chart to people with the data there for those that want to see it. But really what I'm looking at is this chart that says, this is why we got to do the thing we're going to do. So this would take me days, but now I just go to Chad GPT and I say, make me a chart that da da, da, da, da, whatever the thing you see strike. Because it's grounded in their data now.
- [100:07]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [100:08]
Paul Thurott
And it just happens. So I don't like. In my case, I would. I did. I would relearn this one thing in Excel like I'm flowers for Algernon every January. Or I could go to the thing and say, just do it. And it doesn't have to. I don't even. Not only do I not have to master Excel, not only do I not have to use the thing sitting next to Excel to make Excel do this thing, it just does it itself. You're only using ChatGPT. Guess who wants that? OpenAI.
- [100:41]
Richard Campbell
But you get to the logical reality, which was you never wanted to make a spreadsheet. You wanted to derive an answer.
- [100:46]
Paul Thurott
Exactly.
- [100:46]
Richard Campbell
Leadership needed.
- [100:47]
Paul Thurott
Exactly right. This is why there have been little steps like this in personal technology that kind of led us here. In a way, the traditional view of productivity apps is you have this, you run this app, you create a document, you save it to some disk, you back it up and manage it and you do all this stuff. The iPad came along and was like, well, maybe there are versions of this where you don't have documents. OneNote work this way from 2002, whatever year that came out notion works this way. There's probably a file somewhere. But this thing is sort of documentless, you know, And I think if you. I mean, it's open AI, so it's. It's going to be a much broader world. But yeah, this is the. These people and these things are. Are coming from a different angle entirely. And it's going to be confusing to people like me who are kind of traditional and been doing this for a long time and have their own certain way of doing things or whatever. Microsoft isn't going to do this.
- [101:49]
Richard Campbell
No. The funny thing is this is what Gates wrote about in the road ahead. Like, he always hated the fact that they. There was a separate app for documents, a separate app for spreadsheets and so forth. Like, just do the work. And here we are looking at a potential path to just do the work.
- [102:03]
Paul Thurott
Microsoft Works used to be that one integrated suite where it had all those functions together.
- [102:07]
Leo Laporte
And Apple did it too. Claris Works long. Exactly.
- [102:10]
Paul Thurott
Open Docs Doc Focus.
- [102:12]
Leo Laporte
I mean, this is the holy grail. Has been forever. Why has it never happened?
- [102:17]
Paul Thurott
Because it's. Because Change is hard.
- [102:19]
Leo Laporte
It's hard to do or.
- [102:20]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, okay, so we. This August, about a month and a half from now, will be the 30th anniversary of Windows 95. Everyone remembers Windows 95 for different reasons, but we talked about this print, a perfect nexus of timing and all this stuff, right? It was the big explosion of GUI computing, the big explosion of PC buying. It was our initial step into the Internet first with the Netscape or whatever. But it was. There were a lot of firsts and things going on there, but there are a lot of things we all forget and there are things that have continue through the years like Start Menu and the Taskbar, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But there were some UI things in there, UX things, whatever you want to call them, that came and went and are gone. And you probably most of you forget this. So the big one was that this UI was described as a document centric interface. The traditional process of what I just described. We all do this every day. You sit in front of your computer and I'm like, I need to write something. So I'm like, okay. I use Microsoft Word for that. So you're like, okay, Start menu. There it is, there's the icons, blue, I remember that. And you click on it and then you. Maybe you open or create a new whatever. So they were trying to do things that were. In a sort of object oriented way. It was. They were kind of easing into it with Windows 95. And the idea there was that you would work instead of thinking of the app, you would just think of the thing you were going to do, which was writing something and you could just start a new document and it would provide you with the toolbars, depending on what you were doing that you, you needed. So if you were writing texts and stuff, you'd get the Word toolbox right. Word Office 95 had that. I don't even remember the name of it, but there was this thing where you could open an Excel spreadsheet inside of Word and you would get the Excel toolbars in Word. And then when you went out back into the text, you'd get back in the. It was a compound document or whatever they called that stuff. That stuff did not fly. Like, people hated it. It was sophisticated. It was all based on Olay original comm, probably by that point, whatever. But it's just, it's sometimes these things are like, arc is like this to a minor degree. It's like too much of a. It's like, like most people, like, I can't do this. It's hard.
- [104:24]
Richard Campbell
Change in the metaphor.
- [104:25]
Paul Thurott
I have a workflow, you know, I'm used to doing things a certain way. So Microsoft that has a market to protect is never going to come out with this thing I was just describing. They can't do this. They tried it, like in a small way with document centric UI and Windows 95 failed. They tried the people centric thing with Windows Phone and elsewhere. You know, you're the center of everything. You know, they talk about this all the time. It's a good idea.
- [104:47]
Richard Campbell
But my argument would be this is why the layoffs, this is why the chaos inside of the company. Because Satch is trying to find a way for Microsoft to do this, to.
- [104:59]
Paul Thurott
Actually do those things. Right. Right. So maybe it needs the right people in some ways, the people who have been there the longest, the worst, to oversee this work because they'll never be able to. They're like, no, I don't understand. What do you mean? I, I still deal with people to this day who.
- [105:16]
Richard Campbell
You're not wrong about the stock price. I remember years ago talking to someone about how are we going to evolve Windows? It's like, listen, dude, there's several thousand people here that have been here for more than 30 years. Unless they have eight wives and a cocaine habit, they don't need the money. How do you persuade them to do anything?
- [105:32]
Paul Thurott
Exactly. I can't. They can't even agree on the drop shadow on a dialogue box. Like I, you know. Yeah, you want them to do what with AI? No. Yeah, yeah, you need new blood for this. I mean, this is, and this is. Look, whatever. I, I'm, I can't say I'm positive about OpenAI in any way, but whatever anyone thinks about this company, just like Google did 20 years ago, whatever, they now are approaching our world from their perspective and it's different. It's weird. It feels weird. It's not the way we do things. Yeah, and sometimes they'll have a win, sometimes they won't. But expecting, look, we're navel gazing over whether Apple can handle AI and Apple Intelligence. And all they're trying to do is add features to all the apps they already have. Like, they're not even. They're not coming up with like an AI suite of AI first, anything. They just have their platforms, they're trying to add it. They can't even do that. Which, like.
- [106:23]
Leo Laporte
Well, they can do that. That's not really what the issue was. It was they were trying to add it to Siri and that Siri didn't Like it. Math is hard. It could never get to work. But no, they. In fact, in all these new OSs Apple's put. It's nice putting intelligence in. They have an API for developers to put it into their apps. I think they're doing it the right way, which is just simply a thin layer.
- [106:53]
Paul Thurott
So right. What did I. I'm reviewing as Samsung phone. So one of the things I'll publish it after the show actually. But one of the things I write in there is that the way they're doing AI on Samsung phones, there's all these problems with Samsung with all their bloatware, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But it's like Apple, like they're doing it the right way. Like in other words. But it's also the old way, right? I.
- [107:14]
Leo Laporte
It is the old way.
- [107:15]
Paul Thurott
Apple, you're using a irony of this. You're like, I want to send a text message to Richard. I got to think about this for a second. Richard and I actually use. We don't use text. We use WhatsApp. So I got to go, okay, green icon text. Going to find rich in there. I start typing the system. What's Apple have? Their garbage. But the system, whatever it is, Samsung, Android, if it's on Apple, Apple will have their little writing tools, things that are built in. That's the right place for that to be. Right. But what I'm saying is like this is the, this is the next level up. It's like actually five levels up where this open AI sweeps in, says text message up. No, no. You're chatting with this thing and you say, I want to tell Richard happy birthday. Because it's Richard's birthday, by the way, today. Happy birthday, Richard.
- [107:54]
Leo Laporte
Happy birthday, Richard.
- [107:55]
Paul Thurott
And it will be like, great. And it will just do it. You know what I mean? I don't have to know what the app is. I don't have to think about the app. I don't have to think about a document. I just ask it to do the thing. And it does the thing. That's the goal. So it's a completely different perspective. And it's like even as I talk through it, it makes me a little nervous. Like I don't like it, you know?
- [108:15]
Leo Laporte
Well, the funny thing, I just read a kind of an exit blog post from an OpenAI guy. I've been there for a year and a half, loved it. And one of the things he said I found very interesting was everybody at OpenAI was convinced that the interface for AI should be a chatbot.
- [108:30]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [108:31]
Leo Laporte
And I, you know, that's not what I'm looking for. I mean I use them.
- [108:35]
Paul Thurott
Correct.
- [108:36]
Leo Laporte
But honestly, I want search like perplexity so I could type in or research it's all text based. Or I want these little tools built into my apps and Apple can do both of those. The search is a little trickier.
- [108:50]
Paul Thurott
So that's what you're describing. Sorry to interrupt but real quick at a high level is orchestration like what you're asking for is.
- [108:57]
Leo Laporte
That's right.
- [108:57]
Paul Thurott
I have a question or a thing I'm trying to accomplish. You do the thing to make that happen. Whatever.
- [109:02]
Leo Laporte
I don't want a Persona. And that's what ChatGPT has ended up focusing on, which is.
- [109:07]
Paul Thurott
So there was a. Oh boy, where was this? There's a good long form article about that new DM browser somewhere in some mainstream publication. They talked to the guys from the company.
- [109:17]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I just read it. I know what you're.
- [109:18]
Paul Thurott
Okay, so then you know what I'm saying. So it is doing internally what I've been talking about for the past year and a half because the time mentioned.
- [109:26]
Leo Laporte
It, the Washington Post, something like that.
- [109:28]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, it's definitely one of those. And they were like well how does this work? Like what model are you using? And they were like oh no, we're using multiple models. What we're doing is we're evaluating every request you make and then we're doing the right thing with it. I'm like, oh, you're orchestrating it. Exactly. Right now we live in a world where you open up copilot to some degree, but Definitely Gemini and ChatGPT, you as an individual are choosing a model from a drop down. What? What are you talking about?
- [109:53]
Richard Campbell
Right?
- [109:53]
Paul Thurott
Like that is a crazy thing to ask an individual do. To do. It's a little bit like I want to format a disk to make that Windows 10 or 11 install media. It's like. And then you get a choice like XAT ntfs.
- [110:07]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Make a decision that'll affect everything going forward that you don't have any information to make a decision about Chat GPT.
- [110:15]
Paul Thurott
I need Windows 11 install media. Here's my disk. It just does it. I'm by the way just.
- [110:20]
Leo Laporte
And just do it. Don't even tell me how to today.
- [110:22]
Paul Thurott
I'm just. But, but this is an example of who cares how it works, right. Just do it the right way. And that's orchestration. And that's.
- [110:30]
Richard Campbell
Or.
- [110:31]
Leo Laporte
Or what sometimes they call MCP or agentic AI.
- [110:35]
Paul Thurott
These are all. But this is all essentially in other words you give it a. Here's the thing. I want whatever it is, it could be a. I want to know the name of the capital of Maine. Simple. That's an answer. But sometimes it's more complex. It's one of those agent things where it's actually multi agent and it's doing all this stuff on your behalf. But it's like, I'm not like a general on the field. Like, all right, I want you to ride your horse over there and go around the country, okay. I want you to take your thing, the AI. What I say is win the war, right? And then the AI does the stuff. Right. So I. This is where we're heading. This is why we. There are so few details about this office productivity thing. It's essentially a set of features that will be added to chat gbt. Right. So, you know, we have to speculate a little bit here. But the one thing I feel really strongly about is that they will approach it the way they've approached everything, because that's what they are. This is the world. It's not going to be, here's an app with a toolbar and you save documents and you worry about where it goes and it's up to you to back it up. And maybe Microsoft makes you sync it to the cloud. No, it's not going to be any of that. I'm not saying it's going to be better. We'll see. But it probably will be, right? I mean, probably. But it's going to be different. I can promise you that. So this is fascinating.
- [111:55]
Leo Laporte
Let me take a little break before we go on. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat, who is waxing philosophical today.
- [112:02]
Paul Thurott
I know, I don't know what's going on.
- [112:04]
Richard Campbell
The philosophical moment.
- [112:05]
Paul Thurott
I'm going to crawl under the desk again. I'll be back. I'll be okay. I'll be okay.
- [112:08]
Leo Laporte
Richard Campbell is also here. We're going to get more in just a minute. For the Xbox segments coming up, Microsoft 365. More AI news than you could shake a stick at. But first I want to tell you about our sponsor, US Cloud, the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. We've been talking for a few months about US Cloud. Now they are the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises now supporting 50 of the Fortune 500. And there's a good reason for it. Switching to US Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft unified and Premier support. And it's faster, it's better, twice as fast on average time to resolution versus Microsoft. And they're going to save you money in ways Microsoft may not want to save you money. For instance, on Azure, US Cloud is excited to tell you about a new offering. It's their Azure cost optimization services. So if, you know, if we're honest with one another, when's the last time you really looked at your Azure usage? If it's been a while, I have no doubt you have some what we call Azure Sprawl, a little spend creep going on. The good news is saving on Azure is easier than you think with US Cloud. US Cloud offers an eight week Azure engagement. It's powered by VBox that identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. And you're going to get, by the way, the other thing I love about US Cloud the best expert guidance, access to US Cloud senior engineers. At the end of those eight weeks, your interactive dashboard will identify, rebuild and downscale opportunities and unused resources. Which means now you can look at that and reallocate your precious IT dollars towards something you really need. Or if I may make a suggestion, keep the savings going by investing your Azure savings in US Cloud's Microsoft support. That's what a few other US Cloud customers have done. Completely eliminate your unified spend. Save 30 to 50% every month. This is actually what Sam did. He's the technical operations manager at Bed Gaming B E D E. He gave us Cloud 5 stars. They did the Azure Engagement. He said, we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure. But you know, once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month month, it really starts to add up. Yeah, bet it's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance all in eight weeks. With USCloud. Visit uscloud.com, book a call today, find out how much your team can save. That's uscloud.com to book a call today and get faster Microsoft support for less US Cloud. We thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly.
- [115:08]
Paul Thurott
By the way, while we were, while you're doing the ad, I just checked the feed and everything. So OpenAI has signed a deal with Google to use their cloud host like Cloud, Google Cloud.
- [115:17]
Leo Laporte
That was the other thing that, that it said in this blog post about Goodbye OpenAI that all of their stuff was with Azure. So that's a big shift. That is the kind of Workloads that.
- [115:30]
Paul Thurott
That chat GPT uses on Azure, there were four of them. So it's chat GPT, enterprise, Edu, whatever they were. Or also on Gemini or cloud.
- [115:40]
Leo Laporte
Wow, that's. That's a big win for Google actually.
- [115:43]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, it's big. And yeah, the rift is growing. It's like. What do you mean? You're dating someone, we're sleeping. Okay, okay.
- [115:51]
Leo Laporte
It's smart. What, you don't want to be single sourced for anything.
- [115:54]
Paul Thurott
No, it is smart, but it's also. So I would imagine Microsoft has to be okay with it, right? Because of the current situation. They have like it's.
- [116:03]
Leo Laporte
What are they gonna do?
- [116:05]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, well, they obviously said it was okay.
- [116:07]
Leo Laporte
Right?
- [116:08]
Paul Thurott
They announced it. So Microsoft is like, yeah, go, we don't care. Go, go off with your friends. You know, we don't care anymore. Like these people openly hate each other.
- [116:17]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [116:17]
Paul Thurott
So that's kind of interesting. Okay.
- [116:20]
Richard Campbell
But that started with the Oracle deal with Stargate, right?
- [116:23]
Paul Thurott
Like, yes, Oracle's right. Oracle is one and a code weave which I don't 100% understand must be a code weave as a coding tool. Right. Like a. So I'm not really sure what that is, but I guess they have some infrastructure as well.
- [116:37]
Richard Campbell
But I think the Stargate move was the first time we said, oh, it's not just going to be Azure, but. And it sounds like they were just making such crazy demands on Azure that at some point, you know, Microsoft's like, no, we're not doing that. You do it somewhere else. Right.
- [116:50]
Leo Laporte
The code we've name is somewhat deceptive. They actually are. They provide servers.
- [116:55]
Paul Thurott
Servers. I think of them as like they're a hyperscaler. Was that the name of like a Mac based programming codeweaver?
- [117:01]
Leo Laporte
It was a web. Wasn't it a web design tool? I think it was, yeah.
- [117:04]
Paul Thurott
The sun. It's like something I.
- [117:06]
Leo Laporte
It was that. Or was that that Gary, what's his name? Song Codeweaver. I believe you can make it through the night.
- [117:15]
Richard Campbell
I think you're thinking of Dreamweaver, which.
- [117:17]
Paul Thurott
Is also a weapon on the tool. Right. That was bought by Adobe Macromedia back in the day. Right.
- [117:22]
Richard Campbell
And the song, that's Dreamweaver also.
- [117:27]
Paul Thurott
Okay.
- [117:28]
Leo Laporte
That's how my mind works. But Paul understood me.
- [117:31]
Paul Thurott
I 100%. I'm. We're in the same mental space. Sorry. So sorry. Okay. Yeah. So OpenAI has said they're working on a browser, open AI according to reports, the information others is working on not an office productivity suite, but office productivity features that would be native to ChatGPT that, you know, we'll see one of the AI tools that has emerged, that is one of the few ones where I'm like, yes, I get it, this is awesome. Is Notebook lm. And Notebook LM is interesting for a lot of reasons, but the big one to me is that it's specifically designed to be grounded on your data. So you feed it a document or some set of documents and then you ask questions. And that's how it works. It's. You can do this with other AIs, but it's kind of specifically for this thing. This is the, the Google tool that also does that audio overview that sounds like a podcast with two hosts. Right. The problem this solves. Well, there's two problems. One is hallucinations. You know, it doesn't solve it, but hopefully alleviates it to some degree because it's grounding in your data. And the other one is just trust. Right. Because you're only working with your data, you kind of, well, okay, like I can trust this thing. When you're working across the Internet, you're like, okay, well, everyone on the Internet is insane. So the things that this thing is looking at are insane. And how do I, how can I trust this thing? So Google has added a feature to this called Featured Notebooks, which are curated notebooks, Notebook LM notebooks from third parties of high quality sources that you can use just standalone. Like, you can open the notebook and ask your questions, learn more about whatever topic, or you can use it, use them more broadly as one of the several sources of information that you might be using.
- [119:23]
Leo Laporte
I think that's brilliant. We had scheduled Steven Johnson from Google's Notebook LM for today's Intelligent Machines to talk about this announcement. And he's on a plane, so we're going to move him to next week. Actually, Anil Dash will join us, which is even just great too.
- [119:40]
Paul Thurott
This is smart. Like very smart. There's eight or ten to begin with. Some of them, they're all over the map. Right. So they're working with the publications like the Economist and the Atlantic. Good, perfect.
- [119:53]
Leo Laporte
Trusted sources, in other words.
- [119:55]
Paul Thurott
Yep. And then some individuals, plus or minus, whatever. Some of these are still curating what.
- [119:59]
Richard Campbell
The source of truth is. The other approach to. To this will ultimately be I would like to live in the manosphere. Please, please select all of the truth that complies with my current worldview.
- [120:08]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's what rag is, right. You get to choose the source.
- [120:12]
Paul Thurott
Right. So it's funny that's. This is a Missing piece. I was talking about earlier, before the break, about how important it is for it to do the work. Right. But you have to trust it for it to do the work. And it is that thing I just said. The problem is you're like, no, no, no, no. Just only use trusted sources do this. And it's like, ah.
- [120:32]
Richard Campbell
So when you say trusted sources, what do you.
- [120:34]
Paul Thurott
The body of information we have is not a lot of trusted sources. You know, my wife writes about health and wellness and whatever and she has to make sure that the sources are correct. When she uses AI, when she, she'll push like an interview that she did with someone through this thing and say, this person has made this assertion, this type of food lowers your blood sugar or something. I need the five most recent trusted sources that are research based and known to be good for you to cite and I need to be able to check those individually and make sure it's true. That's her doing a lot of work. Right. So what you're saying is correct. But do we trust this thing to, you know, just to do this? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if we're there yet. But this is a good interim step, right?
- [121:25]
Richard Campbell
I mean, yeah, well, and this is structures to try and build trust.
- [121:29]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. And it's. If you look at this list, it's kind of interesting. Like science backed parenting advice based on psychology professor Jacqueline Neal Nessie. Sorry. Popular substack newsletter Techno Sapiens.
- [121:42]
Leo Laporte
Okay, that's kind of narrow.
- [121:45]
Paul Thurott
No, it is, it's super narrow. But that's, I think that's part of the point. Like a science fan's guide to Yellowstone park longevity advice from Eric Topple. Bestselling offer of super ages.
- [121:55]
Leo Laporte
Can you add more than one? Can I like have several?
- [121:58]
Paul Thurott
Okay, yeah. That's the point of this. Right? So this is, this is, this is a little bit like when Yahoo started and they were like, we have browsed the web and Here are the 10 sites we recommend. You know, it's, it's manual, but I mean in this case, like I.
- [122:18]
Leo Laporte
If you want to have fun, do the discover button. Because then it just randomly picks. It says, I'm feeling curious. It randomly. So I just got like 20 things on LIDAR detection of karst formations.
- [122:30]
Paul Thurott
That's awesome.
- [122:31]
Leo Laporte
But if you were writing about that, I just did it again. I have the difference between biofluorescence and bioluminescence. So it's all about biofluorescence and there's.
- [122:40]
Paul Thurott
Like five light up at night or whatever.
- [122:43]
Leo Laporte
And there's like 10 sources, bunch of them. I think it's pretty cool.
- [122:46]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. Hopefully one of those sources is not bobrantz.com or whatever, but this is kind of the problem.
- [122:53]
Leo Laporte
One of them is Newsweek, but it is a stunning new video. So that's different.
- [122:58]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. One of the things I think that's smart about this is there is some hesitancy in some thinking people, right. Where they're like, I want to use this, but I can't trust it. And this might be a way to get over this. Right.
- [123:09]
Richard Campbell
Like, but you always get procured. So what do you trust and why do you trust it?
- [123:14]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, well, I mean, I see things you trust.
- [123:16]
Richard Campbell
It's built on this.
- [123:17]
Paul Thurott
I think to myself, like, well, maybe I pump my book documents into this and have a field guide bot or something or a eternal springboard or whatever it is called. And then I trust myself, I guess. I don't know. Like, I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's. This is interesting. It's interesting.
- [123:35]
Richard Campbell
Yep, it is interesting.
- [123:36]
Leo Laporte
I mean, I already do that. I have, you know, notebook lm. That's for lisp. Common lisp, you know, and I put in the source that's just rag. So this way if you don't know what a good source is, you can. I think this is great for students.
- [123:50]
Paul Thurott
Is good because you could do what you did, you know that the. The language. The official language guide is a good source or, you know, that this book I.
- [123:57]
Leo Laporte
Nowhere exactly.
- [123:59]
Paul Thurott
It's good.
- [123:59]
Richard Campbell
We are just not that far away from you enter a university class and up on the whiteboard is the MCP for the textbooks for that professor.
- [124:07]
Leo Laporte
That's a really good idea.
- [124:09]
Paul Thurott
So. And one of these speaks that. So the complete works of William Shakespeare for students and scholars to explore. Right. So one of the big concerns today is like, students are using AI to cheat. Of course. Students are like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. They'll survive. Meaning cheat any way they can. They'll get away with what? Get away with. Yes, exactly.
- [124:28]
Leo Laporte
I love it.
- [124:29]
Paul Thurott
And look, you could ask this thing, you know, what does it mean in this particular work that, you know, in this book or whatever play whatever it is that he said this to this guy, like, you can ask it questions and learn more about this stuff. This kind of puts that on its head a little bit because you could cheat with this. Like, there's no doubt. Like, just tell me what the plot is of this book so I can write this stupid report and get by it. But if you actually want to learn, like, these seem like incredible resources.
- [124:54]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [124:55]
Paul Thurott
So to me, this, this is good.
- [125:00]
Richard Campbell
I think we have. There are possibilities through to a better world on this, you know?
- [125:06]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Or we could just insertify everything and.
- [125:08]
Richard Campbell
Oh, well, you know.
- [125:09]
Paul Thurott
Oh, it's. Listen there. It's going to press the button. We're going to be.
- [125:12]
Richard Campbell
Figure out what's profitable.
- [125:13]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, that's fine. It's all good.
- [125:16]
Leo Laporte
You know, it always starts promising.
- [125:18]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [125:19]
Paul Thurott
Yes.
- [125:19]
Leo Laporte
And I always. I want to go with that. I like that. I, I want it to be promising.
- [125:24]
Paul Thurott
Yeah.
- [125:24]
Richard Campbell
Remember when we thought the Internet was a good idea?
- [125:26]
Paul Thurott
Yeah.
- [125:27]
Leo Laporte
Seemed like such a good idea at the time.
- [125:29]
Paul Thurott
Listen, I. That.
- [125:31]
Richard Campbell
All right.
- [125:31]
Paul Thurott
And to be clear, society, our societal collapse can literally be tied to the Internet. Like, it's the. It's the unintended consequence of something that seems and is on the face of it, wonderful, which is. I don't. When I read the news, I don't want to see fashion news or beauty news or celebrity news. I want to see maybe, you know, sports, politics, and whatever. That sounds great, right? Sounds great. But the end result of that is now I only see the things I want to see and I don't know anything about anything else. I don't see other viewpoints. I don't, you know, and it narrows your view. And then we get to this kind of perficated society we have today. Like, I, I don't have a solution. I just have an observation. But it's like the, the notion, like, I, When I was still on America Online, I. You could access, what do you call them, news groups. Like using news groups right from within aol, I was able to buy things when I was living in Phoenix that were video game cartridges that were unopened and pristine from the early 1980s, from the crash, had been sitting in boxes in California, and they were selling them to me for a dollar a piece. And I could sell them online for like $5 a piece, but because the Internet existed. Sorry about the noise. I could ship these things around.
- [126:47]
Leo Laporte
Oh, my God. Are you in a dentist's office?
- [126:49]
Paul Thurott
I could ship them around the world. So that's the end of that. So do you want me to move on to Xbox and gaming, or do you want to you move on?
- [126:56]
Leo Laporte
Because I am done with the ads. We'll do one more Club Twit pitch.
- [127:00]
Paul Thurott
I will make one quick. Because we're actually kind of running out of time here, aren't we?
- [127:03]
Richard Campbell
Are.
- [127:03]
Paul Thurott
All right, so the Xbox in Windows 11 and 10, I guess, but Windows 11 is obviously turning into this big thing, but right now what it is is a front end to the games you can buy and install through the Microsoft Store. If you have a Game pass subscription, PC or Ultimate, you can get whatever games you get there. If you have ultimate, you can stream games through there. And Microsoft has been talking about this new functionality, I think, for the past year, but the ability to stream Xbox games that you own because you purchased them digitally. Right. At some point through, you could stream those games. Yeah. Side by side with Game Pass games. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. Right? So I looked at this and to get that, you can get this. Right now the one thing you have to do is download the Xbox Insider app from the store, basically enroll into this program, and then you go to the store and update the Xbox and then you can get features more quickly. So I'm looking at this thing, I'm like, where is this? Like, where. How do I find this? Like, I don't see anything obvious. And where this is, is. Let me see, is it. I think it's in. I guess it's in cloud gaming. There's a header that says, you know, it's like, stream these games. Stream these games. And one of them says stream your games. I'm like, oh, cool. I don't know how many hundreds of games I bought on Xbox since day one, but what I can tell you is that seven of them work through the system. So yeah, the primary view in the app, it's. They're co. Mingled together so you don't see them. But if you actually go to the place where they're called out individually, you can see the list. And for me it's seven. So a couple of Assassin's Creed games, a couple of. There's no Call of Duty games in this list because if there were, I would have all of those. But that's okay. That's cool. There are new game Pass games across all platforms. I'm really just hoping he stops at some point. There we go. That. Because we're now hitting the second half of July. The big one there is Grounded two, but also there's a Robocop game in there. There is a farming simulator in there. And then I'm just mentioning this mostly for humor Perhaps sake, but Cyberpunk 277 is coming to the Mac for some reason.
- [129:31]
Richard Campbell
Cyberpunk 2277 is a great game.
- [129:33]
Leo Laporte
It's very impressive and I feel what's really going on. She's making Frozen Mars.
- [129:38]
Paul Thurott
You wanted to play this though. You would have played it on the.
- [129:41]
Richard Campbell
PlayStation 2 years ago. Yeah.
- [129:43]
Paul Thurott
You know what I mean? So I'm going to.
- [129:46]
Leo Laporte
No, I'm excited. Don't. Don't harsh my mellow, man.
- [129:49]
Paul Thurott
Look, I. I have a. I feel very strongly I. That the Mac is almost certainly like an excellent gaming platform. I think this will be done with metal.
- [129:57]
Leo Laporte
Can't wait.
- [129:57]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. I think it's incredible. There are five games on the Mac right now, so it's like it's not a big thing yet. But you know, I played things like some of them. The Resident Evil stuff. Right. Has come. Yeah.
- [130:09]
Leo Laporte
And they have, they have Death Stranding, which is trending.
- [130:12]
Paul Thurott
Yeah.
- [130:13]
Leo Laporte
I'm excited about Cyberpunk, honestly. And by this five years old now and I place it. But remember when it came out, it was buggy as hell.
- [130:22]
Paul Thurott
Was buggies. Exactly. So these guys, unless they pull up Microsoft with Call of Duty thing, they'll have like the latest updated version. It should be good. So.
- [130:28]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. In fact, I think you get a dlc. One of the DLC packs comes with it. And I'm excited I played it so little when it came out because it was so buggy.
- [130:36]
Paul Thurott
Right, right.
- [130:36]
Leo Laporte
That I'm kind of excited. I get to start a over.
- [130:39]
Paul Thurott
Okay.
- [130:39]
Leo Laporte
And honestly, in five years, game quality, the visual quality of games has not dramatically improved. Right.
- [130:48]
Paul Thurott
I. For the types of games I play, which, by which I mean the, the game I play, it kind of doesn't matter in a way because visual quality is important. But you know, for multiplayer online you want performance and frame rate and all this stuff. And like that's. To me it is more important. But it has reached that level where, you know, it's kind of at a.
- [131:08]
Leo Laporte
Plateau a little bit.
- [131:09]
Paul Thurott
Yeah.
- [131:10]
Richard Campbell
Like after the 3080, like really?
- [131:13]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, yeah. The Call of Duty, that game we talked about last week, the WW2 version, which I still by the way, cannot run because they still haven't fixed it. But that game is several years old. The graphics quality is great. Like it's. Is it any different than the. Whatever the thing.
- [131:29]
Leo Laporte
People are playing eight bit games. They're very popular. Valheim, the game I played for a time, long, long time in Covid, was very low quality, relatively. I mean it wasn't. It's. It was designed not to be. It was almost a retro feel.
- [131:47]
Paul Thurott
All I can say is calling the blinds and.
- [131:51]
Leo Laporte
Oh, Richard, you got a 5080 for the new one?
- [131:54]
Richard Campbell
Oh yeah, I went for it.
- [131:56]
Leo Laporte
Nice. Are you doing any air cooling on the. On the connectors?
- [132:01]
Richard Campbell
They've got A connector system, actually, that distributes across three sets of blocks open. So.
- [132:07]
Leo Laporte
Wow. We're gonna. Richard to assemble his new PC. We were gonna do it this Friday, but the RAM hasn't arrived.
- [132:14]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [132:15]
Leo Laporte
So next Thursday, 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern. This is for Club Twitt members, by the way. Yeah, that's gonna be really fun. I can't wait to do that. Richard. Thank you.
- [132:24]
Richard Campbell
Totally looking forward to it. It's gonna be a ride.
- [132:25]
Leo Laporte
Paul, is there anything you'd like to put together on camera?
- [132:29]
Paul Thurott
Blinds My life. No, not really.
- [132:33]
Leo Laporte
You're already doing that. I just find this is why we love Club Twit. This is what Club Twit is all about, is kind of a meeting of the minds. For a long time, I kind of considered what we did as a giant users group of the airwaves. Users group were so.
- [132:53]
Paul Thurott
I loved users groups.
- [132:54]
Leo Laporte
I mean, I went to them all when I was younger, in the 70s and the 80s and even into the 90s. Well, now we're like your user group and we're international, we're everywhere. You get not only these great shows, but if you join the club, you get access to the Discord, which is a place to kind of hang, just like a user group. But it's 24 7. That's cool. And we talk about everything. I mean, it's not just about the shows. We have a very active, very interesting advent of code stuff thing. Not just December, all year long. I'm working on it and it's so fun. And we talk about games and tv, all sorts of stuff, TV shows. So there's that. That kind of, you know, club aspect of it. You get ad free versions of every public show. We do. You get video with all the shows that we currently only put out as audio. Like Hands On Windows, Paul's incredible show about Windows. So you get the video for that. As a club member. You also get these special events like Richard's PC assembly. Tonight, Micah's doing his monthly crafting corner. We've got an AI user group. Stacy's Book Club is coming up in a few weeks. We've got the photos. I mean, we have so much stuff. So we try to make it. I think we're doing, I have to say, and I have nothing to do with it, but I think the team is doing a really good job of making the club a lot of fun. But you know what's missing? You. We want you to be in the club. Now you may say, well, you just want my money, Leo. No, we want your participation we want have you in the community. Admittedly the price of admission is 10 bucks a month, $120 a year. There are family plans and corporate plans. There's even a two week free trial. So you know, if you want to just see what it's like, I would recommend doing that. But the reason the 10 bucks is the reason the club was started in the first place. We can't count on advertising dollars to make sure that we cover all of our expenses. In fact right now they only cover about 3/4 of our expenses. 25% of our operating costs come from club memberships. That's how important that is to us. We don't want to cut back. We want to keep growing, want to keep doing new and exciting things like Richard's PC build. So please join the club. That's all. I'm just begging, pleading, haranguing you twit. TV club twit. We would love, love to have you in the club. Now back to the dental office and Paul Thurat for his tip of the week. Paul.
- [135:24]
Paul Thurott
So most people are familiar with the fact that the Apple store has a refurbished section which is a great way to buy Apple equipment because it tends to be very expensive. But I actually, I've done that a ton. I also use the refurbished stores that Lenovo and HP offer and in fact the laptop I'm using here I got through HP's store but it was refurbished right. Or on sale otherwise I can't remember exactly in this case. But most people are probably not familiar with this. It's easy enough to find these things. Just you know, Google it. Like I had gotten an email from Lenovo the other day that was, they called it but like door buster sale. Lenovo stuff's always on sale but the like they're, some of that stuff is amazing. They have like the, the latest gen AMD Ryzen 14 inch Lenovo ThinkPad P Series Workstate portable workstation. It's like 1300 bucks. I think this thing was two $800 originally. It's like this is the way to go. So just think about that if you, you know we're talking about this PC upgrade cycle nobody wants to upgrade and.
- [136:22]
Richard Campbell
These are typically lease returns.
- [136:24]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, get a, get a, like a high quality never barely use something something for a lot less. That's like a business class premium PC rather than a piece of junk that's not gonna last that long. Yeah these are, these are really good. These are good.
- [136:38]
Richard Campbell
Did they give them a warranty?
- [136:40]
Paul Thurott
Yeah, yeah, the normal warranty. Well just like same as Apple. Like it's. Yeah, yeah.
- [136:45]
Leo Laporte
I like a lot of times these are open box. Like somebody bought it and returned it without using it.
- [136:50]
Paul Thurott
You can do this at Best Buy does this too. Right. You know, this is one of the, this is one of the weird problems with like the popularity of something like Amazon where. Because Amazon, by the way, does this too. You know, I, I buy a monitor stand. Let's say I get it, I set it up. Yeah. It's not right.
- [137:06]
Leo Laporte
I would never buy anything refurbished from Amazon.
- [137:09]
Paul Thurott
On the other hand. No, no, I'm just.
- [137:10]
Leo Laporte
Okay, but I'm just get it from the manufacturer.
- [137:12]
Paul Thurott
No, I mean, what I mean is I bought it new but then I opened the box. Yeah.
- [137:16]
Richard Campbell
Didn't want it.
- [137:16]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [137:17]
Paul Thurott
Send it back. They don't charge me anything for it. Amazon covers this whole thing but now they've got this thing that's open that nobody wants. So it's good for this to, you know, people to find at home or whatever. I'm sure this is built into their business model. Whatever. But this is kind of a problem. Okay.
- [137:33]
Leo Laporte
Dell has, Dell has refurbs too.
- [137:35]
Richard Campbell
I.
- [137:35]
Paul Thurott
Yes, they do. I didn't. I just highlighted those because I literally everybody does. Literally everything in front of me is an HP something except for one external display which is a Lenovo and all of them were either the refurbished store or just on sale or whatever because they, both of these companies have incredible sales. So this is like a, like a thrift shop of yesteryear's high end Lenovo and mostly HP equipment. It's, you know, it works good. I. This is a laptop that has three displays. Like right now, like it's like it's working fine. Like it's good.
- [138:10]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [138:10]
Paul Thurott
Nice. Okay. Epic is, you know, in the sense that I once said I would never pay for AI and am I also a hypocrite? I do pay for this AI which is language tool. Not for. I wrote for desktop but language tool. So language tool is an alternative to Grammarly. I find it to be better slash, more accurate. However you want to say that I do pay for it and I use it mostly through the browser extension because it's that last kind of edit pass when I paste a document into the form that will put that thing up and onto my site. Right. And it has all kinds of things I like about it. But the big one for me is it's. It has a sort of style guide kind of feature so you can train it as you go so that it recognizes the way you write and Even though there are certain things, like whether or not you capitalize the first letter after a colon, which I have opinions about, or the, like, complex sentences that have semicolons, which apparently are growing out of style, I love them. Or em dashes and whatnot. Like, it's. It's for someone like me who writes a lot, it's great. But I also think it's. You don't have to pay for it necessarily. But for anyone who's going to submit text in any form anywhere in the world, like having something. Look at that before you hit enter. Super important, right? Like, you don't want to miss a typo or whatever it is. This tool is awesome for that. And look, someday this will just be awesome in some browser I'm using and I won't have to pay for this. But this is the one that has emerged for me and I like it so much. I got my wife, like a year subscription or whatever as well, because I'm like, look, this will make your writing better. It's. It's good. Nice.
- [139:54]
Richard Campbell
I'm still on Grammarly, but only because they send me an email each week telling me how awesome I am.
- [139:58]
Leo Laporte
I know, I love that email.
- [140:02]
Paul Thurott
Yeah. Language still doesn't do that.
- [140:04]
Richard Campbell
But this is just an easy win. Like, just an easy win.
- [140:08]
Paul Thurott
Okay.
- [140:09]
Leo Laporte
There are some open source now, AI grammar checkers. I use one called Harper.
- [140:14]
Paul Thurott
Okay. Which I've not heard of.
- [140:16]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And another one just came out. The idea. The idea being it's, you know, privacy first. You're running it locally. Oh, my God. You know, meanwhile, let's see what's happening on the run. His radio program.
- [140:31]
Richard Campbell
Well, I'm doing a little dental project over here. Yeah, not so much. This week's show was from the sessions at Build. This is with corporate vice president of Azure Data, the man who owns data for the whole company, Arun Ulig, who I had on the a year before. So it was fun to bring him back because he's the Microsoft fabric guy. So before he got the role as Azure Data, he ran the Power BI group, so very much about analytics and so forth. And when he got this new role, he had an opportunity basically to rethink how Microsoft provides analytic tools to the world. And that's what Microsoft fabric became. And last year when we were talking, it was really, really new. There was still very much the existing suite of products that they're trying to coordinate better. So it was fun to come back and say, all right, how are we doing a year in? And so big conversations, just talking about Some of the new product lines they've gone into like Real Time analytics, which I've talked to about on the show before for or what they called Real Time intelligence. But also much better integration. A lot of work on what they call, you know, data state issues or data protection services for AI so that you understand and can control what the various co pilots and things that you're using are actually having access to inside of your organization separate from the users. You know, we had a big conversation there about how agents are their. Have their own identities and so they can have their own restriction sets so you can keep your existing workflows running while you're experimenting with the new tools. He's a brilliant guy. Super excited about what he's making. Was very, very fun to talk to him. So a great conversation literally from the leader of the group and then I'm all by myself, so I might as well have a drink.
- [142:22]
Paul Thurott
Sorry.
- [142:23]
Richard Campbell
Not to worry. So this week's whiskey was purchased by. By my wife when we were down in the US actually for July 4th. She found Ran across this. Have you ever talked about this? I'm like, nope. So like, oh, you should have it. And it is Slain is the name of the distillery. And this is their basic product, the Slane Triple Cask. It's a blended with. It's a breadly Irish whiskey from Meath county in Ireland, specifically the Boyne Valley, which is. Is where the Boyne River Boyne runs. So that's about 50km north, northwest of Dublin if you go down the M2. And the name, if you're a history buff, is familiar because of this thing called the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
- [143:17]
Leo Laporte
I remember that.
- [143:19]
Paul Thurott
Oh, maybe I don't.
- [143:21]
Richard Campbell
Incredibly historically important because this is William of Orange. Right, Right. So if you go back a little bit further, Charles II is ruling England for 20 or so years, but never has an heir. But his younger brother James II tries to take control. When Charles II dies, people don't like James, mostly because he's a Catholic. And this is at a time where for 100 years or so Protestantism has been in the full swing there. And so close ties to the French King Louis xiv. And so this is kind of a big deal. And he, he gets married, declares himself king. Nobody really has an alternative. He then almost immediately has an heir, James Stewart, which really gets people upset. And Charles, who was not a Catholic, had made arrangements before his death to have his niece Mary, Mary ii, to get married to William of Orange or William iii. And so that marriage had happened but he, William is still in the Netherlands. And so there was a group of highly influential people they literally refer to as the immortal seven. This is five different earls, sort of the most powerful nobles, along with the Viscount Lumley and the Bishop of London, who then send a letter to William of Orange to take control of England. William decides what the heck of a fun idea. And in 1688 lands with 15,000 troops. As soon as he lands in the far south and a bunch of the nobles come on board with him and start heading towards London, James fields an army larger still, about 24,000 because nominally he is king, but there's enough turmoil in all of that he has a. He basically James panics and withdraws before they actually conflict. And to the point where as, as soon as he starts defecting, more noble sign on with William. And so all of a sudden it's like his army's falling apart. So James actually splits to France, goes hangs with King Louis. And so in April of 1689, William III is crowned King of England. Having no one killed by military conflict at all. Remarkable achievement for the era. But you know, James isn't quite happy with the situation. And so he's still in France, but there is a large Catholic contingent and the large Catholic contingent is in Ireland who's currently being suppressed by the English Protestants. And so they're kind of pro James, so they say they'll sign on with James. So then James gets a bunch of French troops, heads off to to Ireland and rounds up some more troops. The Earl of Cardconnell signs on with him and they start pushing the Protestants south to the north. Right. You can see the beginnings of what we would call the contemporary troubles. And so William then sends one of his best lieutenants, an older general by the name of Schomburg to defeat they call the Jacobites and he lands near Belfast. They have a standoff. Schomburg doesn't really move forward. There's some skirmishes, but it doesn't get too far. So William himself comes over with more troops and they finally collide in the Boyne Valley. James II has a force of about 25,000 in a town near called Old Bridge. William puts his for has his forces north of there, but he actually slept does an exploratory run through slain recognize the name and Old Bridge. Then he was not happy with the surveillance he did, so he actually brought the King's forces himself forward to Old Bridge, which is kind of nuts. The the James's forces fire on him and William III is injured in the Incident they declare. Some folks say he's dead, but he's not. He survives, but he realized he sees the situation and so he sends 7,000 troops up to Slain, which is a good, you know, 10 kilometers further up the river. And the rest hold at Old Bridge. James now sees the count and probably should have withdrawn. He's definitely outnumbered, but instead moves about two thirds of his forces, 18,000 men, towards the folks moving in through Slain, although they end up crossing at Rosnery. And so that leaves only about 8,000 facing the bulk of Williams forces who then come across the river at Old Bridge. The crazy part is almost all the Jacobites half the forces because they actually went into this face off with the diversionary group, didn't actually ever fire shot in anger. There's a series of battles at the riverfront. The forces of James's are grossly outnumbered and they get pushed back and ultimately the Jacobite conflict largely collapses there within a. Within a few months, James flees back to France where he'll die in, in 1701. And William gradually takes control of Ireland along with England and Scotland. And you have the William error. So the Battle of Boyne is the pivotal moment and that is literally the region we're talking about. In fact there is a slain castle which was there at the war, but that largely gets changed over because as William Orr of Orange takes control of Ireland, he confiscates a lot of land from the Jacobites, including the land in the area around Slane. And this is where the Coningham family jumps into that. These are folks originally from Scotland but have been living in, had moved to Ireland in 1611 in Donegal. And then they. And they actually fought in that Battle of Boyne. Both Albert and Henry Cunningham were part of that battle, Henry being one of the generals. And it was Henry Cunningham that get purchases the land in 1703 around the slain castle as part of William's repossessions of lands from the Jacobites. So there was an existing castle going back to the 14th century. There was monasteries and things even older than that. But they take over the initial castle and a couple of generations level and later in 1785 the castle is largely rebuilt. That's the castle. It is still standing there today, although to expanded further in 1796, including a set of stables that today are the Slane distillery. So that's the setup for the area but. And there was whiskey making back in the day in that area, but it had all been shut down for various reasons. The castle of course continued to operate and related to this Entire story in 1981, Lord Henry Cottingham, so many generations later from the Henry that bought the castle originally, but from the same family, used his property to create these things called the Slain Concerts. This is in 1981, which in many ways was a very difficult period during the Troubles. That's when the Maze Prison hunger strike was going on and so forth. And so Lord Henry had the good idea that we could put on concerts to sort of do a positive building space. There's a natural amphitheater that's part of the property, and it is massive. There's room for 80,000 people there. And so they still do these concerts to this day, but it began at that time as a way to have something positive going on in Ireland during the Troubles. But let's get to the whiskey part of the story, which is much more recent. So a the yet younger generation. In 2008, a son of the same Lord Henry, the one that started the concerts. In 2008, Alex Cunningham decides he wants to start making whiskey. And so he starts doing blends from the new Middleton distillery, including a triple casking, not all that different from the one I have today, which he actually launches in 2015. But as he starts to get his head around what it actually takes to make whiskey at scale, and he's a bit out of his depth, he establishes a relationship with Brown Farnham, that's the from Kentucky, the American company that makes Jack Daniels and Woodford Reserve in Old Forester, but also owns a number of Scottish whiskeys you can see, including Benriack and Glenn Glassaw and Glendronach. So Brown Fornum commits millions of dollars to build a proper distillery on the Slane Castle site and opens it in 2017. And so now all whiskey for the Slane distilleries are actually produced on site. They do 100% Irish barley, most of which actually comes from the Cottingham farms and is unmalted barley. If you recall, the Irish at one point were being taxed on the amount of malted barley they use, so they promptly started using unmalted barley. Now they don't quite have enough, plus there's a need for some malted barley. So they also bring in malted barley bottle that is also Irish. You know, the whole unmalted thing started as a tax judge, but it actually turned out to make a really interesting flavors in the whiskey. So they still use both to this day. Their mashing processes are separate from the malted unmalted. This is not that unusual. They use a typical whiskey process with Lauder tons for the malted. For the unmalted, you have to do a few other processes to break down the sugars because it hasn't been malted. You know, the whole malting process is about using the natural plant reactions to break apart the long carbohydrates into short sugars. And so when you're not going to do that, you have to grind it a little finer. You've got to heat it and mix it and add enzymes to it to actually start to extract the sugars from it. And then that can go through the Lauder ton as well. So the grain run and the malt run go separately. They have three wooden washbacks of about 26,000 liters each. They do a very long fermentation, about 120 hours. And then they do a split distillation as well. The malt distill, the. The malt wort goes into pot stills. They do a triple distillation. So there's two 13,000 liter stills they call the wash and the intermediate still and then a 4,4000 liter spirit still. And then for the grain whiskey, they use a column still. It's actually six smaller columns side by side, three of which are stainless steel and three of which are copper. And then those distillates, the resulting product is barreled in three different kinds of barrel. Jack Daniels barrels, because they're obviously part of Brown Farnum and Jack Daniels, the largest producer of whiskey in the world. So they have a lot of barrels or only allowed to use once. They also do new American oak barrels, also from Kentucky, although they are planting thousands of acres of oak trees on the Slane Castle property to start producing their own local oak and oloroso sherry casts from Spain. So that's your three barrelings, two different distillates. So that's six combinations right down there. They do a bunch of aging and then they combine back to make a particular version. Now, this is a blended whiskey. It has both grain and malt in it, so it's relatively inexpensive. $27 a bottle I found on BevMo for a 40%. This is very Irish, which is to say good. It's beautiful. There's no, no big scary nose on it. It smells real gentle. It sips lightly.
- [154:23]
Leo Laporte
It's rich and creamy.
- [154:24]
Richard Campbell
The way that grain alcohol effect has, the way they process it. They've taken all the harsh notes out of it. And you're warm all through, just like listening to an Irish jig. It's fantastic. And it's inexpensive. Normally your default whiskey, your Default Irish is a Jameson. Let's face it. It's the most popular Irish whiskey out there. It's easy to come by. It's about the same price, you know, no big deal. So why wouldn't you buy this lane instead? Because everybody sees Jameson coming. This is just a little bit different. It has a bit of character to it. And, you know, in some ways it almost reminds me of wood for reserve and then. Which is also a brown Fornum product in its particular style, except it's barley instead of corn, so it's just not as sweet. So you don't get that big sweet upfront hit. It goes down super nice, like every Irish whiskey should, but for a really very reasonable price.
- [155:19]
Leo Laporte
Nice. I like Irish whiskey. I think it's good for beginners like me. Yeah, right. It's not Petey. It's often sweet.
- [155:29]
Richard Campbell
Well, and. But this is inoffensive. Right? It's easy to get along with.
- [155:33]
Leo Laporte
Inoffensive like Paul Thurat.
- [155:35]
Paul Thurott
There you go. That's not. I can't put my finger on it, but I don't think that's. I don't know. Maybe.
- [155:46]
Richard Campbell
But you're right. It's a good intro. Whiskey in the sense that it's not going to frighten you. It's not going to try and poke your eye out or anything like that. So you can. You can start off pretty easily. And then when you're going to look for more adventures, there's adventures to be had.
- [155:59]
Leo Laporte
Adventures to be had should be the name of this show because God knows it's been adventurous from drilling to whiskey and everywhere in between.
- [156:10]
Paul Thurott
So I need to bail because he's going to start right here.
- [156:13]
Leo Laporte
Ladies and gentlemen, that's Paul Thurat. He is bailing out the boat as we speak. You'll find him@therot.com Richard is your co pilot.
- [156:20]
Paul Thurott
Goodbye.
- [156:22]
Leo Laporte
And of course, his Books are@leanpub.com Thank you, Paul.
- [156:25]
Paul Thurott
Thank you, sir.
- [156:26]
Leo Laporte
Go get a taco. You just. You've earned something. Maybe.
- [156:29]
Richard Campbell
Get out of the noise.
- [156:30]
Paul Thurott
Okay.
- [156:31]
Leo Laporte
Okay. Richard Campbell is@runisradio.com that's where his shows are, of course.
- [156:36]
Paul Thurott
Course.
- [156:36]
Leo Laporte
And including Net Rocks with Carl Franklin. We do this show every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You watch live. And I apologize for the crackling. We're not sure why that's happening. We don't think it's on the recording. We're pretty sure it's not. But I do apologize to our people watching live on the stream. That's One of the downsides of watching live is you get the rough, rough edges, unedited, bad version of the show, but you get to see it before anybody else does. We stream live of course for the Club and the discord, but also YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick Watch where you choose. I can see the chats, thank you Brett Jones and YouTube and David Hales and all the folks watching all over. You don't have to watch live. That's why it's a podcast. It means you can download it either from our website at TWiT TV WW. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video, which is a good thing to have if you want to share a clip with somebody. But of course the best way to get it is subscribe to the audio or video or vote or both. You can get you get your choice. It's free in your favorite podcast client. Do leave us a good 5 star review if you would help spread the word about the best darn Windows show on the planet. Windows Weekly. You're going to be out of pocket in a week, Richard.
- [157:57]
Richard Campbell
I'm here next week, but be the 30th next week I'll be here and then the week after that will be the cruise.
- [158:04]
Leo Laporte
Thank you Richard. Have a great time on the cruise. But we'll see you next week.
- [158:09]
Richard Campbell
All of see you next week on Mana's Weekly.