WW 943: Five Paperclips - Looking back at 10 Years of Windows 10

Summary

Windows Weekly (Audio) - Episode WW 943: Five Paperclips - Looking Back at 10 Years of Windows 10

Hosts:

• Leo Laporte
• Paul Thurrott
• Special Guest: Chris Hoffman (Filling in for Richard Campbell)

Release Date: July 30, 2025

---

Introduction and Special Guests

The episode kicks off with Leo Laporte welcoming listeners to a special 10th-anniversary edition of Windows Weekly. With Richard Campbell taking a week off, veteran Microsoft insiders Paul Thurrott and Chris Hoffman join Leo to celebrate a decade of Windows 10 and discuss the evolution of Windows 11 and the maturation of AI features like Copilot.

Notable Quote:

• Leo Laporte [00:42]: "Episode 943, recorded Wednesday, July 30, 2025. Five paperclips - Looking back at 10 Years of Windows 10."

Reflection on Windows 10's 10th Anniversary

Paul Thurrott delves into the significance of Windows 10 reaching a 10-year milestone—a rarity in the lifecycle of Windows operating systems. Unlike previous versions, Windows 10 was initially not intended to have such longevity but evolved into a "Windows as a service" model with continuous updates.

Key Points:

• Lifecycle Evolution: Historically, Windows versions had a set lifecycle, but Windows 10 transitioned to a service-based model with biannual major updates.
• Update Strategy: The shift aimed to provide continuous improvements but initially led to issues with update stability and compatibility.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurrott [09:03]: "When we, my wife and I took over Thurrott.com, newsletters were one of the tricky things for us because it was expensive and a lot of work."
• Paul Thurrott [10:11]: "But it's the difference—smaller updates instead of getting hit by a brick."

Windows as a Service and Update Stability

The discussion highlights the challenges and successes of Windows 10's update approach. Initially, frequent updates every six months caused instability and compatibility issues, but over time, Microsoft refined the process, making updates smaller and more manageable.

Key Points:

• Initial Challenges: Early updates occasionally removed unsupported drivers and caused disruptions for users.
• Improvements: Later updates became more seamless and efficient, though some regressions remained, especially in Insider builds.

Notable Quote:

• Chris Hoffman [10:17]: "Well, they install faster. So it's not like you got the bugs faster."

Transition to Independent Newsletters

Chris Hoffman announces his departure from the Windows Intelligence newsletter to launch his own independent publication. Paul Thurrott discusses the challenges and benefits of maintaining an independent platform, emphasizing the importance of authentic, unfiltered content.

Key Points:

• Chris Hoffman's Move: Transitioning from Windows Intelligence to a more personal newsletter.
• Paul Thurrott's Support: Continued collaboration with Chris to maintain the quality of Windows-focused journalism.

Notable Quotes:

• Chris Hoffman [05:32]: "We are ending it and winding that down. I'll be launching my own newsletter that's more personal."
• Paul Thurrott [04:15]: "Sometimes it's forced on you, but it's okay."

User Interface Changes in Windows 10 and 11

The hosts examine the evolution of Windows' user interface, particularly the introduction and subsequent adaptation of Live Tiles. They discuss how features intended for tablets and touch devices were integrated into the desktop experience, leading to mixed user reactions.

Key Points:

• Live Tiles: Initially introduced in Windows 8 for touchscreens, later adapted for desktops in Windows 10.
• User Experience: While Live Tiles made sense for mobile devices, their implementation on desktops was less intuitive, leading to user frustration.
• Icon and UI Simplification: Windows 11 aimed to streamline the interface, though some functionality was lost, sparking debates among users.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurrott [14:03]: "They never called it Metro. Please don't call it that."
• Leo Laporte [27:09]: "And they kneecap themselves because it was only for modern apps."

Copilot and AI Integration in Windows

A significant portion of the episode focuses on Microsoft's integration of AI features like Copilot into Windows 11. The hosts critique features such as "Recall" and "Click to Do," discussing their utility, privacy implications, and overall user reception.

Key Points:

• Recall Feature: Intended to help users search their screen history, but criticized for privacy concerns and limited usefulness.
• Copilot Plus vs. Copilot Pro: Differentiation between versions, with Copilot Plus offering additional AI functionalities.
• User Privacy: Concerns over AI features accessing and processing user data locally and in the cloud.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurrott [20:49]: "Candy Crush, yeah. We had to deal with that for a little while."
• Chris Hoffman [68:25]: "You need the NPU to detect when an email address appears on your screen."

Hardware and Operating System Integration

The discussion transitions to the interplay between Windows operating systems and hardware, highlighting issues with Intel processors and the challenges of supporting diverse hardware configurations.

Key Points:

• Intel Performance Issues: Recent Intel processors (e.g., Lunar Lake) have faced reliability and performance problems, exacerbating frustrations with Windows updates.
• Dual-Screen Devices: Experiments with dual-screen laptops (e.g., Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6) reveal the complexities of integrating innovative hardware with Windows' software ecosystem.
• Touchscreen Prevalence: The ubiquity of touchscreens on laptops, driven by Windows' earlier focus on touch and tablet functionality, remains a point of contention among traditional laptop users.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurrott [33:30]: "What do you do with it? I don't know. Use it."
• Leo Laporte [35:02]: "There's a lot of small interactions that occur on the phone throughout the day... but with Windows, it's more about work."

Future of Windows and AI Integration

The hosts speculate on the future trajectory of Windows with AI, contemplating the role of AI as personal assistants and the potential for AI-driven orchestration across various applications and services.

Key Points:

• AI as Assistants: Microsoft's vision for AI, embodied in Copilot, aims to be a comprehensive assistant integrating seamlessly with both consumer and business applications.
• Competition with Other AI Platforms: Comparison with competitors like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, questioning Microsoft's ability to maintain its lead in consumer AI.
• User Adoption: Concerns over user trust and the practicality of integrated AI features overshadowing established platforms.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurrott [123:43]: "What I'm trying to say is that everyone who has talked about an AI-powered browser has used the phrase, this thing will do things on your behalf."
• Chris Hoffman [137:23]: "It's going to have a lasting, stable presence with memory. It's going to be designed to be your life coach, your productivity assistant, and your teacher wrapped up in one."

Hardware Innovations and Microsoft's Position

The episode touches upon Microsoft's efforts to innovate in the hardware space, such as the development of gaming handhelds and partnerships with manufacturers to create unique form factors. However, challenges persist in aligning hardware capabilities with Windows' software infrastructure.

Key Points:

• Gaming Handhelds: Introduction of Xbox Ally gaming handhelds aims to compete with devices like the Steam Deck, though concerns about pricing and hardware reliability remain.
• Lenovo's Dual-Screen Laptop: Praised for its innovative design, but its success depends on Microsoft's support for dual-screen integration within Windows.
• Intel's Struggles: Ongoing performance and reliability issues with Intel processors impact user experience and trust in the Windows ecosystem.

Notable Quotes:

• Chris Hoffman [159:10]: "Introducing Family Freedom. Our lowest cost to switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network."
• Paul Thurrott [161:20]: "The ThinkBook line... have a lot of experimentation."

Final Thoughts and Announcements

As the episode wraps up, the hosts share their perspectives on Microsoft's financial health, affirming that despite internal layoffs and hardware challenges, the company's diverse revenue streams—cloud services, subscriptions, and gaming—position it for continued success. They also highlight upcoming events and initiatives, encouraging listeners to stay engaged through newsletters and live shows.

Key Points:

• Microsoft's Financials: Revenue and net income growth indicate resilience despite operational challenges.
• Upcoming Events: GamersCon returning in August, showcasing new gaming handhelds and Windows updates.
• Community Engagement: Encouragement to join the Windows Intelligence newsletter and participate in the Twit Club for exclusive content and events.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurrott [169:00]: "Chris and Paul are migrating, but if you sign up now, you will migrate along with them. That's the good news."
• Leo Laporte [171:44]: "We're so glad you're here. We'll see you next time, winners and dozers on Windows Weekly."

---

Conclusion

Episode WW 943 of Windows Weekly offers a comprehensive retrospective on Windows 10's decade-long journey, examining its impact on the operating system landscape and the lessons learned from its service-based model. Through insightful discussions on AI integration, hardware innovation, and the future of Windows, Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and guest Chris Hoffman provide valuable perspectives for both seasoned enthusiasts and new listeners.

Key Takeaways:

• Windows 10's Legacy: A transformative decade marked by continuous updates and evolving user interfaces.
• AI Integration Challenges: Balancing innovative features like Copilot with privacy concerns and user trust.
• Hardware Synergy: The critical need for seamless integration between Windows and diverse hardware platforms.
• Future Outlook: Microsoft's strategic positioning in the AI and hardware markets suggests ongoing evolution, albeit with significant challenges.

For detailed insights and ongoing discussions, listeners are encouraged to engage with the Windows Intelligence newsletter and participate in the Twit Club community.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat's here. Richards has the week off, so we're very lucky. Crispy Hoffman is here, Paul's partner in his Windows Intelligence newsletter, former editor in chief of how to Geek. We'll talk about a very big anniversary. Windows 10 is 10 years old. We'll also talk about Windows 11 and Copilot's coming of age. All that more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurot]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 943, recorded Wednesday, July 30, 2025. Five paperclips. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners. Good to see you. Welcome especially to our club TWIT members who make this show possible. Let's say hello to Mr. Paul Thurat from thurat.com. he's in Mexico City, Romanorta Norte.

[Paul Thurot]

Hello, Paul. Hello, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul, did Richard Campbell go on a reducing diet and shave his beard?

[Paul Thurot]

No, he did not. Now Richard is on an Alaska cruise, which is hysterical. They.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because we went on an Alaska cruise with him.

[Paul Thurot]

He just. Yes, that's true.

[Chris Hoffman]

He.

[Paul Thurot]

They had a tsunami potentially, remember? Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Paul Thurot]

So he.

[Leo Laporte]

We had one too.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. But I mean, he was at sea, so.

[Leo Laporte]

So you just get. Then you get a little rocking and rolling.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I just chatted with him this morning and he's fine. Like, they. I guess the captain set out a deeper sea toward the. Where this could have happened and they didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting, huh?

[Paul Thurot]

They didn't feel anything, but there was a lot of, you know, kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Poseidon vibe going on the Upside down adventure.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm glad Shelley Winters is not on the trip with him.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Tell us who Chris Hoffman is.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know.

[Chris Hoffman]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

When he's at home. Who are you? Chris Hoffman.

[Paul Thurot]

When you're at home, explain yourself. Sir.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, I'm Chris Hoffman. So I'm. Hi. Journalist.

[Paul Thurot]

I've been writing.

[Chris Hoffman]

But. Hi, great to be here, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

Great to have you.

[Chris Hoffman]

And I know each other. So I've been writing about Windows for 15 years. You've probably seen some of my work at some point. I used to be editor in chief of how to Geek a few years ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love how to Geek. We quote them all the time.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, that's awesome. And I've been writing a newsletter called Windows Intelligence for the past few years and writing a Computer World column. And I write for a variety of publications. I review a Bunch of laptops for PC World. I got a fun laptop to show off.

[Leo Laporte]

Bit in, a bit exciting.

[Chris Hoffman]

So that's who I am. And, you know, Paul and I, I've been basically Paul Thrott's newsletter partner for the past two years, and we're looking to continue that as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right. I forgot, Paul, you're on that Windows Intelligencer platform, aren't you?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So we're going to talk about this toward the end of the show again, but you have a big connection to this because when we, my wife and I took over, Thorat.com, newsletters was one of the tricky things for us because it was expensive and a lot of work. And it was your wife who recommended that I speak to JR Raphael, who I don't know. I didn't know personally, but I've been reading for many, many years and really, like. And I told Chris this story, but I. The question he was very open to this would start a Windows newsletter. And it was a matter of finding the right person. Right. And so that was always the sticky point. And I actually. I remember exactly where I was in the car with my wife when I got the message from him, and it was Chris. And I was like, yes. It was like, he's like one of the very few guys in our industry who I also really like. I like his writing. He's knowledgeable and smart. And so that was just a great. That was a great combination.

[Leo Laporte]

Lovely, lovely. Well, yeah, because Junior was a big fan of doing a newsletter. That was like the thing he said, you really got to do that. So that's good.

[Paul Thurot]

So he's made up. Yeah, he's turned that into a business. So we'll talk. There are some changes coming, but we'll talk about that. And, you know, Chris and I are going to continue forward, so it's all good.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice, nice. Well, speaking of moving forward, today is a wonderful. By the way, I apologize. I have to push a button so I can show Chris's website. I forgot to do that. Let me do that right now. So everybody has a reference point. This is where you go get the. Well, it looks just like you. I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, you don't mention Paul at all on here, huh?

[Paul Thurot]

No, actually it does. Right at the top. No, no.

[Chris Hoffman]

Oh, there it is somewhere. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

There's the newsletter right there. And there's free copies of Paul's Window 10 field guides just for signing up.

[Chris Hoffman]

Absolutely. But in terms of newsletter, it's going through A bit of a transition. I guess I should talk about that now. As far as Windows Intelligence, we are ending it and winding that down. So personally I am going fully independent. JR Rayfield has been incredibly gracious and offered to, you know, hand me the list and the relationships or at least, you know, everyone that wants to come. No one is forced to come with me but basically decoupling from Android Intelligence and I'll be launching my own newsletter that's more personal and do you have.

[Leo Laporte]

A name for it yet or you still.

[Chris Hoffman]

I do have a name. I don't know if I want to reveal it. I have, I have a fun concept.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't reveal it until you, I don't know, registered the domain.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, I do have the domain but we haven't. I don't know if I want to reveal it, although. Well, I think it'll come together when you see everything, when it all comes.

[Leo Laporte]

Together, then we'll know. Yeah.

[Chris Hoffman]

Mid to late August, the last Windows Intelligence is firing off in a few weeks in mid August.

[Paul Thurot]

Exciting.

[Chris Hoffman]

That's transitioning and you know, I'm, you know, ramping up work. A variety of publications, PC World, PCMing, all great publications and you know, the newsletter I think going forward is going to be a little, a little more personal, a little smaller, just once a week and I hope to promote.com more in it and I'm really excited about the future of that actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice. Well, I'm a big fan of going independent. Paul and I both give that.

[Paul Thurot]

Sometimes it's forced on you, but it's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Both of us maybe would have done something different had they not said, hey, it's been nice but I'm lazy enough.

[Paul Thurot]

That I would have still, I'd still be working with WUG Net right now if it made sense. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

But both of us, I think it's safe to say Paul, are very happy that we've been independent. It's been a great experience.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I don't know how everyone else handles this, but I'm sure all three of us at one point were like, you know, someday in the future. And sometimes, you know, it happens, maybe not on your schedule. You're like, you know what, maybe this was the right thing.

[Leo Laporte]

And sometimes you have to be pushed into the pool.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Out of the nest into the pool. Because it's not something, you know, and this is actually something everybody listening could probably be aware of because we're about to head into a, I think an era where self employment, especially in journalism is going to be the only way on Twitter on Sunday. It was just a kind of an interesting thing. But every single of one of the people on Twitter was a newsletter author and independent.

[Paul Thurot]

That's funny.

[Leo Laporte]

And I think that that's the trend. You know, for years, Twit was always people who worked for a blog or a magazine. Early days it was magazines, but nowadays it's podcasts, it's newsletters, it's YouTube channels. I think that's too bad.

[Paul Thurot]

We're right outside of that TikTok demographic. But like, maybe. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, we're very pleased to have you. Chris, thank you for filling for Richard, who has big shoes because his feet are humongous.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, he's.

[Leo Laporte]

We're glad to have you. It is a very happy 10th anniversary for Windows 10, which, you know, I didn't realize this, but the life expectancy for Windows operating systems is 10.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, historically it always was. But that's one of the many unique and kind of interesting things about Windows 10, because when it was first announced, it was not going to have a 10 year life cycle. Like especially not the classic.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn't they say it was going to be forever?

[Paul Thurot]

Well, no, not, not. No. Everyone got it. It's amazing to be able to.

[Leo Laporte]

They were misquoted. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

No. What? One employee from Microsoft did refer to it one time as the last version of Windows, but that was. He's not like a brand decision maker or whatever. Like he just kind of said that, in other words. But it was a reasonable mistake to make in the sense that there were a lot of things about Windows 10 that were very vague, including this notion of support. Right. And that was why it was before Microsoft would release a major new version of Windows every three to 10 years, you know, eight years, whatever the timeframe was. But with Windows 10, they were releasing a major new version of Windows 10 every, originally, every six months, which is. Was unprecedented. But the theory at the time was we're going to turn Windows into the service like thing. And ironically or whatever, they got there eventually, but it took a while and there were several years there where we had lots of problems from all the updating and now we are updated every day. So it's the difference. I don't know. It's a different world. Different world.

[Chris Hoffman]

But at least they're smaller updates.

[Paul Thurot]

They are smaller. Yeah. So it's death by a thousand cuts instead of getting hit by a brick, I guess.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, they install faster. So it's not. You got the bugs faster.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, they do. Yeah, they do. I mean, they do. But I was Just thinking about this the other day because I've actually complimented Microsoft for somehow getting Windows as a service to work. Like I said, it took a long time. It's amazing to me that this legacy spaghetti code that is Windows could ever be updated in this fashion. Like, is amazing. And they've done a better job historically than Google with Android or Apple with anything. Actually getting the install of updates to be kind of seamless and quick and, you know, relatively painless. That said, I've been using the dev channel recently, a couple laptops, man, it takes a long time to install those builds. You know, I think it's because they're each sort of treated like, you know, almost like a feature update maybe. But it is kind of weird. It's been a, it's a weird regression. It's only in the Insider program, so it's not a big deal. But I notice it.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, it's weird because the whole Windows as a service thing started in Windows 10. They're like, it's a service now. It's continually updated. And that was every six months. But every six months. Initially it was like an OS level update every six months. It was a long, grinding update. I remember, I think the first big Windows 10 update it installed and then it actually uninstalled some of the programs on people's computers at the time. And it was like, oh, this has been installed because it's not supported. It's not supported. This hardware driver doesn't work. It's like, well, that's nice. But it's been, I've been using this computer for six months. It's Monday morning, I have to work and you just uninstalled my hardware driver. It's like, but Windows is a service. It's like, you know, so, so wherever they're at now is a little more stable than that.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's, it's. The notion that Windows is a service is ludicrous. But like I said, I mean, they kind of, they did eventually get there and not as a service, but I mean, they do. It works. I mean, it's. Again, there, there will always be mistakes. It's Microsoft, whatever, human beings are involved. But it's, it's fascinating to me that we went from this really monolithic schedule to, yeah, we're going to do a new version of Windows every six months. It's like, what? But I think that's part of the history of why Windows 10 is the way it is. Right? It's not just a reaction to what went wrong with Windows 8. Because the rapid release thing started with Windows 8.1, right? That was the first thing they talked about. They launched Windows 8 in whatever that was. September, October 2012. And then by January, they were talking rapid release. And so they, over the next couple of years, released at least three milestones for Windows 8point whatever. Bringing back the start menu, bringing back the start button, bringing back floating Windows, you know, like, I mean, or adding floating windows to modern apps. So, you know, Windows 10 in some ways was almost like a formal policy for that kind of updating, but man, what a mess. And then also, I mean, well, but. But tied to this was also, you know, the Windows rt, the Windows runtime app model, but the Metro app model, as they called it, originally carried forward as uwp, but that those were tied to every Windows release. So every six months there was a new Windows release. Every six months there were new APIs, new capabilities for developers, but you had to have that version of Windows or newer. And all of a sudden they went from, we just want everyone to be on the same version of Windows to we have seven versions of Windows out there now. And it's like, what's going on? You know, it got really complicated.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, I feel compelled to be Microsoft's legal department for a second and say it was never called Metro. Please don't call it that.

[Paul Thurot]

We never called it that.

[Leo Laporte]

They didn't like that, did they?

[Paul Thurot]

Even I will refer to the multitudes of Microsoft documentation that says the word Metro, but. Okay, fair enough.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, it's a modern app or a store app.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, store app, Store app, Store app, and store app.

[Leo Laporte]

That's kind of generic.

[Paul Thurot]

In the beginning, it meant something. Now it doesn't mean anything. It's just anything that's distributed through the store. Could be anything now.

[Leo Laporte]

But, yeah, anything's in the store now, isn't it?

[Paul Thurot]

Pretty much, yeah. Right. So in the beginning, it was very specifically these modern apps only. And then over time, they expanded it. First they tried to expand it through what they used to call the bridges. Remember, these were ways for.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember bridges and I remember lakes.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, Data lakes are different, but there were also islands. Let's not forget those, Samuel islands.

[Leo Laporte]

But how can you forget them?

[Paul Thurot]

Eventually we arrived where we are today. So I would say through the course of Windows 10, it was a big. It's almost like a big learning process, really. Platform wise, updating wise, App store and app platform wise. And it's not perfect today for sure, but it's. It is in a much better place than it was also. I mean, remember this was the name Universal app was meant to connote the fact that these apps would run across multiple platforms. And eventually they called that one Windows. But the idea was that Windows 10 on whatever devices, small tablets, tablets, two in ones, convertibles, laptops, desktop PCs, whatever, Surface Hub, which was announced at the Windows 10 consumer event that January, HoloLens, which was also announced at that event, Xbox One, were all running the same basic platform and could run the same apps. And Phone, I'm sorry, I should say Phone. Phone was going to be for two seconds the volume part of this story, and that disappeared pretty quick.

[Chris Hoffman]

So do you think the servicing model maybe is working better now due to. Technically, Windows 10 is still supported, but they're not really updating Windows 10 like a service in the same way. Most of it's happening in Windows 11. That's a much narrower hardware band. Windows 10 had a lot of old devices that were updated to it. And if you look at some of the posts that Microsoft made when there were problems with Windows 10 updates, they were kind of making a lot of excuses about, well, Windows 10 is on a lot of hardware, so no wonder there are bugs. And it's like, well, should we be updating it that way then? But is it working better now? Maybe because.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I never. I never. I can't say I've ever considered that. But that makes sense, right? That. Because Windows 11 works on a more limited range of hardware and obviously more modern hardware too, which presumably is more reliable. That's not true, actually. But okay, but whatever. Yeah, okay. That definitely could be part of it. Yeah. I mean, they improve the process. Yeah, it's absolutely more secure too, but they. They improve the updating process in fits and starts and learn from mistakes, et cetera. It took a while, but, yeah, a combination of factors. Yeah, for sure. Of course, now they call this continuous innovation, which maybe is more adequate or accurately described as like continuous interruption, but yeah. And even that is something to try to address. Right. If you have an enterprise version of Windows 11 or if you're on server, you only actually have to reboot that PC for updates once a quarter. And the other interim months are those. I can't remember the term they use for that, but they slipstream those updates in without requiring a reboot. Right. And so maybe that's something that we'll get collectively right for everyone running Windows 11 someday.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah. I'm hoping for a hot patching to arrive in the consumer. Maybe that's a Windows 12 thing. Maybe there will never be. Who knows?

[Leo Laporte]

I know the Patching is. It doesn't need to reboot, it just does it in the background.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So if every. In any quarter there are three months, two of those months you'll get hot patches and then the third of those, the quarter end, you'll get the one that requires the reboot or whatever. It's kind of a. They've been doing differential updating for 20 years actually. But.

[Leo Laporte]

It does it.

[Paul Thurot]

A reboot?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. What's the. I mean, I'm kind of used to. Most operating systems want to reboot if it's a significant patch. How do you do it without rebooting?

[Paul Thurot]

I guess in the case of a PC or whatever platform, it's also like a billion ish ones in zero. So there are going to be some mistakes in there. I don't know. Yeah, I'm not really sure. Yeah. So anyway, so yesterday was the literal 10th anniversary of the release of the original version of Windows 10. Right. So July 29th. And in my typical fashion, I completely zoned on it until that morning. And I realized it was that day. And I was like, oh man, I better got to do something about this. So if you go to my article, I actually added a link to the notes that wasn't there originally. At the bottom of this section, I'm giving away the Windows 10 field guide for free. I finally figured out a way to do that. Leanpub really wants me to charge money. But anyway, I figured it out. So now through, I think August 1st, you can go grab that for free at LeanPub if you have the right URL. So that's why the link is important. And then I was thinking back about Windows 10, because at the time, Windows 10 was so welcome and so necessary and for me personally on a couple of levels, because I really liked the Windows Phone experience. I like that team of people. They took over Windows, which I thought was kind of incredible. And they set everything or they tried to set everything right. They had what I would say is a pretty good vision for it all. And there were problems with it that, like I said, were fixed over time, like Windows as a service. But man, the more I thought about it, the more I sort of realized like this. Also, there's a lot of controversy in there as well. You know, Windows 8 was the first Windows operating system to ship with ads in it, but they were limited just to those modern apps that were bundled with the system, like news and weather and so forth. Windows 10 brought that out to the file system, to the operating system itself. And as I predicted, you know, I called the ads in Windows 8 many years ago a slippery slope. Like, you know, you don't put ads in Windows so you can put less ads in Windows next time. You're going to put more and more. That is what happened. So we got the, you know, the sponsored bundled crapware, we got advertising, we got telemetry that was forced on us. A lot of privacy concerns, although most of those were kind of made up, frankly.

[Chris Hoffman]

Candy Crush.

[Paul Thurot]

Candy Crush, yeah. We had to deal with that for a little while.

[Chris Hoffman]

Which Microsoft now owns.

[Paul Thurot]

That's true. And now doesn't bundle with Windows, which is a little strange. But. Yep. You know, the app platform mistakes. Right. Which they fixed in time, or I can't say they're fixed, but that situation is better. Windows 10 came at a weird time. You know, Windows 8 had crashed and burned. Windows 8 had this major launch event in New York City. It was a big deal. Windows 10, I think they launched it like a bake sale at a church somewhere in Northern California or something. Like it was like a nothing. Windows 11 was less than nothing. They announced it online and they delivered some of it, you know, six months later, and then the rest of it a year later, I don't know. And we're still kind of working through that. But, you know, the world changed, right? I mean, the world went mobile and cloud and, you know, Windows just didn't have the same kind of precedence within the company. So I don't know. But Chris was good enough to look at these notes and say, this is a little negative. Let's put in some.

[Leo Laporte]

Chris, you're just learning, aren't you?

[Chris Hoffman]

I was also going to say Windows 10X had a big launch event where we all were excited about the Surface neo. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Sad. Sad.

[Paul Thurot]

10X had two things that were big. And by the way, I have to say, I appreciate Microsoft pushing in both these directions. Right. The first one was a simpler user interface, which is what we eventually got in Windows 11, which is controversial because to simplify something complex, you have to take things away. And the people of all this muscle memory around right click menus and whatever else instantly notice when those things are missing. And so there was that kind of outcry from our part of the world, our community. People like my wife, who I'd call like normal users or mainstream users, couldn't care less. It was fine. They didn't care. But the big innovation in Windows 10X was going to be this componentized. What's the word I'm looking for? When you have like a Docker, like A containerized architecture. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Where that's all the rage. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

All the modern apps would run in their own self contained containers or whatever, as they do now, but every win32 process would run an A container. And the idea there was, this is the thing that they've been trying to solve in Windows forever. S Mode was an attempt at this as well, is how do you take this thing that is inherently old fashioned legacy code. It's insecure by design and by default, and how do we make it safe, secure, reliable, et cetera. And so this was one approach. I thought it was an interesting one. I love that they tried it and it obviously didn't pan out because we don't have that.

[Chris Hoffman]

It was also going to be designed exclusively at first for dual screen devices. It just seems like this designed by committee. Everyone gets, okay, it's going to have containers and it's also going to be only for dual screen devices. And then it's going to have a simplified interface and then we're going to do that and it's like, how do we end up with this product?

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. And that might just have been a matter of timing because, you know, folding displays, we knew they were coming but they weren't ready. And Microsoft wanted to get to market and this is something that would have transitioned to that. There were leaks of this thing that you could just run on a laptop or whatever on a vm and it worked fine as a single screen operating system, just as it does today in Windows 11. But yeah, that might have been just an attempt. Well, it's typical, right? It requires new hardware purchase. Microsoft loves that. The industry loves that. It lets them keep selling a traditional version of Windows on traditional form factors while having this new thing on a new form factor. They sort of tried that with a Windows RT, remember in tablets and so forth in the Windows 8 time frame. But yeah, they tried. I like that they tried. I don't really have a criticism of this. The fact that it didn't work is whatever, it just didn't work. So they tried. I mean, it's fine and Windows 11 is whatever it is, but Windows 11 today is in pretty great shape, frankly. And it felt incomplete. There were a lot of regressions when it first came up, but it's, you know, it's better. So there was something came out of it. It didn't just all get thrown away. Right. I mean, at least we have something.

[Leo Laporte]

At least we have something. Sounds sad.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, there were these initiatives, you know, like Microsoft faced with the success of the iPhone and Android and then the iPad and all that is like, okay, we have to do something around mobile. And they could have done a unique thing that wasn't Windows, but they went with Windows for all the obvious reasons, maybe even the right reasons. And maybe it could have been okay with three more years of updates, but Snofsky was out. They changed directions. They went back to mostly traditional form factor interactions and so forth. You know, they tried with the app model, with the universal apps, and then eventually where we are today, where they're just back to being desktop apps, they tried with these containers. They tried. The store, like Chris said, was originally just the store and it was modern apps and that was it. And now we have very. You could probably buy a T shirt and that thing that today they will sell anything.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, not ebooks or all these other things are not selling anything.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, okay, that's true. Although, yeah, that was also one of many scalebacks that happened over time that maybe, maybe they should never have got. I don't know. I mean, when. I don't know, Zune and then Groove and Xbox. Well, Xbox and then Groove, whatever it was at the time, maybe that made sense. But by the time that stuff disappeared, you know, maybe not. I don't know. So I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say about these, like 10 years of Windows 10. It's like the user interface was clearly designed to match what was on the phone. That user interface made tons of sense on a phone, still would today. It made no sense for Windows. The very notion of tiles, where they're on screen all the time and you see them and there's live information you get at a glance. You don't have to go into the app. Tons of sense on a phone. If something happens on your phone, you pick it up, you're like, yep, I don't need to deal with that. You're good. You don't have to dive into the app, come out like whack a mole. But in Windows, it's in a Start menu, so you don't see it, you know, and they.

[Chris Hoffman]

And they kneecap themselves. Because it was only for modern apps, and people are making modern apps. So if you use any other, if you use Steam, if you use any desktop program and it wanted to put a live tile in your Start menu. Too bad. So sad, right? You got to be using a modern app. And I'm sure that there's like Windows geeks and people who customize their Start menu, but the average person, Start menu, if you Opened it. It was just whatever was pinned there by default. It was Candy Crush. It was viral stories, it was all that stuff. And people. I mean, it's interesting, right, because people customize their phone. Home screenshots, people.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And Microsoft tried to do this with Windows 8 to make it the screen, and it would just be there and it would be on screen and you could see things moving around and whatever it may be. But these are different types of devices. We use them in different ways. I think there's a lot of small interactions that occur on the phone throughout the day for everyone, basically. Whereas with Windows or a desktop operating system of any kind, you basically kind of sit there and you're working an app and maybe you have two apps and they're side by side, however you do that, and you're reading and listening or reading and watching or whatever it is you're doing, but you're not doing little, little things everywhere. And so it just didn't make as much sense. But ironically, the. The app platform that exists today, if they supported Live Tiles, would allow desktop apps to do tiles. Right. Because now it works with everything. It's. They finally did that. But, yeah, you're right, it was. I don't know. They try again. They try. I don't want to criticize them for trying to. I'll just criticize them for failing.

[Chris Hoffman]

If you go back to Windows 8 and even going into Windows 10, the point was that, yeah, we weren't really thinking about desktop PCs. We were thinking about you were going to have a Windows 8 tablet and maybe a small tablet. You have a Windows tablet. So, yeah, you're interacting it throughout the day. You turn it on, you see the home screen. And Even in Windows 10, there was a tablet mode. Right. The tablet mode had a full screen start screen, I think.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. The whole thing, it was all full screen. Yeah.

[Chris Hoffman]

So it was all about touch and tablets, and it made sense there. It's just people didn't. I mean, Windows is a tablet operating system. And that's something I want to talk about later too, is why, you know, why do. Why does the modern Windows laptop have a touchscreen? Honestly. Honestly.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, so it's weird you say this, because this just came up with me and my wife yesterday, literally. But this is something. When this started happening, Mary Jo hated it. And I used to say to her, I don't understand what your problem is. If you don't like it, just don't use it. And my attitude was, if it's there and I don't need it, it's fine. But maybe I. And you know, sometimes maybe I'd sit there and scroll and scream, whatever. But since then, I can't stand touchscreens. I would give anything not to have a touchscreen on every laptop I own. And so yesterday I wrote something. It doesn't matter what, but I asked my wife if she would come in and just take a look at something because she's also a writer. And I just wanted to get her opinion. So she laid down on the bed and she put her finger on the screen and she started flipping through it. I'm like, what are you doing? She's like, what do you mean? I'm like, you're touching my screen. She's like, I'm scrolling through it. I'm like, there's a hundred ways to scroll this document. Why did you pick that one? But she does. I guess she uses it. So, I mean, I use it. Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I don't do this anymore. But for a little while, I would disable it. You can go into device managers, disable touch. You can get rid of it. You know, I don't like it. I don't want to touch the screen. I don't want fingerprints on where I'm reading and writing and, you know, whatever else.

[Leo Laporte]

You're in luck because there's always. Well, you know, it's harder to get a non. Touchscreen.

[Paul Thurot]

No, it's almost impossible. I know. That's the thing. Like, there aren't really that many of them. Like, I like when it comes without touch, you know? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Come to think of it, you're. You're in. Even Apple, the rumor is their next MacBook next year, will have touch.

[Paul Thurot]

So the worst thing about an iPad, when you attach a keyboard, is it you can still touch the screen. You know, I mean, it's kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Weird because I use iPads. I often accidentally touch my laptop screen, expecting something to happen.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So I get the worst of both worlds. I get both these fingerprints and nothing.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, yeah, but you also use a lot of different devices. Most people would have whatever they have, and they kind of get used to it, probably, I guess. But I. Yeah, I don't know. Look, to be fair again to Microsoft, they went to market with Windows 8 with this idea that this computer could do everything. It could be a touch device and a computer, and they didn't make it work. I mean, it works today if you want it to. The laptop I'm about to review today, later is one of those convertible laptops. Screen flips around and, you know, it's a tent, it's a presentation thing, it's whatever gigantic tablet. But it works. I mean, it does work. I mean, so if you want that it's there, you can write on it with a pen and all that. But I just, I don't. And I think most Windows users are come to it with kind of a work focus, right? You're using Word, Excel, a web browser, whatever it is, Adobe Photoshop, and you do the thing and then you, everything that's important to you in life is on your phone. You know, this is, it's more about work.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah. So I, I, I, I'll give it the case, maybe for and against, because I also like, I, I actually kind of, I kind of like touch screens, and I kind of don't, and I don't really know. I do think that they're just on, too. It's just maybe it shouldn't be a standard feature, right? Like, it's basically on every laptop, like almost every laptop, and it's on the majority of them. And I don't know, you know, if we hadn't gone through Windows 8 and Windows 10, if we were just starting fresh in the days of Windows 11, now, I don't know if manufacturers would say, yes, we need to add a touchscreen to all these Windows 11 laptops, because that's what people want. But, like, you know, I, it's actually an indictment of old PCs. Like, the touchpads have gotten better now. When I had a Windows 810 PC and it didn't have precision touchpad, and it was horrible, and I just, I used the screen to scroll because I cannot be using that touchpad because it was so rough. But modern PCs have pretty good touchpads, so the scrolling works. So there's that. I do like, like if I'm signing like a document with my finger on the screen, that's really cool. Like, I don't have to put on my phone. So there's stuff. And if you have a Surface Pro and you want to draw, there's like so much stuff. But, you know, the, the attack on the touchscreen is like, well, first of all, it's, they're generally glossy, so if you want a matte screen for the sunlight, because it's a laptop for work, they use in a bright room, the touchscreen gets in the way. It uses more power. If you actually are using it, then you have the smudges on your screen. But, you know, it's just weird. I don't know.

[Paul Thurot]

This is an optimized for the everyday scenario. So, you know, the industry as a whole moved to touchscreen screens, which is why they're everywhere. Everyone just makes them very easy. It's just what we make now. It took a long time just to switch to 16 by 10 aspect ratio screens. Right. These things take time. But there is some tiny percentage of users who loves Desires, needs whatever these, the pen and multitouch support because, you know, maybe they flip it around or it is a tablet and they, they can write up, they take notes in school or is whatever they are and that's fine, but they're not most people. And for me, like, like I said, on some level, I don't mind that it's there. Like the laptop I'm about to review is a convertible laptop that I used to exclusively as a laptop. Right. I'm not, I didn't, I mean, I did just to do it, but I don't really use it that way. So, yeah, for me, and I think for most people it would actually be better, but you know, not to have that stuff. But then again, this is also an upgrade and I think it's human nature is you go into the store, the car, whether it's a car, a refrigerator, whatever, you have this idea, I'm gonna, you're having a sale, I'm getting the cheap one. They're like, yeah, but you know, for 100 bucks more, you have all these capabilities and you're like, you know, I'm probably not going to need that, but if it's there and I need it, that's really, you know, it's worth it. And, you know, and off we go. So, you know, we buy more than we need and then we don't use it. So I don't know what the numbers are. No one does, I guess, outside of the PC makers or Microsoft, but I bet a very, very small percentage of people uses that stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, look, I just got a new phone. It looks at. Oh my God, it just opened up.

[Paul Thurot]

That can't be a phone. It's too thin.

[Leo Laporte]

Look how thin these are.

[Paul Thurot]

I know, it's easy.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we're gonna take a break. Going down this, by the way, this is the Samsung Galaxy Fold 7 and it doesn't have a touchscreen. I don't understand why. No, I'm kidding. It does, it does. What do you do with a phone that doesn't have a touchscreen? You have a BlackBerry.

[Paul Thurot]

What do you do with it? I don't know. Use it.

[Leo Laporte]

Fingerprints on that. I don't understand your objection, Paul. That's all I'm saying.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm curmudgeon.

[Leo Laporte]

I am going to take a little break now but we will continue this trip down Memory Lane. Windows 10 we hardly knew Ye continues with our special guest. So nice to have Chris here filling in for Richard. He'll be back next week. He's off on a anniversary cruise with his.

[Paul Thurot]

Assuming he survives it with all the tsunamis and whatnot that are happening out there.

[Leo Laporte]

The one foot tsunami. Yeah. Our show today, brought to you, and I mean literally brought to you by Cashfly, our content delivery network. CDN. For over 20 years, CashFly has held the track record for high performing ultra reliable content Delivery serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. And we know intimately because we're company probably number 10. I mean we've been with Cashfly since the beginning, almost 18 years now. We love their lag free video loading, the hyper fast downloads, the friction free site interactions. You probably don't know anything about Cashfly or the fact that we use it. Why? Because there's never any problems. Now I think Patrick, our engineer really loves that. He doesn't have to worry. He knows the downloads must roll. Cash Fly is the only CDN built for throughput. Ultra low latency video streaming delivers video to over a million concurrent users with less than 1 second latency. How about that? Lightning fast gaming delivers downloads faster with zero lag glitches or outages. Mobile content optimization offers. This is so cool. Automatic and simple image optimization. You upload a big tiff or whatever and it automatically turns it into a variety of sizes so your site loads faster no matter what size screen your visitors are coming in on. Plus you get, and this was really important to us, flexible month to month billing for as long as needed. So we didn't know when we first signed up with Cash Flag, all we knew is we couldn't handle the demand. But we didn't know, you know, it was very spiky. We didn't know what was going to happen. So Cash Flow was super flexible with us. They said look, as long as it takes, you know, we'll figure it out. And then once we figured out, you know, as soon as Windows Weekly comes out on a Wednesday, we're going to get a big spike. We got discounts for fixed terms and that's, that's awesome too. The point is like, like us, we don't get anything special. You get to design your contract when you switch to Cash Fly. Cash Fly levers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs and allows you. And we. We've been doing this for years and now everybody can do it. Shield your site data content in their cloud so you get a hundred percent cash hit ratio. There's no misses.

[Paul Thurot]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's so nice. And with Cash Fly's elite managed packages, you are going to get the VIP treatment. You absolutely will. Just like we do. Your dedicated account manager will be with you from day one, ensuring smooth implementation and reliable 247 support when you need it. But here's the good news. You're not going to need it. It's super reliable. Beat your competition, Beat them. With faster content delivery anywhere in the world. It's nice to be a winner. CashFly provides reliable CDN solutions fully tailored to your business. Learn how you can get your first month's free at cash fly.com TWIT that's C A C-H-E F L Y.com/TWIT. Thank you to our wonderful partners at Cash Fly, to Matt Levine and his whole team. By the way, I was just on Cash Flies anycast podcast. Matt did a great interview. If you want to hear kind of the history of Twitt and how we got started and how we found Cashfly, it's all available at the anycast podcast, which you can get wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, Cash line. All right, Paul, it's back to you and Chris Hoffman.

[Paul Thurot]

Have you dated a girl?

[Leo Laporte]

No, but I've never been kissed. I don't know what's happening. This happens as you get older, Paul. You'll know soon enough. Puberty hits again.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, good. And it hits. That's what I. Good. I was hoping for like an acne breakout or. Yeah, exactly, something.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, your voice starts changing, you breakout, it's just not good. Sorry, Chris, you don't need. I'm going to go back to my super thin. You know, one of the reasons I got this is because I was really. Apple is rumored to be doing this next year and I was just. This is what this, this is the state of the art.

[Paul Thurot]

But by all accounts, this phone is incredible, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, that was the other reason. I had Abrar Al Hedi on and she had reviewed it and she said, you're going to be blown away. And it's. Look how thin it is.

[Paul Thurot]

So I tried to get. My wife loves Samsung phones. This is what she. The only thing, she makes this explicit decision, this one of her few tech decisions, whatever. And so I said, I made the case. I said, you should. Your Phone has good trade in value right now. You could trade it in, you know, you could pay. It'd be like 50 bucks a month.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's what I did. I traded in the flip, they sent it and I got on Google Fi. So I really got a big discount. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. She's so cheap, man. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

Help you with that.

[Paul Thurot]

I know. I'm like, okay. I was kind of hoping she'd just do it.

[Leo Laporte]

I think she would really like it.

[Paul Thurot]

I think so, too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's pretty. The screen's amazing and it's cool to have that size, but then when you fold it down, it's really.

[Paul Thurot]

It's an actual phone. Here's a pixel. This is the drain.

[Leo Laporte]

The same size as a pixel, except it's thinner.

[Paul Thurot]

It's thinner. You know, that's what's crazy. It's crazy. No, that's. I. Man, if it was a couple, even just a couple hundred bucks less, I'd probably do it.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. So I traded in the flip six.

[Paul Thurot]

And how much did you get on trade? Sorry to interrupt.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you remember 300. Should be more.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm sure it's more than that.

[Leo Laporte]

Samsung, if you pre ordered, was going to give me 700.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

So you can get it down to around 500 bucks, I think.

[Paul Thurot]

I think the best I could do is like 830 off, but it's still, you know, it's like 1200 bucks. It's like, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's a $2,000 phone.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yeah, it's tough. Yeah, it's tough.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just, you know, I'm living the living the dream pole. That's all I can say.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, Attach that thing to a keyboard and a mouse, you'll be in pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I have to try that out because I used to use Dex, so they have a new thing, but yeah, I have to try that out. All right, back to the show. Sorry about the Samsung chatter. Although I will pair it to my Windows Phone.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And you'll get the best possible experience. Exactly right. Which is nice. So, Chris, I didn't want to stomp all over this, but, I mean, are there any other positive elements of Windows 10?

[Leo Laporte]

Paul, you're so negative. I'm. Is.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, before I continue crapping on it. No, I'm.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, yeah, I mean, like, I think there's so much that we maybe don't associate as part of Windows 10. Like, the Windows subsystem for Linux was huge and like this we could have, you know, a whole comedy thing where we talk about what Microsoft used to say about Linux, about the property cancer that's attaching us. It's attached itself to Windows. And in fact, Linux is still to Windows, in Windows to this day. But that was huge. I mean, and jokes aside, it was this huge embrace of the developer community. And I remember many, many years ago, the amount of people switching from Windows to Macs because they're like, well, it's Unix based, I can do stuff on it. Microsoft's like, whatever. So that was huge. Winget, I think winget is still unappreciated. It's underappreciated in Windows itself. I mean, I do understand because it doesn't make sense from business perspective, but winget's amazing. I'm now showing my old Linux nerd credentials where I'm like, yeah, Linux and package managers, but that stuff was.

[Paul Thurot]

No, but you're right. I use winget extensively in the course of reviewing laptops, it's awesome just to have four blasting a bunch of apps on it automatically. It's improving in kind of interesting fits and starts. When they added that dev center, what was called the DevHome, to Windows 11, which they're now getting rid of, there was this notion of using YAML based configuration for winget and you could then use it to also configure the apps and maybe just go beyond the basics that are there today. So we're still working through that, but kind of like a one line update every app on my system kind of capability, which is awesome. Especially if you go to Windows Update, check for updates, you're all good. Go to the store, check for updates, you're all good. Then you go to Winget, you're like, no, you have 17 updates. So it's good for that. If you want to keep your system up to date, it's fantastic. I wish you could automate it, but.

[Chris Hoffman]

Sometimes those updates are wrong because it's trying to detect what's installed per the registry and it gets it wrong. And we'll try to reinstall this, even though it's already been updated and through the app itself. So it's still kind of janky.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Yeah. And there are apps that Discord is the one that hits me all the time on every PC. I don't remember off the top of my head how I install it, but I cannot update it through winget, it just won't do it. So the app will have to install, which is fine because every time I launch it, it's updates. So it worked. That works out fine. But yeah, but it's still, it's an amazing capability built on top of. Actually, I'm not 100% sure it is built. I was going to say built on top of PowerShell, but actually, is it built on top of PowerShell? It probably is. It has to be. Probably. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And the less said about the Android subsystem, the better. But that was something that, that should have been awesome. And if Microsoft and Google had like an iota better relationship, maybe would have been. But we've moved on from that, sadly.

[Chris Hoffman]

If they had had it in the Windows 8 era when tablets were a big thing, maybe. But I mean, well, they were still pushing.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, we have our own thing and you know, and Windows 8, because of the timing, couldn't ship with Windows Phone compatibility. But even back when that was happening, I made the case, you know, Windows 7, Windows Phone 7 has these panoramic experiences that you scroll across with the phone, but would look very natural as one thing on a tablet screen. And I kind of, you know, that's the direction they could have gone in but didn't, you know.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, Windows 10 is still widely blevaged to this day and many people are very intent on continuing to use it. And you know, and to some degree they should be because the Windows 11 hardware requirements are so stringent that.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Chris Hoffman]

You know, a lot of computers that should, could run Windows 11 fine, aren't getting offered the update officially. And so we're, I mean, we're also like, we're through the looking glass on what's happening with Windows 10 and its support period now. I mean, Microsoft has found a way to go back on its, to kind of go back and kind of not go back on its end of service plans.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, yeah, the original claim was that Windows 10 would be supported for the lifetime of the device, which they never explained and changed continuously. And because of intercompany battles at one point between intel and Microsoft, they started arbitrarily dropping off support for processors from intel just out of spite. But I don't know, it worked out in a sense. I think it's interesting that it did hit 10 years. It's like, okay, actually that was. Maybe this is the right time frame. Maybe this is the way it should be. It's hard to say, but I don't know. I guess you could argue it could be longer too. But I mean, compared to mobile platforms, actually 10 years is pretty good. And then just the way people use computers, I mean, people will be using Windows 10 long after it isn't supported anyway. And of course it benefited from the same thing that Windows 7 benefited from, which was that everyone hated its predecessor so much it had kind of a low bar, I mean, but did a nice job of bringing us back to what I think most people thought maybe Windows 8 should have been in the first place. So, you know, it's not all bad. I just, I don't know. I was one of the biggest Windows Phone fans in the world and if they could have pulled it off, that would have been kind of incredible. But I also look at Windows 10 today, being used to using Windows 11, which to me feels more modern and whatever, subjectively attractive or whatever. And it just feel, it feels out of date to me. Like the tiles that the squirt off everything, you know, it has kind of a. It feels a little old fashioned to me. But maybe that's a good thing in a way because that, you know, it is the old thing. Right now we are starting to move past it. So Microsoft does have a replacement that is, you know, basically the same compatibility, at least on software. And I think it looks better personally.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it just cosmetic though, or is 11 objectively better under the hood too?

[Paul Thurot]

Well, actually today, to be fair, it's both. When it first launched, it was mostly just subjectively better or worse looking, depending on your opinion, I guess. But they got it there. The Windows 11 hardware requirements were literally arbitrary at the time, but they work toward this place where we're at today. And actually now there are features that are inherent to TPM 2.0. Well, that is the highest, but 2.0 versus 1 point whatever, 1.2, whatever it was. Where we have Windows, hello, ESS and all the secure core PC stuff, it is in much better shape today. But you have to have modern hardware obviously for that to be the case.

[Leo Laporte]

So there are features that I know didn't technically require TPM2, but there are features that use TPM2.

[Paul Thurot]

It didn't originally, but now it really does. Like if you Copilot plus PC could not happen without tpm.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Recall probably requires tpm, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it requires that whole thing. It's the whole. It's not just tpm, it's the. It is actually a chain of chips and not just specific kinds of chips, but they have to be manufactured in a monitored scenario where you can assure from the beginning to the end it's never been tampered with, et cetera, et cetera. There's a whole. It's a much more stringent process than a typical PC.

[Leo Laporte]

But. And also though I see why people say, well, you're forcing me to buy a new PC.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And that, you know, grates on some people.

[Paul Thurot]

There's no. Yeah, and, but there's no answer to this. Right. Because that's true of everything. You know, when, you know, people believe that their washing machines and refrigerators don't last as long today as they used to, when in fact these things are technological marvels that are superior in almost every single way to something.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know why they break? Because they're computers.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, well, but mine plays a fun little. I know, yeah, I get the song. My wife just goes again. It's weird, the word. Just today she's like, it amazes me that whoever designed this was like, it doesn't just play a beep, it plays an entire song and it just keeps going.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a real song too.

[Paul Thurot]

It's a real tune. Super excited that the laundry's done. So, you know, whatever.

[Chris Hoffman]

But, so here's an argument. Sorry, yes, but here's, here's an argument and I'm trying to take people aside here because obviously we can say Windows 10 had so many years of support and if you bought a computer, either you could Upgrade to Windows 11 or you bought it prior to that, so you had like six, seven, eight years of Windows support in your computer. And so, you know, what's the problem? You're going to have to update. And it's like, yeah, but on the same time, you know, companies, Microsoft and PC manufacturers don't make that clear up front. In fact, Microsoft said it will be supported for the lifetime of your device. Don't worry. Well, not your device, Chris. Well, the life on each device.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Chris Hoffman]

What does that mean? But like, I don't think it's true. Like, you can't necessarily expect the company to support the laptop for 30 years with security updates. But at the same time, you know, Microsoft isn't really the piece of the industry, isn't really upfront with this about peoplefront, with people about this. Maybe that's part of the issue. I don't know.

[Paul Thurot]

Here's the irony, I think we all need to acknowledge, which is that the people, people complaining about this, the ones that you hear and have seen, are the same enthusiasts who are by nature into the latest thing. I don't even understand the complaint. If you're technical enough that for some reason you have a 6th gen intel something, I don't care what it is, and it's good enough for what you're doing, then who are you. What is this? Or, and. Or you are technical enough to know how to get by the restrictions in Windows 11 and can run Windows 11 on that computer just fine. Anyway, so what are we complaining about? You know someone. We're just talking about how I'm a curmudgeon. But the, but literally, I look at this situation and I think this is okay. I mean, I'm not saying it's perfect. There is the issue of, you know, landfill and all those things. Those are real. It's real. It's whatever. But I mean this audience, the us, us, not you people out there, us, all of us. We, we have the know how to work around it if we have to. We, we are people who by nature want the latest thing. Leo just got a brand new Samsung folding phone. He's not using a Samsung flip phone from eight years ago. Yeah, I, Why is it okay? Why is that okay? And, and you know, I, I know.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel guilty though, Paul. Is that good?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. No, you're white and middle aged and you should feel guilty. But I, I, you know, our children.

[Leo Laporte]

I've, you know they're going to be buried in trash because of me.

[Paul Thurot]

But, but, yeah, but that's, they can build a world out of that. Like Ready Player one. It's going to be fine.

[Leo Laporte]

It's.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I don't know. I. Look, there were, there are real problems. I'm not saying the right but it's just weird to me that the complaints, like the, the complaint isn't the dentist who doesn't care about computers and just needs something that just works and wants it to work for some amount of time and whatever. It's not the people who work at the subway where they have a, or whatever the Metro's called, where you live and you have like, you know, these computerized screens and oh, there's a Windows blue screen. Ha ha ha, you know, whatever. They're still running Windows 7. Hilarious. They're not really complaining. They don't even know what's happening. They don't care. What are we complaining about? God, 10 years.

[Chris Hoffman]

The Linux desktop is actually great nowadays. Like if you want to keep your hardware going, that's a great thing to do. Install Linux. You can install Chrome OS Flex.

[Paul Thurot]

And I would say to that, yep. And the very people who are smart enough and have the know enough to make that work and to try different distributions till they find the one that works great on the computer they have are the same technical people who for some reason are complaining that they can't run Windows 11 as something they don't want anyway. What are we complaining about? It's crazy. I mean, I don't mean us, I mean like just us collectively. Like what is this complaint? It's bizarre. I don't think we're going to reach a point in our lifetimes where some desktop operating system is supported for 20 years. I don't want to run a computer that's 10 years old. Could I? I mean, maybe it depends on your needs. Right.

[Chris Hoffman]

I still have some Windows 10 era PCs that can upgrade officially to Windows 11 because I have them. I want to test stuff on Windows 10 and honestly when I use them it's horrible.

[Paul Thurot]

It is horrible.

[Chris Hoffman]

Thank you. It's so much slower. I don't enjoy it. And like these are computers that were felt fast at the time. They have SSDs, like they have hardware that was high end eight years ago, but.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. So my test case, my test laptop for Windows 10 is a Surface Book 2 that has an 8th gen intel processor that can in fact Upgrade to Windows 11. But I've kept it on 10 on purpose and same thing every time I use it. When this computer was new, I loved it. I loved it and I use it now and I almost hate it. It's unbearable how slow it is.

[Leo Laporte]

On the other hand, I'm sitting in front of right now a, let's see, 2016 laptop that I. So it's nine years old, it has a GeForce GTX 980 and an i7 in it and I'm putting Linux on it and it runs back beautifully. Part of the reason your stuff doesn't run well is because you're using Windows. I know that's not a nice thing to say on this show, but there are good versions of Linux. In fact, I'm running a very modern version of Linux on it called Cache OS which optimizes for speed.

[Paul Thurot]

So it depends on what you need. Right. We'll talk about this I think later in the show. But when you think about handheld gaming devices and the popularity of something like.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not playing Call of Duty on this thing, that's for sure.

[Paul Thurot]

No, right. But it is a fact that Linux is lighter weight and thus better for certain things. And when you get down to a smaller device where you're space constrained and the battery's not going to be as big, the processor is not going to be as good and Valve has done work to bring game compatibility to Linux and yes, that works, but it's not going to run games at the same or run all of the Games that Windows can run. So you have that compatibility thing. And when you just talk about just a normal PC, laptop, whatever, two years old, eight years old, whatever, we do what we do on those things. And for a lot of mainstream people, the apps that they use every day are just. No, it's not just gaming though, but it's just apps. Right. I think people who use Linux, this is what used to happen on Mac OS X, right. Back in the day. It's not as big of a deal anymore, but you would always try to find alternatives to the thing that was the mainstream thing you use. So they didn't have Photoshop, they don't have Photoshop and Linux. You use like Gimp or something or they don't have native app version of Microsoft Word. So it's like I can use like LibreOffice or the web version of Word and you kind of, you do these things. And then for me that would be okay, you know, depending. Again, depending on your needs. For me, one of the things I use all the time I really rely on is this Files on Demand feature that's available in OneDrive but also in Google Drive and the Synology NAS that I'm using. Right. And that's not available on Linux. Right. And so there are things that are sort of like that. They're not quite the same, you know, it's not exactly the same. Yeah, but Google Docs, which I would.

[Leo Laporte]

Bet most people now use, is available everywhere.

[Paul Thurot]

Google Docs is a web app. I mean Google Drive, like the ability to synchronize some portion of the file system to the local computer and have it always sync and remain up to date. It's not a feature, it's not a thing. In Linux there are third party utilities. Again, you're always like, all right, so I want to use OneDrive, like maybe it's OneDrive. I want to use OneDrive. My files are in OneDrive. How do I do that? There are third party services, they don't offer files on demand, but they're better than nothing. And that's what you do. And so you make these kind of compromises and yeah, I guess you can still use that 8 year old computer for something. And maybe it runs Linux, maybe it just runs an older version of Windows and maybe it works for you. Maybe it does. But I mean, I don't know what we're talking about here. That's not a normal use case. I mean that's not the main street use case.

[Leo Laporte]

Some of it is that people don't. I think people have Turned their attitude about this disposable economy and then that's.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, you went in a different direction. I'm sorry, I thought you were gonna. No, yeah, no, that's part of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Say, hey, look, this is a 3.6 GHz processor. When I bought it, I intentionally put 32 gigs of RAM in it, which was a lot for those days. I've got five terabytes of storage or four terabytes of storage in it. So it's a perfect in terms of specs, except for that it's an i7 6820, but in terms of specs it's fine.

[Paul Thurot]

So I don't remember the exact details of this. I just wrote an article where I compared the laptop I was using at the time, which has DDR5X RAM running at 8 GHz. You know, whatever the speed, 8000 MHz, whatever. Let's call it 8 GHz. The 8th gen intel chip supports RAM up to half that speed. So even though you have 32 gigs of RAM, it's still, it's still the over. That's why that laptop is. So that's part of the reason. Right. So even though it has an SSD, it's still based on older, whatever, PCIe, whatever version, whatever it is. I don't know what, I don't remember. This one is a DDR4. Yeah. DDR4 is much slower than 5x. Much slower. It's half. In fact, it can be about half as fast. So, you know, that's a thing. That's part of it too. Right. So anyway, there's a lot that goes into this. But again, just to have that conversation, you have to know what you're talking about. You have to be technical, you have to care.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but most people are not going to install Linux.

[Paul Thurot]

Frankly, no. My sister, normal mainstream user, gave her some laptop several years ago and her husband texted me last week, two weeks ago, whatever. And it's like, hey, you know, this thing's slower than, you know, whatever. She would never say anything, you know, do you have another laptop? I'm like, Yeah, I have 27 laptops. Of course I can give you something. But like, but that's what normal people do.

[Leo Laporte]

But I feel like the industry, it's a little bit. The burden is on the industry to make it easier for normal users not to throw out your laptop every five.

[Paul Thurot]

Years or to make them easier to recycle. Right. Like, if you bought this thing knowing that, well, a, it was upgradable in Some meaningful way like a framework laptop. Right. Most laptops you can replace the ssd. Most today you cannot even add RAM or replace ram. But there are different components obviously you can replace.

[Leo Laporte]

But my point is that the Microsoft, the manufacturers, Dell, they don't want that to be. They want it to be the geeks that do it because they want mainstream users to buy a new one.

[Chris Hoffman]

Right, of course.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, of course.

[Chris Hoffman]

I love to say something a little dangerous, which is, you know, there's, there's this obvious tension here where every company, including Microsoft, is saying, well, our number one priority is sustainability and reducing waste. And also buy a new computer. Why do you want to keep using that old one? You got to buy a new one. It's like, well, their number one priority.

[Leo Laporte]

Is to their stakeholders, no matter what they say.

[Chris Hoffman]

So the messaging is this greenwashing. It's the same thing in AI, right? Our number one priority is getting our emissions and our energy is down. Also we got to have started all this power for AI because that's also. Well, you know, so yeah, I was at CES a few years ago and, and there's a lot of this kind of greenwashing of like the company will say we have these amazing wireless keyboards and mouse made of recycled ocean plastic. So you have the built in battery and you plug it in. We're selling these to these companies that want to be more sustainable. It's like if the company wants to be sustainable, first of all, shouldn't it just keep them?

[Paul Thurot]

Just keep it? Well, yeah, that's the same. You say that. We say that about cars too. Right?

[Chris Hoffman]

But it wants to be sustainable. Why is it wireless? Like isn't it more sustainable to just have any keyboard that you plug in with usb? It doesn't have the built in battery, you don't have to deal with that. And it's like. But the point is about selling the product. It's selling the ocean keyboard. It's selling this idea of like. No, but well, no, it's, it's marketing. Yeah, it's marketing. Right. But it's weird that there's not really a push for recycling, which recycling is its own thing. Like if you think that a laptop you drove off to be recycled is going to be like beautifully recycled, like, you know, look into what actually happens with that. But.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I feel like we're kind of getting there in a way. Right. So cars, if you think about it, are kind of the same thing. I mean, there's an argument to be made rather than buying that Prius or whatever electric vehicle to save the world, to keep driving the thing you have. That way a car doesn't have to come over and ship from China or wherever or whatever it is. Right? There's all these reasons, but at some point that car is old enough where actually it does make sense to get the new thing. And the question like, in other words, if you had like a 1970s vehicle with a Cadillac converter that actually required regular gas and you have to do something to make normal gas work in that thing, at some point it might be better for everyone if you were using a modern car. And so the question here, I guess is, is the PC there yet? Or you know, have we hit that point and is 8th gen a catalytic converter cart? Not exactly, but.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, but people don't necessarily trust, you know, Microsoft the lines Microsoft draws. So it's a perfect moment to talk about copilot plus PCs and all the wonderful new AI features that definitely need an NPU. Definitely cannot be done on a desktop PC or anything with the GPU. You need to get rid of your computer right now and buy a Copilot plus PC because you know, to do this AI stuff, you're going to need the npu. It's very important. There's no way.

[Paul Thurot]

So we only have a couple hours, but maybe you could digest that conversation down to those feet. What are those features?

[Chris Hoffman]

It's like recall, which everyone wants, everyone loves. Can you know the worst thing about recall is how boring it is. There's been a year Microsoft bet the company on this feature. Like, bet the company's reputation because it was this massive blow up and then recall finally arrives and I was using it for months before it released and it's so boring, it's terrible. Like, no, as, as an experience, it's bad. And I'll tell you why. Like, one of the obvious things is like, if I'm, you know, scrolling through stuff really quickly, if I'm going through emails, if I'm going through a webpage, if it is actually taking a screenshot every five seconds, it doesn't capture everything I saw. So I can't actually rely on it. If you even have the full text.

[Paul Thurot]

Look, I don't know if this is empathy or what the word is, but I on one level understand that some people might find this useful. I don't know if they're visual thinkers or something. I don't remember. But we all think of things or remember things in different ways. So maybe those people are out there where they're like, I was looking for green Pants. I always use the example. It might be good at finding that in your history, whereas if you searched, you don't even know what store you were at or whatever. Maybe it makes sense. I find it to be pointless for my needs, but I feel the need to point out that Google, Apple, the companies that are making platforms, all have some tool like this now and none of them have generated any controversy. It's not on by default. It's on 0.01% of computers and of those computers, probably 0.101% even use it.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, it goes to show the lack of trust people have in Microsoft in general and the lack of, you know, it's like, oh, it's going to be local, oh, that's going to be local. And all these other things on my Windows PC are suddenly cloud. Like my desktop suddenly is opted into being a cloud sync. But I'm supposed to just understand that that's going to be local. Yeah, but of course, me, you have.

[Paul Thurot]

A green leaf icon in Windows Updates, so you know, it's fine.

[Chris Hoffman]

And of course when they announced it, they said, hey enterprises, you're not going to be able to turn this off with policy that's up to your users. And it's like, well, we wonder why people got upset.

[Paul Thurot]

I, I know, I, yeah, right. I, I haven't tried this yet, but Google, I think it was Google, I lose track of this and I actually cut this out of the notes because who cares? But there, There are approximately 117 new AI features released every single week across all of these platforms. So it's hard to keep track of this. But the point of recall is that it's capturing information that's on your screen so you can go back and, and search. Because that AI capability is pretty well understood and pretty efficient and it works pretty well where it can do image recognition or text image recognition or image to text recognition, et cetera. But that requires local AI for some reason. Whereas the other solutions to do this, I don't know if it's Perplexity or Google or. I'm sure they all will do it if they don't do it right now, will work side by side with whatever's on your screen. So why do I need local AI for this? Like why, you know, it appears to just work. So I don't know. This is a cart before the horror or yeah, cart before the horror situation. I think they were trying to get that thing out quickly, but also have some compelling use cases and they came up with what they thought was one and it wasn't. And I wouldn't buy a Copilot Plus PC for this feature. But I do think the click to do stuff is actually really interesting. It's going to expand. If anything, it's going to bog down. This simple Windows 11 UI with all these giant menus of actions. But that's kind of cool. I also don't understand why it requires local AI that should just be everywhere.

[Chris Hoffman]

You need the NPU to detect when an email address appears on your screen. Because otherwise, if we don't have the npu, there's just no hope for fixing. There's just not possible.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Chris Hoffman]

That's what they say, right? You can detect. We now have the technology with the MPU to detect what a phone number looks like.

[Paul Thurot]

Wow. I mean, listen, that is, I still use applications that do not accurately control a text box to reduce so that it only accepts numbers. You know, which is crazy when you think about it.

[Chris Hoffman]

Also, even if you have the NPU and you open Notepad, the MPU can't do anything in Notepad. You're going to have to spend that credit from your account on that one. You have the Copilot PC. If you open Microsoft Word, you hit Copilot. No, you need Copilot Pro, not a Copilot plus PC. Copilot plus has nothing to do with Copilot.

[Paul Thurot]

Even Excel running on a 64 bit processor does not have enough cells in it to show the matrix of AI features that are in Windows 11. So you can see what you get with what. Because it's really confusing and in many cases it's not obvious looking at it, why you have it, or why you might have it on one computer but not another. So the best example of this is paint, oddly, because if you open that app, depending on your computer, you'll see some number of features under a Copilot menu. There's others that are outside of that menu too. Some of them come through your Microsoft 365 copilot license, if you subscribe or whatever. Some come through being a Copilot plus PC. Some are just there for everybody. I mean, I, I can't off the. I mean, I feel like I know a lot more about this than most people. And off the top of my head, I don't think I could rattle through an accurate list of what you get with what it's confusing. So, yeah, that's a unique Microsoft problem. They're. They're really good at that. So, you know, this is the company, remember, that had Windows Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate Pro Enterprise. I'm probably forgetting some. I don't remember. They had all these different versions and it's like, guys, come on. So yeah, Windows 11 is simpler, but that's. You have to take that in context too.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a little time.

[Paul Thurot]

I just want to everybody, I didn't intend for this to be an extended rant, but I don't know. Well, I guess I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's good.

[Paul Thurot]

No, but at least we have the copilot button, the keynote. Thank you for reminding me of that little piece of nonsense.

[Leo Laporte]

These are important topics. These are important topics. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and our special guest Chris Hoffman from Windows Intelligence. Chrishoffman.com youm should go to that website.

[Chris Hoffman]

Chrisbhoffman.com Chris B.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't forget the B. That other Chris Hoffman, was he a hockey player? What is he something else?

[Paul Thurot]

Like a porn star or something? Porn star.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, Chris baby, the B is silent so we call him Chris Hoffman. Anyway, ChrisBhoffman.com do bookmark that because there are changes are coming and you'll want to have the right information. So that's all I can say. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurot and Chris Hoffman sitting in for Richard Campbell. I'm Leo laporte. We're so glad you glad you're here.

[Paul Thurot]

Let's analyze this week's tech innovations and startup moves.

[Leo Laporte]

Honestly, Elena, I didn't track the updates, but I did switch to T Mobile.

[Paul Thurot]

With their new Family Freedom offer.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not the disruption we're covering. Well, I'm pivoting from AT&T and scaling up with T Mobile.

[Paul Thurot]

They paid off my family's four phones.

[Leo Laporte]

Up to $3200 and gave us four.

[Chris Hoffman]

New phones on the house unicorn status.

[Paul Thurot]

Introducing Family Freedom Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network.

[Leo Laporte]

Visit your local T Mobile location or.

[Paul Thurot]

Learn more@t mobile.com FamilyFreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone16128GB8299 Eligible trade in eg iPhone11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact T Mobile. You can make a difference in someone's life, including your own with a job in home care. These jobs offer flexible schedules, health care, retirement options and free training. They also provide paid time off and opportunities for overtime visit oregonhomecarejobs.com to learn more and apply. That's Oregon home care job. Jobs.com on.

[Leo Laporte]

We go with the rant. Don't. Don't let me stop you.

[Paul Thurot]

No, actually most of the stuff. Come on. Yeah, most of this is pretty good. So yeah, there's some positives.

[Leo Laporte]

This was a good version of Windows.

[Paul Thurot]

We'll try to balance it out a little bit. Microsoft has been a solid adopter of Rust across the span of their platforms. They're putting it all over Azure, they're putting it all over Windows and Server. The Surface team doesn't get a lot of credit for this, but they've redone all of their drivers are now written in Rust as well as the firmware. And Microsoft makes that available to anyone that wants it, meaning PC makers. And of course you can imagine hp, Lenovo, Dell, whatever, Like, yeah, right, Microsoft, that's cute. But it's something to look at because there's something to Rust, obviously. So now it's starting to document how third party driver writers for other hardware devices can switch over to Rust as well, either partially or completely, whatever, over time. But that's a solid move, I think, for the industry. So that's good. I like that. There's also, you know, you were mentioning this with the Samsung device, there's the link to Windows app, which is built into Samsung devices, but other Android and iPhone users can download from the store. Different levels of experiences there depending on what type of device you have. But on Linux, I'm sorry, Linux. On Android, at least Linux. Android.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, it's based on Linux.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, there's a new version. I've not seen it in person yet and it's killing me because I really want to try this out. But they're turning the link to Windows app, which is the phone part of this connection, into a kind of a simpler new app which if you're familiar with or have seen or used that kind of little sidebar thing that goes on the start menu now in Windows 11, it actually to me looks just like that. And it's more of a hub for doing things between the phone and the device because there's some level of functionality that again differs by device. But you could do things like copy and paste like Apple users can use between their devices, or just share files or receive files. Like a place to go and see, you know, what was in the clipboard from the Windows PC but on the phone, or what file you've shared from the Windows PC to the phone. Like there's this, you don't have to go all over the phone to find those things, right? So to me, this looks really nice and I'd like to see it in person. I don't have my phone here, right. But. But yeah, I've been checking every day and it's like, I still. Maybe because I'm in Mexico, I don't know, I can't see it. Let's see a couple of builds, nothing major, although there is one term in here I want to highlight. So dev and beta channels of the Windows Insider program are getting the same functional updates. Dev is on 25H2, beta is on 24H2. There's that settings Agent feature they're rolling out. That was on Snapdragon before. It's on x86 now. If you have a copilot plus PC, click to do improvements. Windows Search improvements. You know, that kind of Copilot plus PC type stuff. The fun one in here, though, is called the Skoob. So Windows user has a lot the Scoob.

[Leo Laporte]

Like Scooby Doo.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So this one is funny to me because I've never heard this term before. And in fact, if you look it up in the Windows user interface, it is not called this. But when you. By default, if you don't change anything, you install a cumulative update, you're probably going to be prompted with that full screen experience. It looks a lot like Windows setup, where it says, hey, you should finish setting up your device. And you're like, I already. I did finish setting up my device. What are you talking about? But it will give you some options there. So that thing is, they're referring to it now as the second chance out of Box experience, or Scoob, as opposed to the out of box experience, which is one of the two major parts of Windows setup. In the Windows in Windows Settings, if you go into. I think it's. Yeah, System notifications, additional settings, you'll see an option there. It says suggest. Actually, that's not the right one. Let me get the right one. This is the way to turn that off from happening. So suggest ways to get the most out of Windows and finish setting up this device. That's the Scoob.

[Chris Hoffman]

So can I complain about that name, like, Second Chance? I've seen that thing so many times over and over on my computer. That's like the 20th chance experience.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, exactly. And it's. For me, this is one of my problems. So because I have to see what real people see, I would turn this off. Like, I would just turn this off personally. But I need to see what it's doing. Right. So the one thing you will see over time is it actually changes. Like, they've changed the language, they've changed the layout and stuff. And so. So they don't usually call it out, but this time they're calling it out. So what they've done is put a. And I think I must have used that screenshot, right? Yeah. So they have the three big options, which are. The way they describe it is if you're doing yourself a favor, but really you're doing a favor for Microsoft. Like, every one of these things could be tied into Microsoft benefits. You're going to back up your app and settings. You're going to use your recommended browser settings. Right. Bing is a search engine, Edge as the browser, and then you're going to import automatically from other browsers. And by other browsers, they mean only Google Chrome. And the idea there is that you sign into your Google account, and if you use Google Chrome on a different computer or that computer, and you're adding extensions and saving bookmarks or whatever, it will sync that back to Edge so that when you do use Edge, it looks and works a lot like Chrome. And maybe you won't notice you using Edge. You know, like, this is the theory. But, yeah, look, if you're not, me or Chris strongly recommend just turning this off. It's useless. I have no idea what the point of this is. It's like an extra step before you get to the desktop. For some reason, when you reboot, sometimes it's kind of there.

[Chris Hoffman]

I love how it comes up and says, you've got Microsoft 365. Okay, thanks.

[Paul Thurot]

No kidding. Thank you. Thank you for telling me. No, it's crazy. Like, it's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Congratulations.

[Paul Thurot]

You would benefit from this if you would just. Just click this box and give us more of your private data. You have no idea the benefit you would get from that.

[Leo Laporte]

So cool.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, you're right. I have no idea. And there is no benefit. There have been two Canary builds since we last spoke. None of them have new features, so there's not much to talk about there. But both of them are fixes. And then just little things that we've seen elsewhere in other parts of the Insider program. So on this computer I'm running here, for example. Yeah. For some reason. Well, not for some reason. If you don't have a Copilot plus PC, they move the search box to the middle top of Settings, and now you can get that in Canary. So that's how exciting that thing is. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. Hold on to your hats. This just happened this morning, but Adobe released beta versions of Premiere Pro, After Effects Audition and Media Coder that are Native on Windows 11 and ARM or Windows 11 Arnarm in beta.

[Chris Hoffman]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

They took their time just now.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Well, these, they did Photoshop pretty quick.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I don't know why this took so long, actually. You could actually run all of these apps in emulation. They would be okay if you're a heavy video editor. Obviously that's not an ideal scenario, but.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I think they did it for the Mac a lot quicker than that. But maybe I'm wrong. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

But the Mac very quickly became arm, you know, like Windows. It's still a very small percentage. The fact that they're doing it all is actually a positive sign. Opera, God love them, sued Microsoft for antitrust issues in Brazil. And of course, the big question there is, why Brazil? And the truth is, it has complained to the United States and it has complained to eu. In fact, Opera was one of the companies that kicked off the complaints that turned into the Digital Market Act. But Brazil is one of those markets where Microsoft behaves even worse than usual. And Opera actually has a higher than usual market share. And they would be doing even better if Microsoft wasn't preventing users or at least hiding or, you know, doing their deceptive dark language, whatever, all this stuff they do in that country. So they're trying to get the Brazilian antitrust regulatory body, whose name I can't remember, to get Microsoft to stop that. I look at this stuff and it's all the stuff you already know. I am using Edge, but it tells me it prompts me to use Bing. I am not using Edge, but it runs Edge even when I click Search highlights or something in widgets or whatever. It's the same stuff. But they also have deals with PC makers in Brazil where they pay them not to bundle other browsers and to use Edge, which in other countries is actually not possible. They're doing things there. It's like riding a bike, I guess. I don't know what they're doing, but yes. What a world we live in. So that's good. And then, Chris, this is what you should talk about. I'm curious about your take on this, actually.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, it's funny, there's now just this constant drumbeat of negative recall news because it's this great. I don't want to criticize the developers, but it's not. It's just observing, like if you're an app developer of Anything privacy related on Windows, you now just can come out and say, we care so much about user privacy, we are blocking Recall. And then every few weeks there's another story like this. It was Signal and it was Brave and now I think it's adguard and there's going to be hunts and drumbeat of stories about this. And, you know, some of it's true. Like, I think it seems fair that I think Signal's original point was saying, like, Microsoft doesn't give us an easy way to block this. They said they were going to. Did they? I don't remember. Maybe they did. But like, as a user, you can opt out of apps, but the developer can just say like, you know, we're using the DRM to block this from being captured. But you know, is there really good developer experience? Say, hey, hey, don't capture my app, please recall. I don't know if there is, but I don't know.

[Paul Thurot]

There is actually.

[Chris Hoffman]

Should there be? Apparently Microsoft doesn't think so. Or apparently they just don't care about Reclaimer because, like, whatever. But you know, it's just this weird. Recall is weird. It should become the poster child for privacy concerns.

[Paul Thurot]

And yeah, I mean, well, I will say to date, the three examples that you cite, which are the three examples are all in their own way privacy related. Right. Brave markets the privacy of the browser, et cetera. So you could make a case that the audience that would use Brave would want to block this thing. It's also the audience that would never enable that thing in the first place. So I'm not, you know, again, this is one of those weird discussions. It's like the audience that would care about this is like, yay, someone's blocking recall. Awesome. That's what I want. You know, it's like, yeah, but you're not, you're not going to use recall, so what's the difference? But to me, this is fine. It's the way it should work. There should be a simple API for any app developer to just. That would guarantee that this thing is not recorded.

[Chris Hoffman]

It's messed up because I think Signal is pointing out by doing the DRM thing we're going to break accessibility software. But Microsoft doesn't give us another way to do it. And it's like, should Windows really work like that? I don't know.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean, we can kind of debate the specifics. An app should be able to have an interface that opts out of that. I don't. There was a discussion around Brave is doing it by default and it's like, well wait a minute, is that the right thing or should you allow the user to control that? They do allow the user to control it, but their default position is it's going to be off. It's not going to work with recall. And again I think for that product it's like okay, that makes sense. But however it works, whatever the interface is, whatever the APIs are or aren't, the user should have this choice and they do. I mean if use recall. But again, I don't know, like recall, like the type of person who would use recall is by definition probably non technical. Thus they're probably not going to go in and go through every little interface and settings and do those things. I don't, you know, are you. Somebody emailed me over the weekend and said, and they used a really extreme kind of example which I'm not going to get into. But let's just imagine that you are an individual, you have a computer and you want to do something that you don't want other people to know about. It could be banking, like something private like that. It could be porn, it could be your googling how to kill somebody. Whatever it is, doesn't matter, that's your issue. It's, it's whatever. I don't want recall recording that right? I mean you're not using recall right? Like any of those scenarios. And if in the case of, I don't know, maybe banking, definitely porn or whatever it is you were probably using like a private window of some kind in a browser, those things are not recorded by recall by default anyway. Recall is only on copilot PC PCs. And so it has a stringent level of security that does not exist on normal PCs that's also helping to protect that data. You know, for someone to get at your snapshots, they either have to physically put you in front of the camera, if that's how you're signing in, or force the pin out of you or move your hand onto the fingerprint reader, whatever it is. And you get bigger problems when that's happening. Right? Like this is, this isn't a recall vulnerability. This is just a physical access common, you know, this is common like we've all seen the movie where you know, it's like sci fi thing and they cut the guy's hand off and use it to go through the door or whatever. I mean like if that's the problem, the fact that your recall history is now available to that person is not the least of your problems. But man, you've got bigger Problems, that's all.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, I'm going to make a prediction and. Sorry, I'm going to predict that recall is going to be going away because the only people I see talking about recall are people beating up on it and maybe technical like us trying to.

[Paul Thurot]

Do like it's a black mark almost. Yeah.

[Chris Hoffman]

Microsoft is not there with like one year after the launch of Recall and now that it's live, here are some user stories of the people using recall in business to help them with their copilot species. Microsoft is like, no, no, no, look at click to do.

[Paul Thurot]

I know as soon as the words came out of use of Mehdi's mouth, I was like, oh no, not because.

[Leo Laporte]

I haven't used it. The problem is just your device.

[Paul Thurot]

I wasn't worried about it. What I was worried about was that Microsoft has a certain cluelessness about how they're perceived in the world. Like Google does this all the time. Like Senator Pichai will get a message and say the world trusts us with their. And I'm like, I don't think you understand what the world thinks of you. That's not the case. And I feel like as he was talking about it, I was like, oh, this. I can see the complaints coming already. I didn't actually see the depth of the complaints that were. That did come, but they could have done a much better job of communicating this. But you know, as I pointed out at that time before they started delaying this thing, like this is only going to be available on these PCs that are windows at the time were on ARM only. Like they're not going to be very many of these. And even if someone made the explicit choice to buy that kind of computer, most of those people are not going to enable this to begin with. And they were initially going to have what was essentially a public preview, but only on those computers over the course of the second half of last year. And that just turned into a private thing and they made changes. They didn't make that many changes, but whatever they supposedly improved it, they'll just kill it.

[Leo Laporte]

They'll just change it.

[Paul Thurot]

I just, I don't think it matters. I don't think it matters that much. I.

[Chris Hoffman]

And, and I'm sorry, I think it again, it just goes to how people feel about Microsoft, how people trust them. And this is going to be a big issue. And I think we start talking about Copilot in a bit and Microsoft's plans for Co Pilot and its place in your life.

[Leo Laporte]

Does it have a place in your life? Does it?

[Chris Hoffman]

Oh, it hopefully will According to Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

I use ChatGPT a lot and perplexity, I use even more.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I use it for research. We have a friend who has a disease, an illness, symptoms that nobody's been able to figure it out and we're trying to use AI and there's lots of things people use AI for. I use it for research all the time. It makes mistakes. I know it makes mistakes.

[Paul Thurot]

And you know, the selling of AI is tough. I sort of alluded to this earlier. Where is the AI and these features in Paint or whatever in Windows 10? Where do you get this stuff? And the inconsistency of I might have a computer and I have whatever features because whatever computer I have, I go to my wife's computer, she's like, how do I do this thing? I'm like, you don't even have this feature I have. I don't even know. I don't like that aspect of it. Like this is a problem. I think today it's been a problem for Microsoft for a long time but it's worse now with AI. Yeah, recall it now is just one of whatever, a dozen or more kind of copilot plus PC specific features. But it's the least useful of them to me. I mean I personally.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, have you tried the image generator in the Photos app? Because you might change your mind after that.

[Paul Thurot]

I have. So I mean this is one of those things I was saying I'm not going to remember this exactly, but if you use. I'm going to get the names wrong probably. But in Paint, not Photos, but in Paint, if you use the Image Creative feature there, I think that's the one that's AI based. It uses AI credits. It's ridiculous but it will do these kind of, you know, high quality, pretty good. But then there's the co creator which I believe is the Copilot plus PC one. It does the same thing. You can do other things. You can draw a little sketch and it turns it into something better looking. But whatever, it doesn't matter how you do it. If you do it exactly the same way as with Image Creator, what you get is a cartoon drying that in no way approaches the quality of what you can get in a normal web based AI or whatever it is, Internet based. And that's one of those limitations of local AI today it will get better, but it's still not as good. So it's like, oh great, I paid all this extra money, got this extra feature and it makes garbage.

[Chris Hoffman]

If I'm a normal human being, if I'm A normal human being sitting down in front of Windows. How am I supposed to know that? Oh, the one in Photos is bad because it's local. But the one in Paint, that's good and it's going to use AI credit. It's a lot better because using a cloud based model can paint, but not in the Photos app.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know. Listen, every one of us has done this at some point or another. We have run into some problem with Windows. We debug it or figure it out and we find a solution. We figure it, we solve it. And I always think, I don't know how a normal person would do this. I'm invested in this. This is my life. I spend more time on this than I spend on my relationship, relationship with my family. And how does someone who just. This is like a tool. I use it to get work done. I don't care. Why is the screen flickering? Why is the performance so slow? Why does, you know, whatever. Whatever the problem is. Right. Good luck, you know, so it's like finding an AI feature in a single app on Windows 11. This is beyond anything these people are capable of. It's. It's not them, it's not their fault. It should. This is stuff that should just work. I'm sure Copilot will solve all these problems. He says stupidly. Probably not. Okay. There's some hardware related stuff around Windows. I'm just mentioning intel earnings in here because we've been mentioning this stuff and intel, as everyone knows, is kind of circling the drain at this point. That's going to continue. Sadly, they actually had a decent quarter if you look at it in isolation. And that was because of the coming end of Life of Windows 10. And there's been a lot of buildup of stock in these PCs that can run Windows 11. And short term benefit, that's going away like they said, as soon as this current quarter, that's over. But the big issue, and there's a lot of issues in there, they're cutting back everywhere. But they had eliminated, I don't remember the number of jobs in June, maybe 5,500 somewhere in there. But their plan now is to eliminate about 24, 25,000 jobs, calendar year 2025, so that they will be about 25% smaller overall by headcount by the end of the year than they were a year earlier. So there's going to be more layoffs. So yay or whatever that is. And then we have.

[Leo Laporte]

So depressing.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, yeah, it is. Well, it. Yeah. But again, get to remember it's important. Look, I don't want. It's not like I want intel to die or go away or whatever. I desperately do want x86 to die and go away, but I think it's important to remember how horrible this company is or was at least.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, it's not that they didn't earn it, but I feel bad. There's tens of thousands of employees.

[Paul Thurot]

They had a decade and a half of chances to do the right thing technically and do the thing that Microsoft had been bugging them and then begging them to do for so many years and make their chips more efficient and better for mobile and see the world as it was evolving at the time and address it, please. And remember when Microsoft kicked off Windows 10 on ARM, Terry Morrison said, he's like, I don't care if ARM wins. I just want the damn intel stickers off the laptops. I just want to see a. If the outcome is intel actually makes more efficient, more reliable chips. Fantastic. That's all we really want. We just want the computers to work. You know, the laptop I'm about to review, and Chris is going to talk about a couple here too, is in some ways fantastic. But it's an intel core Ultra Series 2, whatever product, Lunar Lake, it is the most unreliable, annoying, aggravating experience because you never know when it's going to fail you. You just know that today, sometime it will. Maybe more than once, you know, it's. It's fundamentally is broken and that's the best these guys could do, you know, like, I mean, up and, you know, they'll do better this year, I guess, but it's. It's a nightmare. It really, really makes me sad that it's not better. Not because I have a love of intel, but this is all they did. They ignored cloud and mobile for the most part. Could you get this right? No, I guess you can't. I don't know. It's too bad. Okay.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, obviously intel, you know, from a mobile perspective, I see Comment from mobile perspective. You know, the power usage was. Battery life was bad for so long. I mean I had so. I've had so many suspend resume issues, which on a laptop is just such a mess. I mean, maybe, maybe it's better now, but a few years ago was so bad.

[Paul Thurot]

It's. No, it's not better.

[Leo Laporte]

So did Paul, you call it the hot bag. You think that was Intel's fault?

[Paul Thurot]

It was Intel's fault. Well, that was a combination of Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

It was intel and the operating system not handling it right.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, it was a lack of experience on Microsoft's part, not understanding this is the original, that this is what happens and it's up to them to fix these problems. Like, they saw this and said, oh, you have a flaw in your chip, right? And intel was like, yeah, we do. You're right. You're supposed to. So you're going to fix this, right? And they're like, no, we're not fixing it. I. And you know, to the other PC makers, that was just kind of cute. They're like, this happens every time. It's just that you don't really hear about it because we just do it. Yeah, yeah. That hot bag issue was very specific to Surface and Microsoft, whatever. But no, the stuff that you see on Intel PCs today is you open the lid, you just used it maybe two hours ago or last night, whatever, and you open it and what's it going to do? You know, it could be anything. Could you go through a full boot process? It could come right on. That actually does happen sometimes. It's wonderful when it does that because my Snapdragon XSpace PC does it every single time. It just works. That's reliable, it's consistent. This thing, it's like, I don't know what I'm gonna get. I'm on battery life on this thing. And the performance drops. If you run benchmarks, you'll see, like, intel trips are the worst for like, performance drop, drop off on battery. But the numbers that you see are in no way resemble the real world problem, because this happened to me this morning. It was especially bad last Friday when I was writing this enormous article. But the performance drops to the point where the computer is literally unusable on battery. And I had to close every app. I had to plug it into the wall and eventually I just rebooted because it was never coming back. And it's just. Lunar Lake in particular is just. It just has so many problems and I was just rushed to market and it's something that just spans. It spans. All I've reviewed was it 25, 27 laptop, whatever it was last year. The Lunar Lake ones are the worst. They're just all of them as a one, as a group or whatever.

[Chris Hoffman]

I feel like I've had a better experience, though.

[Paul Thurot]

I've had better experiences, too, but that's the point. It's inconsistent. Like, it's. It depends, you know, it's. They are the least reliable of the modern chipsets. There's no doubt about that.

[Chris Hoffman]

Anyway, anyway, speaking of cool hardware.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Chris Hoffman]

This is a cool one, yeah. So I have. I'm reviewing for PC World, the Lenovo. Let me get ThinkBook Plus Gen 6, which I don't know about names. So this is the rollable. What?

[Paul Thurot]

But it just looks like a normal show it rolling.

[Chris Hoffman]

Okay, here it is. There it goes.

[Paul Thurot]

I love how it does. Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's getting bigger.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, it's rolling up out of the inside.

[Leo Laporte]

That is filthy. Filthy.

[Chris Hoffman]

Huge.

[Leo Laporte]

Where is it coming from?

[Chris Hoffman]

It's inside the hinge.

[Paul Thurot]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're saying it's a grower, not a shower is what you're saying.

[Chris Hoffman]

So how.

[Paul Thurot]

This is like a 14 inch.

[Leo Laporte]

You can use that in your review if you want. I just.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, but what's the delta, though? Like, what do you. What are you gaining there? Like three or four inches or whatever. What's the.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty. It's cool.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Chris Hoffman]

And it's nice to have that extra decent amount.

[Leo Laporte]

You can see this creases. You can see the folds, where the folds are. But that's all right.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, but that's just the reflection. It's normal.

[Chris Hoffman]

I have that length of a.

[Leo Laporte]

It's cool.

[Chris Hoffman]

I mean. Yeah, it's like you can see the part there. So you got a chunk. Personally, I just think this is cool. This is just the kind of product that as a reviewer, you would see at CES and you'd be like, whoa, when's that coming to market? And the company was like, that's not coming to market.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, exactly.

[Chris Hoffman]

Lenovo's managed to release the proof of concept and anyone can go buy it, which is wild. I don't know if you should go buy it. If you think it's cool, you should go buy it. Is this the average computer of the average person? No.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, but this is interesting. This solves problems, right? Like, I know a lot of people, and again, these are technical people, whatever, who often travel with a second display. Right. A USB C display. And this is a way to have the same thing, in a sense, if you don't mind it being tall rather than wide. Right. And also, I don't think Lenovo gets enough credit for this kind of experimentation. The ThinkBook line, which is supposed to be for small businesses or whatever technically, but is where they do a lot of this experimentation. Right. There have been a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul, I'm demoting you to the little screen.

[Paul Thurot]

No, it's fine.

[Chris Hoffman]

It's like reasonably normal looking laptop. I mean, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

It. It's hard to tell because the camera might be a little wide. Is it a Nor is it really is a normal. Or it looks a little bigger.

[Chris Hoffman]

I mean it's going to be a little thicker. But some of the thinkbooks are a little.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but even like.

[Paul Thurot]

No, it's a 14 inch laptop. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a standard aspect ratio, whatever dimensions and Pretty standard.

[Chris Hoffman]

I think it's okay. I should have looked that up. Right. But it's like a. I think, I think that's 16 by 10. Looks pretty standard. Yeah. So, yeah, but I mean, yeah, the, the Thinkbook or sorry, the Yoga book. That was the yoga book. 9 I. They made the actual dual screen laptop.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Chris Hoffman]

They reviewed it last year and it's wild. They say it's so cool. I don't know if the average person should buy that laptop. But it's not about that. It's. It's just really cool that they're releasing stuff like that. And I was thinking about Windows 10X too, because that, because I was like, man, right. The. One of the worst things about that experience was because, Mike, it didn't really work that Windows wasn't really built for a dual display thing that constantly shifts. Like Windows isn't really built for this either. Like they have like some custom software that's doing resolution changing as you hit that. So like, you know that. That's a little bit. Some of the issue with some of these experimental computers is that Windows isn't really designed for them. And yeah, like $3200. 300 is a lot. That's expensive. Right. However, again, this is not the last time for the average person. However, to be able to buy the tech demo laptop from CES for $3,300 is wild.

[Paul Thurot]

Like these.

[Chris Hoffman]

How can they even produce it for that much money? It's not going to be a high margin. It's not going to sell a bunch of units. How can you even produce that in a factory at that scale for you? That little. I don't know. But it's really cool that it's out there. Right?

[Paul Thurot]

I agree.

[Chris Hoffman]

This isn't like praise of Lenovo. I just, I, I just like, as a computer user, I just.

[Paul Thurot]

Maybe I think it's okay to praise Lenovo. I mean, look, someone has to, to do this kind of work. You know, HP used to do more of this than they do now. Microsoft alleged. Well, Microsoft likes to think of itself as a form factor generator, but most of that stuff has been terrible. No, I. Look, they've had more misses than hits for sure. But I like that they're doing it. And you know that dual screen thing, which I reviewed last year as well. And actually, when I get back home, I have the other. Whatever, the newer ones is exactly the same. The form. Nothing has changed from hardware. You know, it's, it's cool. There's complexity to it, right? Because you've got a keyboard that doesn't have a trackpad built in, so you have a mouse, and then you have this origami thing that works as a stand, and you got to have all this together, and the pen goes in the loop and, you know, you're carrying around a lot of stuff. But if this matters to you, if that dual screen is what you want, the fact that that's available, like you said, for this thing, I think that's the important thing. Like, I think it's really cool that you can buy that if you want it. Most people don't need it.

[Chris Hoffman]

I used it while traveling, and I was able to set up a dual monitor system while traveling, and that was wild. I mean, yes, you can get a, you can get a portable monitor, which is one of the issues, but it's, it's just, I don't know, it's just cool. Like, I, I, I love just weird and interesting products like that. And that's one of the cool things about, like, shows like CES and, But normally you're just reading, you're either there in person or you're reading the news about it, but the fact that you can actually buy it is.

[Paul Thurot]

I didn't read this, but there was some headline. I'm sure people will recognize this when I say it, but it was like, I'm upset that PCs have gotten boring. I wish it was better. And it's like, you're not looking hard enough. I mean, you can buy, if you just need a standard laptop for work, whatever those are there, it's fine. But this stuff is available if you want it. There is innovation occurring. It doesn't mean that we found the future form factor that everyone will use or anything like that, but, But I think it's great that they're doing it at all.

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah, I mean, it's like the key, the yoga.

[Paul Thurot]

It's, you know, it was even like the touchscreen conversation we had earlier. Like, I don't like it, I don't want it, but I also don't, like, hate it. So to the point where I'm like, I don't think anyone should have it. No, it's fine. Like, if you want it, it's great. I love that you have that option.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think Microsoft should have kept the Neo.

[Paul Thurot]

No, no, no, because that was really, that was supposed to be 10x and obviously 10x didn't happen and there was no, there's no work in Windows 11 that makes that make any sense really. I don't know, I feel like companies that have maybe more experience in this area, like Lenovo, hp, Dell, et cetera, are the right place for this kind of work because they volume agreements with hardware component makers, et cetera, they can, they can go to these companies and say, hey, we're thinking about something crazy. Could you make a, you know, whatever for us? Right. Whereas Microsoft would go and they'd be like, you sold three computers last year. What are you talking about? You know, we're not doing that.

[Chris Hoffman]

The problem though is that Microsoft needs to do the system integration. So like I have reviewed a Lenovo handheld Steam Deck competitor with Windows many months ago and it was absolutely horrendous with Windows. Just the software is horrendous experience. And like the problems with issues like this is that they're hacking on with, you know, manufacturer utilities, the auto resolution change and the multi screen transformation on the dual screen device. So like Microsoft needs to do more to support them really. Like at least on an Android device. Android is nominally open source and it can be customized and you know, at a low level. But Windows is like, well, you put your driver on top and it's like.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Chris Hoffman]

I mean, well, I don't know. The weirder the device gets, the more flaky and janky it can get.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So in the Android space, Samsung is the one that was doing things like Dex is kind of comes out of that work, the live notification stuff. And you see those two, like I always said with Dex, like Dex should have, but that should be an OS feature like that should come from Android and now it will, I guess eventually this year or whatever. Yes. I mean Microsoft does something like create Snap for Windows and then improve it over time. So the version of Windows 11 is pretty good, but they still don't accommodate the stuff you were just showing off and the dual screen stuff very well. And Lenovo has to build on top of that. So there's also the kind of software complexity, folding, what do you call it, folding laptops, where the whole thing is a screen, you can put it in clamshell, put the keyboard on top. It has to recognize that the keyboard's there and all those interactions, there's a lot of complexity to it. So that's the trade off with versatility, I guess, is the complexity. But again Most people will look at that dual screen laptop, the Yoga 9i slim 109i, whatever the name of it is, and say, wow, that's, that's really cool looking. I don't want to need that. But I love that it, you know, or whatever it's there. But one out of every hundred or something will be like, oh my God, that's what I've been waiting for. You know, like, like, I like that they can get it. You know, you're not going to get this on the Mac side, that's for sure. Right. And you see a little bit in the Chromebook space about, you know, tablets and or two in one devices. But also it's just a lot more limited from hardware choice. Most of it's just laptops, you know, so at least, at least we have it. It's not all bad.

[Chris Hoffman]

Flexibility is good.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Chris Hoffman]

That's the point of the PC.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, let's take a little time out.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because we all are in agreement now. This is. You're watching Windows Weekly. Look at that. I know you're saying, what happened to Richard? He got thin and beautiful. No, no, that's Chris Hoffman.

[Paul Thurot]

They're both beautiful on the inside.

[Leo Laporte]

They're both beautiful on the inside. Richard, thank you for. I'm sorry, Chris, thank you for filling in. Chris B. Hoffman. Don't confuse him with the action figure.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, the Fillmore C. Hoffman, he is.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course, the former. I didn't realize this, but this is really cool. Editor in chief of one of my favorite sites. You helped it grow quite a bit.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Chris Hoffman]

Took it to the acquisition and then. Well, it's time to move on.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Who acquired, who acquired Evil Corp.com?

[Paul Thurot]

No.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, Valnet, as you know, is owner of. I don't even. I can't even.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they private equity?

[Chris Hoffman]

Is it one of those private equities? Polygon, Android Police make use of so many. I can, I can list stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

So they're also, you know, like. I mean, I used to work for a company that was Penton. Penton had like agricultural companies. They had, you know, the shipping and logistics. It was like, what is this company? It's just, well, how to geek so good.

[Leo Laporte]

But it was better when you were there, let's put it that way.

[Paul Thurot]

How about that?

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, anyone, anyone being under that corporate structure is going to have trouble being as. It's hard having the voice it had before, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's very hard. So it was independent up until the acquisition?

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, we were independent up till the acquisition. We were one of the last few ones.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Chris Hoffman]

So then that was.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, what's happening in the world.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah. So. And I, you know, I chose to leave. I had a job offered to stay on, but I like to, I like to keep saying that I didn't, I didn't want to really run it for Valnette and I wish everyone the best of luck there. I hired a lot of amazing people that are still there and best luck to them.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they've got great SEO, right? I mean, they keep showing up in my AI searches.

[Paul Thurot]

That feels inertia and vestigial based, but. Yes, but yeah, absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

It's also part of the new Google Zero movement where you're not getting, you're showing up in the search results, you're showing up in the AI, but you're not getting any traffic anymore.

[Paul Thurot]

Listen, I'm happy to be like a little asterisks and a description and you go down and it says, maybe I helped.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, golly.

[Paul Thurot]

It's all I ever wanted.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, golly. Anyway, Windows Intelligence is the current incarnation, although that's about to change as well.

[Chris Hoffman]

That, that, that's about to wind down and transition into my personal newsletter. And I'm still all over the place. I do a lot of work for PC World and some are publications and I'll be reaching out to more and yeah, so I'm, I keep wanting and.

[Paul Thurot]

Waiting for you to blurt something out that will be like something new that I haven't heard.

[Leo Laporte]

It's called my next and it's going to be no, remember that when the Verge. When they.

[Paul Thurot]

When, Please. I don't even.

[Leo Laporte]

When the guys left Gadget and they said, we don't know what we're going to call it. We'll call it My Next thing or something.

[Paul Thurot]

Horse. Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Parkour.

[Paul Thurot]

Crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to call it Parkour. Anyway, good luck with that, Chris. And everybody should go to ChrisBhoffman.com to stay up to date on what Chris is up to. Paul, I don't have to explain, you.

[Paul Thurot]

Know, Paul, you could not explain, so don't even try. It's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

As the kids say, iyk yk, this is Windows Weekly. Glad you're here.

[Paul Thurot]

Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips. Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips.

[Chris Hoffman]

But I did switch to T Mobile.

[Paul Thurot]

With their new family Freedom offer. That's not the itinerary we're following. Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile.

[Chris Hoffman]

They paid off my family's four phones.

[Paul Thurot]

Up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house. Bon voyage. Introducing family freedom. Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network.

[Leo Laporte]

Visit your local T Mobile location or.

[Paul Thurot]

Learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte 82999 eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact team.

[Leo Laporte]

On we go with this edition of Windows Weekly. Let's talk about AI. Have we talked about AI? Have you started using Comet?

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. So I got in, I joined the wait list. I think somebody told me, actually they added me. You can point.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff Jarvis went to their PR firm and got a journalist version. He's been sent me an invite. So that's how I got in. Maybe he's sent you one too. I don't know. What do you think?

[Paul Thurot]

It was someone else, but I am actually really impressed with this.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is perplexity, which I love, but it's their version. I almost wonder why I need a browser because it's really kind of perplexity in a browser, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, but that's the point of this stuff, right? In other words, months ago I had written this thing and I think it was partially based on what the browser company was going through. ARC had become too complex and it wasn't what they were. It wasn't the good basis for what they wanted to do. They, you know, have since switched to dia and they're trying to make that happen. Whatever the bigger players, isn't it? I mean, it is, but. So I can't. I don't have a full comparison to make yet. But I can tell you one way where.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S not so obviously Chrome. That's one thing. That's.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, it depends on what you're looking at. If you. Once you bring up the menu, you're like, oh, no, this is Chromium.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's Chromium.

[Paul Thurot]

But here's the thing. So look, browsers are going to change. They're going to change so much that someday someone's grandchild is going to say, why do we call this thing a browser? We don't.

[Chris Hoffman]

Browser.

[Leo Laporte]

What's a browser, Dave?

[Paul Thurot]

We don't browse. What is that? What is browsing?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. So they've changed the font and everything. But these are the same menu items as in Chrome.

[Paul Thurot]

It's very clearly Chromium. But whatever, that's fine. By the way, this is the point when Microsoft switched Edge to Chromium. Oh, competition, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, no, no, no, no. We need a standard at the rendering engine level where you innovate is on top of it. And this is maybe the ultimate example of that. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So yeah, you want that browser that works everywhere.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, it just works the way you're familiar with, but then can put stuff on top of it. Right. So remember, Leo knows better than anybody, but with Arc, that was one of those things. Nine times out of 10 people like, oh, this is too much. There's too many things going on. It's two different. But they. How did they do this? They kind of hijacked is a tough term. But they, they. The standard, like Control T, Control L controls, they remapped and did different things. And so it was a different kind of a experience. And so when you control L here and go to the address bar and you type, type in a thing, unless you explicitly choose it from the dropdown, it's going to go through perplexity. Right. So you still have that opportunity. See, it says ask Perplexity or Ask Google or whatever the terminology is.

[Leo Laporte]

And then this is the search I got.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, but that search that you get, that's perplexity. Right. So it looks a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the other Chris Hoffman, Chris Thomas Hoffman. He's a Zimbabwean actor and voice artist.

[Paul Thurot]

I confuse them all the time. So honestly.

[Leo Laporte]

Or it could be the superintendent of the Elk Grove Unified School District, Chris R. Hoffman. Or it could be Chris Seehoffman, who is the managing partner of the cnn. This is hysterical. I'm finding all the other Chris Hoffman's. But you know what, you're number one, the tech journalist.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So I have to say until now I've been kind of on the sidelines with this type of thing because Google is adding AI everywhere, Microsoft is adding AI everywhere. But they also have these established browsers that they don't, you know, they're not going to get too radical with these things. Right. So you have to turn to third parties. Like Opera talks about Neon, but I don't have access to that. The browser company has dia, but it's only on the Mac, so I can only use it sporadically.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a good search result for you, I think.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No, look at the sources. It's all your stuff. I mean, x Is a little high on there, but Instagram, I'm on their own. Are you. You still use X. Okay.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, I have to. This is just a reality.

[Leo Laporte]

What's wrong with you? What's the.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, it's like, why not build iPhones in America? The same problem I. Unfortunately, you know, I can't really just do that. So anyway, by the way, you remain influential in the time, despite my attempts to undermine my own credibility.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting little, little subtext subtweet there. You remain influential.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, you know, kind of. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I got to see what they say about me now. Now I really want to know.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I barely remain influential. Leo. Who's that? Oh, look at all this stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

You're an accomplished author.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm accomplished. See, I'm accomplished.

[Paul Thurot]

You're an accomplished author.

[Leo Laporte]

Zippity doo dah. That's what I accomplished. Oh, deep knowledge. I have a deep knowledge.

[Paul Thurot]

You do have a deep knowledge. This is actually the thing I think that's most impressive about you. No, I mean, it's how much you know about how much. Like this is. No, I mean it. This is a really rare.

[Leo Laporte]

That is a picture I wish did not show up when you searched for me.

[Paul Thurot]

You look like Gabe Newell there. What's going on?

[Leo Laporte]

I know what the hell that must have been at my heaviest. And this guy is not me. Oh, that's the player portfolio. Okay. Must be a soccer player.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, but this is just like a search result, like the.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but it's perplexity. So I can do the same. Yeah, but if I'm saying if I do, how do I tie a shoe?

[Paul Thurot]

I'm not saying this. What I'm saying is.

[Leo Laporte]

No, what are you saying?

[Paul Thurot]

What I'm trying to say is that everyone who has talked about an AI powered browser has used the phrase, this thing will do things on your behalf. Right. It will accomplish that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the MCP stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

This is agents and whatever else. But for that to work, either they have to manually through some kind of screen scraping or whatever you want to call it, facility, kind of force it on whatever website or whatever, or over time, things will be rearchitected and we'll have these kind of backend services that just do this by default, like Windows software. And you can see it in the Settings app right now in Windows 11 is changing to meet this exact need. Right. This is what's happening behind the covers. So as a programmer, you could write an app that changed one feature that is exposed through the Settings app, or you could even have the Settings app Launch to the exact page and highlight that feature. Right. So they're making it more. I'm going to call it Componentized because I don't really have the language for this. But it's happening. This is going to happen everywhere. So one of the things that's really cool in here, which does not work with DIA, by the way, is you can go to Google Maps and say, give me a walking route from my current location to. And I'll just name a restaurant Mexico City somewhere. And it interacts with the page and does that. That. It creates it for you. It doesn't move the mouse around. It's not controlling the mouse. But the box highlights, text goes in, it hits the enter, it goes. The thing happens, the map changes. It actually is controlling that web app. And if you type that into same exact query into D, it's like, yeah, that sounds like it'd be a really cool feature. You'll have to do that inside Google Map. There's nothing on. On in the page I can see that helps me do that. Like, it can't yet do that. So I'm sure it will someday. I'm sure they'll all do this someday. But like, I was kind of going through all of the examples that Perplexity provides, like the types of things you can do with Comet, and I was like, okay, yep, okay, that's pretty good. You can, without being on Google Calendar, you can say, give me a summary of my week's schedule. And it's here it goes. You know, you have to give it permission, obviously, but that's this thing Will is already integrating with web. I'm going to call them web apps, web services, whatever. To a degree that is starting to get kind of interesting, you know, and when you see that happen, when you do that for yourself, it's like, huh. Like you can see now you can kind of see it like they've been talking about it, but this is the first time I've experienced it anywhere where I'm like, okay. And you know, Perplexity as a search engine, I guess it seems like it's pretty good. Honestly, like, I've been so far, I've been using it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, I use Cocky still more.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Because one of the things that happens when you use an AI search engine is frequently when you just want a site, you get a lot of extraneous stuff and it's, you know, oh, the site's up there in sources like, if I were searching for you, if I did it in Kagi, I'd get Your site right away. I mean, it just feels.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels a little complex. The other thing, something that Perplexity has done, which is interesting, is at least in the Mac, I don't know what they're doing with the Windows, but on the Mac, they've added an MCP server.

[Paul Thurot]

Same with that on Windows, too.

[Leo Laporte]

They did that on Windows, too. So I have an applescript MCP installed in my. So I can now type a command to Perplexity. Let me see if I can describe this without being confusing. I could type a command to Perplexity. Perplexity can turn it into AppleScript. So I could say, open my calendar. And it put. And remind me that I have to call my dad because it's his birthday today, which it is. Happy birthday, dad. And it will use the Apple. It'll write an Apple script that will then on Apple, open up the calendar and add that. Yeah, that's pretty cool.

[Paul Thurot]

That's really cool.

[Leo Laporte]

You're talking about that agentic AI. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

This is also. This reminds me of the beginning of, like, what was it called in the beginning? DDE and then Olay and then Com. You know, the idea that, you know, very simply on a single computer, you could copy in one app and then paste in another app. And it has to handle the different, you know, how maybe text is formatted or if it even accepts text or if it's images or whatever it might be. And then you kind of move that to multiple computers on a network, whether it's local or the Internet. And then this is, you know, now we have this. If you have these things that are exposing interfaces, like you can control it.

[Leo Laporte]

With AI at the time, Microsoft said, and this is Longhorn era, you don't want to work with apps, you want to work with data, you want to work with documents. And we'll figure out what app to use.

[Paul Thurot]

That's the dream.

[Leo Laporte]

That was the dream. Right?

[Paul Thurot]

And that's orchestration. You just described it. Right. I think this is the goal. The ultimate goal of this stuff is exactly what you just said, that whatever the situation is, whatever hardware you're on, whatever you're asking it, it will determine if it's local or out in the cloud and whatever. And you'll ask whatever. I need to buy a plane ticket to whatever place during whatever time period and let me know as soon as this happens. And, hey, this thing just went on sale and it's 100 bucks off or whatever. Here's the. You know, and you get to go do it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's your Assistant now?

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Like your personal assistant.

[Paul Thurot]

And then having said that, of course I write about this. And then people are like, well, I mean, are you comfortable giving perplexity access to your Google account or whatever? It's like, are we seriously having this conversation again? This is like when Cortana was added to Windows 10, it was one of the features, right. Of Windows 10. It was like, well, I went to turn this thing on, it was like it needed access to my calendar, to my contact. Like, what is this? It's your assistant. The point of the thing is that it works with that stuff. If you're not comfortable with that, do not use that thing. That's what it does. It has to work with your data. That's the point. So, yeah, am I comfortable? No, but I accept that. I want to see if it works.

[Leo Laporte]

Chris, are you a big AI user or not?

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, I've been doing a lot with it. I think I've been. I don't have access to Comet yet, so in terms of agentic browsing. No. I did enable Copilot mode in Edge earlier and I was about to talk about how that isn't really the same thing at all. But yeah, I think like long term, the dream though, in terms of comfort, in terms of privacy, long term the dream is, you know, local AI. You have your local AI that runs on your device and that's long term dream. I mean like that, that isn't the current copilot PC plus PC with this MPU. But yeah, maybe, you know, and maybe in five, 10 years that will just happen on your device and you won't have to say, are you comfortable with uploading that to a server?

[Paul Thurot]

I think so. I feel like it's going to be accommodate. I don't, I'm not sure the end game is just everything is on your device because we're just going to, we're connected all the time. Right. So yeah, like some things will be better or faster, whatever the, you know, term is. But the point of AI orchestrating this is that you, you ask it a request and it's whatever. Well, like whatever resources you have, it will find the best way to do that. If it's local and you have an mpu, maybe that's what makes the most sense. If it's local and you have a gpu, maybe that's what makes sense. It should just do it for you. But right now we have all these kind of hard coded solutions that it's like the things we were talking about in Paint, like, oh, do you have A copilot plus PC. Then you have this stupid feature, it can only work this one way. That should work multiple ways, right? Like that should work no matter what kind of computer you have. But yeah, it's a mess.

[Chris Hoffman]

Companies might self host their own models and their own data center or stuff like that. Right now it's like using perplexity. That's just what it is.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Yeah, that's funny. It's like grounded AI as the new on prem server, you know, kind of. It's something to it for sure. So anyway, if you do, if you've signed up for the waitlist, you get this eventually. Whatever it is, I have to say it's not perfect. I don't mean that and whatever. Mostly it's just a browser. But there is a future here where it's like you're going to be talking to your computer, you're going to be just talking and it will pick up that you mean it to do something and it will just happen. That's part of what's going on in that browser. And then just the interaction with online services, which is the real power here. Because if you think about it, when you search, you might be looking for a simple answer. It's like what's the capital of some state and is the answer whatever. Search engines do that. But sometimes you want something more complex. Sometimes you want something deeply personal, whether it's a relationship or health issue or whatever it is. And it will talk through this with you and maybe point with the right thing. I think someone mentioned earlier this notion of AI helping doctors find diagnoses that they would not have come to on their own. I've learned, read a lot of stories about that. My own son's life was saved 27 years ago by a doctor who said, this is going to sound crazy, but this looks like bacterial meningitis, a thing we have not seen in 20 years or whatever. And it was. And if that guy, if he had got any other doctor, would have been like, he has a cold, he's fine and he would have died.

[Leo Laporte]

So holy cow.

[Paul Thurot]

Like that? Yeah, like that stuff is. That's life changing. Like that's amazing. I mean, so look, it makes mistakes, we get it, but so do human beings. I mean, it's going to get better. This is fascinating to me. I think our whole world is about to change. Unless you're using Microsoft Edge. Go ahead, please.

[Chris Hoffman]

It's so funny. I saw the news earlier. I went in, I flipped the switch and I put in copilot mode. And then I Said, let's go, let's. But let's navigate Google Maps just like in Comet.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. How does that work?

[Chris Hoffman]

I mean, it's just the same. I don't understand how it's different. The blog post, it's saying, but I can do some tasks. It didn't say what they are. It just seems to be the same. It's like it has the copilot and it can see the browser and it's.

[Paul Thurot]

Fine, but you're missing the major way that it's different. And I'm surprised that you missed this because it's so obvious. They move the Copilot icon from the top right to the top left.

[Chris Hoffman]

Actually, there's something I love about it, which is that when you flip that on, your new tab page becomes copilot. So all the viral headlines are gone. And that's the. It's the best I've ever seen for now, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Like, yes. I mean, you could do that work to make your new tab page simpler. You could, you know, replace it with something else, which is what I do. But, yeah, same thing. I. When that thing comes up, I'm like, nice. The only thing I would like is the ability, like on momentum or I use Bonjour to just arbitrarily add shortcuts that are just down there all the time. You know, like, it will see what you're browsing and add some. But I would. It'd be nice if you could configure it. But yeah, that thing comes up and it's like the. It's like the cure to the normal new tab page. Yeah, for sure.

[Chris Hoffman]

What's. What's weird to me. And we'll talk. Maybe we'll talk about that when we get to Copilot in general. But they're saying, oh, well, Copilot is going to help you cut through the clutter in your online life. It's like Edge is the most cluttered browser I have ever used. And I used to use it in the early days when it was Project Spartan, and I just eventually had to switch because the new tab page, the menu, the shopping features, every little thing, the sidebar that comes up by default, and it has the MSN game link. And it's like, I can't. I just can't use this. And they're saying, well, don't worry, it's going to cut through the clutter in your life. Don't worry, you're going to have an AI generated feed of good stuff you want to see. It's like, well, I know exactly what you think about generated feeds that I want to see Microsoft and I'm not sure I'm on board with this.

[Paul Thurot]

You're describing a Microsoft service that when it's fully realized, will be a paid service that will solve a problem with a free Microsoft product that they created. And it's like when Microsoft was selling antivirus software in the early 2000s to consumers. Right. One Care. It's like, guys, you're solving a problem you created. Like the cure should be free. Like it's, it's your fault, you know? But yeah, you're correct. Yeah. So I do find it coincidental and I'm sure it is really. But that Microsoft, the day after I got Comet, was like, oh, we have a AI browser. So I feel like they've been working on this for a little while. They've got a long way to go. I think for whatever reason, every day there are AI announcements. But they, they didn't really preview this. They, this wasn't. When we heard about it build and they're like, here it comes. And then eventually it came. It just showed up out of the blue. And it, like you said, it doesn't feel like it's much, but I think it's because it's the basis of where they're going. It's not there yet.

[Chris Hoffman]

But I mean I, I think they just, it, it's not ready yet. It doesn't have all the features. But launch it, Launch it. We need to get the hype out there. Everyone else is launching eye browsers. This needs to be an AI browser. And if you actually go look at like the Google Play Store, iOS App Store they call Edge and AI Browser. Like they have that in there for like the SEO Edge AI browser. They've been client AI browser for a.

[Paul Thurot]

Long time, but it's just a browser. It's just a browser.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, I mean they, they did beat Google in a lot. Like Google just Chrome just got Gemini integration. So.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, right.

[Chris Hoffman]

As a value add.

[Paul Thurot]

No, but that's, this is what happens with these giant monopolies. These big tech companies, right. They're protecting something. They want to push forward with this thing, but they also don't want to step on the thing that's working for them. That's why Microsoft and Google and Apple, I suppose with Safari will be slower moving than these little companies because they're protecting empires. And if you're looking for something really innovative, it's going to be the browser company or Opera or Perplexity or whatever. And, and maybe those things are Good enough that they influence these bigger companies to then do things like that. I mean Microsoft does talk about this stuff. I mean they were early on with mcp. They were early on with if anything they were too early with this stuff agents and they talk about it. Microsoft at Build, not this year but a year ago talked about adding local AI capabilities that developers could use in their own apps and they only delivered the first preview of that in January this year in it's still not available generally to everybody. You have to use a pre release version of that SDK like it's, you can't actually ship code with it. So you know they have like this dream, they have this idea, they have, you know but the reality takes a long time to occur and part of it might just be that Microsoft's such a big company, you know.

[Chris Hoffman]

Well, I mean honestly I'm going to maybe push back against that a little bit because I think think, you know I had that's a take I had in computer world recently in my column is like Microsoft actually Bing Chat was the first AI search engine. Microsoft was an early investor in OpenAI and actually when Bing Chat launched it had a GPT4 model that was more powerful than what you got Chat GBT at the time. Like Microsoft was ahead of everyone in consumer AI at that point. So yeah, no, they're not trying to cannibalize this. It's like. But the funny thing, the sad thing is if they want to be ahead, they were ahead. And then they kind of just I don't know what.

[Paul Thurot]

So yeah, look, whatever happens, whatever the history is, Microsoft kicked this off. There's just no doubt about it. That day in February two years ago, Yusuf Mehdi and they went with the Bing brand to begin with, it was just like what if you look at that announcement it was like advancements for Bing and Microsoft Edge. And you're like what? It wasn't until March that they took the Copilot brand that they had from GitHub and applied it to Microsoft 365 copilot and then by the end of the year they had 117. I think the number of Donna Sakara supplied me with Copilot branded products or services. Right. I mean and this is you know itself kind of a unique Microsoft problem where they don't brand things very well. But when they do land on a really good brand like Windows, they tend to beat the death out of it. You know, like they just use it and use it and use it. And then of course I think Microsoft knew Google OpenAI, of course. And then other companies were going to race to catch up and surpass them. So that partway explains the chaos of all the releases of them putting Copilot into Windows before that major release of Windows to ensure everyone had it right. Of changing the architecture, so to speak, of the Copilot App in Windows 11 has changed at least three times that I know of, and probably more. Right? Probably more. So it's sort of like Windows 10X. I have to give them a little credit for trying, a little credit for moving quickly. Because they don't typically move quickly. Right. I mean, it's amazing to watch this. It's sad in a way because they've created a lot of churn and uncertainty and little things. Like that situation I mentioned in Paint, which is not like a huge issue, but. But there's like features everywhere. And it's like, do I have this? Do I get this with this? How do I have to pay for this? Like what? You know, like, it's hard to know what's what, but that's what happened. They're moving fast, you know, it's a mess. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But I did the same as you. I turned, I flipped the switch and I was like, okay, they moved the icon. Cool. That's fun. What does this thing do? I'm like, it doesn't really do that much. Right. I mean, it's cleaner. I like the new tab thing. This is a stupid thing, but I do like it. I don't know. Have you. Well, I don't know if this is available yet. So they announced a. Like, they're going to add expressions, meaning, like humans, like when I react to you saying something or whatever to Copilot, which, you know, raises the ugly specter of Clippy coming back.

[Chris Hoffman]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, one of them is going to be a paperclip and, you know, people are going to choose it, you know, right now.

[Leo Laporte]

It's good reasons. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

It's like. Yeah. I mean, it's the current design they're showing off. It's just a prototype, but is like a blob. Because we're having trouble, I don't know, visualizing our new God here, you know, apparently it's a marshmallow with a fun little face, you know, But I. I don't know, maybe this will make it more.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. What was that?

[Paul Thurot]

Personable or something?

[Leo Laporte]

It was Casper the Friendly Marshmallow.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, exactly. It's just so weird.

[Chris Hoffman]

There's like two Angles. There's the new feature, which I don't have. Access. Only a few people have access to it. I don't have the appearance toggle. I haven't used it. But there's the appearance thing, which is they're going to give it a cute face in voice mode. And then there's what Microsoft AI CEO is saying on podcasts about how long term Copilot is going to be your buddy. It's going to age, it's going to live in a room, it's going to have a face. It's going to remember you over your life.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Chris Hoffman]

It's going to be a continuous observant and observer and participant in creating new culture alongside you. It's going to have a lasting, stable presence with memory. It's going to be designed to be your life coach, your productivity assistant, and your teacher wrapped up in one. I'm just giving quotes now.

[Leo Laporte]

It could be a tomato with a blue mustache.

[Paul Thurot]

Unfortunately, it has dementia. And, you know, look, I'm sure it will get there. Chris, you weren't around for this, but a week ago, maybe two weeks ago, we were talking about just the ways in which Copilot has been failing so far. I mean, things could change, obviously. But part of the problem Microsoft faces is that for whatever reason, ChatGPT, especially OpenAI, has just such a good brand. People know about it, use it, they choose it over the thing that might be built into what they have already. It has achieved that magical thing where it just is like a hit with normal mainstream users. For some reason, I would think that if you're a Fortune 500 company, Microsoft 365, like, you're going to use Copilot, obviously. Like, it's the one that's going to integrate the best with all the stuff you're using. But there's indications that's not happening either. So I don't know. They got to be hitting. I'm not saying it's desperation moment yet, but like, they're clearly just throwing stuff at the wall at this point. Like, oh, we got an AI. You have an AR browser. We have an AR browser. Oh, you. You know, like, they just like Google announces, like the audio overview feature, basically podcasting, you know, for whatever the thing is. And Microsoft's like, we have a podcast thing too. It's like, of course you do. Like, of course you do. You know, So I don't know, maybe they'll. Maybe it will land.

[Chris Hoffman]

It's hard to say the bizarre thing if you read the stories, like, yeah, because there are Stories about, you know, companies, employees just went chatgpt. They don't want Copeland, they don't want this or that. And it's like, if you read the stories, it's like, supposedly Microsoft thinks, well, people are going to want a different consumer AI at home. They're not going to. They're going to want different AI at work and a different consumer at home. So. But first of all, it isn't true because people are choosing ChatGPT in both cases, statistically speaking. Second of all, if that is true, why are you calling them both copilot? Because people will have the copilot for Microsoft 365 at work. That will be that brand. And then people have their little copilot at home, which will be their little life AI friend, which is what Microsoft is doing. And that if they want a different one at home, they shouldn't be called both copilot. I don't understand the branding.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, you've triggered so many memories here. But I'll just use one simple example. It's always a similar problem, which was Microsoft on their whatever blog, Microsoft 365, whatever it was called at the time, would come up with like, hey, here are like five new features coming to OneDrive. You're like, oh, interesting. So you're reading through it and you're like, okay, what is this? And then you realize halfway through, they're talking about OneDrive for business, not the one that consumers have. But they never really differentiate them, even though they have basically the same name. And it's like, guys, some features would be here, some would be there, whatever. That kind of thing's always been a problem. But you also touched on an issue I just kind of glanced by earlier today, which was Microsoft is a browser that nobody seems to want to use for the most part. It's. It's Chromium. It's basically Chrome. It has Microsoft stuff in it instead of Google stuff. So compatibility, performance, whatever, it's going to be similar. They're doing nice work, honestly, on some of the stuff with the UI and redoing it and whatever. But, okay, who cares? But literally there's an option built into Windows that it will steal data from Chrome every time you launch the browser. It will sync with this backend thing because they want you to think this thing is Chrome and they have the OpenAI stuff. They can use it. They're going with the same brand across business and consumer. And everyone's like, yeah, we don't care. I don't want the thing that's like, it whether it's good, bad or indifferent. I don't know that anyone could honestly say ChatGPT is better at XXX than Copilot today, but if they could, tomorrow it will be different. Two weeks from, you know, it'll be different. It changes all the time. So yeah, it's the same strategy. So this came up last week. I think it's like, what do you call it when you keep doing the same thing and you expect different results? They really are in that way using the same playbook. And that playbook has not worked for them with Edge for sure. And it hasn't worked with them with Copilot against OpenAI either.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, that's such a good point. Like, you know, if, oh, if I use Chrome, convince me to switch to Edge. Well, it's almost the same as Chrome, but like, well, what's the difference if I, someone uses ChatGPT, convinced me to switch to Copilot, it's like, well, it's basically the same thing under the hood, but it's like, well, where's competitive advantage?

[Paul Thurot]

It can't be a percent better, it can't be 7% better, it can't be better at this one thing if it's 40% better or whatever. Now it's like, okay, I'm listening. What do you got? What do you got? You know, but that's the thing. These things are gonna, they're all going to kind of land in the same place, aren't they? I mean, and because of the fast nature of this in MCP and the interoperability that all these AIs are doing, you could be this random person who's like, I do use OneDrive and I use Microsoft Word and I use, I have a Microsoft 365 subscription, but I also have Gemini and that's what I use with word and with OneDrive. And it works fine, it will work probably the same way. And then you could mix and match in any direction you care for. I don't, I think it's just all going to kind of work. Yeah, we just, Sorry.

[Chris Hoffman]

But the other problem is like if people are, someone's really into it and they're paying for the subscription, it's like an average person is not going to Pay for the 20amonth chat GBT and the 20 month Copeland and the 20 per month Gemini subscription. It creates a like I, I, someone say, I chose Chatbot because my friends use that, I pay for the subscription. Why am I going to use a different one?

[Paul Thurot]

They're also not going to launch the same query against multiple AIs to see which one's better and then keep doing that for the foreseeable future in case it changes. Most people are just going to use the thing. You don't notice it until it doesn't work or until it annoys you so much that you want to move on to the next thing. But everything's moving so fast right now. I don't know that they're all in the same place with the same workloads or whatever. I have. No, I don't know. I don't. I don't know. It's complicated. Anyway, they're trying. I God love them. It's, you know, it's like that old. It was that meme thing. It was like, you know, Safari, Firefox and Chrome. It was like we have, you know, we support PWAs, we support, you know, Web2, whatever it was. And it's like Internet Explorer at the time I think was like, yay, Internet. It's like they're trying. They'll get there. Maybe they won't. All right, what do we got here now? So long term, copilot plans. This is where it's all going to come together and the future is going to make sense.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yes, I was rambling about that already, but.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Chris Hoffman]

I mean, the plan according to Microsoft AI, CEO and a podcast is. This is.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, you're talking.

[Chris Hoffman]

It's going to be your life coach and it's going to be bald in every part of your life. It's going to interweave fiction, your real life. It's going to. He said very soon my AI will join this conversation. My co pilot will be in my copilot. Our co pilots might be in this podcast in a few years. Right. Talking.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, I.

[Chris Hoffman]

Talking.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you talking about? Chris B. Hoffman.

[Chris Hoffman]

But that's this co pilot vision they have of. It's going to be your buddy. The consumer version, the work version, that's totally different thing, although it has the same name. But the consumer version is going to be your buddy. Right. And I don't know, just. Do people want the Microsoft branded AI friend? Even if, you know, let's say they do want an AI friend. Let's just agree with that. Everyone's an AI friend. Do you want the one from Microsoft?

[Paul Thurot]

Right. I want the one that says Scarlett.

[Leo Laporte]

Johansson is the one I want.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, yep. I feel like Elon Musk.

[Leo Laporte]

They'll be a differentiator, to be honest. What's the differentiator going to be?

[Paul Thurot]

I think that's the problem Right. If my look Microsoft and we should just acknowledge that and a lot of it is in full featured productivity solutions like Word and Excel and all that stuff. Right. And so if you're in that space a consumer, but more likely a business. Yeah, there might be. There either are or will be advantages to Copilot, et cetera.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess, you know, there is the tyranny of the default. If you're using Windows it might just be Copilot because you're using Windows.

[Paul Thurot]

Except that we've. It's already been defeated. Chrome has broken through that with web browsers. That's the primary success of that product to me. Like they've gotten people to get off of the, of the default and on Macs too by the way. Although not to as great of an extent. And then OpenAI I feel like they've done it already with AI same thing I Switching is either hard or perceived to be hard. It doesn't really matter. But either way, paying for it or not, most people make that choice, they use it and unless it betrays them in some major way, they're not going to be looking around. You know, they found the. That works for them, right? I don't know. I usually. Well, I mean like when do you turn off notifications on your phone? Do you install all your apps and then go into the Settings interface and be like, okay, that's off, that's off. Or do you wait till you get an annoying thing and you're like, no, you get rid of it. Right. I think that's just kind of human nature. So yeah, the pop up that Microsoft will absolutely display actually sorry, already is. I took some screenshots of this for Copilot where it's recommending things it could do for you. Is the moment where you're like, nope, you know, because what is that? Like, get out of my face, I'm doing something.

[Chris Hoffman]

You know, especially in new laptops which all seem to have the copilot key. Like that's. I'm sure that that's. The internal metrics are saying copilot launches are going way up on these new laptops because you can just bump the key. But you know, maybe that's not actually helping. Maybe potentially it's not actually helping your brand if you're accidentally hitting the copilot key all day going like, ugh, closing it. I don't know, maybe just a thought.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't. I'm sorry, I'm trying to. This guy in discord, I'm trying to understand what he's trying to say here, Copilot is going to be the most used AI in Windows because it's the default. Like Edge is the most used browser because it's being. I'm sorry, he's being sarcastic. Sorry. Okay, like, right, I'm like that. We've already pointed out that that's not the case. Yes. Okay, sorry. You do get it. Okay, look, I don't dislike or want Copilot to fail. All I can do is tell you what's happening so far and it's not great. So I guess we'll just see what. I don't know. We'll see. So Google, like Intel and actually, by the way, before we're done with the show today, most likely Microsoft will announce their earnings very soon as well. But they announced their latest earnings and I have to say, I guess anything could change. But as of now, $96.4 billion in revenue in one quarter.

[Leo Laporte]

That's amazing. What was the profit on that?

[Paul Thurot]

28.2 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

Too many Christmas.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. So profits were up 19%, revenue 14%. Yep. I think the figure, yeah, 65% of the revenues came from advertising overall, you know, across all their properties. But they have honestly, a strong cloud business. They have a strong workspace business. They have pretty good. It's kind of a nebulous thing, but like subscriptions and devices and something else which is, you know, Pixel and Google One and whatever else they have for consumers. So, yeah, I mean, search, double digit revenue growth, these are a little more vague, but, you know, they have AI overviews, AI mode, et cetera. Those are performing well. They don't have numbers for that, of course, but why would they. But yeah, I think Google's going to be okay, you know, for the short term. I mean, there are things that can happen to Google that will change this, of course, and including some antitrust issues that you may have heard of. So we'll see what happens. But I would say, at least so far, there's no indication yet that the rise of like whatever, chatgpt and et cetera has impacted them in any kind of negative way yet. So that's actually really interesting to me.

[Chris Hoffman]

I think the big thing is they have to compete, Right? If we were talking about this five years ago, we'd say, like, what's going to replace Google? Now we say, what's going to replace Google? It's like, well, there's some plausible things if Google doesn't get stacked together, right? So, you know, they have to compete. And they've been pushing hard on Gemini and they've been frantically trying to turn Google into AI search engine as well and doing all this stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

And they, I mean they had a lot of this early on but didn't put it out because it was going to harm that business. Right. You know, so they, they played a major role here. I feel like by any objective measure they're up there. I think they're actually in better shape than maybe some people think with AI or whatever. But yeah, I mean Apple infamously was good about saying, okay, we've got this one dominant product finally an ipod. Like what could replace this? And it's like, well, a phone. Okay, so we need to do that. We need to be the ones that replace the thing that we have. You know, Microsoft was not necessarily great at that, although they did find other successful businesses. Obviously that company's doing pretty good too. So there's that. But yeah, I mean Google could. Maybe it works out that Google replaces search, you know, or changes search enough just like browsers are changing that it becomes where we get answers. Right. Because if the Google AI stuff is in search or you go to Gemini and it's some kind of a chatbot experience, whatever. If it's, if it's the same thing, you just have your choice of how you're going to get those answers. I guess so we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

But let's hustle through the. We only have about 20 minutes left in the show, so.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh God, how did that happen? Oh, okay. You're at the two and a half hour mark. I'm so sorry, I didn't realize that. Okay, just real quick. Yeah, I can do some quick stuff. I'll just quickly. Satya. Nadella sent out an all employee email discussing the company and the, and ostensibly the layoffs and kind of the rationale for it. There was no rationale for the layoffs in there but Microsoft thought enough about it. They published it on their website so we could all read it. And yeah, you know, Sachin Adela doesn't really. A lot of words but not a lot of content. So I'll just leave it at that. In the Xbox gaming space. Gamerscom is coming back in August. It's annual events in Germany. Microsoft always go or Xbox goes. They will be there. The big news for me is that they're going to show off and let people use hands on the Rog Xbox ally gaming handhelds for the first time. So that's going to be interesting. Just for that, there's a July Xbox update that is actually just for the PC. I think that might be the first time they've ever done that. And these are just two big bucket features that we've been talking about for months that they've been testing in the Insider program. The Xbox Insider program, the ability to stream your own games on the PC, including console games, which is. Well, that's what the game streaming is, console games pretty much. And then cross device history, which is just an extension of Xbox Play anywhere where you can move from device device. And I think this is the Xbox Ally gaming handhelds point to this. They're clearly moving toward making Xbox just be essentially a PC platform. And then Chris has some less good news about that.

[Chris Hoffman]

I just wanted to throw that in there because I already saw this happen with the Lenovo Legion GO s that I reviewed. Is like if the big push is for Xbox gaming PCs, they're not hitting the price point of the Steam deck. So the Steam deck is. I don't know what's going to have to happen there. But if all these Xbox gaming PCs are coming in hundreds of dollars above the Steam deck, I don't really know how they're going to grow a market there.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So the operating system that's used by these Ally gaming handhelds is Windows, but it's also cut down so that it doesn't have all these background processes going. And the Xbox app is the front end ui, not the shell. Or is the shell, I should say. And so this is a way to make Windows smaller, lighter, whatever, fewer resources. So make it more competitive with Linux in that way, which is important, but while retaining the compatibility. Right. I think the reason you might spend more on a Windows based gaming handheld would be game availability. Because the Steam deck is Linux and it's whatever subset of games that they offer. But Windows is Epic and gog and Amazon and whatever. Like wherever you get games, it's just games. Right. And Xbox of course. So that's the idea. I mean, whether it's feasible or possible, we're about to find out. Right. Because I haven't used one. But we'll see if these new. What are they called? Ally gaming handhelds, if they pull it off. I don't know.

[Chris Hoffman]

Know.

[Paul Thurot]

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

[Chris Hoffman]

Competition's good.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Yeah. And it's good for Microsoft to be in the space. People have been clamoring for an Xbox game gaming handheld since there was an Xbox. Right. I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Well, so that's what this is the ally. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But you didn't like the Legion so much.

[Chris Hoffman]

The Go just the window you know, they hadn't done the, they, they still haven't, I think, released the, the version of Windows that's going to.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I see.

[Chris Hoffman]

So the OS was the Windows Desktop experience.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not good.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, not good.

[Paul Thurot]

That's not good. Is that what the one do they give you a choice, like, you can buy it with Windows or with.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, you can now buy it with SteamOS. So, like, literally coming, you know, it's not just, oh, do you want the Steam Deck or do you want a Windows PC? It's like, do you want the same PC with Windows or Steam os?

[Paul Thurot]

Right. You know, that's interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, we're going to take a little time out. When we come back, back at the book, we're going to get some tips and picks and I think we're going to do a beer pick for, for a change. People are saying, oh, there'll be no whiskey. Oh, no. But there will be beer because frankly, you can't get through this show without alcohol.

[Paul Thurot]

I refuse to believe anyone spends a lot of time in Windows and is not an alcoholic. I.

[Leo Laporte]

This show and all the shows we do are brought to you by. Are great friends in the club. Our club Twit members bless you and thank you. They pay 25%. Look, we didn't make $92 billion last quarter, so, I'm sorry, $96.4 billion last quarter. So much as I wish we had. We do. All right, we have advertising, but truthfully, advertising alone doesn't cover our costs. Only about 75% of our costs. For the rest, we go to you, our fabulous audience, and we're really grateful to our supporters in the club. What do you get? Well, you get. For 10 bucks a month, you get ad free versions of all the shows. I think that's a pretty good benefit. No more plugs for this or any of our products. You also get access to the club Twit Discord, which is full of animated gifs and other fun things. It's also a great place to hang even when there aren't any shows on. So these are people chatting about Windows Weekly right now. But there are other things going on in the club, including special events. In fact, we've got some big events coming up Friday. Our AI users group. I've invited Alex Lindsey to come and show us how he uses midjourney. But we'll see what we do there. We record many of the shows like Paul's Hands on Windows, that you don't see video if you're not in the club. You only get audio, but in the club you get the video. You also get the live recording. Same with home theater geeks. This one coming up August 4th. I bet you Scott will want to talk about the value shootout. We have a new best TV in the world, king of the TVs. And Scott likes to talk about that. Our home theater geek himself. IOS today. Our Stacy Book club's coming up a week from Friday. Very good book called this is how youw Lose a time or read it if you can. We'll be talking about it on on Friday. And I'm trying to get Jason Snell to stop by because he also thinks this is one of the best books out there. Right after it's photo time with Chris Marquardt. Our assignment, the word classic. Not too late. Just take a classic picture, upload it to Flickr. We will be covering the Pixel 10 announcement August 20th. And just a little heads up, from now on, we do all the keynotes in the club only so that we don't get takedowns. Google didn't do it. Microsoft didn't do it. Apple did it. So we just thought it'd be safer to do it in the club. I'll be sewing during Micah's crafting corner. But you could do any craft you want. August 20th. These are some of the things. Oh, and don't forget, Micah's gonna do a. He's gonna be our dungeon master and he's planning to run a one shot adventure in the club on Friday, July 24th.

[Paul Thurot]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

That's wrong. Oh, next year. Oh, okay. He wants a lot of time to plan this adventure. In fact, he's giving you some time to take the poll about how we should do this. All of this by way of making the club be a great destination for people who care enough to support what we do. It's your reward if you're not in the club. TWiT TV Club TWiT. Please join. We would really love to have you.

[Paul Thurot]

Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips. Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips.

[Chris Hoffman]

But I did switch to T Mobile.

[Paul Thurot]

With their new Family Freedom offer. That's not the itinerary we're following. Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile.

[Chris Hoffman]

They paid off my family's four phones.

[Paul Thurot]

Up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house. Bon voyage. Introducing Family Freedom. Our lowest cost to switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network.

[Leo Laporte]

Visit your local T Mobile location or.

[Paul Thurot]

Learn more@t mobile.com FamilyFreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone16128Gigabyte8,2999 Eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact T Mobile.

[Leo Laporte]

Now it's time for our tips of the week. Let's kick things off with Mr. Paul Thurat. Actually, you're both in this one.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, we both have a tip and a pick.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

And then of course we're both in the. Yeah. So we've already kind of talked about this, but Chris and I are going to continue partnering on newsletters. So I will support him, the work he's doing. So it's going to be fun. And so I guess it won't be till mid August where this is all comes together, but we'll get together before then, figure out exactly how this is going to work. But yeah, stay tuned. So that's something to look forward to.

[Leo Laporte]

If you subscribe to the newsletter now, will you automatically get subscribed to the new one?

[Chris Hoffman]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so don't. You don't have to if you're actually, you should go right now to Windows Intelligence and subscribe and then that way you'll have it and you won't have to worry about where it's going because you'll go with it.

[Chris Hoffman]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. Yes.

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah. And then in terms of tip, like I also wanted to mention, like, since we've been talking about Click to Do and everything, like the Snipping tool on Windows 11, the OCR feature in there is so good and still almost no one knows about it. You know, you can just hit Print Screen or Windows Shift S, I think, and then just, you know, select some text and copy paste in anything. And it's funny because that's one of the key features of Click to Do if you have a copilot plus PC. But it's really useful on Windows 11 PC and also in Windows 10. You can do that with a PowerToys text extractor if you download PowerToys. So the integrated OCR is one of my favorite things, honestly. Even a Martin smartphone where you can select text and I think don't miss out on that feature because you can.

[Paul Thurot]

Also just right click on an existing image and open with Snipping tool and do the same thing. It's become incredibly versatile. It's really nice. The app pick is also sort of a tip. I had gotten into Perplexity Comet right through the waitlist, wrote about it and someone wrote in and said, this is going to sound strange, but if you have a Samsung device, download the Perplexity app from the Galaxy Store, sign in. However you sign in and you'll get Perplexity Pro, which is $20 a month free for a year.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Paul Thurot]

I was like, come on, there's no way.

[Leo Laporte]

I already paid for it.

[Paul Thurot]

I did. Worked. It's weird because it doesn't say. It doesn't be like, hey, congratulations, you got a year. It doesn't say anything. But the Perplexity app shows Pro and the thing. And then you get an email that says, hey, you signed up for a year. And I'm like, wow, so my wife does it. Yeah, it's. Look, this could be limited to the United States or something, or it could be limited to whatever, I don't know. But I know of at least five people now who have done this and it's pretty silent about it, but it works fine. Like it works great. So I wouldn't normally go to the Galaxy Store, but why not?

[Leo Laporte]

That's wild.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's crazy.

[Chris Hoffman]

And yeah, yeah, I also did that a while ago and it works. And it's a reason to use a Galaxy Store, which is rare but on Windows. Like, I love auto Dark mode so much, you can grab it from the store. Like, I don't understand why this isn't integrated in Windows. It's integrated in other platforms. It's integrated with the nightlight. I think it's called Nightlight feature. But you know, I like Dark mode sometimes. I don't always want it in dark mode. I usually want it in dark mode if it's night and it's dark. So it will just automatically, you know, work with sunset and flip back and forth. That's just the way it should work with the toggle and settings. But you know, you can do it for free.

[Paul Thurot]

Could not agree more. I think the only reason it doesn't is because it's still kind of half baked. There's still too many windows that are not, you know, modernized or whatever. But yeah, this is such an obvious feature. It's excellent that you can do it this way. Yeah. Woohoo. And then Chris.

[Chris Hoffman]

Okay, so has a beer pick.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, nice.

[Chris Hoffman]

So it's ha. It's halfway between. Well, not maybe not halfway, but it's related to a brown.

[Paul Thurot]

A Mary Jo wig that you could wear.

[Leo Laporte]

We haven't had beer in a long time.

[Chris Hoffman]

So I used to live in Eugene, Oregon and there's a brewery out of there called Ale Song and they do a lot of Bourbon Barrel Age beers. So this is both a beer and. Well, it is a beer, but it is related to liquor. So it's partway in between. And I don't know, I just really like Bourbon Barrel Age beers in general. And this beer, you'll have to pretend it says Rhino suit because most of them are called Rhino Suit. But I didn't have the rhinestone in my basement. But it's basically the same thing. And I wanted to talk not about the tasting notes, but about just the cool story that I think I may have heard from them when I was there. Like, why would you call it Beer Rhino Suit? And you know the story they say is when they were starting up a business, you know, they were talking to a friend who's a winemaker and he said, well, running a business is about putting the people put walls in front of you every single day and try to stop you from doing things and what you have to do. When someone puts a wall in front of me, I put on my Rhino suit and I just break through that wall over and over and over. And they thought it was a funny story and they called their first beer Rhino Suit because it was about. I mean, it's about business and it's about honestly anything in life about, you know, breaking down barriers and stuff like that. So I apologize to anyone who's expecting a lot of tasting notes. Although it does taste very good and it's dark and rich and whatever. And if you are near the, you know, Pacific Northwest, Alesung is great. So I would recommend picking that up.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paul Thurot]

So I just got a Microsoft 10k email because I get an alert. So that means they're probably are about to or just did release their earnings. One second.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, we have a whole three minutes left. You could.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I could cover this extensively, you know, if Edge would just work. Yes, they did. So Microsoft revenues of 76.4 billion, by the way. 20 billion less than Google.

[Leo Laporte]

That's amazing.

[Paul Thurot]

18% net income is close though. 27.2 billion, up 24% year over year. And then I can't. I'm not sure how much I could do like off the fly this. But just reading the this. Yeah. Windows OEM and devices revenue up 3%. Xbox content and services re Activision up 13%, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, you get the idea. So, yeah, fundamentally productivity and Business processes, which is Microsoft 365 biggest business again, because remember, they pulled the revenues out of Windows for that part of IT revenue. Intelligent cloud, almost 30 billion more. Personal computing is still stuck in the 13 billion range. 13.5. So, yeah, I think they're going to be okay too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Yeah. But interesting that Google has done so much better. Tomorrow we get the Apple results.

[Paul Thurot]

So Amazon is going to have to happen within the next couple of days too.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think anybody's going to approach 90. What was it? 92.6.

[Paul Thurot]

96. So I think, think Apple. Well, Apple could be up there. Amazon will be over 100. I mean, they'll, you know, Amazon. Didn't they just have their prime day thing? That was that quarter. Right. So they'll probably be. These companies are all going to be okay, guys. Don't, don't worry. You know, I know it's concerning you're.

[Chris Hoffman]

Worried, but it's a load off my mind.

[Paul Thurot]

These little American mom and pop stars, they're going to be okay. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

I picked a good time to invest in technology, ladies and gentlemen.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, bad time to become a Microsoft employee, but, you know, other than that, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's why the stock goes up, right? Yeah, sadly, employees hit door, stock go up.

[Paul Thurot]

I know I'll never understand this world, ever.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, I hope they have options as they leave.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Ladies and gentlemen, we have come to the conclusion of this fabulous episode of Windows Weekly. Chris Hoffman. Thank you.

[Chris Hoffman]

You.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

He lives in New England.

[Paul Thurot]

New England. I live in old Mexico.

[Leo Laporte]

I also live in old Mexico, but we call it California now.

[Paul Thurot]

Chris, by the way, Leo, sorry to interrupt. They want it back, so I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

They can have it as far as I'm concerned. I would like to be a part of the proud.

[Paul Thurot]

It turns out there's some lingering resentment.

[Leo Laporte]

Over that you took our state. We still have the missions. All the Spanish missions are still here.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Chris is, of course, @chrisbhoffman.com. don't forget the B. Otherwise you will get the Zimbabwean actor or something else. I don't know what you're going to get, but if you go there, and I would recommend you do, sign up for the Windows Intelligence newsletter, which features Chris and Paul Thurat. You'll also get free copies of Paul's Windows 11 and Windows 10 field guides just for signing up. That's a pretty good deal. Chris and Paul are migrating, but if you sign up now, you will migrate along with them. That's the good news. Are you going to change the name, Chris?

[Chris Hoffman]

Yeah, the name is changing.

[Paul Thurot]

Chris. What is that name?

[Chris Hoffman]

I could say it, but it'll be so much better once it all is released at once. And you can.

[Paul Thurot]

I think he's chosen a good name and a good format and we'll see.

[Chris Hoffman]

But I, I think it'll be, I think it'll be a lot of fun.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm very excited. So Chris, I appreciate your filling in. Richard will be back next week, but Chris Hoffman, we really appreciate it. Chris.

[Chris Hoffman]

Be thanks so much.

[Leo Laporte]

This was so much fun.com Paul Thurat [e-mail] and of course lanepub.com for his books. Everybody should go and sign up to the Windows Intelligence newsletter and then you will never lose track of these two as much as you might try.

[Paul Thurot]

I know. Try as you might.

[Leo Laporte]

We do Windows Weekly Wednesdays right about 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. Watch us do it live if you wish. If you're in the club, of course you get behind the velvet rope access in the club Twit Discord. But you can also watch it. It's open to the public. The unwashed masses may wash, watch and [e-mail] twitch tv, x.com TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. We're on all of the platforms and if you chat with us on those platforms, I'll see it here in my unified chat screen. So that's a good way to participate in the show after the fact. Though of course you can watch the show or listen to it at any time. Download a copy from Twitter TV WW. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. Great way to share clips. But of course the best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done. And if you're podcatcher allows reviews, please give us a five star a plus thumbs up review. Give whatever it is, five clippies, whatever it is that they, whatever they use, you give us, you give us all of them. All right. Thank you very much for your participation and we thank you for being here. We'll see you next time, winners and dozers on Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurot]

Bye bye. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.

[Chris Hoffman]

With the price of just about everything going up, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in.

[Paul Thurot]

A reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a.

[Chris Hoffman]

Thing Mint Mobile Unlimited Premium Wireless 30.

[Paul Thurot]

30 Better get 30, better get 20, 2020 Better get 20, 20 Better get 15, 15, 15, 15 Just 15 bucks.

[Chris Hoffman]

A month, so give it a [e-mail] Save upfront payment of $45 for 3.

[Paul Thurot]

Month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required new customer offer for first 3 months only. Speed slow after 35 GB of network's busy taxes and fees extra See mint mobile.com Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great.

[Paul Thurot]

You love the host.

[Leo Laporte]

You seek it out and download it.

[Paul Thurot]

You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom.

[Leo Laporte]

Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads, go to Libsynads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.