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WW 947: Hallucinated Clown Shoes - Microsoft v. protesters, round 3. Or 4. Or something
Microsoft v. protesters, round 3. Or 4. Or something
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- [00:00]
Paul Thurrott
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thuratis here. We've got the great Chris Hoffman filling in for Richard Campbell. We'll talk about the protesters taking over Building 34 on the Microsoft campus. Windows UAC gets even more disruptive and AI floundering at Apple. That and a whole lot more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.
- [00:30]
Leo Laporte
This is tw.
- [00:38]
Paul Thurrott
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Chris Hoffman. Episode 947, recorded Wednesday, August 27, 2025. Hallucinated clown shoes. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Microsoft. Let me shrink my screen and expand theirs to say hello to Mr. Paul Thurat from Thurrott.com and as we heard last week, Mr. Richard Campbell is on the road again. But we are very pleased to get Chris Hoffman back of the Windows. Now, the new Windows Readme newsletter at WindowsRead me.
- [01:20]
Chris Hoffman
Yes. Good. Great to be back.
- [01:22]
Paul Thurrott
And if you were already a subscriber to Windows Insider, you will be automatically getting the Windows readme newsletter, Am I correct?
- [01:29]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah, if you got Windows Intelligence, you will be getting it automatically. You probably already got it. So if you didn't get it, please look through email because, yeah, like, unlike.
- [01:38]
Leo Laporte
My email newsletters, his actually go out. So. So he's figured that out.
- [01:45]
Paul Thurrott
You know, I keep. It's funny because almost everybody now who shows up on our shows has a newsletter. I mean, it's.
- [01:52]
Leo Laporte
It used to be a, like a YouTube channel. Before that it was a blog before that. Maybe you worked at a publication or were a book author, you know. Yeah, it's the new way to reach people.
- [02:02]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I guess, I guess. And I feel bad because, well, we have a corporate newsletter which is mostly just, you know, here's what's coming up on Twitter this week. Frida All a iswit TV newsletter. I do not myself have, you know, the laporte Report, a weekly email.
- [02:20]
Leo Laporte
You should call it the Report. LA Report.
- [02:23]
Paul Thurrott
LA Report. The LA Report. Or I feel like I should, but I also feel like I would say they would start it and then I would go, oh, I don't want to do this anymore.
- [02:35]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't, Gary.
- [02:36]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah, I still have.
- [02:38]
Leo Laporte
Deadlines are a thing. Right. And I, in the same way that I wake up every day without an alarm, I hate putting anything on my schedule. You know, I hate it. So if I have to do a, like back in the day, I would do a newsletter Monday or whatever. I mean, I dreaded that day Every. Every week, I dreaded it.
- [02:58]
Paul Thurrott
That's what I fear. So y' all is just going to have to look at. Sorry.
- [03:04]
Leo Laporte
Put up with lazy writers.
- [03:07]
Chris Hoffman
Well, you know, I think everyone kind of wants to have their own thing. Some people have video show networks, some people have websites.
- [03:15]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's right.
- [03:16]
Chris Hoffman
Some people, you know, like myself, you know, we had stuff that we didn't own. And, you know, if I'm. It's a lot easier for me to start a newsletter or keep a newsletter going than to start a whole new website. So I think. I think it's really valuable to have that kind of direct channel. And like, you know, you@thorough.com and you got Twitter. So that's my direct channel.
- [03:36]
Paul Thurrott
It's, you know, it's challenging because you're responsible now for paying yourself.
- [03:41]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah, well. Yeah, well, either way. Either way. So that's not all I do. I am also a freelance tech writer, so I wrote for PC World in our publication. So I'm already doing that. But it's nice to have a publication that's your own thing. It's my direct thing. There's no advertisement. I'm not doing any advertising on it. It's just what it is.
- [04:03]
Leo Laporte
The hell is wrong with you? No, that's good. No, that's smart. And plus, you're using substack, which my wife and I use for our Eternal Spring thing. But it's a newsletter. Technically. But I mean, I sort of view it like a website.
- [04:18]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, it's kind of like a.
- [04:20]
Leo Laporte
Blog that gives you a website. Yeah, right.
- [04:22]
Chris Hoffman
You can just read it on the web if you want.
- [04:24]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [04:25]
Chris Hoffman
Or in the app or whatever.
- [04:27]
Paul Thurrott
I have a blog, personal blog. Leo fm. And that you can subscribe to. I don't know if anybody has. I haven't looked. So it is, I guess. I guess I do have a newsletter.
- [04:37]
Leo Laporte
It's very informative. You might have been. In fact, I believe you were an email newsletter pioneer, technically speaking. Well, yeah, because you had this capability always.
- [04:46]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. You've always been able to subscribe to my blog posts. Yeah, that's a good point. So, what do I know?
- [04:54]
Leo Laporte
Yep.
- [04:54]
Paul Thurrott
I hear there was a little kerfuffle in Redmond on the campus. We. We reported. In fact, I think most people underreported the protests at Microsoft's Build Conference.
- [05:08]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [05:08]
Paul Thurrott
Which. Because you and Richard were there.
- [05:10]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, based on our firsthand experience, you know, people. It's like the protesters interrupted the Build conference for the third time. I'm like. The third time. It was like the 31st time.
- [05:20]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, time, yeah. So what happened?
- [05:26]
Leo Laporte
Well, there's this little thing happening in the Middle East. I don't know if you pay attention to the news, but of course, yeah. So right. Israel and Palestine are having a, we're going to call it a conflict, whatever. Anyway, Israel, the government and also the military are, you know, customers of Microsoft's. So they use Azure. They use Azure, yeah. And there is a small but very vocal contingent of Microsoft employees, some now ex employees who do not want Microsoft to help Israel in their efforts.
- [06:03]
Paul Thurrott
Actually, I'm sympathetic to that.
- [06:05]
Leo Laporte
No, I understand it. I mean there's two sides to every story I guess. I mean you don't like to. Look, Google employees have done this in the past where they protested Google technology being used for every tech company.
- [06:16]
Paul Thurrott
Even Apple at their last event at WWDC had a guy stand up.
- [06:20]
Leo Laporte
You might have notice though that the Google stuff doesn't happen as much anymore. And part of it was because there were some mass layoffs when you know, last time they did this.
- [06:31]
Paul Thurrott
I feel like this is the right though of the employees, is it not.
- [06:34]
Leo Laporte
To say we don't want to be.
- [06:35]
Paul Thurrott
In this business and we're writing code.
- [06:37]
Leo Laporte
Right. To give credit to Microsoft. They actually now have said that thing I said way back in May where without being privy to whatever conversations might have occurred internally, you could find this, I said this on Windows Weekly that week. Microsoft is the type of company that would actually be okay with this type of thing if it was done within the confines of the rules.
- [07:01]
Paul Thurrott
It's a little embarrassing, especially when the building gets taken over.
- [07:05]
Leo Laporte
Well that's the thing.
- [07:07]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah.
- [07:07]
Leo Laporte
So they look, what do you call it? Non disruptive, nonviolent, whatever protests are right in this country of sorts of. Microsoft allows it on their campus. It's just that these protesters are, they're not taking no for an answer, I guess. So there were disruptions in April 1st, remember at Microsoft's 50th anniversary event where people satya Nadella or Suleyman or Bill Gates at one point or whoever was on stage and people would run out and say things. So that was the first one. I was like, oh, that's kind of weird. And then there were the bunch of things that happened at Build across a couple of days there. And last week there were 20 or fewer whatever protesters who sort of took over the outside of a building on the east campus. And then yesterday they decided to occupy a building. And not just a building. Right. So if you've been on Microsoft's campus a Lot has changed, by the way. But Building 3435 are kind of the epicenter of the important stuff there. And building 34 is where Satya Nadella has an office, where Brad Smith, Microsoft President, has an office, and other top level executives. And so they just went in the building and locked themselves in offices like adults do and refused to come out until they slid flat food under the doors or whatever and have a weird reference. But eventually Microsoft had to call the police and so they arrested several people. The 20 or so that were outside were asked to leave and they did, and that was the end of that. Except this isn't the end of it, right? Like this is never really going to end.
- [08:53]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. What is Microsoft saying to these employees?
- [08:58]
Leo Laporte
Well, a couple of months ago, first of all, they investigated whether their technologies were being used by Israel to kill people basically, and they didn't find any evidence of this. They still maintain that point, but honestly, the language they've used with regards to the protesters to me is correct, which is, we hear you, we're sympathetic, you don't need to do what you're doing for us to pay attention. We're not in the business of we don't build bomb systems and guidance, whatever. We don't do that. That's not what we do. Like I said back in May when we talked about this, it just seemed to me like given what I know about Microsoft, they'd be very accommodating to these people. And as it turns out, they have been. So there are protests, I don't know, every day, but all the time on the campus. And it's like, fine, it's okay. You have this, right? We're okay with it. We get it.
- [10:00]
Paul Thurrott
I think so. And what the protesters want is Microsoft to stop selling Azure to Israel.
- [10:07]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [10:08]
Paul Thurrott
Microsoft has no intention of doing that. Right.
- [10:11]
Leo Laporte
Well, I can't say what their intentions are, but I. They have not stopped doing that. I mean, I don't know, you know, this is one of those tough things. It's like, you know, before we knew anything horrible about what Apple's business in China has led to, you know, if you go back 20 years or whatever, you know, and Microsoft would want to get it to China with, you know, maybe Bing or, you know, sell Windows or Office legitimately or whatever it was back in the day, the conversation was always like, look, we know there are some people who don't like these places, but if we're going to do business there, we sort of have to abide by whatever their rules are. And that's kind of been whatever. And so depending on what we're talking about, there are companies, when antitrust occurs in Europe, you'll get these really radical viewpoints where people will say, well, they should just stop selling iPhones. And you're right. Like, yeah, no, that makes sense. You know, So I don't know.
- [11:09]
Chris Hoffman
One thing I. Sorry, but one thing I find interesting that I think we're talking about it, but in most of the headlines, I don't really see it coming through that, you know, it's Microsoft employees and ex employees that are protesting. It's not some public protest movement. And most of the headlines it's like protesters take over. It's like it's Microsoft employees, which is really interesting.
- [11:31]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I mean the number of current Microsoft employees that are actively engaged in this is really small. It might even be less than a dozen. Right. But whatever the number, that doesn't actually matter. But most of them are former Microsoft employees. There was this feeling during build that their activities were a little too on point. It seemed unlikely that some random group of employees got together in a meeting somewhere and said, all right, we're going to do this and this is what we're going to do. It almost felt like they were getting help from the outside somehow, if that makes sense, that there might be a group helping them orchestrate all this stuff. But I don't know that I have a huge opinion on that.
- [12:17]
Paul Thurrott
Doesn't even matter. Maybe there's some overriding, overarching, you know, protest group about Israel's actions in Palestine that isn't a Microsoft employee group but is supporting them. I don't know if that invalidates the protest.
- [12:32]
Leo Laporte
No, no, I'm not, I'm. And I'm not, I'm not suggesting their complaints are not valid.
- [12:39]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, unless it's the Russians or something.
- [12:42]
Leo Laporte
Right, right. Unfortunately, the Gaza, Israel thing is not all one sided. Right. There are, you know, there are two sides. Yeah. It's nuanced, et cetera, et cetera. So.
- [12:54]
Paul Thurrott
But I, I'm not unsympathetic to their, their goals.
- [12:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean I, Right.
- [13:00]
Paul Thurrott
I, I don't, you know, I don't. Obviously you can't occupy the Capitol building and you can't occupy Building 34. But. Oh, wait a minute, you can't, apparently you can't occupy the Capitol building. I'm sorry, that was a mistake. But you definitely can't occupy building retroactively. Building 34. And I understand Microsoft's probably held off as long as they could before they called in the police. Right. But these guys were.
- [13:26]
Leo Laporte
No, they tried to, they wanted to keep this internal and whatever. And the problem was they locked themselves in offices and Brad Smith wants to go to work.
- [13:36]
Paul Thurrott
He said, and I think this is important, the vast majority of Israel's. And this is from your article, Paul. If Israel's use of Microsoft technology is to protect the cybersecurity of the state of Israel.
- [13:47]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [13:47]
Paul Thurrott
We cannot do everything. We might wish to change the world, but we know our role. We're here to provide technology in a principle and ethical way. Is that you think that's true? You think that's credible?
- [13:57]
Leo Laporte
I mean, five years ago I would have said absolutely, that's true. Right. Because this was a time when Microsoft refused to sell its own AI to law enforcement in the United States because it was prejudiced against people with darker skin.
- [14:11]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [14:12]
Leo Laporte
And it wasn't something they built into it on purpose. It was at the time that was described literally as when middle aged white guys work on AI software.
- [14:20]
Paul Thurrott
It's a training issue, kind of biases.
- [14:22]
Leo Laporte
That we saw that with Kinect, same issue. But back then Microsoft seemed like it was kind of taking the higher ground compared to other big tech companies. And then as soon as this AI thing happened, a flip was switched. And I'm not sure I get that vibe from the company anymore. So I'm not saying I don't think he's correct. Brad Smith is one of the better.
- [14:47]
Paul Thurrott
He's a good guy.
- [14:48]
Leo Laporte
Right people there, if that makes sense. He's the guy that got them out of the antitrust mess in the early 2000s. He's the guy that got Activision Blizzard pushed through with antitrust regulators from around the globe by working with them. The one thing that Apple especially is not doing today, Google is not doing, you know, you hope that we learn from the mistakes of the past and you know, and behave differently, etc. And so I don't know, I don't know. I guess the central message here is I really don't know what to say about this.
- [15:23]
Paul Thurrott
It strikes me that Microsoft is acting with an even, as, even a hand as a company can, I think so the fact that some of these people are still employed says that that's the thing.
- [15:34]
Leo Laporte
I mean they haven't, you know, the people that interrupted those Microsoft events, right. April, May, by running, trying to get on stage, were let go. They violated their employee contract. You know, if you want to protest and hold a sign building. Yeah, they allow that. It's fine. This is not a problem.
- [15:56]
Paul Thurrott
They've Been as tolerant as one would expect. And as soon as the law gets broken, they have to. They step in. And I think that's not inappropriate.
- [16:03]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah, well. So. So you look at this, and it's interesting. I'm just thinking about it, you know, why? Obviously the protesters, I assume, wanted this to become public. Like, they wanted this whole public question. They wanted to get arrested, like us, to talk about this. But now that we're talking about this, we're all kind of saying, well, we don't. Like what. What do we say? Right. Because Microsoft says they're not doing. And the protesters say they are doing it. Like, and we're just sitting here going back and forth, like, is there evidence? Like, I mean, these are Microsoft employees. Like, I mean, is there. Have they put out evidence and accusations and everything? Like, I don't. I don't really know. I haven't dug into it. But I would think that it would be really effective to put out an argument and say, like, no, Microsoft is doing this thing we say they're doing. Here's what they're doing. Here's the evidence. We're employees. I mean, if they're employees.
- [16:50]
Leo Laporte
Well, I mean, that's like saying Toyota is also contributing to atrocities in Gaza because I saw an Israeli military vehicle that was a Land Rover or whatever Toyota vehicle, which is, I think, how this happened. Right. Well, we know it's public that Israel is using Azure to some degree. So you could just draw the line and say, well, Microsoft shouldn't sell Azure to Israel. But this is what I mean, there is no consensus that what Israel is doing is wrong. We might have our opinions about it.
- [17:26]
Chris Hoffman
Well, there's no consensus on what Azure is being used for in Israel either. So it's right.
- [17:32]
Leo Laporte
Microsoft says it's investigated. They came up again because of this. It's like, guys, we've looked at this multiple times. We've never seen anything where our software is being used for something horrible.
- [17:41]
Paul Thurrott
I think it's pretty clear the protesters think that any sale of any product to Israel should.
- [17:46]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but that's stopped. This is literally the we don't negotiate with terrorists argument. Right, Right. Because if the lesson here is if you complain enough, the person you're complaining to, the company you're complaining will stop doing that thing, then everyone's just going to complain about everything. I don't want to undercut the veracity or the seriousness of the charge. And this is above our. It's not our pay grades. It's outside of our worldview. We don't really, it doesn't matter if I have an opinion about Israel and Gaza.
- [18:18]
Chris Hoffman
Outside of my expertise.
- [18:19]
Leo Laporte
Here's what I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. I mean, just outside of the technology part of it, which is to me is just kind of a minor thing really, but. Or maybe not a thing. I don't even know what it is. I don't know. That's the thing. We don't really know. So I don't know. I keep going.
- [18:34]
Paul Thurrott
Let's move on.
- [18:35]
Leo Laporte
Sorry.
- [18:35]
Paul Thurrott
But yeah, that's the story.
- [18:37]
Leo Laporte
I don't have much. Yeah, there you go. Yep. I knew I couldn't ignore it, you know. No, I hate having to cover it. I don't, you know, but I feel the same way.
- [18:47]
Paul Thurrott
We do.
- [18:47]
Leo Laporte
We got to address it.
- [18:48]
Paul Thurrott
I would love to just talk about smartphones and door locks, but sometimes guys.
- [18:53]
Leo Laporte
You know, copilot is in smart TVs now. Like, what are we talking about? Why is this important?
- [18:57]
Chris Hoffman
I'm just happy we're not talking about Intel.
- [18:59]
Paul Thurrott
Oh man.
- [19:00]
Leo Laporte
Are we? No, we're not. Yep.
- [19:02]
Paul Thurrott
Not today. I'm like, not today, not today, not today. Let's talk about. How about. I got a thought. Windows 11.
- [19:10]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, there's some Windows 11 stuff. So couple of Windows Insider type updates. If you're in the dev or beta channel now, you can download whatever the latest build is on the respective channels. And one of the additions is a continuation of this functionality Microsoft's trying to do across Windows that is in some way going to emulate the way Apple devices kind of handoff or have continuity or whatever it is where you're doing something on your phone and then you can continue it on your PC. So the first thing they did along those lines, other than just the phone link and my phone then phone link, whatever that stuff. And then the Samsung partnership, of course, cut and paste, copy paste, et cetera, is cross Device continuity with OneDrive. The idea is that you were in the OneDrive app on your phone, you were doing whatever you're doing, maybe looking, editing, document, whatever, put the phone down and then you sign into your PC and it will come up and say, hey, did you want to continue that? And now they're doing this with Spotify. So I guess we're doing this on an app by app basis, I guess.
- [20:21]
Chris Hoffman
Well, here's my question. This sounds like we're creating this great new feature for third party developers in Windows. Is anyone going to use, is anyone going to use this? How many times have they made, especially in the Windows 10 and Windows 8 days. Look at this. Amazing new feature for app developers and no one uses it and three years later it's killed.
- [20:39]
Leo Laporte
Yep. So yeah, this I think has a really good chance of being exactly like that. So if you're running Windows 11 now, one fun thing to try is I got to just put a file there so I can see what it says. Exactly. I made this point some months ago when the right click Menus in Windows 11 were originally designed to be prettier. Of course, and they're laid out differently, they're kind of more spacing and more modern looking. Whatever. But they were also supposed to be simpler with fewer options. Right. Than they were in Windows 10. And they were at first, but they've been growing. And so there are two areas where this has grown pretty well. Actually I get maybe three, depending on what you're doing, where this has grown or could grow dramatically. One is the Open with Submenu, which is just based on whatever apps you have installed. But the two that are a little more modern are the Share with Submenu, which is kind of new. It used to just be Share and then you would choose how to share from a share pane or share window. But the other one is this list of bizarre AI based features that appear at the bottom of the menu. Because Microsoft is. One of those app platform things that Chris was referring to is app developers can build connectivity into their apps where you could right click something like whatever it might be and say do something with this, like open this with this app. You can now say do this AI based task with this app. So instead of just saying like open with paint, you could say remove the background with paint, you know, that kind of thing. And there are suddenly a dozen or two dozen of those, depending on what you have installed. And this menu has gotten stupid. And every time I see something like this, especially the share width is probably the big one and it's probably the closest to what Chris is saying as being the next thing they cancel. It's just kind of grown out of control. Like Microsoft has spent so much time working on Share, this feature that's been part of Windows since Windows 8 used to. Remember, it used to be like a sidebar thing and now it was like a full screen experience. Now it's like a window. But you know, there's all this stuff and depending on what you're doing, you could edit the thing in line, you could copy it to the clipboard, you can send it to your phone, you can share it through compatible apps which are listed, some of which aren't even installed yet. And you know, they want app developers to use this stuff, but nobody does. Right. And so the first couple that have appeared, like WhatsApp, if you can share with WhatsApp, or I think Facebook messenger might be one as well. Telegram is in there. Microsoft did those. Right. That wasn't Facebook or Meta or whatever company. That was Microsoft. It was like they were trying to be like, look, see, look, you work with third party apps. It's not just Microsoft stuff. But I don't think we're going to see a lot of companies taking advantage of this. This is just not. I don't think people spend their time using computers this way really. Right. So I happen to use the share pane all the time. I use nearby sharing as much as I can, but I can't tell you the last time I did share and then like, oh look, I can share it to WhatsApp from Windows. Like I, I'm sure there's someone out there doing it. But yeah, I don't know. So, yeah, this, this cross compatibility thing, cross device continuity thing, whatever we're calling it. Yeah, I, it's. I don't know. We'll see.
- [24:04]
Chris Hoffman
Here's another disaster about the Share feature, and maybe it's because you don't use OneDrive, but OneDrive normally pulls in all the documents and pictures and desktop folders. If I right click a file on my desktop and pick Share, I don't get the Share menu. I get the OneDrive sharing menu. I don't know how to get to the normal Windows Share menu from most of my files. I don't know, it's probably in there somewhere, but it's confusing. I have to explain to people. It's like, well, you click Share unless the folder is files in OneDrive, which it might be automatically in the background. And if that happens, you'll get a totally different paint. It's very confusing.
- [24:39]
Leo Laporte
So, yeah, they fixed this in a way. So these used to be completely separate and different and they still are by default. But there's a link you can click. I think if you click like make a link for the thing you're sharing through OneDrive, it will then come up with the normal Share with Windows. So it's like an extra couple of steps or whatever, but yes. Well, if you were looking for consistency, why are we using.
- [25:01]
Chris Hoffman
Oh, there it is.
- [25:03]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's a little complicated, but it's not obvious. Right. But the good news is no one even knows this exists. So you know what I mean, you and I are like, what the heck is going on here, but most people just like, whatever, and it will just like you said, it's going to disappear. This stuff will move right along.
- [25:17]
Chris Hoffman
I don't understand what the Share menu is still doing there. I mean, it's such a Windows 8 feature. They're still investing in it, but they're using it, They've escalated. If they're investing in it, why is it so messy with OneDrive? I don't understand.
- [25:32]
Leo Laporte
I bet it has to do with the. I bet the impulse or. The impulse, the rationale for this or the inspiration or whatever is in fact this stuff we're seeing now, I bet this is what it was about. It was like, we have to build this little bit of an infrastructure here so that apps can do this programmatically. But it's really about cross device, not compatibility, but sharing or whatever because, you know, fundamentally, like, if you look at Windows compared to like a Mac and say, okay, so what are the pros and cons here? We all, a lot of them are obvious, but the, that it's that cross device thing on the Mac in the Apple ecosystem more broadly, that's so special and so amazing. And it also locks you in, right? Yeah, no, it's perfect. That's why it's so great, you know.
- [26:20]
Paul Thurrott
Because it's like not get an iPhone now, right?
- [26:23]
Leo Laporte
Well, people yerik. Someone would say, well, yeah, you don't want to do that though, because it locks you into the Mac, you know, the Apple ecosystem system. It's like, yeah, no, actually I do want that because it's awesome. It's convenient. Yeah, it's really good. And this is a year and a half ago, but I'll never forget the first time I did this where I was using a MacBook Air at the time, taking a. I took a photo on my iPhone during a meeting of the whiteboard and I was like, man, I'd really like to put this in my notes. And I was like, wait a minute, I think I can do that. And then I just copied it to the clipboard on the iPhone and went to the Mac.
- [26:50]
Paul Thurrott
It's amazing, isn't it?
- [26:53]
Leo Laporte
Appeared immediately. And I was like, yeah, no, this is real like this. And by the way, we, you know.
- [26:58]
Paul Thurrott
It took them a few years to get there. It didn't work at first.
- [27:00]
Leo Laporte
I mean, it took a couple years. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I'm not a.
- [27:02]
Paul Thurrott
But they've been doing this for a long time now and it's pretty consistent.
- [27:05]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah.
- [27:05]
Leo Laporte
So Microsoft's doing it too. They're using that phone link app, Right. It works way better and there's way more going on if you have an Android phone, especially if you have a Samsung phone. But.
- [27:14]
Chris Hoffman
Yep.
- [27:15]
Leo Laporte
But there's some basic stuff there if you have an iPhone too, because, you know, this is. This is a pretty good group of people, but I don't know. This isn't a. This comes up from time to time. I don't know what to call this. I feel like Stephen Sinofsky must have used the term for this in his book. Sometimes in Microsoft's case, they'll come up with features that they can then put in a slide that is one of a bullet point of whatever. And the reason it's there is not because they think, oh, this is what's going to cause people to use our platform. It's because this is what's going to cause people to leave our platform, not to leave our platform. Right. That they see some of the stuff that might be available on the Mac in this case and say it's kind of tempting. And they're like, well, hold on a second. We do it too, sort of, and depends on the kind of phone you have. And it's a little more complicated, but we do it too. We do it too. You know, Microsoft is heavily involved in fighting these walled ecosystem, walled garden app stores. Right. Part of the reason for that is this stuff might be possible if Apple has to open up their phone more. Right. They'll be able to do those things they want to do. It's not just about them putting their, you know, Xbox game store or whatever it is on the phone, although they would love to do that for sure. It's some of this stuff too, right? Because that thing is like. It's a black box. It's. It's worse than a black box. It's a black box covered in cement, buried under the ground. Like you can't get to it. So they can do certain things on Android and it's pretty good. And they can do very few things on iPhone and it's okay, anyway. I don't know.
- [28:49]
Paul Thurrott
It's okay.
- [28:50]
Leo Laporte
It's okay.
- [28:51]
Paul Thurrott
I'm okay, you're okay.
- [28:52]
Leo Laporte
Everyone's okay.
- [28:53]
Paul Thurrott
Okay.
- [28:54]
Leo Laporte
All right. So for the past, I don't know, six months, ish, we've been talking about this kind of progressive rollout of what I call semantic search. Microsoft has called it like eight different things now. They've settled on semantic search finally, thank God, because it's a good name and it's in Windows 11, it's local. So local AI copilot plus PC only. But if you have that kind of a PC now, and it's unstable now, you can do semantic search across the file system and File Explorer Start search, which works from the taskbar or from the start or from just the search window and to a lesser degree separately. But also only Copilot PC in the Settings app. Right? With this kind of a setting, they literally have a Settings app AI model on your device only for this purpose. And okay, that's fine. Now what they've done or what they are doing, this is still in the Insider program and this is across channels, is they are adding this capability to the Copilot app and concurrently to that, they're changing the UI of the Copilot app yet again to make it look to me a lot like the. What I would call what used to be the Microsoft 365 app. Like the. I think it's just the Microsoft 365 copilot app where it's, you know, the thought is, yeah, sometimes you go there and you chat and you're like, I want to know what the capital of Alaska is or something, or what year did whatever happen? A lot of people want to work against their documents or against their email or against the web or whatever it is. And so it's actually kind of a pretty UI I wouldn't get too used to. These things change every six months. But a lot of people I guess want to go into Copilot, throw in a couple of their documents and say, hey, give me the summary of whatever this PDF is or this presentation or whatever it is. And now you can just go into Copilot. If you're in the Insider program, this will probably come to stable, I don't know, probably October ish or something. You can actually just give it permission to scan your entire file system if that's what you want, or whatever, wherever you want it to go. There is some kind of programmability there for cloud services, etc. So if you are using say OneDrive, but in the future, Google Drive, Dropbox, whatever service and they're using that kind of files on demand capability, you can actually search against that even though those files are not local. Right. So that's useful. And I think we talked about this last week, but we've been kind of stuck with index based search for ever, I guess I'd call it, or at least for 20 years. There were plans in the early 2000s to kind of make that more sophisticated and better. That didn't come together and I feel like AI is going to get us over that hump a little bit. I have done a lot of searches lately. Like we'll talk about Gears of War late late in the show, but I went back to find all the reviews of those games I'd ever written and find screenshots I took from back in the day, literally using a capture card and an Xbox360 or USB thing or whatever it was. And yeah, it comes right up now. It's pretty good. Like searching against OneDrive used to be pretty sad in Windows. So much so that I would often just go to the website and that would work better. But now that this is happening, you have to actually index the drive like that actually saws to happen or index whatever you want to index. But once you do that, the natural language search stuff actually works really good.
- [32:29]
Chris Hoffman
Well, I have a burning question and this is so bad. The fact that I don't know the answer to it fully is a major problem.
- [32:36]
Paul Thurrott
I'm sure Paul has the sav for your burning question.
- [32:39]
Chris Hoffman
I don't know because Microsoft is very unclear. Yes, but you know, I. That's wonderful On a Copilot plus PC, guess what my desktop isn't. Guess what? A lot of laptops are. There's no such thing as a Copilot plus PC desktop as far as I know, unless something has changed. So is this a feature I can even like? A while ago Microsoft made this big announcement. Oh the. I don't even know. I can't even follow this. The Copilot app platform or the AI app platform, whatever the app time or whatever Copilot Windows runtime or whatever is will now support GPUs and stuff and CPUs and it's like, well that's cool. Like wait a minute, does that mean I get the Copilot plus PC features with a gpu? Or does it just mean third party apps written against the runtime get to use the gpu? I don't understand.
- [33:27]
Leo Laporte
It's not even. Yeah, it's right. So whatever that's called now, I think it's just called Windows Foundry now. Windows AI Foundry they renamed it but. And it's still not out and stable by the way. So you can't as a developer, you couldn't use it even if you wanted to. But the theory there is the same as it is with Apple with their foundational model support. Like these are local AI models that you as an app developer can either access because they're on the machine or cause to download because your app needs Them there's a set of APIs that will allow you to do a lot of the things you see in Microsoft apps like Notepad, where it's doing summarizing of text or rewriting it to be more succinct or longer or less formal or more formal, whatever the STU styles are. Right? And these things use Microsoft and third party AI models that are local, like small machine models. Are they the same ones that Copilot plus PC users access without knowing? Not usually, actually. I think in some cases they can be. And in those cases they could run off the CPU too, by the way. Right? I mean, they could run on the GPU, but they're not copilot plus PCs. And that's just a. They're not going to discuss that. Right. In other words, the feeling there is. Qualcomm has some deal with Microsoft where at first they were exclusive for a little while. Now they get those features first right before x64 does, usually only by a month or two. So it's not like a huge gap. But I mean, we still sell intel makes, especially makes chips that don't have good MPUs that qualify. AMD does too, to a lesser degree. But at some point that will end. And the question is, yeah, you have a gaming PC, let's say, or you're a developer or an engineer or whatever you are, you have some awesome graphics capabilities. Why can't I bring down the power grid so I can use Copilot to summarize text or whatever it is, or do the stuff that copilot plus PCs can do? There's no technical reason why this can't happen. And we keep waiting for that day where they finally say, look, we're opening it up to everybody, right?
- [35:45]
Chris Hoffman
So like from a Windows user perspective, when Microsoft says the Settings app's really complicated, setting app is really complicated, so we're going to put an AI agent in there. So on your Copilot plus PC, you will finally have an easier time changing settings.
- [35:59]
Paul Thurrott
The rest of it it's like, excuse.
- [36:01]
Chris Hoffman
Me, what about everyone else without a copilot plus PC, which is most people buying new PCs. Still, one of the issues with the Settings app is the search feature is terrible. In my opinion, all they really need in the Settings app is a better search database of equivalent words so that you could search through it and that would help everyone. And then the other thing is, why can I use a cloud service in Notepad to summarize text, but I can't use a cloud service in the Settings app to find A setting I want to change. It's like there's different parts of Windows and it's like, well, this part of Windows is run by the local Windows team trying to sell computers. And this one, this part of Windows is run by the cloud team. And so Notepad, the cloud team got that one, so they're pushing the cloud services. But the settings app, the local team got that one, so they're pushing the NPUs. It's like, it's just a mess.
- [36:50]
Leo Laporte
First of all, I have to express how uncomfortable it makes me when I see anyone being more cynical than I am. It's good for you. Sometimes I feel like I get dulled down by this because it's just so relentless. But you're right, Microsoft, I say insurtification on this show to keep pg, but Microsoft is as guilty of that as any big tech company. But also because they're beholden to different kind of responsibilities, I guess. So they want to make the industry healthier, the PC industry. So they want to sell more new PCs. They're tying it a little bit to this Windows 10 end of life thing. The Copilot Plus PC is an attempt to, you know, another, you know, more premium type of PC that maybe costs a little bit more. It's good for PC makers. Right, because those things have higher margins. So this was, you know, media center, they did this, tablet PC, they did this, et cetera. So I guess the question, well, not the question, but I guess the commentary here is in serving its PC maker partners to the best of their ability, they're doing a small or a disservice of some kind to their customers, which is like. Yeah, I mean, like. Yes, right. I mean that's. It's not possible to do the right thing for everybody. So look, it's inevitable that these features will be available everywhere. It just is. Right. And that will either happen because every PC basically out in the world at some point is a copilot plus PC by today's standards because NPUs just become more widespread as older computers get pushed out or what you're asking for, I think. And what I think most people are asking for, which is I just spent 800 bucks on a GPU. What do you mean? I can't do a stupid little drawing and paint that for some reason works on a $600 laptop because they have an MPU.
- [38:43]
Chris Hoffman
So, yeah, I, I mean, if I was going to say something, you know, positive of my. I guess I don't know if positive is the word, but I feel like maybe from the PC maker partners have kind of failed them a little bit. I don't know if they expected at this point intel to still be, you know, cranking out CPUs that have no NPU or a NPU that's too slow. I don't know if they really expected, you know, the, the latest, I get the latest gaming game, app, laptop. Oh, it has a core Ultra Series 2. It's like, oh, Series 2. It must have Lunar Lake. No, that has a small view.
- [39:11]
Leo Laporte
It depends if it' have Aero Lake.
- [39:15]
Chris Hoffman
It could have Meteor Lake.
- [39:16]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you get the old.
- [39:16]
Chris Hoffman
Even the Ultra could have Arrow Lake. It says Ultra. Does that mean it has an npu? It doesn't have a good enough one for Copilot plus PC features.
- [39:24]
Leo Laporte
It's like, so intel was on their own schedule, right? They did Luna Lake because Microsoft is like, look, we've got this Copilot plus PC thing. We're doing it with Qualcomm. We know how much you hate them, but we're doing it. AMD's on board and they're like, yeah, we're not going to be ready. It's like, okay, well, I guess you'll be the only PCs that don't have this. Then. They're like, okay, hold on. And so they rushed Lunar Lake to market. That contributed a lot to their financial issues last year. And there are problems with those chips too, but whatever. But they still had all those other chips that were on the regular schedule. They didn't change all of their schedules. They couldn't afford to do that. I am not defending this. Intel should have been on board with this stuff years and years ago. A big part of their problem is they, they've missed so many boats. But we'll get there, right? I mean, it's, I don't know, IFA is next week, right, in Berlin and then CES is in January and there will be a year, right, where all of a sudden, oh, all the new chips do have those NPUs, right? That will happen. It may not happen. September, January, maybe the fall, I don't know, who can say? But yeah, I will say, based on the way Copilot plus PC launched a little over a year ago, I didn't expect to ever see NPU lists or weak NPU based processors in the market. And there are probably more of them than there are versions with the MPUs that qualify.
- [40:55]
Chris Hoffman
Plus, from a PC market perspective, I just reviewed a laptop and I won't use the manufacturer's name, but they use the word AI in the laptop model. Oh, it's an AI laptop series 2 or whatever. No copilot plus PC features because the MPU is low.
- [41:15]
Paul Thurrott
Well, AMD says it's got an AI processor, too.
- [41:18]
Leo Laporte
Lenovo just did their things and their whole thing was, we are the biggest seller of AI PCs. Right? Whatever the mix was of AI PCs, regular PCs, has gone up pretty dramatically. But the definition of that term, which by the way, was an intel thing, is it has an npu. It doesn't have to even do one, tops. But as long as it's an npu, you qualify for that term. And Microsoft, it's too bad, because AI PC would have been the better thing to call Copilot plus PC, right? But then again, the right thing to do would have been to say, well, you have a GPU that would qualify. I don't understand. Whatever.
- [41:54]
Paul Thurrott
But it's kind of a marketing term, right?
- [41:57]
Leo Laporte
It's more than kind of.
- [41:58]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah. So it's like. So maybe they're losing control of it in the sense that not all AI PCs or copilot PCs, it's kind of like Evo or one of those other marketing terms where then they probably shouldn't be restricting features to something that is merely a marketing term. Right.
- [42:20]
Leo Laporte
I'm not defending it, but this has been. Look, since maybe not the very beginning, but if you go back to like, say, xp, where there was Home and Pro versions, right, There were some features that are unique to Pro. You know, we went crazy for a little while. We had Home Basic, Home Premium, ultimate, you know, business, whatever. I don't remember all the names, but. And now we're back to kind of home and Pro. I know there is education and other versions, but those are the two basic ones for consumers. And so Copilot plus PC is like this weird Venn diagram thing where there are features that are unique to those things. So it's, in effect, sort of a third skew. Although technically you could be running home and have the Copilot plus PC features, but not have the features that are unique to Pro, Right? So it's not. It's not a strict superset, but, yeah, that's how Microsoft has always done things. So I don't know why this is surprising, but, yeah, I don't know.
- [43:21]
Chris Hoffman
Let's be honest. It's. AI is hyped right now. Everyone wants to put the word AI in everything. The start of 2024 was. It's the year of the AI PC. 20. Did you know 2024 was the year of the AI PC?
- [43:32]
Leo Laporte
I mean, wow.
- [43:33]
Chris Hoffman
Like how many people are Even using the NPUs on their laptops for anything? Like any device can be the most people. If you're using a chatbot or something, it's running in the cloud. If you're using Photoshop and Adobe Firefly, it's running in the cloud. The average person is not doing anything with their npu. I mean, like, have you used the Photos app? Like, have you tried generating images in the Photos app? It is a mess.
- [43:56]
Leo Laporte
Yep, it's right. It doesn't help that the generation capabilities of local AI is vastly inferior to what's in the cloud. Right. These are by definition much smaller models. You don't really notice it too badly with things like text because if it's just about restructuring a sentence maybe or rewriting something, it's actually that's pretty good. The image stuff you really notice, right? Because it's visual. It's so bad. Yeah. The local AI versions of create an image of whatever are children's drawing on a refrigerator and then the copilot. Well, we'll talk a little bit later about one of the newer ones, but these latest cloud based AI models are like Rembrandt paintings. Like by comparison, they're unbelievable.
- [44:39]
Chris Hoffman
Right? And I'm just going to say it again because I like bang on about this. If you use the local NPU powered image generation features in Windows, in Photos or wherever they are, it needs a Microsoft account, it needs cloud access. It will not show you the image unless it generates the image on your PC. It goes to the cloud, Microsoft cloud service. Check it to make sure it's safe or whatever. Then they send it back to your PC and like, okay, I'm not arguing against the safety part of that, but what's the point of doing it locally? Why not just generate it in the cloud? You'll have much better quality, but then you won't be able to, you know, market and say, well, did you know the laptop generates itself the way you say that?
- [45:12]
Leo Laporte
It almost seems like they're eliminating this artificially, but. Because they are. But no, I said this. I oversimplified earlier, but I sort of said it's like they're serving different masters here or whatever. It's not just PC makers who they're trying to help prop up, however, through Windows, like new PC sales. And they don't just have these direct customers like people like you and I who use Windows or whatever, they also have themselves. Right? So they're using AI. They host this AI. I'm sure it's infrastructure, it's Expensive. They want to reduce those costs badly. And if they could get this to work and they could do less round tripping with the cloud and the user didn't notice, that would be great. They're not there yet.
- [45:55]
Chris Hoffman
That's so far away. Yeah, that's basically almost. That is so far away. And even when that comes, people are going to have chatbots and image generation tools that they can access on their phone in the cloud and they're going to be even more powerful at that point. And they're already so cheap. I mean it. In what world? I don't, I don't. I'm sorry.
- [46:16]
Leo Laporte
No, no, it's. I, no, this is the, this is the ongoing debate, you know, like, however.
- [46:24]
Chris Hoffman
Like local AI is really cool in theory because you have the privacy advantages. You can run your own model. You don't. It's not, you know, you can tune in, whatever. That's cool in theory, but even that is going to be.
- [46:34]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, well, you said, you said, for example, like most you have a computer with a good mpu, you're not using it, which is absolutely true. The weird thing is, every once in a while, depending on what you're doing, you might actually be using it and you don't realize it. Depending on the apps you use and if they've been optimized for local AI, image editing apps, video editing apps, whatever. Every once in a while, not the whole app. Right. But you'll file, export something and they'll be like, oh, this is an API, an MPU feature. It probably happened half a millisecond faster than it would have on a GPU based computer. There's nothing to indicate that you even used it. You have no idea that you were receiving a benefit, if any. And that's kind of a chicken egg problem here because GPUs are optimized for specific things. Right. The reason we separated that off of the CPU was for that reason npus are the same thing. And there are huge efficiency gains, but also huge performance gains for specific workloads. It's just that the things we're describing are not general purpose. They're very specific and they're individual features in individual apps. You don't buy an app that's like, oh, this is all MPU powered, there's no such thing. You couldn't build that app. The thing I keep blabbing on about is this sense of orchestration, which is what would happen if Microsoft just allowed this to be everywhere, which is that you would just like you run an app now it looks at your system and says, okay, this one has a gpu, so like we could do whatever, the game will run faster or look better or whatever it is. This one has an npu. Oh good, that means this can happen. So any apps that support this in the future, to me it's the responsibility of the operating system. It makes a call to the OS and the OS says, okay, this one's best with the CPU and this one's best with the MPU and you know, that kind of thing. And we're just early days. We're just not there.
- [48:33]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah. Plus, I mean it's. Then there's another issue with like, with more and more people using web apps. You have to use a local app. That is, that's some things. I mean it's not the new wave of like, everyone should be happy that they have an AI laptop because it can, you know, I mean it sounds good in a press release, but I.
- [48:56]
Leo Laporte
Mean Generally speaking the copilot plus PCs are better than other PCs in certain ways. Right. And that's kind of true, especially on Snapdragon, but it's kind of true AMD intel as well in the sense. But you know, AMD intel, you kind of get the vibe like this was going to happen anyway. Right. Like just natural course of improving processes over time. We're just going to, we're going to get to a better place. And so that, that feels a little more iterative. But now, you know, we've seen with Apple especially, but also with Snapdragon and Windows that, you know, this ARM architecture or an ARM like architecture, if you're not willing to make that switch as an intel or AMD quite yet, has its benefits. And so they've been, you know, they're plotting their own paths. Right. If you look at the intel processor or AMD processors in a very new laptop and compare it to like a 12, 13th gen Intel Core or whatever, they're very different, you know, very different. They're not perfect, but they are very different.
- [50:00]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah, I'm, I'm hoping for more from ARM Windows laptops in the future. Right now it's kind of a mess a little bit like, you know, there's going to be more. I don't know if most people haven't seen like the rumors that they know, like Nvidia is supposedly coming out with their own ARM chip and there's going to be actually next. There's that way actually competition.
- [50:22]
Leo Laporte
Good for everybody. Right.
- [50:23]
Chris Hoffman
I mean right now it's kind of a mess. I wrote, I wrote about for P0 recently, if, you know, you get the new Qualcomm laptop and it has the new slower CPU in it and they said it was going to be $600 laptops and you know, tariffs, they were a thing, but they said they were going to power $600 laptops. They come in, it's a $750 laptop and you're like, well, an average person can go to Walmart and buy an old MacBook for 600 or 650.
- [50:50]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [50:50]
Chris Hoffman
And so like you're bringing in these like kind of bad laptops.
- [50:55]
Leo Laporte
You're not wrong.
- [50:56]
Chris Hoffman
But.
- [50:58]
Leo Laporte
That $600 M1 based MacBook Air has 8 gigs of RAM and is whatever, 4 years old or whatever it is. But we're only just now catching. We haven't caught up. We haven't even caught up, so. And Apple's not stopped, so we're kind of never really going to catch up. I think that the thing that Snapdragon did was at least get us in the kind of ballpark against whatever M3, if you want to. Whatever you want to call it doesn't matter. So yeah, if you're going to buy a $500 computer, you're either looking at like a Chromebook, a piece of junk Windows PC or I guess this used, not used, sorry, old Mac. But you know, eventually years will say.
- [51:37]
Paul Thurrott
This crappy old Mac, it's okay.
- [51:38]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's okay. It's fine. I'm sure. But, but it's. But eventually the PCs we have will be efficient and reliable and performant enough that that $600 computer in the future won't be so crappy. Right.
- [51:56]
Paul Thurrott
The Holy Grail is running these LLMs locally. It would be really amazing. People are doing it, but at great expense right now. I mean, Copilot's not designed to run locally. I mean the whole thing is still on the server.
- [52:09]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [52:10]
Paul Thurrott
It's just so in a way, Copilot is. Yeah, the NPU is.
- [52:13]
Leo Laporte
It's just not there yet.
- [52:14]
Paul Thurrott
A MacGuffin. Well, it's not even important.
- [52:17]
Leo Laporte
It will get there. It will get there like everybody.
- [52:19]
Paul Thurrott
Is it important because you're not running Copilot locally or are you?
- [52:22]
Leo Laporte
No, not now you aren't. But I mean, but the goal is to get more and more like for hybrid AI. Right. So do more and more locally and then hand off to the cloud lane when you have to.
- [52:30]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [52:31]
Leo Laporte
And the good enough point is where we're heading towards not. Let's take that chatgpt, whatever and put it on the computer, it's, let's get one that's good enough. That for 80 to 90% of the tests it's going to just be fine. But then every once in a while we have to go to the cloud. That is something, by the way. I keep saying it, but orchestration. You wouldn't notice or care that it was happening. It would just be something that is a feature of the OS and it's better for Microsoft or whomever because you're not killing the server the whole day and grandma can have her electricity to bake the cookies or whatever.
- [53:03]
Paul Thurrott
By the way, I think this is a good excuse for you to go to Hawaii for the Snapdragon event in a couple.
- [53:09]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it is.
- [53:10]
Paul Thurrott
I think you should really be there.
- [53:11]
Leo Laporte
I am going to be there.
- [53:12]
Paul Thurrott
Are you? Oh, good.
- [53:13]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yes.
- [53:17]
Paul Thurrott
It's interesting how they have them in such exotic places. You know, I compare it to podcast conferences which are held in places like Dallas in August.
- [53:27]
Leo Laporte
You know, if they said to me this show's in St. Louis and whatever, I'd be like, yep, I'll be there tomorrow. I would be happy.
- [53:34]
Paul Thurrott
I think it's gonna be interesting. And they sounds like they have a big night.
- [53:36]
Leo Laporte
We gotta say Hawaii is a pain in the butt to get to. No, it is for you, not for me.
- [53:41]
Paul Thurrott
I could be there. Why don't I go as your proxy?
- [53:43]
Leo Laporte
It's still. It's like a. It's basically an 11 hour day, you know, for you. Yeah.
- [53:47]
Paul Thurrott
Because you have to fly across the.
- [53:48]
Leo Laporte
Country and then even from Mexico City, it's the same thing. It's.
- [53:51]
Paul Thurrott
Oh yeah, it's a five hour flight from San Francisco. It's still a long flight. Yeah. Because I hear it's in the middle of the ocean.
- [53:58]
Leo Laporte
I mean, yeah, it's literally an island. It's.
- [54:02]
Paul Thurrott
It's literally a bunch of islands.
- [54:06]
Leo Laporte
It's on Maui, but yes.
- [54:07]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, nice, nice. Let's take a break and we will continue. I have the new Parallels desktop running if you wish to examine it in detail. Our show today, brought to you by, and I mean this literally, Cash fly. For over 20 years, Cashfly has held the track record for high performing, ultra reliable content Delivery serving over 5000 companies in over 80 countries. At TWIT, we have been using Cashfly practically since the beginning. We thought. I thought we. There was no we. It was me that it would be, you know, podcast. You could just serve it from your website. Right. No, you know, turned out that didn't work out so well. And then I went begging hat in hand for bandwidth. We were using AOL radio bandwidth for a while and BitTorrent. I was asking people to seed it. Then Matt Levine, the founder of Cashfly, came to me and said, leo, Leo, I can help. And they have been ever since, almost 20 years now. Thank you, Cashfly. We love their lag, free video loading, their hyper fast downloads. Cashfly's proof is in the petabytes. Actually we serve two or three petabytes a month from Cash Fly. I think a lot of data events stream smoothly with Cash Fly's ultra low latency video. Less than 1 second of latency to millions of concurrent users worldwide. Online games start 70% faster. They scale instantly. They play without lag. Software downloads flawlessly, which is important. You got a big new release, you want it to go lickety split, right? Patches and updates, same thing. HD video plays on demand with ultra fast sub second start on every single device. We know how important that is. If you go to our site or any video site and you press play and you have to wait more than a second for the playing to start, a lot of people will leave. I will leave podcasts. I've heard of them. Have you reached global audiences in record speed at any scale? I can vouch for that. Cashfly delivers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs and allows you to shield your site content in their cloud, ensuring a 100% cash hit ratio. And with Cashfly's elite managed packages, you get the VIP treatment. Cashfly is like gaining an extension of your team. When your business model depends on delivering massive amounts of content, you cannot afford to go it alone. We learned that lesson the hard way 15, 16 years ago. We also learned you can count on personalized help anytime from a tenured expert who gets it Engineer to Engineer 24, seven from CashFly. We love Cashflow. You will too. Learn how you can get your first month free@cashfly.com Twitter that's C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com TWIT. Thank you, CashFly. Now back to Paul Thurot and Chris Huffman filling in for Richard Campbell and Windows Weekly.
- [57:11]
Leo Laporte
Yep.
- [57:13]
Paul Thurrott
Uac.
- [57:15]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, remember that one? Remember that? Loved it. Yep. So Microsoft was like, how can we do that again but make it even more disruptive? And they figured it out. Now, to be fair, this solves an actual real problem that's been a real problem for at least 25, 30 years. We'll call it 25 years, which is that most individuals Sign into. Well, all individuals who sign into a new or whatever Windows PC for the first time are administrators. And then they just use it as an administrator. And Microsoft has done a few things in Windows to kind of minimize that. But the reality is everything that you do well can run under elevated admin privileges right by default. And so they came up with UAC as a method to help with this. UAC didn't go over well when it was first released, although by the way, never any more annoying than what the Mac already had by that point, even though Apple made fun of it incessantly, which always bothered me. And there are ways to bypass uac. UAC suffers from what I think of as the third brake light problem, which is like, it was a good idea for the day. Now we just don't even think about it. I think a lot of people are just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They just kind of click through it. You know, it's really just meant to be a final prompt. Like, are you sure you want to do this, this thing you're doing whatever that thing might be, like installing an app maybe, or changing certain settings, like for some reason the time, which is, I'm sure a date tied to some security thing requires a UAC elevation, right? Or a UAC prompt. It's not really an elevation, but you just say, yeah, yeah, I'm sure. And then you move on. And so administrative protection is something that came out of the Windows Resiliency Initiative, which they announced last November, right at Ignite, which came out of Secure Future Initiative, which actually predated, but became even more of a thing when CrowdStrike happened last summer. So kind of company wide, like we got to really batten down the hatches. And so when you look at Windows, you're like, well, security wise, what can we do? There's been a lot of fundamental work, foundational work, even around the hardware side of it, TPM2 and then onto Secure Core PCs, Microsoft's Pluton Security Processor, Windows, hello ESS, which is this whole unbelievable process. And maybe there's a better way. And so basically when you enable this, I think it's a mode, essentially it's a toggle. You can turn it on and off, you have to reboot. And when administrator protection is running, basically everything you do is running as a standard user, even though you've signed in with an admin. So it kind of solves that part of the problem. But you do have to escalate your permissions or privileges from time to time. And it does this on the Fly with a token that exists only for the duration of the thing. So in other words, if you run, you search for Notepad in the Start menu, right click it, say run as admin, that that process will be running as an admin until you close it, which doesn't change or is no different in some ways than how it would have been in the past. But the difference now is that it usually is not running like that when you are running as admin. It actually has a different view of the virtualized file system and also the virtualized registry. And it's a temporary slice in time. Right? So that's maybe not the best example. But if you say, like, I'm going to change the system time, you're like, yep, change system time. As soon as you're done changing the time, it goes back to standard privileges. So, okay, like this sounds okay to me. The problem is it uses Windows hello and Windows hello isn't the problem. And Windows hello is secure and it's great and all that stuff. But if you have seen the latest Windows hello ui, you will know it's a little too secure. You know, it's kind of a pain. And so it's slow. If it's facial, you get the little eyeball, he's looking around, he's like, oh, there you are. And then you have to click a button. It's like, guys, come on.
- [61:27]
Chris Hoffman
It doesn't work in the dark anymore.
- [61:29]
Leo Laporte
And it doesn't work in the dark anymore, right? They've made it more. That's the thing. They've made it more secure and less convenient. And so when you think about security, this is the trade off. It's always like convenience versus actual privacy. And most people are lazy and they kind of tend toward that convenience side of the fence. Every once in a while, Microsoft will make a really disruptive change to Windows UAC and the whole security, the trustworthy computing stuff they did, which also involved Windows Server at that time, Windows Server 2003, the whole. It's a server, not a surfboard. This is when they really tone down what IE could do, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot that goes into it, but you don't really realize because why would you realize? No one would know this. It's astonishing how much this thing comes up and depending on what you're doing, you might not be able to use it because it's going to be so disruptive. It actually stops things from working. Apps need to be rewritten in some cases to work correctly with this thing. Visual Studio. If you're a developer, do not turn this on. You'll ruin everything you're working on. It's horrible. That will probably get better over time, but I went into this like, yep, I'm willing. I'm going to take this bullet. I'm okay with this. Like, I want. I want this. And then I've used it and I'm like, you know what? I'm not sure I do want this. This is. It's annoying. So as of now, it's only available in the Insider program. I think it's across the channel, so I think it's Canary Dev Beta. So it's basically everywhere. You have to enable it. Like I said, it's off by default. There are other security features in Windows 11 that are like this, that are still like this. Right. So Smart App Control is one. There is a ransomware protection feature. They're off. Like, for some reason you have to turn them on. And Microsoft has said, well, we're going to. This will be enabled at some point. But I'm thinking when 25H2 comes out and whatever that is, October, that this thing will still be optional. Obviously, businesses could enable or disable it as they want for you, but for individuals, I can't imagine they're going to turn this on. It's just too disruptive. So it's. I'm glad they did it.
- [63:36]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. But it's no good to have a security feature that people turn off. Yeah.
- [63:41]
Leo Laporte
Yep, yep. No, I know. But you have to kind of get it in. Well. So for example, like, smart app, an.
- [63:45]
Paul Thurrott
Option, if you wanted.
- [63:47]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Like, if you want to be more secure, you can do it.
- [63:52]
Paul Thurrott
The point of UAC was that you could be an administrator account, which most people do anyway, and still have the privilege escalation built in.
- [64:01]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [64:02]
Paul Thurrott
So it wasn't automatic, so you would still have to confirm it and stuff. And I thought that was a good idea. Is this roughly.
- [64:08]
Leo Laporte
It was a good idea. This is an evolution of that. Right. So there are better security protections in modern computers now, so they can take advantage of that. Windows slow being one of them. It's just slow. Yeah. It's just that the process is so slow and unfortunately, because now almost literally every process and app you run and whatever is standard user, this thing actually comes up a lot more than it used to or a lot more than UAC used to. So you won't see a UAC prompt. Well, that's not totally true. No, that might be true. I'm going back and forth between computers. So I'm going to think about that. I think you might see one.
- [64:41]
Paul Thurrott
Hello is slow or do you think.
- [64:43]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, the dialogue slow because they wanted to make sure it wasn't spoofed. So, you know. I know.
- [64:50]
Paul Thurrott
They also don't want you to click it. Okay, okay, okay, okay.
- [64:52]
Leo Laporte
Hey. Exactly. So you can't because you're like, wait, you're like, come on, come on, come on. And then you're like, oh, there it is. Click.
- [64:58]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, that would drive me nuts.
- [65:00]
Leo Laporte
Makes me insane. Yeah. And then I discovered that like the app I'm working on, a visual studio, just breaks and I can't.
- [65:07]
Chris Hoffman
So here's a. Here's a question. I understand why this is part of the Windows resiliency initiative. Obviously a lot of corporations are going to want this and Microsoft can say, we support this and that's great. But especially since it's so disruptive, I wonder in terms of what real world problem is it actually solving for the average PC user? So, like, if I would think about the average PC user, you know, if you use a phone, you can install an app from wherever and the app can't like, you know, constantly wash your screen or everything you type and all that because there's. That's a level of sandboxing. And sandboxing is what Microsoft originally want to do with Windows 10X. So there's an alternate universe where maybe we have sandboxing that made in here now, but like, you know, the average person. Okay, well, it doesn't elevate, but it could. You know, the app you download could still be running in the background, watching everything you type and logging it. I mean, so if we're going to introduce something that is disruptive, is this really the disruptive thing to introduce? I mean, it seems like some degree of sandbox would be better.
- [66:05]
Leo Laporte
First of all, do not ever make me defend Microsoft, but I'll say this. So the sandboxing thing you were talking about, so Windows 8 does sandboxing for it started that, right? With modern apps were sandbox. The idea behind Windows 10X was that every app would run in its own sandbox. But win 32, which is the desktop, and most apps actually would run in one container.
- [66:29]
Chris Hoffman
Oh, really? I guess, yeah.
- [66:30]
Leo Laporte
There were not separate ones for every app. So unfortunately, like you could have rebooted that thing or whatever. But the issue, okay, so they've done all these things like this is part of a continuum and basically what happens is everyone rejects everything, right? And so if you think about the original promise of just the store if you forget about the app model and all the craziness, like the idea is a good one. It's like, look, this is trusted place where you can get apps. These things are sandboxed. They're guaranteed not to overstep each other. They can't screw up the system. There's one click uninstall, there's no registry nonsense everywhere, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Sounds great, Nobody used it. A bunch of fart apps. And then they started expanding what the store could do. And the store now is just a distribution method for all kinds of different apps. And most of them are just desktop apps. Some of them have their own licensing that's not going through the store. You just sign into whatever account, like if it's an Adobe app, whatever. So they kind of gave in on that over time. And then in the process of giving in on that, they started thinking about, well, okay, we could do things like S mode, where, you know, everyone seems to hate it, but the idea, it's not a bad idea except that it's a one way, dead end street, you know, if you could just say, I'm going to run my system in S mode, but I also want to run the desktop version of Google Chrome or whatever. To me that seems like a individual decision, but they didn't allow that. Okay, fine, there's a switch somewhere in Settings, you know, set Settings, app, something probably advanced, where you could say, look, if, prompt me if I try to install something that's not from the store. Prompt me if I try to install something that's not from the store and there is a version of it in the store, you know, that kind of thing. But they can't, you know, if you enable that by default, like this thing we're talking about, everyone would be like, what is this thing? I'm downloading Chrome, just leave me alone. Like I know what I'm doing. And so, you know, it's kind of a nanny state problem. And so they have these ideas and they try them. Nobody likes it, or it doesn't in 10x's case, didn't work technically, I guess. And so, you know, it's 20 years later, we're like, all right, so we did UIC. We haven't moved the needle at all in anything else. But we do have all this advanced security hardware now. And Windows hello, et cetera, biometric sign in. Maybe there's an evolution of this. And so they called it a different name, but I mean, really it's UAC but with a Windows hello prompt. And there's actually better. That's not a guarantee. I don't know what to call it. Better. It's more likely that almost everything you're running normally a standard user, which solves a lot of the problem, because it's a hard thing to sell someone on. But if you're running, as anyone would any normal person, you're an admin and you get malware in your system, you have no idea that thing's running at admin privileges. It could do whatever it wants. You don't have to be using the computer. It could be sitting there doing its thing, stealing your data, uploading it, using you as a zombie, whatever. So that's what it's really for. But what it's really going to do is just annoy people. That's the sad part. Until and unless the apps that everyone uses are updated to make it okay and tied to the thing you said earlier up top, I don't think it's going to happen. So we're going to find ourselves in this weird position of recommending to normal people, mainstream people, that maybe this awesome advanced security feature that would really, would secure you forever you should not use. It's like telling someone not to wear a seatbelt. It feels weird.
- [69:59]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah. I mean, the problem is so many of these features, they sound good, but like the. I guess it's the ransomware protection, like, I don't. Or controlled folder access. I ran into so many issues with that. You just start a, you know, just a PC game from 15 years ago and it's like, it just doesn't work. Because it's like, no, but it's trying to do the same files in your document. It's like they're constantly in their whitelisting apps and it's like, so enabled by default.
- [70:24]
Leo Laporte
If you as, like almost said compulsive. That's not fair. If you as a concerned user said, look, I'm going to look this up. You wrote an article or someone did, or there's some list somewhere. It's like, look, here are the whatever security features in Windows that are not enabled by default for some reason. So here's where you go and you turn them on. You're like, all right, I'm doing the right thing. And then two days later, you install Photoshop or Call of Duty or whatever it is. And then like, one day, something just doesn't work right. You don't know why. Crashes, maybe. I don't know. It's not going to. Windows is not going to say the reason this doesn't work. Is because you enabled administrative protection or whatever it was that caused this. And this is the uncertainty. This is the problem. And this is why. I mean, we're going to get in that awkward position because we can't guarantee or even predict until we have maybe lists of apps that are causing problems with these things, like what will or will not work. And some of these are really weird, like, smart app control. You turn that thing on, you're like, nice and doing the right thing. And then whatever you'll get. If you haven't seen it yet, you'll get this dialogue. It's like, hey, part of the app you're running, literally, it says something like that is violating our security standards. We're not going to allow it. And then the app doesn't work properly, and you're like, okay, well, I need this app, so I'm going to turn that thing off. And now you can never turn it on again for some reason. I know there are registry hacks to get around that, but it's a weird feature where once you turn it off, never comes on again. It's just. It's. Can't turn it on. At least this thing you can toggle on and off. I don't. I'm not sure that's progress, but I don't know. All right, let's spend 20 minutes on the next.
- [72:03]
Chris Hoffman
I'm really slowing us down.
- [72:05]
Leo Laporte
No, no, I don't actually.
- [72:07]
Paul Thurrott
You don't have to help. Do it all on his own.
- [72:10]
Leo Laporte
This is a very natural process. This is like a football game. You ever sit, like, you were sitting there for two, two and a half hours, watch football, right? Nothing's happened. It's like seven to three, seven to three, third quarter, set, seven, three. And then the last 15 minutes happens, and it's a tight game, and all of a sudden an awesome game breaks out. That's what this podcast is like a lot. It's kind of just like. Just kind of goes and goes. And at the end, you're like, all right, we're going to finish this up. And then we go into a light.
- [72:32]
Paul Thurrott
I'm the guy with the orange gloves who comes out, and you're like, just.
- [72:36]
Leo Laporte
Throw the ball, throw the ball, throw the ball. Okay, so this one I'm curious to kind of experiment with, except that I would never get in a game and use a headset. But obviously there all these different kinds of Bluetooth, not just versions, but also Bluetooth features like btle, which is the low energy version, et cetera. So if you've ever opened up like a more recent pair of earbuds or something. You might have seen a little dialogue pop up in Windows like you would see on your phone. It's like, hey, we can auto, you know, configure, do that kind of stuff. And this has worked in Windows for a while. I'm sure Windows 10 has it, but Windows 11 absolutely does. But now there are these other Bluetooth features that work off of that, like Advanced Audio Distribution profile, what's the other one? Hands free profile, etc. So to date, those things have only worked in mono on Windows. And so if you're using a headset and playing a game in Windows, you have really crappy audio quality. So they're fixing it. In fact, I think they've already fixed it. And this will not benefit just games. This works in things like, you know, teams or whatever apps that might use like headsets and these kind of Bluetooth audio features. So I'm curious to try this, except that I know when I turn my headset on in Call of Duty, what I'm going to hear is going to be so repulsive that I will just turn it off. But at least it will sound.
- [73:58]
Paul Thurrott
I got you, Paul.
- [74:00]
Leo Laporte
Exactly right.
- [74:02]
Chris Hoffman
This honestly is huge news. I mean, like, I remember how many years ago, maybe it's eight years, but you know, people are saying Bluetooth wireless audio is good now. I'm like, wow, no, that's great. I'll get a Bluetooth headset. It sounded pretty good. I flipped it, I started using the microphone with it and the quality went off a cliff. And I was like, what? What happened? It's like, oh, that's just how they work. It's like, that's just how they work. Like, no wonder everyone uses a little wireless now.
- [74:25]
Leo Laporte
Remember when the Bluetooth thing was a little thing you stuck in one ear and it's like, yeah, that's what it always sounds like in Windows. Well, even if you look, there's different.
- [74:33]
Paul Thurrott
Profiles for Bluetooth and the headset profile is very low quality because it's for phones. But there's also a 2DP, which is the stereo version.
- [74:43]
Leo Laporte
Yep. So Windows has never supported that until. So now it does.
- [74:47]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, well, that's a huge improvement.
- [74:48]
Leo Laporte
It is. It's huge. Yeah.
- [74:50]
Paul Thurrott
I can't. Wait a minute. They never support an A2DP.
- [74:54]
Leo Laporte
I can't explain. Well, especially in. Well, in specific. Yeah, it's like for specific uses in.
- [74:59]
Paul Thurrott
Le with low energy.
- [75:01]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [75:01]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [75:02]
Leo Laporte
So this is most headsets, right.
- [75:03]
Paul Thurrott
There are now in Bluetooth profiles that are Even higher quality. I think there is a. There is a Bluetooth profile that is lossless, as I remember.
- [75:12]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. If there is, though, that thing does not exist in any shipping hardware like, you know, someone said it does.
- [75:18]
Paul Thurrott
But not in any Windows hardware.
- [75:20]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Oh, not in Windows. Well, even something like this Bluetooth version.
- [75:23]
Paul Thurrott
It'S a Qualcomm thing, aptX. It might actually be on the. On the Snapdragon, the Qualcomm thing.
- [75:28]
Leo Laporte
It probably is.
- [75:29]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. That's actually interesting. Yeah. I have one pair of headphones from Denon that are APTX support. And I've been looking for things that.
- [75:39]
Leo Laporte
Can play aptX, by the way, to be fair to Microsoft, again, stop making me do that. This is a mess in the Apple world too, right? You have something like those Apple AirPods Max or whatever they're called, where they're just Bluetooth and lousy, but you could plug in a wire like a USB C cable, and then suddenly it does, like lossless and Dolby Atmos or whatever or something like that. I don't remember the exact details, but like, you know, they. You still have these weird things where, you know, this stuff is still kind of in flux and, you know, getting better or whatever. But I don't know. Next week I'm going to experiment with this because I'm going to. I'll be on the road. Right. So I got a. I think they're Logitech headsets. Nice headsets where you can use Bluetooth. You can use their proprietary dongle, which would get, you know, would be better for latency, whatever. But you can also just use a USB C. USB C cable, which is what I'm going to use, obviously, because I'd want it to actually just work. Yeah.
- [76:35]
Paul Thurrott
And there are that. Come to think of it, there are a number of Bluetooth dongles that do aptx. So I think Microsoft's probably just presuming, oh, you're going to connect something to the USB port.
- [76:43]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I don't know what to do.
- [76:43]
Paul Thurrott
If you care about it that much. If you care that much.
- [76:46]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. So, Leo, you said that you were running parallels desktop 26.
- [76:52]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I saw your article and I immediately downloaded.
- [76:55]
Leo Laporte
Okay. And you noticed all kinds of changes?
- [76:58]
Paul Thurrott
No, but I do have the updates notes here.
- [77:02]
Leo Laporte
And what is. What is. What if you could find an item on that list that you think would benefit you as an individual?
- [77:07]
Paul Thurrott
Well, brings updated icons across the board on Macs running Mac os. It's really for Tahoe. It's for the latest.
- [77:12]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [77:13]
Paul Thurrott
So they number at 26 for match.
- [77:15]
Leo Laporte
Apple. Yeah.
- [77:16]
Paul Thurrott
Mac OS 26.
- [77:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [77:21]
Paul Thurrott
There's a long list of what was removed, including shared Bluetooth functionality.
- [77:27]
Leo Laporte
Bluetooth, that's great.
- [77:27]
Paul Thurrott
It says to connect a Bluetooth device to this virtual machine, consider using a USB Bluetooth dongle. So I was right. Yeah. It doesn't seem like a.
- [77:38]
Leo Laporte
Most of it is for businesses.
- [77:39]
Paul Thurrott
The thing that annoys me about both Parallels and Fusion, which is VMware, is they do a yearly release so they can get money out of you.
- [77:50]
Leo Laporte
That's right. Yep. You pay for this by the year? Pretty much, yeah.
- [77:55]
Paul Thurrott
So they don't want to do a.
- [77:56]
Leo Laporte
Subscription in that way. It's almost worse than that in a way because if you stuck on the last version, you still have to pay, you know, you still get. You know what I mean? You still have to pay to keep going. But this is.
- [78:07]
Paul Thurrott
So far they haven't asked me for money. I did update. They haven't asked me asking for anything yet.
- [78:12]
Leo Laporte
Okay. Okay.
- [78:13]
Paul Thurrott
We'll see.
- [78:14]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. So look, the, the hard work there has been done in a way just getting virtualization working on an M base.
- [78:22]
Paul Thurrott
Well, this is why I'm running Parallels. You know, Fusion does have a free tier, but Parallels seeing everybody agreed was the best on.
- [78:28]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah. And they also, you know, now that Microsoft is finally Putting out official ISOs for non insider builds of Windows 11. Nice. You know, it's nice.
- [78:42]
Paul Thurrott
So there you go. I'm updating my Parallels tools right now. That's very exciting.
- [78:46]
Leo Laporte
That's the thing I don't like about the most is all the extra stuff. Yeah, there's always like updates for something.
- [78:51]
Paul Thurrott
Oh yeah, yeah. First you update it and then.
- [78:53]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's like I just want to use the damn thing. Like, oh, you gotta update the tools. You want to use the tools.
- [78:59]
Paul Thurrott
Can't do it without tools.
- [79:00]
Leo Laporte
Yep.
- [79:01]
Paul Thurrott
But the tools do give you some functionality.
- [79:03]
Leo Laporte
Those tools are like Powertoys on Windows. If you look through them like it's a crazy good collection of things.
- [79:08]
Paul Thurrott
Kind of need it.
- [79:09]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. It's pretty cool.
- [79:10]
Paul Thurrott
Anyway, I'm happy.
- [79:11]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [79:12]
Paul Thurrott
As long as they don't want more money, I'm happy.
- [79:15]
Leo Laporte
Well, eventually they will want more money.
- [79:18]
Paul Thurrott
Eventually they're gonna.
- [79:19]
Leo Laporte
That's their right there, you know, that's not.
- [79:21]
Paul Thurrott
Hey, they're a business, you know.
- [79:22]
Leo Laporte
It's not a charity.
- [79:23]
Paul Thurrott
It's a business. It's not a charity. You're watching as you probably figured this out Windows Weekly. But what you're puzzled by is how much weight Richard lost over the last week. But that's. No, that's not Richard. That's just a svelte. Chris Hoffman, formerly of Windows Insider, now of WindowsRead Me. The newsletter has moved to WindowsRead Me.
- [79:46]
Chris Hoffman
That's right. So please subscribe. I think it's a lot of fun and it will. What would I.
- [79:54]
Paul Thurrott
So this is your chance. What would I get if I subscribe to Windows? I do.
- [79:58]
Leo Laporte
What do I have to do to get you into this newsletter right now?
- [80:02]
Paul Thurrott
Well, besides an email once a week, what would I get? What would be in the email?
- [80:06]
Chris Hoffman
It's me. I think it's fun. It's. I think it's exactly. No, it's exactly this type of energy and I think it's something that is missing on the modern Internet. A lot of the time it's just kind of this old school tech blog energy. I mean, we're having it right now on this. I do miss on this podcast. It's not viral headlines, it's not SEO. It's not. I'm not. There's no advertising in the newsletter, Chris. Somewhere in the background you're be fun.
- [80:29]
Leo Laporte
Your TV is turned on and it's, it's running static and it says, Chris, come into the AI. Come into the warm embrace of slop. We'll get it mostly right. We promise.
- [80:42]
Chris Hoffman
Well, I mean, especially with the Internet now, it's becoming more and more AI, which is, you know, I'm not against generative AI. There's a place for it, you can use it yourself. But the entire Internet shouldn't just be pages and pages of other people's AI generated content. I mean, or, you know, that, that, that go generate your own AI.
- [81:00]
Leo Laporte
This is one of the best things.
- [81:01]
Paul Thurrott
About AI is it's going to drive people towards stuff like you do, which.
- [81:06]
Leo Laporte
We will now call artisanal, you know, handmade meeting.
- [81:10]
Chris Hoffman
Right, right. So it is exactly. That is artisanal. Handmade. Chris Hoffman content. And, you know, I also, you know, write for PC World and our publications. But this is me directly. No ads. Straight to you in your inbox. I'm doing a lot of cool retro fun stuff. I'm making it personal. I think it's exactly like twit. You know, conceptually, it's, it's human. This, this is human. This is not algorithmic. This is not AI. This is not a bunch of ads. This is not a bunch of clickbait. This is like real people. This is. Hopefully you're having fun. If you're watching this, you enjoy it, right? I mean, so that's exactly what I, you know, thank you for putting it up.
- [81:48]
Paul Thurrott
So that's the first one is out now.
- [81:50]
Chris Hoffman
I want it to be, like, fun. Like, I had to bring this kind of fun retro idea. If you scroll down a little bit, you can see, you know, I just actually really want it to be fun. Like, I mean, how long did it.
- [82:03]
Paul Thurrott
Take you to do that? Ascii hello. Me in notepad.
- [82:07]
Chris Hoffman
Not long. Because if you just go around, you'll find. No, there are old, like, websites that people are using to make this, like 20 stuff to like 20 or 15 years ago. Right. You can go find those little websites and go, boom, boom.
- [82:20]
Paul Thurrott
There's actually a new one I just saw in Hacker News. It just came it to ASCII Art.
- [82:25]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [82:26]
Paul Thurrott
Nice. Black Viper. There's a name I haven't heard in all these years.
- [82:30]
Chris Hoffman
Yes. So it's not just like, you know, me talking about, you know, tips. It's like I'm reminiscing about. I remember when I use the Black Viper service guide my Windows xpc and, like, why that isn't really necessary anymore. And I'm Thank God there's like this whole retro nostalgia thing I'm doing.
- [82:48]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, you know what? This is a good subject. How to bloat your PC nowadays.
- [82:53]
Chris Hoffman
Modern. And it's. And, and, and so that is exact. And that's like. It's not. There's no links out. There's no ads, there's no SEO. There's no AI slop. It's just me, actual advice based on all the laptops. I've been reviewing everything I've done, all the, like, feedback I've got, like, there are scripts out there and some of them are probably fine. And like, GitHub is full of like 800 different scripts from who knows who.
- [83:15]
Leo Laporte
Right. I can't stand them.
- [83:17]
Chris Hoffman
Who knows what they do to your PC and you shouldn't run them and you don't need to. And.
- [83:23]
Paul Thurrott
Did you do this on Hands on Windows? I think you did. How to make your Windows look more like a Mac.
- [83:29]
Chris Hoffman
And look at that. That is a official Microsoft theme that leaked for Windows XP. That's 100% authentic.
- [83:37]
Leo Laporte
Was it called Liquid Glass?
- [83:39]
Chris Hoffman
It's called Candy. There was an internal theme and I.
- [83:44]
Paul Thurrott
Like how you end.
- [83:47]
Chris Hoffman
I'm trying to have fun with it. There's no world where any SEO site would let you do. Just scroll down a tiny bit more because I. Oh, there's more.
- [83:55]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, there's more. Wait, there's. Wait, there's more.
- [83:58]
Chris Hoffman
Let's See, so there. Like I'm trying, I'm trying to have like, I love it.
- [84:04]
Paul Thurrott
That's awesome.
- [84:05]
Chris Hoffman
Like, it's, this is like an energy that I think is missing on the market largely. Yes. So I, I also have a lot.
- [84:12]
Leo Laporte
Of fun and useful in my newsfeed. I will see things from like, it'll be like random generated site names. It'll be like rai Ks and it's like Microsoft does something, something about something and you're like, you know, this thing is just an AI generated nothing.
- [84:28]
Paul Thurrott
Like I know what happens though. You say, wait a minute, that's my article.
- [84:31]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Well, that's, that's, that was my first introduction to perplexity, by the way.
- [84:35]
Paul Thurrott
But yes, it's, wait a minute, I wrote that.
- [84:38]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. You're like, oh, that's fun. I'm free of the five sources for this answer. That's interesting. Yep. That's a weird moment.
- [84:46]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I bet. Anyway, congratulations. It's @WindowsRead me.
- [84:51]
Chris Hoffman
That's right.
- [84:52]
Paul Thurrott
In beautiful ASCII. And you can subscribe or read it on substack and there's a paid and free version. Thank you Chris, for filling in for Richard. Rich will be back next week.
- [85:01]
Chris Hoffman
He's on his Great to be here.
- [85:02]
Paul Thurrott
He's on his travels, his usual thing.
- [85:05]
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- [86:05]
Paul Thurrott
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- [86:36]
Paul Thurrott
Now we resume Windows Weekly, which is already in progress with a look at Microsoft 365. I shall push my button. Apparently I left my camera on for a while and I was eating my lunch and I apologize to all who saw that. It's disgusting. It's like feeding time at the zoo.
- [86:55]
Leo Laporte
How dare you eat like a human.
- [86:57]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I don't know that people realize I eat live rats for dinner, so.
- [87:01]
Leo Laporte
Ah, well, that would do it.
- [87:02]
Paul Thurrott
That. That might have shocked them, you know.
- [87:04]
Leo Laporte
But Ozzy had went out really on a high note, so. I mean, I think anything is possible.
- [87:08]
Paul Thurrott
Hey, don't knock Mr. Osborne.
- [87:10]
Leo Laporte
I'm not.
- [87:11]
Paul Thurrott
He was a great, great man. I love Nazi. Sad to have lost him.
- [87:16]
Leo Laporte
I agree with you.
- [87:17]
Paul Thurrott
But at least a rabid bat.
- [87:19]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, moving on. A mistake anyhow.
- [87:22]
Paul Thurrott
Yes, he says that. By the way, he lost his head. He thought it was mean to bite it.
- [87:26]
Leo Laporte
He thought it was a toy bat. Why would anyone have a live battery? Anyway, whatever it. Okay, so.
- [87:33]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, what a story.
- [87:34]
Leo Laporte
We can't explain these things. Okay. One of the reasons I don't use Microsoft Word anymore is that, well, it was harassing me to save to OneDrive. And the reason it wanted me to do that was because then I could use autosave. And I looked at this objectively and said, you could do autosave to any location in the file system. What does OneDrive have to do with this? And whatever. But now, out of the blue, and I have no idea that maybe this might be a regulatory antitrust thing. They didn't say that, but I wouldn't be surprised if the EU is somehow behind this. But they are going to support autosave and also just by default to any cloud service. Right. And so if you use, you know, Icloud, Dropbox, Google, whatever, it should work. And it's not available. It's not available in stable, so I don't have it yet. But the version of Word that will likely come up next month in Stable does this. And then they're going to add it to PowerPoint and Excel as well. So the way that works today is by default it wants to save to your documents folder in OneDrive. And that's what this it's set to. It will just do that and you can. I think, I think autosave is also enabled, but now you're going to be able to change that and retain autosave so you can have a default save location that's not there in OneDrive. It could be in some other cloud service. I'm really curious if this will work with Synology Drive, which is technically a cloud service, sort of private Cloud service. We'll see. Or if you could somehow get it to work with just any arbitrary location in your file system, which to me would be great, or whatever.
- [89:09]
Chris Hoffman
I do use OneDrive, but I was really excited that it will just save the file by default. Like, I've had multiple situations. I open a Word document, I get in the zone, I write for two hours, I look up at the top of the window, unsaved document, oh my God. Or I know it's like offline, but it freaks me out.
- [89:24]
Leo Laporte
I do this a lot and I'll sort of reflexively just control s. Control S. And then I guess sometimes I forget because sometimes I'll do the same thing. I'm writing, hit control S. It comes up a save as dialogue. I'm like, wait, what? Like, did I not save this? Is that possible? Yeah, yeah, that's possible. If you've ever used a Mac or an Apple device. This is something Apple's been doing with icloud for a while, actually. Probably from the very beginning. Right when mobile me became icloud.
- [89:48]
Paul Thurrott
I don't know about that.
- [89:48]
Leo Laporte
Apple's own apps did this. No, I know, but it's an attempt to get by the problem that he just described.
- [89:55]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I understand why they do it, but I hate it.
- [89:57]
Leo Laporte
Okay. No, I kind of do too, honestly. But if it's auto saving, one thing you can do, go to the top of the app, just rename it. That's cool. The chances that I wanted it to be where Microsoft wanted it to be by default are 0. So I suppose even if you are going to continue using OneDrive, you could just change the save location to anywhere else in OneDrive. Right. Which gets by two problems. One is the obvious one, the root of documents is not where I want things saved necessarily, but also B, it's tied to that folder backup feature they auto enable on so many people in Windows 11. And that was part of my problem where I was like, I don't want this. I have a system for. I do save to the cloud all the time. Why can't I arbitrarily just save this to Anywhere else in OneDrive? So I believe I don't have it yet, but I believe you could just do that now. Right. So I have a Paul folder in the rooted onedrive and I go from there and I could be like, paul documents. That's where I want it. And then as you create new folders files, they'll autosave there instead. Right. So actually this is a pretty big step for a company that was Kind of batting it down the hatches there on that kind of thing. So that's good. And then the next thing that Microsoft people can complain about because you know they're going to NR already is the OneNote for Windows 10 app, which was originally like the OneNote app or the OneNote MX app or whatever the store app version. Right. Which started out okay, but got pretty great. And then Microsoft actually got rid of the. I think it was OneNote 2016 was going to be the final version on the desktop. And then late in the game they were like, actually we got to go back to the desktop version. So we're going to deprecate this. When Windows 11 came out, it was no longer included in the OSS. I don't know if it was from day one or it's some version of Windows 11 and now it is going to go out of service or out of support at the middle of October, October 14th. So in the interim years they have made OneNote 2019 and then I guess OneNote probably 2024. I guess I don't use OneNote anymore, but I assume that's in there, you know, have. Where all the new features occur, where stuff is happening. It's going to be where the copilot stuff happens. Sorry. So it's a better experience than it used to be. But there was something about the store app I really liked for a little while. It was a poster child for what was possible with that platform, which was kind of limiting and annoying in many ways. But OneDrive was a good. Or OneNote rather was. Was one of the good ones.
- [92:38]
Chris Hoffman
And now it's a poster child for what happened to that platform.
- [92:41]
Leo Laporte
Yes, it is. Yep, yep. Yeah, it is. Yeah. No, that's true. So that's gone. All right. Now we have a bunch of AI stuff that is not Microsoft AI stuff. So I'm gonna try to move through this pretty quickly. But I just want to mention these things because some of it is just kind of interesting out on the side. Apple is rumored to be looking at maybe buying Perplexity or Mistral. There's so much stuff going on at Apple right now with AI. It's like we'll see where it lands, but there's any one of 21 outcomes that could occur there and we'll see what happens. But one of those things is now talking to Google about a version of Gemini that would run on Apple's private cloud. What is the private cloud? Compute servers only for Siri. For that new conversational Siri. They can't seem to get off the ground. And so I don't know, we'll probably find out who won that little battle in the next couple of months. We'll find out. Perplexity, which came out of nowhere with what is still right now kind of the best AI browser, if that makes any sense. You know, it's like, okay, but what's the model here? I mean, obviously you can pay for Perplexity. There's a Perplexity Pro and probably a Max or whatever that's 200 bucks a month. But now they offer a $5 per month Comet plus subscription that's tied to the browser.
- [94:02]
Paul Thurrott
You've seen all the security issues with that browser now, right?
- [94:05]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but they fix them as they come up. It's like Microsoft software. It's fine.
- [94:10]
Paul Thurrott
I actually deleted it. I thought. I don't. But that part of it was because it's agentic and this is going to be a problem with all of the agentic browsers.
- [94:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is the issue that Brave raised. It was like, look, this is going to be a. It's going to be a problem and.
- [94:22]
Paul Thurrott
Even Brave is doing one. So.
- [94:24]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, so the. And so Anthropic yesterday came out with an extension for Cloud. Cloud, whatever for Chrome, which means it will also work on any Chromium based browser. But they're really limiting who can have access to it. So you have to be one of their Max customers. That's a 200 bucks per month thing. And it's only like a thousand customers at first. And they're really looking for people because they're kind of pulling an Apple here where they're like, look, there's security privacy issues here. We know that we're working to fix them before this goes out broadly, we want to make sure this thing is safe. And honestly that's pretty good messaging. So we'll see if they get it there. But Anthropic is kind of like Mistral too, actually is kind of setting itself up to be like the Apple of AI and not like Apple is an AI, but the place where privacy and security are respected and that kind of thing. So we'll see. But I think we're going to see over time extensions for every AI in every browser, because of course we are. Right, right.
- [95:26]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So now you have a choice. Do you have an AI browser or do you have an extension in existing browser?
- [95:30]
Leo Laporte
Why is it that you want to do. Yeah, yep. Yeah. I think mix and match. This is such an obvious thing in a way, but I think that's going to be the future, all this stuff. Notebook LM is that thing that kind of exploded. And it was the first thing Google did with AI in the post kind of Bard Gemini world, where it was like, holy. Like, this is actually really cool. And so last October, I think it was, they did the audio overview feature where they could turn an article into a podcast, like an audio podcast with two hosts, and they kind of banter about the article or whatever. I took a Stephen Stanofsky blog post from 2012, I think it was 8,000 words, fed it into this thing and it was fairly amazing just to listen to this. Now, since then, they have come up with video overviews which are not yet. They will be, but not yet. Like avatars of hosts. It's more like watching a presentation where you're seeing a slide deck or whatever. You're not seeing people, but it's the same sort of thing. And of course, these two things were US English only forever when they were first released. But now both are available in over 80 languages, each kind of amazing what they're doing. It's astonishing. And this is where Google's scale kind of really helps because that's amazing. Yeah, pretty good. And then AI mode, which I think everyone hates, but I have to say I find myself using it, is also available in over 180 countries now in search of. Sorry, Chris, we gonna.
- [96:58]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you're gonna defend AI, not AI mode per se, but you know, I think maybe not quite in here so much, but in general, journalists don't like AI mode for obvious reasons. It's breaking the business model. But like the web is so bad that actually conceptually using AI tools to search in some way and summarize content actually can work pretty well a lot of the time. And it's hard to say as a journalist who's, you know, industry is in trouble.
- [97:28]
Leo Laporte
Gutted right now by.
- [97:29]
Chris Hoffman
Yes, but I mean as a, you know. But so. But often I think journalists. I was in a private community the other day and people were saying everyone hates AI mode. And my journalist friends, it's the true. But like, do. Do they like. Does the average person really hate AI mode? I don't know.
- [97:46]
Leo Laporte
I don't. Honestly. You're going there to get an answer, right.
- [97:49]
Chris Hoffman
And sometimes it's wrong. But that's an art matter, right?
- [97:53]
Leo Laporte
That would be a problem. But for example, there are all these AI developer tools built into developer IDEs and then just into AIs. And you could run anthropic side by side with Visual Studio maybe, or actually that's the thing behind GitHub Copilot, anyway, whatever. But the traditional way to do this stuff when you were looking for the answer to a question would be to Google it and say, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I usually type in something like the name of the framework, the language, and then what it is I'm looking for. And then you rifle through what is mostly stack overflow results and try to find one that does it. And now Chrome at least. And I think Chrome at least. Anyway, I'm sure others do this, the AI overview, and you get this kind of expandable summary at the top. So it's done that work for you. Which is kind of, to me, is the point of AI save you time and is it always right? No, but if it's something like, I'm trying to find the WinUI 3 version of the whatever control from WPF, it's like, this is it. Here are the things. Here's the link to the Microsoft documentation. It's like, yeah, that's what I was looking for. It's pretty good. I agree with you. When I said that, I didn't mean myself. I think for some reason the overall vibe on this is kind of negative. And I understand the impact on publishers, content creators, obviously, but I don't know, like, my use my. When I see it, rather than be outraged by it, I kind of look at it and I'm like, oh, yeah, there you go. That's what I wanted in the first place.
- [99:18]
Paul Thurrott
Hey, incidentally, we mentioned Parallels doesn't support Bluetooth. I think it might be a little bit of a problem for Phone Link because Windows says you can't.
- [99:30]
Leo Laporte
Oh, geez. Right? Yep. You did that.
- [99:32]
Paul Thurrott
Without Bluetooth, you can't link to your phone. And so I think that's something people should pay attention to because I was using Phone Link with Parallels before.
- [99:43]
Leo Laporte
Oh, so that actually was disabled and it previously worked, is that what you're saying?
- [99:47]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, it's a different phone, so it may be that. Do I need Bluetooth only to set it up? You think, I don't know, I'll play.
- [99:55]
Leo Laporte
With Bluetooth pretty much, period.
- [99:57]
Paul Thurrott
That's what I think. And I think the.
- [99:59]
Leo Laporte
Well, no. Out. Okay, wait a minute. No, no, hold on a second.
- [100:01]
Paul Thurrott
Didn't it say I have to have a dongle to make this work?
- [100:04]
Leo Laporte
A dongle? Oh, boy.
- [100:07]
Paul Thurrott
Anyway, I don't want to. I didn't mean to hijack you. I just. This just came up, so I'm wondering.
- [100:13]
Leo Laporte
Interesting then. So I've been looking at AI web browsers I got invited to check out something I guess I had heard of. I don't remember this, but Norton is still around Norton, like Corella still around Norton? Yeah. And they're making something called Neo, which is an AI web browser. It's pretty terrible whether or not you.
- [100:36]
Paul Thurrott
Intel bought them, right?
- [100:38]
Leo Laporte
No, Symantec back in the day and then Symantec split up and then merged with whatever. So Symantec or it's now. What's the name of the company? Something like. It's got a real gen, I think is the name of the company now gentech or something. And they're very. They own a lot of littler companies that you might remember from back in the day. So in the security space is stuff like Avast and other avg, these kind of classic security companies, kind of like whatever Corel's called now owns not just Corel, but all of the former Borland apps. They own a bunch of these, like Paint Shop Pro and all these. They're like little holding companies.
- [101:15]
Paul Thurrott
It's the last days of these things. Right?
- [101:18]
Leo Laporte
Milk it, whatever.
- [101:19]
Paul Thurrott
All the way down.
- [101:22]
Leo Laporte
Anyway, I didn't like it, so I'm not going to talk about it too much, but maybe it gets better and I don't really care because I'm never going to use it. So whatever. I just felt obligated to try it.
- [101:30]
Chris Hoffman
This is just the usual AI hype. It's like, oh, AI web browsers. Let's say we made one.
- [101:35]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Every once in a while though, right? So most of this stuff is pretty tame or not interesting or it doesn't work yet or something. And a lot of it's like screen scrape level stuff where it literally moves the mouse cursor around and does stuff in the webpage. You're like, okay, that's kind of interesting. But this is going to be more interesting when it's a, you know, controlling it on the back end, something like that. But every once in a while I will do something in one of these browsers where I'm like, okay, that's pretty good. Where I was comparing speakers in Comet actually, and then later came up and said, hey, remember the thing you were talking about? Well, it's on sale or whatever. And you're like, no, that's okay. Pretty good. It remembers what you were talking about. The summary stuff is pretty big, pretty obvious or whatever, pretty common now. But it's, you know, it works well, I don't know. We'll see. The big change is going to be later though, because it's going to be. It's not going to be about clicking on things and talking. Well, you'll talk to it, I guess. But I think website's going to be really de emphasized. Like the content will still be there, but it will be accessed more programmatically.
- [102:41]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. We had a guy from Rich Scrint from Common Crawl on and he's been promoting. And I think he's right that sites have to stop thinking about SEO, Search engine optimization.
- [102:55]
Leo Laporte
That's right.
- [102:55]
Paul Thurrott
And start thinking about aio, or as.
- [102:58]
Leo Laporte
I would call it, A, E, I, O, U, A, E, I, O, U.
- [103:01]
Paul Thurrott
But if you, if you're, let's say, selling running shoes, you have to make sure that when somebody does an AI search for running shoes that you show up.
- [103:10]
Leo Laporte
That's right. And I'm a Kevin.
- [103:12]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, no, don't scrape me. I don't want to be in that.
- [103:15]
Leo Laporte
That's not scrap. It's no programmatic. See, we're thinking about this the wrong way. Like, the goal here is that if someone goes to your site, you have a pretty site that works, whatever, it's fine. But if someone says, like, I want to, I'm going to use an AI agent two seconds from now. And you want that to be working with that thing on the back end. Like, you definitely want that. Because otherwise you're just. That's the way people are just going to do that. Like they'll be walking from their car to their house and say, just buy me the best pair of shoes.
- [103:38]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [103:38]
Leo Laporte
Of whatever kind. Let's do it increasingly. And it will show up tomorrow. You're not even going to think about it. You'll just say it. You know, you gotta be there. Doesn't work today.
- [103:49]
Paul Thurrott
You know my size.
- [103:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And then you get these clown shoes, you know, because it's AI and AI doesn't work half the time.
- [103:57]
Paul Thurrott
I hallucinated clown shoes.
- [103:59]
Leo Laporte
What is this? Like, yeah, that's going to be like, look, we all do this today with the Amazon. But like, it's like, hey, this is delivery here. It's like, what is it? It's like an Amazon package. And I'm like, what? And I'm like, okay. And then Stephanie will say something like, did you order something? I'm like, maybe.
- [104:12]
Paul Thurrott
What do you think?
- [104:13]
Leo Laporte
I don't know. Probably. I don't know. And then you open, you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, that thing I ordered that.
- [104:18]
Paul Thurrott
That's bad.
- [104:19]
Leo Laporte
I clicked on something to get it right. I mean, when I just say it, like I say all kinds of things out loud. How am I supposed to remember this? You're walking like a new car is going to be sitting out front in the driveway. It's like, where's that thing come. Oh, yeah, I was drunk.
- [104:30]
Paul Thurrott
It's got a bow on it.
- [104:32]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I ordered it. It's on my Amex card. Great.
- [104:35]
Paul Thurrott
Nice. That's the nice thing about an Amex card. There's no limit.
- [104:38]
Leo Laporte
There's no limit.
- [104:38]
Paul Thurrott
Buy a yacht if you really.
- [104:40]
Leo Laporte
Hey, if it wasn't gold, I wouldn't have got a nice car. I don't know. So, yeah.
- [104:44]
Paul Thurrott
Anyway, okay, moving along.
- [104:47]
Leo Laporte
Yep. I don't think this is anything today, but Proton makes an AI chatbot of their own called Lumo, which, you know, you can access from their other services, but it's also a standalone chatbot and they're doing what some other companies are doing. And this is the part I think that's kind of interesting, which is giving you a choice of open models and protecting your privacy against the owners of those models. Like Apple does with Apple Intelligence and ChatGPT. Right. And Kitty cat. It's a cute little cat and it's, it's limited and it's small and it's, it uses like the small models. Right? It uses like Gemma. Yeah, Bristol, small three, you know, whatever. So they just got. But they're also kind of doing our Euro stack thing, which is what? Meaning they're trying to, you know, loose. Lessen reliance on US based big tech. Right. And so, you know, they host in Germany or. Well, Germany, yes, but you know, European countries, et cetera, et cetera. So this thing is, you know, it's going to be limited at first. Of course. It's like anything else. You can use it for free, you can pay them and get more or whatever.
- [105:56]
Paul Thurrott
But they did just encrypt even the conversation end to end.
- [106:00]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they do all the right stuff. It's Proton like they, they, they do it right. It's open source. You can, you know, you can look at it if you don't believe it's safe, you can look at the code. And I think there's a future here, but it's not there today. So this 1.1 release comes, I don't know, two or three months after the initial release. It's a dramatic improvement in both sophistication and performance. But it's still little AI, I guess, but I think it's going to get there. I think this is it, this kind of thing. I think this is interesting. If we can get people to kind of accept the Fact that. That they're probably going to be paying if they weren't really good quality. And then at that point it's like, well, you want to go with a company you can actually trust and an AI you can trust, et cetera. I think there's. DuckDuckGo is probably going to get there. Brave will try opera. Well, I'm not sure what they're doing, but this notion of we're going to give you the models you want, but we're also going to protect you from the big tech predator that's behind the model. It's not a bad. It's not a bad business model. Yeah.
- [107:07]
Paul Thurrott
You're a big proton fan. Yeah, no, they're in the position now maybe moving out of Switzerland because.
- [107:14]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, because of the. Because they might change the laws there to be a little less private. So, like. Yeah, we're not doing that for them. Good on them. Incredible.
- [107:22]
Paul Thurrott
That's what I expect from a bunch of physicists.
- [107:25]
Leo Laporte
Yes. Right. They're going to take. And we're taking our CERN with us. Yep.
- [107:33]
Paul Thurrott
All right.
- [107:34]
Leo Laporte
Chris has a. Oh, no.
- [107:36]
Paul Thurrott
A rant.
- [107:37]
Leo Laporte
Controversial.
- [107:38]
Paul Thurrott
Should I get the gong?
- [107:39]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah. I'm gonna take us off topic again, I guess. But I don't know. Like, I was. I was writing about this yesterday, and I know you've probably talked about Windows 2030 a bunch, but it's just like, there's this AI in general is. I. I feel like everyone is getting it wrong and maybe not here, but in general, like, it's either, like, okay, well, it's either going to replace everyone's job tomorrow or it can't do anything. And it's like, well, neither of those is really true.
- [108:04]
Paul Thurrott
I 100% agree.
- [108:06]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah.
- [108:06]
Chris Hoffman
Neither of those is really true. And, you know, I think there's just too much hype because there's so much hype that even I want to just come out and, you know, yell about AI laptops. And I did, because there's too much hype. But, like, if you could. If there was not that much hype and you could just discover, like, oh, look at. I just actually got access to Comet. And it's like, like, kind of cool and kind of like, it's actually plotting. It's like, do the same. Google Maps is taking four minutes. Like, okay, this clicking that. It's actually. It's interesting. It's not going to, you know, replace.
- [108:32]
Leo Laporte
This is what I mean by program. But that's, you know, once it can actually just control that site instead of it. Like.
- [108:38]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah, but so, like, if there wasn't this much hype and you could just discover this weird technology and that no one was talking about, you think maybe this is kind of cool. This is interesting. I could play with this. Like, it's interesting to play with Comet. Like, like technology is. In some ways it's actually pretty fun to play with like chatbots. It's pretty fun to play with like, comma. It's pretty fun to play with an image creator. This can be interesting, but there's too much hype. But like the Windows 2030 stuff, I really was bothered by the. Especially the pull quote of like, oh, you know, it's mice and keyboards are going to be alien in five years. And it's like, that's such a bad way of communicating with your audience, you know? Well, I mean, it actually reminds me of Windows 8. It's like, oh, we're going to be a voice first. Just like we were touched first. It's like, well, so I mean, people are going to want, you know, it's actually like a bad. It makes people bristle. It's like, I don't want that AI thing.
- [109:31]
Leo Laporte
Okay, but hold on.
- [109:32]
Paul Thurrott
And by the way, 71% in the most recent poll I saw of people are afraid of and dislike AI. And that's exactly why. Right. They sold the wrong story.
- [109:42]
Chris Hoffman
But.
- [109:42]
Leo Laporte
But Microsoft's not going to make the mistake of Windows 8 again, right? These things will be additive. They'll just be if we're going to talk to our. When Microsoft added Cortana to Windows 10, it was like, well, maybe if there was a voice way of making this work, I could see that. And then there were these other things they did in Windows 10, like the live tiles where I was like, no, because you're hiding that. The point of this is it has to be seen to be useful. So there were some things that work and some things that didn't. And obviously Cortana has disappeared. But I think that, yeah, that pull quote that you're talking about is the thing that freaked everyone out. And by everyone, I mean us people our age and older who are old timers and have been doing this forever and you'll pull my keyboard for my cold, stiff hand or whatever the phrase is. And the point isn't so much. Well, it's literally not that voice is going to replace keyboard mouse, just like touch didn't. But rather that it's something that will be there when you need it. And so I think who they're really speaking to is a younger generation. And I Think they, in one of those two videos they referenced this generation where these people don't use devices that have keyboards and mice and they don't, you know, they don't understand this to them is foreign, whereas this to me is a lifeline. But, but when, when does.
- [111:10]
Chris Hoffman
God, I'm sorry, sorry. But like, like the funny thing is in the pull quote they said Gen Z, which gen Z is 13 to 39 to 29. So the idea that a 29 year old is going to find a keyboard foreign in five years is crazy. So obviously they're talking about actually a younger generation. Gen Alpha, fine. But like, you know, it's funny because the same companies will say one day, oh, you got to be a prompt engineer and be really good at typing the precise things and you got to be a good prompt engineer. And then the next day it's like, well, you're really just going to ramble at your computer. You're really not even going to need a keyboard. It's like, well, which is it? And also, you know, guess what, guess what? Even OpenAI is going to come up with their new device. They're working with Jony Ivan and people are going to come with new devices. But even if there's a new device and everyone loves it, people are still going to want PCs to be PCs and to have keyboards and have mice and I have a smartphone and I love it, but I need my PC to be a PC. So Microsoft, in a bit of a between a rock and a hard place, but also like I think they would have a better time selling AI to people if they didn't say insane things like this.
- [112:08]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but I. So this is that competing masters thing. Like who? Look, I'm 58 years old, right? Is that true? Yeah, 58. So I have to always do the math on that. And look, I am going to be using a keyboard and a mouse or a touchpad or whatever for the rest of my life. And I came up in the age of computers, home computers, personal computers, literally PCs, Windows, whatever. This is my thing. I'm less comfortable on a phone than I am on a PC. I can't type on a phone. I can type a nut job on a PC but I can't on a phone. But they're not speaking to me. They don't care what I. I'm going to be retired when this thing comes through. So who cares what I think? And also look, Microsoft, there's no Gen Z or younger people listening to Microsoft Talk about Windows 2030 Anyway, who cares? This is For Wall Street. This is for stock price. This is for investors. We're not missing this boat. But I always like, there's a real knee jerk thing that can occur where you see that and you have that response. Not you. I mean, where one like Mary Jo did this. We talked about this last week a little bit jokingly. It's like, nope, no, screw that. Stop touching notepads. Stop changing things. And it's like, yeah, I mean, I hear you. But the fundamental problem with Windows 8 wasn't the idea or the touch thing or whatever. It was just so one way they optimized this thing for touch in a world where everyone had normal computers. And it was like, guys, you're screwing us all over here. This is the thing. I think they're very careful to be different about now because they saw what happened. Well, no, they are. Keyboard and mice don't go away, you know, not when you. Sometimes you need a big screen. You need to type like a person. But the natural language thing will be there too, and the computer will have. We've already gone from a world where like, you know, we have webcams, right? We have IR sensors for Windows. Hello. We have integrated microphones and whatever, whatever. Computers today have presence sensors, but they also have these other capabilities. It's kind of a goofy term, but it's like room sensing kind of things. You can sense when someone's looking over someone's shoulder and dim the screen so they don't steal your ideas or whatever. And so what they're really talking about is an expansion of that stuff that you will interact more in this kind of natural way. Even people who are kind of cynical about this might have experience by now. This thing where you talk to ChatGPT or whatever it is out in the world, you walk around, you talk, it talks back to you. You have this conversation and then you do this thing. You're like, wow, okay. Actually, this is completely different than anything I've ever done. And it's actually pretty good. Like, you know, give it a chance. But I don't think like while you're doing that, someone's like taking the keyboard away from your desk. It's like, you know, it's, you know, that's always going to be there. It's a PC.
- [115:07]
Chris Hoffman
But yeah, so, and like, I wrote about that. I actually, maybe it's just because I'm like you and I don't really want to type 10 paragraphs on my phone. It's. It's forever. Like, but especially with AI in the phone, it's like rambling with the voice to text works so well then like, you know, it could work well in a computer. But like, yeah, you know, it's just. This is just like, this is just like the AI hype in general, right? It's either. It's either going to be nothing or it's going to entirely replace the keyboard and mouse. And you know, like, it's just, just.
- [115:36]
Leo Laporte
I mean, go back and watch the original Copilot plus PC announcement if you want to see a complete disconnect with reality, you know, just like. And then compare it to what actually happened and it's like guys like come on, recall. Yeah, well, I mean, just the way they did. As soon as they started talking about that, I was like, oh, I can already tell how this is going to go, you know, and it was way worse than I thought too. But you just tell like they just don't. They have a certain cluelessness about how they present themselves or whatever. I sort of vaguely appreciate they're even making videos, honestly. This is something. They stopped doing this for a long time. They haven't done a vision video. I can't even. Decades. It's been a long time. So the fact that they're thinking about the future with regards to Windows is sort of a good idea or good to me or positive or whatever. Although given all the updates we get every month, there's times when I wish they would forget it existed, honestly. But yeah, anyway, I don't think you or I have to worry about keyboards ever disappearing.
- [116:35]
Paul Thurrott
But thank goodness carpal tunnel is real.
- [116:40]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I know. That's why I use these crazy keyboards.
- [116:45]
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- [117:45]
Paul Thurrott
You're watching and I'm so glad you are my friends. You are watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrock, Chris Hoffman filling in for Richard Campbell. We're glad you're here. We do this show every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live and many of you are right now a 369 of you in our club. Twit Discord on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn, Kik. We like having you watch live. We appreciate it. But of course you can also watch after the fact on the website TWiT TV WW on YouTube where there's a dedicated channel to the video. Great way to share clips and the best thing to do. Subscribe on your favorite podcast player and you get it automatically the minute we're done on a Wednesday. Back to the show. Let's talk Developers, Developers, Developers.
- [118:35]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So I've mentioned repeatedly that in many ways GitHub Copilot is one of the better examples of how AI can be useful. But I'm also me. So it's also one of the ways that has annoyed the hell out of me using a computer, like on a fairly daily basis. And the reason is it does things that are pretty great. You can type the beginning of a function or a method or whatever, or type a line of code, whatever it is, and it's just auto fills, sometimes 20, 30 lines of code. You look at it, you're like, yeah, that was what I was going to type. That's amazing. You know, like, it's amazing. It can be amazing. There are other times, though, where I'm maybe typing some line of code and it's trying to anticipate what it is I'm going to type. So I'll type like the name of an object dot, and then it will be the name of like a property or method that is associated with that thing. And I type the first letter and it auto fills some other thing. And I'm like, nope, that is not what I want. And then sometimes getting that thing back is a little tedious. And so I'm apparently not the only person that has complained about this, because in the latest version of Visual Studio, which came out, I think last week now, they have added several options in Settings where you can actually tune this stuff down a little bit. And so, for example, you can change it so that when you're typing code, it won't try to autocomplete until you've paused for a second or two. And that's the thing I've been running into, especially where I type pretty fast. I'm like, okay, and it's like, because as I type quickly, it auto fills or auto completes, I guess, and the whole thing fills in. You're like, what is this? I was in the middle of writing like a single line of code like, what is this? So there's a bunch of little options like that. And if you use this tool, strongly recommend looking at this. I'm experimenting with this now because I want to find the right balance because I do like the code completion stuff, but I also. Sometimes it's a little too much, a little too fast or whatever. So. And then I guess this is semi related only because when I'm in Visual Studio, this is what I'm doing. But Microsoft has come under a lot of fire from developers about the Windows app SDK, which is the modern replacement for that app platform we've been referencing a few times that began with Windows 8. Right. One of the big differences is that this actually targets desktop apps. They've gone away from the mobile part of it, but it's the same basic APIs and they've removed some dependencies on Windows versions, et cetera, et cetera. The problem is, well, the problem. There are many problems with the Windows app SDK and you don't have time or care. But one of the big ones is that they don't ever seem to respond to anyone who has questions or complaints. They never seem to fix any bugs. The first time this came up a few weeks ago, I referenced something that was over five years old where they were like, yeah, we acknowledge this is a problem, never fixed it. The documentation is out of date. Chris mentioned the Windows Copilot runtime, which came and went, except that it never came because they announced that in May 2024 and didn't ship the first early preview for developers until the following February. They still haven't shipped it in stable and you still can't ship an app in stable using this technology. It's like, what are you guys doing? It was supposed to be in Windows app SDK last fall or summer or whatever, like a year ago.
- [122:00]
Chris Hoffman
They're hyping AI.
- [122:02]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, yeah. So the look, I even hate to use this term, I'm not even sure there is a team that actually works in this thing. But the people who are still there, who haven't been laid off or whatever, or aren't off working on more important things at Microsoft, have heard the complaints and are responding and they've come up with a plan. In the end, game here is they're going to open source the Windows app SDK like they did with WPF and Windows forums and. Net. Well, I'm assuming part of the goal is that means a lot of the support weight would follow the community where if there's a control that doesn't work right or some whatever it is like that the community can now fix this because Microsoft's never going to. I have run into so many things in the Windows app SDK that you're just missing like crazy, crazy things that are missing that are available in older frameworks that have been around for 20 years. Like they just work fine. And as I keep trying to build this version of the app in the Windows app SDK, I keep running into this problem. So anyway, they provided an update. They're basically through with what they call phase one. So the new a preview version of The Windows app SDK 1.8 will has shipped and then they were supposed to ship the final version by the end of the month. What is it? The date is what, the 27th? They've got a couple days, so they could still do it. Probably going to be September. But this is going to get them on the path to supporting this stupid thing better. Hopefully. But I don't. Who's making Windows native apps today other than me? Nobody. Right? Nobody.
- [123:35]
Paul Thurrott
Well, what do they make if they don't make Windows native apps, what do they make?
- [123:38]
Leo Laporte
Cross platform apps of any kind. Is that the case?
- [123:42]
Paul Thurrott
It's all.
- [123:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. For new apps. Yeah. I mean, why would you target just Windows?
- [123:46]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you're right.
- [123:47]
Chris Hoffman
Games. That's it.
- [123:49]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [123:49]
Leo Laporte
Right. Games.
- [123:50]
Chris Hoffman
12 AI web browsers. That's a new Windows native app.
- [123:53]
Leo Laporte
Yes. Okay, that's true. Okay, fair enough.
- [123:56]
Paul Thurrott
That's actually fascinating. That is a big shift.
- [123:58]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Well, web browsers, you know, web browsers were stealing share from other apps 20 years ago. Stephen Stofsky used to write about that back in the day. And then.
- [124:09]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but remember when Facebook released an app that was essentially just a web app for iPhone and people hated it and finally Facebook said, oh, we're going to do a native app. And that was maybe 15, 10, 15 years ago. Everybody said, oh, maybe 10 years ago. Oh, thank God. Native apps a wrap.
- [124:31]
Leo Laporte
No one would even know if you did it today.
- [124:32]
Paul Thurrott
You can't tell me.
- [124:33]
Leo Laporte
These things are so sophisticated. And by the way, why are we even thinking about this at this point? Like these things, like, who cares what it's.
- [124:39]
Paul Thurrott
What is the. What is the framework that. Is there one that's generally preferred in Windows? Yeah.
- [124:46]
Leo Laporte
No, so there's the.
- [124:48]
Paul Thurrott
It's just electron. It's Not.
- [124:50]
Leo Laporte
No. So if you look, first of all, there's no such thing. I mean, asterisks for new Greenfield, you know, native apps on Windows. Like, it's not happening. Not at scale. Right. So.
- [125:01]
Paul Thurrott
Because, like, what hasn't been written, I guess, is part of the problem.
- [125:03]
Leo Laporte
And why would anyone do that now? Like, if you're going to. I have the greatest idea for a new app, and I only want it to run on Windows. Said nobody ever. Right. So that's just not going to happen.
- [125:12]
Paul Thurrott
So that a shift. That's.
- [125:13]
Leo Laporte
It's a huge shift. Right. But this happened a long time ago. I mean, it's happened a long time ago.
- [125:17]
Paul Thurrott
I just wasn't paying attention.
- [125:18]
Leo Laporte
No, I mean, this is something, you know, this is. This is a big discussion. But. But what we do have are these. Like, the Windows app SDK is really. I'm using it to make a new. A new app, which is stupid. But most people that.
- [125:31]
Paul Thurrott
But you're doing it for fun. You're not. This is not a business I'm doing for fun.
- [125:35]
Leo Laporte
I hate myself is what I'm doing for. I have no idea why I'm doing. I can't even.
- [125:37]
Paul Thurrott
But that's. That's the fun for you. You love it.
- [125:40]
Leo Laporte
Torturing myself is fun. Okay, fair enough. Most people, what they want to. What they have in the Windows space, what they have is a legacy app of some kind. And they want to modernize.
- [125:48]
Paul Thurrott
They got to maintain all that C.
- [125:49]
Leo Laporte
But they want to make it look prettier. Right. And so it can be used for this purpose. That's probably the biggest use case, actually, modernize an app. If you did latch onto that Metro modern UWP framework, you could also transform your app into a desktop app using this thing and move it into the modern world. They're pretty good at that kind of stuff. They rejuvenated WPF last year because so many companies were still using it internally. There were thousands and thousands, tens, hundreds of thousands of these apps out in the world, and they were looking increasingly out of date, especially on Windows 11. They're like, all right, so we can support. We could throw a skin on there. It would look fine.
- [126:25]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's the thing. It's the skin. The underlying stuff is the same.
- [126:28]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So they're doing. That's what we have. We do have React native. Right. So you could create an app that would.
- [126:37]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. React is running cross platforms.
- [126:39]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Mac, Windows or Windows.
- [126:43]
Paul Thurrott
The thing is, you want to be available on mobile, too.
- [126:45]
Leo Laporte
That's right. Yeah. And you want. There Are all these terms in the developer space you want your app to respond, be responsive, meaning if you're running it on a big screen, it looks like a desktop thing. If you're running on a small screen, it looks like a phone app, it's full screen, whatever. We're getting into these weird spaces with iPad and Android tablets or Android phones even where you can run windowed apps. And it should, you know, respond to those changes, etc. Etc. Anyway, we're never going to get a modern native Windows only app SDK ever again. Like it's, that's over. Like it's just over. And by the way, I look at this thing and I'm like, maybe this is for the best because Windows app SDK is a dumpster fire. It is unbelievable.
- [127:27]
Paul Thurrott
It's time. It's time.
- [127:28]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's bad.
- [127:31]
Paul Thurrott
Here we are two hours in and we haven't even done the Xbox segment. So Mr. Surat, kick it off.
- [127:39]
Leo Laporte
Let's go get this stuff happening. All right, so this has been a pretty good week for Xbox. Again, the big news is that Microsoft, just before the show started, this is a little confusing, but if you're familiar with Game Pass today, you know that there's Game Pass, I'm going to forget the name. There's a Game Pass Core, which is what used to be Xbox Live Gold. There's Xbox Game Standard, which used to be Xbox Game Pass. Right, the one that gave you the day and date on console only PC. Game Pass, which is its equivalent on PC and then Xbox. Or I guess now it's just Game Pass ultimate, which is all of that stuff combined.
- [128:16]
Paul Thurrott
Plus I can't imagine anyone would be confused by any of that. I mean, that seems so sensible.
- [128:21]
Leo Laporte
It's getting more. Well, I'm about to make it more complicated. So if you do have Xbox or whatever it's called Game Pass ultimate, you get into the cloud streaming stuff, right? This is Xbox cloud gaming. You do that through the Xbox app. You can do it to mobile, you can do it to smart TVs, whatever streaming. They have talked recently and this is. Now we can know why about the possibility of bringing that capability to like lower cost subscriptions. I sort of thought it was going to be like a standalone cloud gaming thing, but I guess not. Instead what they're doing is in the Xbox Insider program. So on a PC or actually a console, you have to enroll that device into it. You get the new version of the dashboard and, or the, the app and then you get new capabilities before they're available. Publicly, you can now test some version of cloud gaming on Xbox Game Pass Core and standard and PC Game Pass, which is confusing to date. Xbox Cloud Gaming, which is streaming, has streamed Xbox games, Right. So if you're on a PC or a phone or whatever, the game you're looking at is an Xbox. It's an Xbox game, which is, you know, could be bad on mobile because the screen's so small if there's little text. Right. So part of the deal there is they want to update these games so that they can tell what they're running as the react thing, actually. And you'll have the option to use touch controls maybe, or change the UI, etc. Now, what they're testing on the PC is there are also select PC games that will stream via Xbox Cloud Gaming to PCs, so we don't know what those are yet. I actually can't test this, oddly, because I have Game Pass ultimate and that's not included in this. So I don't get to see this. But apparently if you're not yet anyway, for some reason this is limited to core and standard tiers of the subscription. You have to be in the Insider program, like I said, and then they're playing around with this, so it's kind of interesting. So I'd like to see this, but I'm not going to start a new account, so I don't know. I'm curious about this. I think this is in the notes. I think this is tied to this. Yeah, so it's not in the notes, but. But tied to this also in the Insider program on Xbox is the ability to see multiple stores inside of the Xbox app. So if you have Steam, Epic, gamestore and then Gog and a couple of others, and you've installed games, you can actually access those games from the Xbox app, which is like a dashboard, which is literally the UI on one of Those handheld gaming PCs that are coming out soon. So. So right now, of course, that features PC only because those stores are on PC. But the theory is that Xbox will be a PC, you know, will be a Windows PC next gen. And when that's the case, that means that even from what we're going to call a console, or whatever it is, or from these gaming handhelds, you'll be able to access whatever games you bought on Steam or wherever else, and then do it from that one ui, which is actually kind of cool. So potentially that will be coming to the console eventually. So. Yes. So someone asked, but not Game Pass PC. Yes, it is. Game Pass PC is part of it. But it's a different test there. They're testing making select PC games available through for cloud streaming. So these would be PC games streaming from Microsoft servers in the cloud.
- [131:55]
Chris Hoffman
Which is first, which is really huge because if you're a PC, especially on the Snapdragon laptops where they couldn't download a single PC game, you go in and you go to the interface, you can cloud stream it. And it's like sometimes there's a game that is on PC. It has a PC version optimized for keyboard and mouse, but you're not streaming. And then it has the console version, but you're streaming the console version. So it's like, well, now get out your controller. It's like, but can I use my mouse? No, because it's not the PC version of the PC game on your PC.
- [132:22]
Leo Laporte
Yep. Yeah, they'll get it there eventually.
- [132:25]
Chris Hoffman
They're getting it there apparently.
- [132:28]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it is. I'm sorry, that was actually a notes. I was just talking, talking about that, but there it is. So for the past year I've been playing Call of Duty again. So I'm playing the latest game. I don't play it as much as I used to, but it infuriates me just as much as it used to. So that's good. And actually they found a way to infuriate me even more. So instead of just it being some random camper idiot who's always in the same exact place on a map, they are giving out these are selling them. I don't know how they're price selling them, but they've been doing these tie inside all year. Now this is not unique to this year, but it's been really bad this year. So the first one was that I can recall might have been. Oh, squid game. So all these squid game characters running around in Call of Duty and you're like, okay, whatever. It was like Terminator 2. You're like, okay, maybe. So you're sitting there playing the game and you got like, you're looking down the thing and you hear some voice behind you go, I'll be back. And you're like, oh, that's hilarious. What does it have to do with Call of Duty? I have no idea. But then it got really weird. Like there was a Seth Rogen skin.
- [133:27]
Paul Thurrott
No.
- [133:28]
Leo Laporte
So he walks around mumbling to himself and he's like, I'm not even sure I care.
- [133:32]
Chris Hoffman
That war.
- [133:32]
Leo Laporte
What are you doing here? Hurt. It's ridiculous. And I don't even know what that's tied to. It's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Well, no, it's not, because the next thing is the stupidest thing. So from there, it was like Mutant Ninja Turtles. Those guys are hopping around with the stupid shells and whatever. And then the latest one is Beavis and Butthead.
- [133:47]
Paul Thurrott
No.
- [133:48]
Leo Laporte
So, like, you're playing the game, first of all, these things, they're humongous. So this guy's hiding by the wall. You can see, like, his head because it's huge. All right, we're going to kill this idiot. But the whole game, it's like, I'm going to score, you know, and it's like, oh, my God, what are you doing in this game? And the thing is, look, I don't care that they offer this stuff in a way, but what I do care about is I can't turn it off myself. Like, I don't want to see this crap. Like, what is this? Like, so Fortnite.
- [134:15]
Paul Thurrott
You can blame Fortnite for this.
- [134:18]
Leo Laporte
Absolutely, I do, actually. Right. And by the way, this is where that stuff belongs in Fortnite. This is a military show, right? So Microsoft or Activision recently announced Black Ops 7. So this thing's shipping, I think, in the beginning of November this year. Obviously, Battle. What do you call? EA has announced Battlefield 6, which looks unbelievable. Super realistic military, grounded military shooter, whatever. This game's never going to outsell Call of Duty. But this has intensified the calls from people who were like hardcore Call of Duty guys to be like, could you stop doing this, please? Like, the stuff you're doing is terrible. So one of the things they had announced a week earlier was that all of your stuff from Black Ops 6 multiplayer would come forward to Black Ops 7. Meaning if you bought that Beavis and Butthead skin, you could play it. You could play as those characters in 7 too. And, you know, you hear that or I hear that and I'm like, oh. It's like, oh, I don't know if I want to do this anymore. Like, it's just so annoying. So they got so many complaints about this, and I think Battlefield 6 really helped. I really think this is what put it over top that they actually announced, we're not doing that anymore. So forget it. Like, we're not doing it. They're still going to bring things forward in Warzone, which is their battle royale type game, like, Fortnite type game. But in the main Call of Duty game, the multiplayer modes, those skins and weapons too, and whatever else are not coming forward anymore. And thank you. Just return to common sense.
- [135:45]
Paul Thurrott
Don't you make enough money already you have to start selling Seth Rogen skins?
- [135:50]
Leo Laporte
Come on. Seth Rogen? Are you kidding?
- [135:52]
Paul Thurrott
That's weird.
- [135:53]
Leo Laporte
It is bizarre.
- [135:56]
Paul Thurrott
But it's me. It was very popular in Fortnite. All these, like, Sabrina Carpenter skins.
- [136:00]
Leo Laporte
Well, some of the Fortnite. It's like Darth Vader or something. Okay. It's fine. It's fun. Like, I get it. I'm not like a. Like a goon about this, but like, but it's so stupid. Like, I don't understand why I can't turn it off. Like, I could turn off the microphone so that no one. I don't have to.
- [136:14]
Paul Thurrott
Because somebody paid a lot of money for that skin.
- [136:17]
Leo Laporte
Okay, but all day. Look, if you have the skin and no one else sees it, how would you know?
- [136:22]
Paul Thurrott
Well, that's true. How would you know they wouldn't be shooting at you?
- [136:25]
Leo Laporte
I don't know.
- [136:26]
Paul Thurrott
That's a good question.
- [136:27]
Leo Laporte
I mean, how would you know? Who cares? Like, as long as you bought it, you're happy. Like it benefit yourself and whatever. Yeah, okay, so this.
- [136:35]
Paul Thurrott
That's a good mini rant. I like it. Good job.
- [136:38]
Leo Laporte
Well, it's super localized to something very specific. But, like, I don't know, just as an adult, I'm looking at this thing. Come on. What are you doing? What are you doing? There's been a bunch of things that happened recently. I've been sort of reading up on the video game industry for various reasons. I read this book about Gabe Newell that was terrible, but he's an interesting person. And I went back to some older games or older books I'd bought. Like a million years ago, there was a book about Nintendo and some. I'm just, Just anticipating some things down the line. But I came across something where I was like, wait a minute. And maybe this is common knowledge, but I just wrote about this. The 30% fee that mobile app stores just kind of do without any reason whatsoever. Like, literally pulled that number out of the air with no regard to anything is from Nintendo. When 1983, two big things happened. One, the video game crash occurred in the United States, killing or basically killing all of the consoles. We had at the time 2600, 5200 Mattel and television, ColecoVision, et cetera. That was the end of that. And then we had like a two to four year time span where nothing happened with video games, basically, and we moved to home computers. But the other thing that happened in 1983 was Nintendo released what we called the NES, the Famicom in Japan. And it was originally released with just games that Nintendo made. And to me, in the early 1980s, looking at Nintendo, to me they were like a B level kind of second rate kind of video game company. It was like they didn't have like Pac Man, Galaxian, like the good stuff. They had like Donkey Kong, whatever, Popeye. It's like, who cares? But then two of the game companies, including Namco, which made Pac man, went to them and said, look, you're going to let us make games on this thing, how's that going to work? And they were like, oh, because the market had just died in the United States, which was the market, they said, well, we can't let that happen again. So too many games, no quality control, no licensing, no anything. It was just third party developers in many cases either left Atari and just knew how to do this stuff or reverse engineered it, whatever. It was a lot of video games, the crash card, whatever. So they're like, well, they're like, what do you think we should do? And these two, I can't remember the other one. One was like I said was Namco, but I can't remember the other name, the other company. But they basically said, well, you should have a licensing program and then you could just approve of the games that come out on your system. Also, we're small companies, we can't afford to do this. You could make the games, you could actually physically manufacture them, you could charge us for that. And they were like, okay. So Nintendo and the two companies arrived at a 10% fee for life licensing, which sounds like a pretty good fee by the way, for Apple and Google. I'm just saying. And then the other 20% was physical manufacturing of cartridges, which was expensive, right? And that's where this came from. Sega immediately adopted this. They had a similar system in Japan. They both came to the United States in 1987ish. And that was the thing. They didn't sell these things as video game consoles. They were like, it's an entertainment system system, it's a control center. They did everything other than say, this plays video games. Look, you can play with a little robot. It's fun, it's for kids. And Sony entered the market, whatever. And this has been the fee structure ever since. And so Apple will never admit this, but when Apple came up with 30%, it wasn't like, well, how much is this costing us? It's like nothing. This is going to be hugely profitable. Like, okay, 30%. Yeah, let's do 30%. So that's Nintendo. So I guess I don't know if you want to thank Nintendo or if you want to thank the 1983 video game Crash, but it is astonishing to me that 30, no, 40 years later, we are still living with the ramifications of this. Right? So we'll see. I think antitrust will unwind this, but I feel like if Apple and or Google had just said, you know what, we'll take 10% this, we wouldn't even be talking about this now. Like it would this. That would be the end of it. No one would care. 10% sounds about right.
- [140:49]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I don't. You know, they never do mention the fact that the gaming companies are taking 30% and well, that's.
- [140:55]
Leo Laporte
So this is also part of the story. So yeah, they are. So when people write about antitrust and Apple especially, they'd be like, man, video game companies are going to have to watch out. It's like, why? But why? No, I mean why? Because it's the same system. Apple has a monopoly and also controls a market that is several billion people. Nintendo. I had to write this. I have to look this up because I don't remember this, but if you just look at the best selling console of all time is the PlayStation 2. If I'm not mistaken, the current gen, like Nintendo Switch is about to overtake it. This thing has sold fewer than 300 million units over several years. Apple sells that many iPhones in two quarters every year.
- [141:45]
Paul Thurrott
I'm sure that's where Apple got the 30%.
- [141:47]
Leo Laporte
I am too. No, I am too. Which was fine when the App Store was small and they weren't in any way dominant and it didn't matter. But Google, like Sega did to Nintendo, just copied it. They have no rationale for it either. Apple's doing it. That's our reason. And look at these companies today. The best year Nintendo ever had financially was 2020. $16 billion in revenues. Apple's revenues that year were $275 billion, order of magnitude bigger. Last year they were $390 billion. Apple's profits last year were over $90 billion. In each of the past four years, Nintendo's highest ever profits were $6 billion. These are completely different markets.
- [142:30]
Paul Thurrott
Yes, it's a really different category.
- [142:34]
Leo Laporte
That's why antitrust is so important at scale. Scale is a big part of it. The market definition is important. If you have a monopoly on corner markets in some neighborhood, nobody cares. It's too small. But if you have a monopoly in this kind of market, that's serious antitrust.
- [142:52]
Chris Hoffman
Is such a big part of it. Steam Also, Valve takes 30%. But Valve can say, hey, we use it to make things people like. And if you don't like it, you can go to epic and get 10%. But guess what? People love Steam. But, you know, Apple is. It's not a competitive market. Even Google can make an argument like, well, people prefer the Play Store to the Amazon App Store. Look what happened to the Amazon App Store. But Apple, you know, obviously you can't get apps from elsewhere, so.
- [143:17]
Paul Thurrott
Yep, let us, you know, that's a signal to me you guys are ready for the back of the book. And we will do that in just a bit. Tips and picks coming up. No whiskey this week. Sorry to say. But the good news is Richard is traveling the world collecting whiskeys.
- [143:35]
Leo Laporte
That's right. Yep. He's like a magnet for whiskey bottles.
- [143:39]
Paul Thurrott
It just, it adheres to his body. It's amazing.
- [143:42]
Leo Laporte
That's right. Yes. Yeah.
- [143:44]
Paul Thurrott
So he'll come back with lots to talk about. Chris, you don't have any vices you'd like to share with us?
- [143:52]
Chris Hoffman
I'm on the road right now. I do not have. I do not have.
- [143:56]
Leo Laporte
I was really gonna have my wife do something, but I actually forgot. And then you know what? We can keep it on. We can keep it on.
- [144:01]
Paul Thurrott
Your favorite chewing.
- [144:02]
Chris Hoffman
My vice is windows. Unfortunately, sometimes it's pretty bad for me.
- [144:07]
Paul Thurrott
What's your favorite candy? Do you have a candy that you like? I think we should have a candy segment on this show.
- [144:13]
Leo Laporte
Candy. Candy of the week.
- [144:15]
Paul Thurrott
Candy of the week. Fried fruit of the week. I don't know, just something. Anyway, think about it.
- [144:20]
Leo Laporte
Kombucha of the week.
- [144:22]
Paul Thurrott
Our Kombucha of the week.
- [144:24]
Chris Hoffman
I should have brought a kombucha.
- [144:27]
Paul Thurrott
You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrot, Chris Hoffman, the great Chris up and filling in for Paul. We great to have you. Thank you. Chris.
- [144:35]
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- [145:34]
Paul Thurrott
We will have more in a minute. The back of the book coming up. Of course, a reminder. All of this happens thanks to you and your support in the club. And we do, we do. We are very grateful for all of our Club Twit members. They make this possible. Club twit is 10 bucks a month. With it, you get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the best darn, you know, social network in the world because, well, it's frankly, it's exclusive. You gotta figure when people pay 10 bucks to be in our Club Twit Discord, they care about it, they've got an investment in it and so it's that much better. That's why the animated GIFs are real. Their animated gifts are real. Look at that. They're now choosing their favorite candies you support. Also the programming we do and that's key, right? Without you, we would not be able to do all the shows we do. We'd not be able to hire and staff it up as we have because frankly, Club Twit now pays 25% of our our operating costs. That makes a big difference. We thank you so much. TWiT TV Club TWiT. We've got some events coming up you might want to know about in the club. On Labor Day Monday, we're working Paris and Jeff and I are going to be interviewing Karen Howe. Her new book The Empire of AI is really a scathing indictment of OpenAI and its practices. 5:30pm Pacific September 1st. The Apple event has been announced and perhaps you know this, but we used to love to do these simulcasts of the Apple and other events. But because Apple has tried to take us down so many times, we've decided to keep those in the club, only they're no longer in the public. So if you want to watch Micah and my coverage of Apple's awe dropping event September 9th, you got to join the club. We'll be doing it in the Discord, which what's good about that is it means you can participate as well. We've done this now a few times with the Made by Google event and the Microsoft Build keynote. We're going to do Facebook Connect as well. So in fact we're going to do more keynotes because of the club. So thank you. Also shows like Paul's Hands on Windows Home Theater Geeks, Hands on Apple With Micah Sargent. Our photo time with Chris Marquare. A lot of stuff happens in the club. In the club. No Bottle fiddle, bub. But you will be in the club. So I hope you will be in the club. Go to Twit TV Club. Twit support. What we do. Think of it as a vote in favor of the content you get at twit. We really appreciate it. It makes a huge difference to us. As you know, we no longer get government support. So it's really important that you. We never got government support. If only we had gotten government support. It's up to you to keep it flowing. Twit TV Club. Twit. And thank you in advance to all our great club members. Now Paul has some tips.
- [148:36]
Leo Laporte
Maybe there's a government intervention that could save us.
- [148:39]
Paul Thurrott
That would be good.
- [148:40]
Leo Laporte
You know, I feel like we're a national security. Yeah.
- [148:43]
Paul Thurrott
Support for Windows Weekly is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcast. The Commerce Department.
- [148:49]
Chris Hoffman
Yes.
- [148:50]
Paul Thurrott
The Commerce Department, yes. No.
- [148:53]
Leo Laporte
Okay.
- [148:54]
Paul Thurrott
It's not going to happen.
- [148:55]
Leo Laporte
So we're going to round robin this, I guess. So Chris and I both have a tip.
- [148:59]
Paul Thurrott
Okay.
- [149:00]
Leo Laporte
And then we both have a.
- [149:02]
Paul Thurrott
Okay. Well, I'll. Let me then pull Chris back in. I was going to give him a moment to go have some kombucha.
- [149:07]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Don't you dare. This will be quick. I pulled this one out of the AI section because I was actually kind of blown away by this. I mentioned that notepad notebooklm when it first came out especially. But, you know, ongoing is just like super impressive. But they also just updated the Gemini model that does image creation. And this is the thing. Remember when it might have still been called Bard at the time, but back when Google first came out the gate, they kind of stumbled and face raked and did really badly out of the gate. They had to pull the image generation stuff because it was creating crazy kind of racist imagery in some cases or whatever. And they were like, all right, we got to get a handle on this. And I can tell you they kind of turned the corner on this because if you haven't looked at it, it go to gemini.google.com, whatever, and just have it create an image or have it edit an image that you already have. You could have it add or use two images to create a single image. Like, here's a dog in one photo and here's me. And, like, make a photo of us, but we're on the beach and I'm hugging the dog kind of thing. Like, it's crazy how good this looks like it's really, really good. And anyway, it's worth looking at. So given that this just happened, Microsoft obviously does image generation stuff through Copilot and it's, you know, designer.Microsoft.com et cetera, et cetera.
- [150:22]
Paul Thurrott
Is this the new Nano Banana or is this something.
- [150:25]
Leo Laporte
Yes, this is it. No, this is no order of magnitude better than what Microsoft does. Like, it's. It's not even.
- [150:31]
Paul Thurrott
It's really interesting, the competition that's going on now because each of them is getting better in turn. I'll have to try.
- [150:38]
Leo Laporte
You can expect Microsoft will turn, you know, they'll turn up some knob and they'll get there too. But like this thing, when they announced, well, even before they announced, remember this thing kind of leaked. Like this Nano Banana thing. It's like, what is this thing? And it was the next gen version of Gemini's image generation model. It's super good. I don't know if I could. Trying to think of this easy way for me to do this.
- [150:59]
Paul Thurrott
Put it in the discord and I can show it. Can you paste it in there?
- [151:01]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I'm trying to think how would I get to it from this computer? Let me see.
- [151:08]
Paul Thurrott
I've seen a few on Twitter that are kind of.
- [151:10]
Leo Laporte
Oh, did I put it in an article? Yeah, I did actually. So if you go to the article.
- [151:14]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, okay. I'm sorry.
- [151:15]
Leo Laporte
It's there. So there's a picture that Mary Jo and I are in it that we took at Ignite 2019. So the last ignite before the pandemic.
- [151:26]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, you turned into a cowboy.
- [151:28]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, like an old west thing.
- [151:29]
Paul Thurrott
Wow, that's great.
- [151:31]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Now the guy in the front, Gary, 100% nailed him. Like, it's perfect.
- [151:35]
Paul Thurrott
You looked like you lost 10 years.
- [151:37]
Leo Laporte
And Mary Jo did too, and whatever. But whatever. But. But as far as it looking like a photo and looking realistic and kind of matching the style I was looking for, et cetera.
- [151:46]
Paul Thurrott
It's a western selfie.
- [151:48]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is pretty good.
- [151:49]
Paul Thurrott
You don't do video too, right?
- [151:52]
Leo Laporte
That's a separate model, but yes, they do that too. And so that might be veo or vo, however you pronounce it. But that's the one where you take a photo and it makes it into a 10 or 12 second whatever video, which was that cool kind of effect where it's like a photo from the 1920s, like your great grandparents and they're just holding each other in black and white. And then you do a color version where they actually kind of move around a little bit. You're like, oh, my God, that's amazing. Some of that stuff is pretty cool, but the image gen stuff was kind of their Achilles heel for a long time. And I really feel like this one. You should look at this. It's worth looking at.
- [152:27]
Paul Thurrott
This is. I mean, this is on Twitter. I don't know if it's.
- [152:33]
Leo Laporte
I don't know if.
- [152:34]
Paul Thurrott
I guess this is. So it's from Barbie and they swapped in the face. They took Ryan Gosling's face and they swapped in President Trump's. And that's pretty amazing. That's apparently Nana Banana, according to the Twitter folks, so I guess it can do more. Yeah, it's got a banana there.
- [152:56]
Leo Laporte
There is a banana. Yeah.
- [152:58]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, wait a minute. It's VO3 and cling 2.1.
- [153:02]
Leo Laporte
I thought it was VO4.
- [153:03]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah.
- [153:03]
Leo Laporte
Ye.
- [153:03]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's the Higs field. Swap to video whenever that is. I don't know, you see stuff on an x.com and. And you just go, yeah, that must be true.
- [153:14]
Leo Laporte
You could go back. It's not that many years, right? They did the. The AI generated Grand Moff Tarkin in.
- [153:21]
Paul Thurrott
That Star wars movie, and it was clearly fake.
- [153:24]
Leo Laporte
It was like, really fake.
- [153:25]
Paul Thurrott
Not so good.
- [153:26]
Leo Laporte
But then you look at this stuff and you're like, yikes. Like, it's like, like. And you could just do this on your phone.
- [153:32]
Paul Thurrott
That's what's amazing.
- [153:33]
Leo Laporte
What are people asking me about? What am I. What am I doing? What bottle am I holding? This is a Dunkin Donuts coffee mug from the 1980s.
- [153:40]
Paul Thurrott
It's not alcoholics, Duncan.
- [153:42]
Chris Hoffman
No, it was in the picture. That was.
- [153:44]
Leo Laporte
Oh, in the thing. Oh, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. In the image. I'm sorry. That was just. Yeah, that looks like. Yeah. Oh, what am I? So in the real life, that was a bottle of whiskey brought to us by Kyle, who was the guy with the white shirt from Australia, which was one of the reasons we had a couple of different things from a couple of different people. And it was like we had to get out of the bar. And I was like, let's just go back to my room. This is a time there.
- [154:11]
Paul Thurrott
One of our. Did you pretty fly for assist guy. Did you do this in the new model? He took Steve and me and Cowboy us up.
- [154:21]
Leo Laporte
Cowboy. Nice.
- [154:22]
Paul Thurrott
That's good.
- [154:23]
Leo Laporte
Good.
- [154:23]
Paul Thurrott
That's pretty good. I like it. So, yeah, I think this is fun. I can't wait to. To play with this a little bit. Nano.
- [154:30]
Leo Laporte
It's worth looking at.
- [154:31]
Paul Thurrott
No longer. Nano Banana was like a secret code name Right.
- [154:35]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [154:35]
Paul Thurrott
And now they've come out and said.
- [154:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they didn't want people to know what it was until it's really Gemini.
- [154:40]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Oh, it looks like it's stuck. That's interesting. Maybe it's a changing reality.
- [154:48]
Leo Laporte
That is amazing. Or a baby just wearing a hat.
- [154:51]
Paul Thurrott
Or maybe I'm just wearing a hat. All right, continue, continue. That's a good one. I like it. You, you, you get points for that. What else?
- [155:03]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah. So my tip. A two part tip. Main part of the tip. Subscribe to my new newsletter, Windows.
- [155:10]
Paul Thurrott
Good tip, Good tip.
- [155:11]
Chris Hoffman
It's a good tip. Is free and like it. It's email. If you want email, you could read it on substack. You read on substack on the web, you could read on substack in the app and when you're doing that, you could read substack as well. Eternal Spring.
- [155:27]
Leo Laporte
Thank you.
- [155:28]
Paul Thurrott
Which is not about Windows, despite its name.
- [155:31]
Leo Laporte
Nope.
- [155:32]
Paul Thurrott
Moving to Mexico.
- [155:35]
Leo Laporte
It must be full of ads.
- [155:36]
Chris Hoffman
No, but there's no ads. No, but I think you'll really like it. If you like this. I'll write a little bit about. I'll write something about Windows Weekly this week. Week. And you can check that out too. But you know, in terms of actual relevant tips, like, you know, I was writing about debloing Windows and I've had some conversations with people over and over who are shocked that, you know, we. I'm sure, I know Paul Thrott has talked a lot about OneDrive and you know, OneDrive should be optional. I do end up using it. Fine. But it should be optional. And guess what? Most people don't realize you actually can just uninstall OneDrive from Control Panel. Every time I tell that to someone, they're shocked. Yes, you can uninstall it and it's gone. And you actually don't have to like modify a Windows ISO and reinstall Windows to get rid of OneDrive. So that's something I would recommend to people. And in general, like Debo, the amount of stuff you can actually just uninstall on a marn version of Windows, often even just from the start menu, just go right click, uninstall, right click, uninstall. Back in my day in Windows 10 days, like you had to open a PowerShell thing and run the right commands to remove these.
- [156:39]
Paul Thurrott
I remember I had a script to do that. Yes.
- [156:42]
Chris Hoffman
So actually a lot of the scripting stuff isn't even necessary anymore. And it's easy to miss that if you've just Kind of given up or if you're just in a habit of running a script. But it's actually pretty easy.
- [156:53]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's good because I would prefer to do it with the uninstaller rather than do it with a script, to be honest. That's what I used to do. I used to go through all the things I could uninstall. Manual in the uninstall and then in the remove software. They still have that remove software dialog, what was it? Add, Remove software. Yeah, they still have that. So you can go through that?
- [157:16]
Leo Laporte
Well, you can do it from Settings as well.
- [157:18]
Paul Thurrott
But yes, I like it all in one spot. Add, remove software, you see all the list and then you can go, yeah, take that out, take that out. And more than you think, I think you told me, Paul, about this one OneDrive exploit. Remember me suffering, suffering, suffering because OneDrive.
- [157:35]
Leo Laporte
Kept popping up like a whack a mole, like a cancer.
- [157:42]
Paul Thurrott
And finally he said, you know, you can't uninstall it.
- [157:45]
Leo Laporte
Well, by the way, this is another area where I think regulatory action actually kind of helped because they were forced to do this in Europe and in this case they actually are just making these changes everywhere. Not all of them, but the uninstalled. A lot of the system components or pre installed apps, you can uninstall them.
- [158:03]
Paul Thurrott
Which is great, like Candy Crush and all that.
- [158:06]
Leo Laporte
Why would you want to install. Come on, let's be safe here for a second.
- [158:08]
Paul Thurrott
Never that, never that.
- [158:10]
Chris Hoffman
It's a Microsoft first party app now.
- [158:13]
Paul Thurrott
So that's why I get PTSD when you say Word is now going to save by default to OneDrive.
- [158:19]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, because you've used it on Apple and you realize that as a human being with a brain, maybe this isn't the thing for you.
- [158:24]
Paul Thurrott
But the first thing I turn off on a new Mac is the saved desktop and documents to icloud. I don't like that.
- [158:31]
Leo Laporte
Yep.
- [158:32]
Paul Thurrott
I want them local.
- [158:33]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's the type of thing maybe you're on a phone or an iPad and you're like, okay, I could see it. But like on a Mac where it's a desktop operating system, you know.
- [158:42]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I get it. This is Windows Weekly, Paul Thurat and Chris Hoffman filling in for Richard Campbell. Let's see, Chris did one and Paul did one. So I think it's your turn now, Chris.
- [158:54]
Leo Laporte
Chris, right.
- [158:56]
Paul Thurrott
No, no, no, that was Chris's. It's near turn now, Paul. Okay, I'm paying attention. I really am.
- [159:05]
Leo Laporte
Yesterday a couple things happened. Helldivers 2 came out. Haven't tried that. But Gears of War Reloaded came out and I did try that. So Gears of Wars Reloaded is a remastered version of the original game. It's actually a remastered version of the last game, which was a remastered version of last one, which was not the.
- [159:22]
Paul Thurrott
First time they've remastered is what you're saying.
- [159:24]
Leo Laporte
No, no. So there was the original Xbox 360 version, which kind of maxed out at 720p, but really hit that, but looked amazing for the day. And it's a great game.
- [159:33]
Paul Thurrott
It's always been a pretty game.
- [159:35]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's incredible.
- [159:36]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [159:37]
Leo Laporte
And they at least single player multiplayer is kind of garbage. But this was really innovative and beautiful and a great game, a good story. And they did a remastered version for Windows Vista and what wasn't called Xbox, but was Xbox, which was games for Windows Live. You know, Halo 2 was one of the big launch titles for that and that added, I want to say 1080p support. And they added levels that couldn't have fit on the Xbox version. Because the Xbox version in that year, which I think was late 2006 when that game came out, was, you know, an optical disk that only had like, it wasn't even DVD size. Like it was small.
- [160:15]
Paul Thurrott
It's a CD rom.
- [160:16]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So they had to cut out some content they wanted, including a great level that's actually in all the promotional materials for the game where the dinosaur is attacking. He's got the guy riding on his back. So that level had been cut out. So that version went back in the game, some other stuff. And then a million years later, probably 2016ish, they did a version called Gears of War, I want to say Ultimate Edition, which was for Windows 10 through the store. And they added 4K, 120 frames per second support, some other controls, etc. So the version we're getting today is a new version of that. So if you actually have that game, if you ever paid for that or have it in your library, you're going to get this one for free.
- [161:02]
Paul Thurrott
Nice.
- [161:03]
Leo Laporte
It's not that different, honestly on the PC, but the. Because they've added some things in the interim. Like you could, I think before it was like could be 60 or 120 frames per second. Now it could be, you could just say, look, I want to limit this to like 30 frames per second. But I want to focus on quality graphics, whatever. I've been playing it on a laptop that has a dedicated GPU, like a nice GPU and it's awesome. It's like 110, 120 frames a second. 2, 8K native resolution, HDR, all the effects on high and it's like. Yes, it's really good.
- [161:35]
Paul Thurrott
It's the Unreal engine.
- [161:37]
Leo Laporte
Yep. Yeah.
- [161:38]
Paul Thurrott
And you said the sounds improved too in your article.
- [161:41]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So yeah, they've added, I think it's like Dolby soundtrack and you know, all this stuff. But the biggest thing is it's, it's basically everywhere. It's not a Nintendo, but it's on PlayStation 5 for the first time ever. It's on Steam. It's across Xbox Series X and S, obviously Xbox and Windows, which is Windows PC. Game Pass. Game Pass Ultimate Xbox Cloud gaming. So if you want to stream it, you can do that. And it does cross play and cross progression across all platforms. So you could start playing the game in single player on a PlayStation 5, move over to your Windows PC, you know, pick the game up, keep going, come back to the PlayStation, whatever. Like it's, you know, this is the, this is the big selling point for Xbox as a cross platform platform. Right.
- [162:25]
Paul Thurrott
And this was a famously exclusive Xbox game at first.
- [162:29]
Leo Laporte
Yep. So back when Microsoft was still trying to do that. Right. Halo was the biggest one. But remember the three? Well, people forget this stuff. Like people forget how much everyone hated XP when it first shipped and it became the most beloved version until 7 or whatever. But when the 360 came out, they didn't have any AAA in, you know, in first party title. It was nothing. Halo 2 didn't come out until a year later. Right. Or even a year and a half, whatever the time frame was. Or Halo 3 or whatever. Halo 3, I guess it was. Sorry, sorry, Halo 2 or 3. I forget the timing, but. So this came out a year after the launch, but it was like, okay, here we go. This is a big deal. And plus remember the original trailer for this thing was awesome. It was that Mad World trailer with this awesome song from Tears for Fears or whatever. So yeah, over the years this thing has gotten just prettier and prettier basically and the performance is better. Same game, right? So. So I feel like I could blow through this in like 5 hours if I had to. Like I've done it so many times, but it's just as good. And I'm hoping now they'll take this and move it to a Master Chief collection type thing where they may do Gears two and three and maybe even four, five, six, you know, eventually, but. And have it as a package or whatever. But this is A good first step. Well, fourth step, I guess. I don't know, whatever step it is. But anyway, it looks great and it plays great on just about anything, so it's good.
- [163:57]
Paul Thurrott
Keys of War Remastered Remastered Remastered Remaster.
- [164:00]
Leo Laporte
Also not my article, but if you have a PlayStation, PlayStation has a little speaker in their controller. So the radio transmissions and the game.
- [164:08]
Paul Thurrott
That's cool.
- [164:09]
Leo Laporte
Speakers. So they sound like it's a radio thing.
- [164:11]
Paul Thurrott
That's really cool.
- [164:12]
Leo Laporte
That's the real reason PlayStation is better than Xbox. Guys, I don't know what people have been telling you, but. Yeah.
- [164:21]
Paul Thurrott
Let'S see. That means it's your turn, Chris, to wrap this puppy up.
- [164:25]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah. So I'm going to put my money where my mouth is because I've been talking about copilot plus PCs a lot. If you do not have a copilot PC but you have a desktop PC, a laptop, what have you with an Nvidia GPU. Not many people talk about the Nvidia Broadcast app, but it's pretty good, pretty impressive. You may not have access to Windows Studio Effects, but Nvidia's Broadcast app can do a lot of that type of thing with the fake eye contact and with the background removal and even like with like Void real time voice and video processing, especially on the higher end GPUs. If you have a recent Nvidia GPU and you just want to look better in a video meeting, seriously, like check out the Nvidia Broadcast app. And like I said, it's especially good if you are using a powerful PC that Microsoft says you don't get Windows Studio Effects on. So. But yeah, if you have a modern Nvidia GPU and you want that type of Windows Studio effects style, real time AI machine learning type of processing, it's really worth checking out. I do think that in general, I'm not even using Windows Studio Effects right now. Right. I just have a good microphone and a good webcam and I think it's kind of good that it looks a little raw and I don't really want everything to look like AI polished. Right? Like if, if I had an AI polished background and my fake eye contact, it would look a bit uncanny. But you know, for video meetings and.
- [165:48]
Paul Thurrott
Et cetera, we've had people do that on our shows. I think Daniel Rubino was doing that with the Nvidia thing and it was a little.
- [165:57]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, I don't know why you. His eyes were uncanny because I think it looks incredibly realistic. It's.
- [166:04]
Paul Thurrott
You can never tell you've moved into the New. The new place. Yeah.
- [166:08]
Leo Laporte
My arms are totally natural. There's nothing going on there. It's. What's your problem, man? Turn that right off because that's.
- [166:17]
Paul Thurrott
Why don't you.
- [166:18]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's good.
- [166:19]
Chris Hoffman
It actually works. I think it works better than that. I don't think that was Nvidia's.
- [166:22]
Paul Thurrott
No, that was.
- [166:23]
Chris Hoffman
If I'm wrong.
- [166:23]
Paul Thurrott
No, no, that was Restreams. I don't know what that was. No, the Nvidia one's supposed to be very good.
- [166:29]
Chris Hoffman
It actually is. I was pretty impressed by it. You know, I don't really want it. I don't know if I want to use it for like professional like videos because I want to kind of look raw and human and have a good webcam, but especially if a worse webcam and you just. Just doing video meeting. It's actually great. It's actually great.
- [166:43]
Paul Thurrott
Yes, yes. What is the minimum GPU you'd need for that? Did they say.
- [166:50]
Chris Hoffman
That is such a good question that I should have been prepared because I.
- [166:54]
Paul Thurrott
Think I only have like a 3070 or something.
- [166:58]
Leo Laporte
What are you poor?
- [166:59]
Paul Thurrott
Come on. I know it's sad.
- [167:02]
Leo Laporte
That's a good question. Oh, RTX 2060 or higher, I guess.
- [167:08]
Chris Hoffman
2060 or higher.
- [167:09]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, so I could use it.
- [167:11]
Leo Laporte
Okay.
- [167:11]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah. And there's some like really the high end real time voice and video processing stuff. The super. Oh, it's studio quality audio or studio quality video. Like they fake, they. They change in real time. Like the lighting and actually is like kind of wild looking but so that needs like a you know, 5080 or 5090 type thing.
- [167:28]
Paul Thurrott
But that would make sense.
- [167:30]
Chris Hoffman
Most of the effects can run on basically anything. Well, anything slightly modern like that. Like we said a 26 year newer.
- [167:37]
Paul Thurrott
And it's called the Broadcast app.
- [167:38]
Leo Laporte
Is that.
- [167:39]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah, but it is broadcast.
- [167:40]
Leo Laporte
What could this GPU be if it can't run recall? Like I'm just saying, you know, think about it. Just think about it.
- [167:47]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah.
- [167:48]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, look how good you look in that shot. That's good.
- [167:51]
Chris Hoffman
Well, yeah, so I wrote about it there and kind of show off the app so you can check it out because there's actually not that much writing about the Nvidia Broadcast app. And it's easy to miss because it's. Right. It's not even included in Nvidia's like driver suite. It's not even included in GeForce Experience. You have to hear about it and go hunt it down.
- [168:10]
Paul Thurrott
And this will work as a camera. So you could use it in zoom or teams as a Camera.
- [168:15]
Chris Hoffman
So you can use it in any app and it's like a pass through.
- [168:19]
Paul Thurrott
It does. It's a little uncanny Valley. Chris. I can see why you.
- [168:22]
Chris Hoffman
I enabled every single effect for that one. Right. So that is like too much. But it shows. Goes to show how much it can do.
- [168:30]
Paul Thurrott
It can do a lot. Hold on.
- [168:32]
Leo Laporte
But we can make. I mean there's a Windows Studio effect that is way worse than anything that you're showing there.
- [168:39]
Paul Thurrott
Do you want to show us?
- [168:40]
Leo Laporte
I'm going to see if I can do it. Maybe I'm going to see if I can try it.
- [168:42]
Paul Thurrott
So you can turn it on.
- [168:44]
Leo Laporte
Do I have it in here?
- [168:45]
Paul Thurrott
You still need a good webcam. As you point out in your article. This is at the Micro center website. You do need a good camera.
- [168:52]
Chris Hoffman
Ideally you want a good webcam.
- [168:54]
Leo Laporte
So it's that one. We did it one time when I was in Mexico. It was like. It's like a water painting effect and it's like the. It is so awful. Like it's awful and actually for some reason it's not on this particular computer.
- [169:04]
Paul Thurrott
That's like the old photo booth kind of effects that they used to offer where that. Yeah, they weren't. They weren't so great.
- [169:15]
Chris Hoffman
Little gimmicky.
- [169:16]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, a little. Little gimmicky.
- [169:17]
Leo Laporte
Get it to come up. I'm sorry.
- [169:20]
Paul Thurrott
Very nice camera.
- [169:21]
Leo Laporte
Let me see if I'm right.
- [169:22]
Paul Thurrott
Camera.
- [169:22]
Leo Laporte
Camera. Oh, it's because I'm on the wrong camera. Oh. Because I can't do it. I don't know how. I don't know.
- [169:28]
Paul Thurrott
I can.
- [169:29]
Leo Laporte
If only I knew how. Windows.
- [169:30]
Paul Thurrott
I could join you from the Apple campus. How about that?
- [169:33]
Leo Laporte
Oh, there you go. Nice.
- [169:34]
Chris Hoffman
Oh, wow.
- [169:35]
Leo Laporte
That's actually pretty clean looking.
- [169:36]
Paul Thurrott
That's an apple effect. As you can see on the edges. There's not. Yeah, but I have a green screen. As soon as you put a green screen behind it, it works very well.
- [169:43]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, this is.
- [169:44]
Paul Thurrott
This is without anything special so you can see, especially hair. Hair is very tough.
- [169:48]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, hair's tough.
- [169:49]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [169:49]
Chris Hoffman
Yeah.
- [169:50]
Leo Laporte
That's why I go for the helmet head look. You know.
- [169:53]
Paul Thurrott
A good coiffure goes a long way. Let me.
- [169:57]
Leo Laporte
You don't want any stray hairs out there. I'm just saying.
- [169:59]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [169:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [170:00]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I guess it's time to say so long to. Oh my God. To our family, Chris Hoffman. The brand new newsletter. It really looks good. I'm definitely going to subscribe, Chris, and I promise I won't leave you in the archive folder for long. That's where all my Newsletters go. This is when you're going to want to read windowsread me if you want to subscribe. Although if you're already a Windows Intelligence subscriber, you'll get it automatically.
- [170:32]
Chris Hoffman
I've already had it.
- [170:33]
Paul Thurrott
Thank you, Chris Hoffman, for filling in. Richard will be back next week and I think he still does run as radio even when he's not here because he's got a lot of them in the camp. So you can go to run his. Smart, smart man. We like to do it live because you never know when Paul's going to go off the rails.
- [170:52]
Leo Laporte
I don't even think that's ever happened.
- [170:54]
Paul Thurrott
Magic happens.
- [170:56]
Leo Laporte
I don't have a memory of that.
- [170:59]
Paul Thurrott
That's right. Paul is@therot.com that's his website and of course his books, including the Field guide to Windows 11 and Windows Everywhere are at 11. We join up every Wednesday to do this show and I hope you will join us next Wednesday for another thrilling, gripping edition of Windows Weekly. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Paul.
- [171:21]
Leo Laporte
Thank you.
- [171:22]
Paul Thurrott
Have a wonderful week. We'll see you next time. Bye bye. All you winners and dozers.
- [171:26]
Leo Laporte
Take care of.
- [171:38]
Paul Thurrott
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