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WW 950: Coding Makes Me Cry - Will Microsoft Listen to Consumer Reports' Plea?
02:43:09
Will Microsoft Listen to Consumer Reports' Plea?
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- [00:00]
A
It's time for Windows Weekly. Richard Campbell has the week off. Paul Thurat is here. We're going to talk about the letter to Satya Nadella that Consumer Reports wrote saying, please, Microsoft, continue Windows 10 support. We'll also talk about three new Insider builds that seems to be a weekly occurrence. Paul will ask the question, why put a touchscreen on a MacBook and Xbox games? There's a whole lot more coming up next. Oh, and a secret tip on how to improve your Windows 11 security on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.
- [00:39]
B
This is Twit.
- [00:47]
A
It's time for Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 950, recorded Wednesday, September 17, 2025. Coding makes me cry. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners and you dozers. This is the show. We cover the latest from Microsoft with the top team of Microsoft Terminators. Mr. Windows himself, Paul Thurot is here from Thurrott.com like a team of one.
- [01:20]
B
Yeah.
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A
I'm sad to say there's an empty pane. I like the riderless horse where Richard would normally sit. But Richard Campbell is stuck in an airport somewhere in Europe.
- [01:32]
B
Yeah.
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A
Somewhere between Denmark and Amsterdam.
- [01:36]
B
Yep. I am sure I speak for everyone when I say, you know, I'm tired of him slacking off. Yeah. I don't know what he's doing with all this travel.
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A
Richard sits down.
- [01:46]
B
How dare he?
- [01:48]
A
Well, you know what? The news is the same whether Richard is here or not. And I see you picked up on the, I think, the funniest story of the week.
- [01:57]
B
Yeah.
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A
A little note from Consumer Reports to Satya Nadella.
- [02:03]
B
So, you know, Consumer Reports has a good rep. Right. Other than that Suzuki thing from the 1980s or whatever that was, they're doing pretty good. You know, they're excellent.
- [02:12]
A
They don't take advertising.
- [02:13]
B
They're well regarded.
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A
They're pure. And of course, Paris Martineau works there. Stacey Higginbotham works there. Nicholas De Leon works there. We have three regular contributors who work there. So, yeah, I mean, watch your words. The rot.
- [02:26]
B
No, I like them. I mean, like everyone else in the 21st century, I read the wire cutter now, but. But they're good.
- [02:33]
A
I think. Honestly, I think it's more reliable than the wire cutter.
- [02:36]
B
Oh.
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A
But I did. I did think this letter was a little odd.
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B
I did, too. And, yeah, so I saw.
- [02:42]
A
I support it. I don't think it's wrong.
- [02:45]
B
This is. But this. Okay, this is an interesting. I'm not going to call it a Debate, but it's, it's an interesting question or something, I don't know which is, you know, Windows 10 has been in the market for 10 years for the third time in history. Now. Microsoft has extended the support for major version of Windows, in this case for three years. You have to pay for it first year though, consumers getting an additional year for free. So I, you know, to me in the, in the span of history, I think to myself, this is mostly okay, right?
- [03:19]
A
It's pretty normal. It was 10 years, which even Consumer Reports notes.
- [03:25]
B
Yeah, right.
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A
They warned us in 2015 that it would end October 14, 2025. We didn't think that day would ever arrive, but. And it is now just around the.
- [03:34]
B
Corner many days I never thought we're going to arrive, but yeah. So in the scope of history, the way I think of this is Microsoft, as they moved into serving businesses and enterprises, especially adapted to this kind of licensing model. And this is when they did the 10 year mainstream extended support life cycle for Windows and other products. And that lasted for not quite 20 years, 15 years at least. Windows 10 was actually sort of the beginning of the end of that, I guess Windows 8 in some ways. But you know, but the thing that happened over that period of time that kind of counters this in a way is PCs got a lot more reliable PCs, you know, PCs. When you think of PCs and reliability, you think about blue screens, you think about, you know, you're in the subway or the airport, there's a thing up there not working and it's because it's running Windows or whatever. But really, I mean, reality, you know, in reality Windows is much more reliable than it's ever been. And I guess on that note, you could make a case that maybe, maybe it should be supported longer.
- [04:43]
A
Here's their brief, by the way, I should point out this was signed by Stacy Higginbotham.
- [04:49]
B
Yeah.
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A
So former host of this Week in.
- [04:52]
B
Google Policy, madam, am I right?
- [04:54]
A
Anyway, yes, she is. But I think the point that's kind of interesting that they make is almost half of all Windows users are still on Windows 10. But more to the point, many of them, maybe a quarter of half of that number, bought their PC in the last three or four years with a full expectation they'd get to the next version of Windows.
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B
Did they? I mean, that's not technically true, but.
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A
Which part? That they didn't expect to get to Windows 10.
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B
People who bought PCs in the last three or four years got Windows 11. They didn't get Windows 10. You know, businesses could have put Windows 10 on PCs. I mean, there was obviously a period of time where there were both in the market, but you'd have a hard time finding Windows 10, I mean.
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A
Oh, okay, well, maybe, maybe I misread the letter.
- [05:38]
B
No, no, I'm sure I, I, there is, there's some, I read it, you know, and I, I'm like, as you go through it, you're like, no, not really. No, no. You know, so I, I, I do agree. This is a question. I, the situation in which x percent of PCs out in the world are still using the version they're getting rid of is not unique to Windows 10. This happened with Windows 7. It happened with Windows XP. Are there more numerically by unit or whatever today with Windows 10 than they were with 7 or XP? That's debatable. That I'm not really sure of. They haven't. Well, as I said to the guy next to me at the Lenovo event at ifa, Microsoft uses four different numbers when they want to tell you how many people are using Windows, right? And they don't really have a, they don't really know, you know, for sure. So we get these different numbers. But let's call it 1.4 billion. So if there are 50%, let's call it, to make it the math simple, 700 million computers in the world still running Windows 10. It's a lot of computers, right? I guess the fine print here is that a, if this is an absolute necessity, you can keep going with 10. If you're a business, you can do that for three years. And we talk about this a couple times, at least on the show. But at some point you get to where the computers that are running Windows 11 are so modern and so much more secure and have so much, you know, much more going on for them that it's kind of a tough call to say, well, I still want to use this old computer. I still want to use my version of office from 1997 or whatever the scenario is. There are anyone who's been out in the world, if you go to a doctor's office, dentists, you see this all over the place. There's still older out of support versions of Windows being used in many places, and there are still companies supporting those older versions of Windows even when Microsoft doesn't. Mozilla just announced they're going to extend the support in Firefox for Windows 7 another year or two. I don't remember the timeframe. That's incredible. Windows 7 has been out of support forever. I mean, that's kind of interesting.
- [07:50]
A
It's probably the case that most people running Windows 10, even if they knew that it wasn't going to get updates in two weeks, after two weeks, just keep using it. Just keep using it. Isn't that what usually happens is.
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B
Yep.
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A
And it's not businesses. They're smart, they have IT departments, they know better, it's home users.
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B
I mean, you might have businesses that are doing this still, but hopefully what they're doing as well is using third party antivirus or whatever. Ltml.
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A
Yeah. So that's the question. Can you run, could you run Windows 10 safely for some time?
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B
Yep. And this is actually, honestly, this speaks a little bit to the argument for keeping the support, which is fundamentally Windows 10 and 11 are the same operating system. Right. They look different and there have been changes to Windows 11 that have improved the security of the system. But basically 1011 and then what I'll call like 11 version 24H2 plus are really the same thing. So if, if all you're doing is shipping security updates that you are creating for Windows 11 anyway, I mean, what's the big deal?
- [08:59]
A
Well, that's the other issue and that's the thing that bothers Steve Gibson is Microsoft is making these updates. They just decided.
- [09:07]
B
Right.
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A
So not to offer them.
- [09:09]
B
If you think about other platforms in this space, not the Mac necessarily, but like these really big volume platforms that have a billion plus users like iOS or Android, the mix is very different because you're essentially forced to upgrade on those platforms very quickly. And no one really complains about this. Right. You're not going to find a guy with an iPhone 16 or whatever running iOS 16 or something like you. At some point you can't. Right. They stop digitally signing these things. You know, you upgrade, you're always going to be in the latest version pretty much. And it's not. You don't. Consumer Reports isn't writing an article saying, Apple, you got to support iOS15 forever, I mean like, or whatever.
- [09:47]
A
What they're saying is that these are unusual circumstances because, you know, Microsoft four years ago announced, oh, Windows 11 is going to require a certain level of hardware and your computer, even one that you bought last year, may not be compatible.
- [10:04]
B
Right? Yeah. By the way, and that's only going to continue. And the evidence of that is Copilot plus PC which did that again. Right. They raised the bar again. So they're creating a kind of a have and have not situation, if you will, for functionality and for compatibility that's based on what hardware you have in your PC they're being a little more aggressive about it. This is something that Apple has always done. You know I've just, I, it's interesting like in the old world when Microsoft dominated and the Mac was this tiny thing, we didn't have phones and whatever, this was a big deal. Today Apple's Apple has as many customers as Microsoft does, maybe more. Android does as well or Google does. And you don't really hear these kind of complaints about those platforms. They more aggressively. Well Google or Apple does. Google actually doesn't have as much control. But you know people are running Android phones, they could be like mid level Samsung phones, they might be three or five years old. They're probably on Android 12, whatever version. I don't know what things are out there but. And you don't really hear people being like man, you got to keep supporting that thing with security updates. Google, what are you doing? Like you don't really hear that. So what is it about a PC that makes it an exception to this?
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A
Well, ironically on a PC there are alternatives. You can make that hardware continue to run with Linux for instance.
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B
You just throw it in the trash. Which I think is the alleged concern. It's always like every time you hear we need to keep supporting Windows 10, it's always about the landfills.
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A
Landfill, yeah. But these are perfectly good PCs.
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B
In fact, I guess they would probably.
- [11:46]
A
Run at the same speed if they had an up to date operating system on them like Linux.
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B
Yeah. So the nice thing about a PC is it's an open with you know, quotes around it open platform where you can do that. Right. Very easily. Most people won't, but you can't.
- [12:01]
A
No, most people can't because it's a technical challenge.
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B
What there should be out there is some organization or organizations that are collecting these instead of recycling them. Getting away. There are so, but, but maybe this.
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A
You know, it's a patchwork because it's every community its own little thing. There used to be a national organization, I think it's called the Christina Organization.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And I don't know if they're still around. Let me look them up because I used to, on the radio show I used to tell people here's what you need to do stuff.
- [12:34]
B
Imagine I don't know what your local library is like. It's actually really nice here and but I can just imagine this kind of circle of chairs with old people and someone's trying to explain to them how to use Linux or maybe put Chrome os, Flex or whatever on these things and it's just like the dull stares of incomprehension. You know I think I just, it, it's weird because these solutions do exist. There's a way, there are ways around it. I think most people just would keep using them and not think about this and they'll be fine, you know. So it's a, it's a weird thing for them to right now come out the way they did this and say yeah, I mean it's like well they're.
- [13:17]
A
Trying to be consumer advocates. So the Christina foundation is still around. You can still. This is most of the time it's a regional thing. There's your local E waste recycler or your local charity where you can donate hardware. Sometimes it's even just a guy. I know many people around the country who do this kind of as a good work. They take old PCs, put Linux on them and donate them to people in need or, or groups in need. So the Christina foundation is one of the few national organizations that will do this and you can donate used computers to them. So it isn't, I think it's, I mean if people are smart about it, they're not going to put it in the landfill. It's at least going to go to an E waste recycling.
- [13:59]
B
Yeah, this stuff is tough, you know if you think about like safety equipment and cars, right. Always debuted in the most expensive vehicles like airbags were, you know, were in Volvos and Mercedes and whatever else first and then they made their way down to you know, lower end cars, et cetera. It's the sad thing here is that the people who can least afford to upgrade are going to be stuck with these older computers that maybe don't work as well or are running it out of support operating system or if God help them, they could figure out how to get Linux on there and then they don't know how it works and they don't know how to fix things when they go wrong or whatever it is like it, it's yeah, Linux.
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A
I wish it were, but it's not. Yeah, I wish like Google or somebody would come along. Google had Chrome OS and you can install it on these PCs but they don't.
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B
It's not that easy and it's also not really the full experience. Right. You don't get like Android apps and whatever.
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A
I really wish there were some.
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B
Yeah, I mean there is this stuff like you said there are, there are, there are things.
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A
Well, Christina by the way is now digitunity not the greatest name.
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B
Digitunity.
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A
Digit D I G I T U N I T. Yes, for that kind of a. Yeah. So I mean, you know, especially if you have more than a few to, to get rid of, like if you're a business, this would be a smart thing to do. Get it, get a tax break, donate it. And, and they, they recycle them, they upcycle them.
- [15:22]
B
I. Look, I, I know to a lot of people this seems like some kind of a sinister plot. And you know, with a company like Microsoft, it's kind of understandable that we.
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A
Would go for the money. You don't.
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B
But they are a for profit corporation. I mean they're not a public good, you know, charity.
- [15:38]
A
That's a great insight. Oh no, I mean, but they are.
- [15:42]
B
You're right. I mean, but I also feel like there's enough in Windows 11, whether it's this, it's not even creeping, this aggressive addition of AI especially copilot everywhere. We'll talk about some of that later today that I think is going to turn people off. You also have things like, well, like Chromebooks, actual Chromebooks. You have things like the iPad, which now works like a computer. And these things are simpler. They're not as full of overt ads and in your face, you know, hey, did you want to summarize this? You know, like clippy. It's like Clippy, like the worst thing Microsoft ever did. Let's do that times a thousand, you know, like how often can we get in your face? And you know, even before the AI stuff was taking off, there were already behaviors and they're in 10 too. But in Windows 11 especially where, you know, it starts to rub you the wrong way. And I, if you're older or younger, but older, definitely. In my case, when you're, you've kind of gone through this whole thing, you're. You understand PCs, you get it. And it's aggravating.
- [16:42]
A
You know, there's also the question, and Steve Gibson brings this up as well, of whether these requirements for TPM2 and Intel processors, 8th generation or later are legit. I mean, we know you can install Windows 11 with hacking older machines. When are they arbitrary?
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B
Windows 11. Yeah. So when Windows 11 was first announced, they were absolutely arbitrary.
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A
Okay.
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B
Today I would say less so because now there are these security advances that actually rely on technology. That is plan.
- [17:13]
A
Microsoft had a plan which was to take advantage of these hardware characteristics to make a better Windows.
- [17:19]
B
Yep. And when they announced it, it was like, wait, what are you doing? Because at the time it was like, I'm sorry, but this is Windows 10. So if Windows 10 runs on this thing, this will run on this thing. I don't understand what's the problem? You know, and the truth is that sit is still there, it's still true. But you actually do have a more secure PC if you're running 11 with this new.
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A
So that's good.
- [17:40]
B
Newer hardware. Well, it is good. It's good on multiple levels. It's good for you as a consumer if you can afford it and that's what you need or want. It's good for Microsoft, it's good for hardware makers because they're selling new PC. It's good for silicon vendors, etc. But I don't know, the thing that I think other than the. No, this is the primary problem I have with this thing is just that this isn't the biggest digital platform or a personal computing platform. This isn't the thing that most people are spending most of their time on every single day. This is a weird place to drive a stake into the ground. I think it speaks to the elderly nature of this publication and their audience and the people who work there compared to the kind of hip young people that are doing YouTube stuff and are at the Wirecratter probably where, you know, this concern would be like, what is your problem with Windows? Like, they're like, who's using Windows? What do you mean? There are a lot of people using Windows, but I mean, as far as like being engaged every day and screen time and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, some of us are drones. Some of us are idiots like me who just sit there and work all day long. But like most people, they're doing that on a phone, right? That they're spending that kind of fun. I just, I just, it's, it's, it just feels weird to me. I. Not that they're like wrong, literally wrong, but in the, in the scheme of history here, when and when this has come up, this is the most generous, if you will, I hate to use that word, but that Microsoft has ever been with regards to extending support in that they're providing consumers with this for a year for free. And yes, I mean, there's that it's like, yeah, but you have to, you know, back up your PC to your.
- [19:32]
A
OneDrive and you have to use another Microsoft product.
- [19:36]
B
Yeah, but what does that, what does that get free. But you, but what is it getting? Like is they. Do they. All it does is use up a little bit of data on their servers. It really doesn't, doesn't train AI. It doesn't do anything for Them it's not useful.
- [19:48]
A
There's also a secondary issue, which is I suspect many, many people, a vast number of people will not upgrade, will be vulnerable. And it doesn't just affect them, it affects the Internet ecosystem. If you have a lot of vulnerable.
- [20:05]
B
PCs, which, by the way, actually explains why Microsoft wants you to back up your thing because. And upgrade to a new Windows 11 PC. Like a lot of the. I mean, it's not the only reason. I get it. But one of the reasons that when they did 10 was if we can get as many people as possible on one version, the world will be safer. It's better. We can respond to security threats more quickly. We only have to write one version of a patch. We will see problems more easily because those problems will be exhibited across more computers because we're all on the same thing. It's not going to be something specific to some version for all the reasons that make sense. But, you know. Yeah, look, but if we've learned, like I said this, I think up top. But we've all been out in the world, you see computers running old versions of Windows. If you're paying attention, if you know, everywhere, you notice this.
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A
The ATM in the train station.
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B
Yeah.
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A
On the subways. So platforms everywhere.
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B
I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. So I, I thought this was. I was mostly. I was curious about this. And as I read it, I was like, oh, I don't agree with all of this, but. But I understand. I do. Obviously I understand where they're coming from. You know, like Satya Nadella is gonna find out about this, Right?
- [21:26]
A
Well, what it does is it puts pressure on Microsoft, puts public pressure on Microsoft to respond and to say to do something. And I think that if they're kind of. They should be kind of aware of public opinion. And what Consumer Reports is trying to do is mobilize public opinion to get Microsoft to do something.
- [21:44]
B
Here's the problem. Public opinion of Microsoft is ambivalent. And the customers that matter to Microsoft, companies that always get whatever supported versions of Windows they are, there are. They were upgrading on their own schedule. It's a lot quicker than 10 years, even the slowest one. So they're all moving along. It's fine. Like, like they don't really. I mean, I could picture Sacha do being like, do we still make Windows 10? You know, like, I mean, who's using that? Yeah, I like, is that the one I said I wanted people to love? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [22:23]
A
You Know they mean the most secure version of Windows ever. That one.
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B
Yeah, yeah, the one, the one that was gonna be the last one.
- [22:28]
A
Yeah, the last version. Yeah, yeah.
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B
You're, you're taking the last version of Windows ever and putting it out of support. That doesn't, you know, that doesn't ring true somehow, but I don't know.
- [22:42]
A
Well, I think what we recognize because we're realists is it's, this is going to happen.
- [22:48]
B
Yeah.
- [22:48]
A
And I don't if it's a, if Microsoft takes a little PR hit, so be it. They're willing to do that. They've taken them before because this is going to happen.
- [22:58]
B
Listen, guys, Apple just released an iPhone air. Nobody gives a crap about your stupid Windows 10 product. You know, we're, we're concerned about other stuff.
- [23:07]
A
Well, in my fever dream, in my little fantasy world, I think, oh, look, all these people who have Windows 10 PCs are going to discover Linux and finally it's going to be the year of Linux desktop. Woohoo. Thank you, Microsoft.
- [23:22]
B
Yeah, unfortunately, Linux is just not a solution for the people who are most vulnerable.
- [23:28]
A
I agree to this. That's, that's, I agree.
- [23:30]
B
And the people who know what they're doing are going to be fine. But they were always going to be fine.
- [23:33]
A
There are some small companies that do like senior PCs. They do modified Linux PCs for seniors with big icons and, you know, it's easy to use. They're, they're out there. But I don't think they have widespread adoption, you know.
- [23:47]
B
Yeah.
- [23:48]
A
Oh, well, anyway, I, I thought it was an interesting story and it was funny to see Stacey Higginbotham's name at the bottom of that line.
- [23:55]
B
Oddly, and oddly enough this is later in the show, but I, I wrote an editorial, I guess yesterday or the other day that was about the future of computing and when I was doing the super site for Windows, when I started that, so it was 1998, it was the year my son was born. He's 27. Whatever.
- [24:14]
A
Isn't that amazing?
- [24:15]
B
Yeah, this is just the baby, you know, little thing. The first business trip I went on after he was born was out to the Seattle Reviewers Workshop for what was then called Windows NT 5.0. Right. Which became Windows 2000. And the plan for that release was to unify nt and Windows 9X into a single platform and have this secure, wonderful underlying thing, you know, that, that would make Windows safe for everybody and, and also reliable and all the, all the good stuff. And this was really exciting and to me, and at the time that was the future of computing, right? I called it like. The tagline for the site was like, it's the future of Windows today. But really it's the future of computing. Because at that time Microsoft had beaten back every competitor that there ever was. The Mac was circling the drain. There was nothing else. You know, if you, what we think of as personal computing was Windows PCs. That's what we, everyone got on the Internet first on Windows. Everyone experienced social media and digital music and whatever else first on Windows. Like this was, this was the era, it was peak Windows and it was very exciting. The future of computing today is quite different, you know, and one of this, a lot that goes into that, but you know, web, cloud, mobile, obviously. But a big part of that kind of transition is reducing complexity. And when you think about like an iPad or a Chromebook, whatever problems you may have with those things as a power user out there, the truth is those are better for most people because they're simple and they work and you know, they just, every day you open it comes on, it works. You know, it's magical. In Windows when you, especially on an ARM device where you open the thing up, you know, I always talk about that just comes on, it's like, oh my God, it's like a device. Like we don't really get this in Windows. Like this is not a thing. So Windows is like not the future of computing. Right. I'm sorry. But you know, I love it and I'm super into it, I always will be. But I think we just need to acknowledge like this isn't the future. And yeah, I mean the landfills are full of devices that came and went. I mean, that's just the nature of things. And there are a lot of these things, I get it, I'm not dismissing it. But they're full of old phones too, guys, and they're full of old tablets, old iPads and old whatever. It's like this landfills are full of all kinds of crap. And PCs are not unique in this regard. Microsoft's 10 Year Support Life cycle that lasted for so long is actually kind of unheard of in the broader consumer electronics space. I mean, it's changing, right? That it is changing and we have right to repair now and we have devices that you can open up and swap components without bringing it to a repair shop and all that stuff. It's great, that's good. But, but for that stuff to make sense, these things have to just work and just be simple and, and you know. Yeah, and that's. Those are not Windows PCs. I'm sorry. So I'm not saying it's okay. I'm not saying it's right. I'm not completely disagreeing. I completely see the point. But it's weird to take a stand on this thing. You know, we have this old crappy platform that nobody should be using anymore and let's keep it around forever. You know, here's an idea. Let's not do that, let's not do that. Let's move on to something better. You know, Windows on ARM is a, is a better step, but I think even simple, it's still Windows, right? And so I think simpler platforms like the iPad, Android, if they, there's no reason Android couldn't be like the iPad. I think that's what they're trying to do. You know, maybe they get it there as well, whatever, but. And then of course, by the time they figured this out, we're going to be doing classes and embedded technology. Who cares? We're going to be like, what do you mean you had a device? You know, it's lit like when Microsoft was formed and they eventually came up with this computer on every desk and then in every home and then running Microsoft software, you know, as they evolve that over time, that seems so far reaching and amazing today, that's not just quaint, it's stupid. Why do I have to go to a certain place in a certain building to do a thing? Like I can bring this thing with me all over the place and that will seem stupid too because the computing will just be ambient everywhere. Like you had a, you had to have a phone with a screen that was like this big and the battery would die and you couldn't do it anymore. That's stupid. Just like a computer in a room is stupid. You know, evolution occurs. So I don't know, I, I don't know what to tell you. This seems, it's a weird thing to take a stand on, but to me, I don't know.
- [28:41]
A
Moving right along.
- [28:43]
B
Yeah, what else? What else?
- [28:45]
A
Let's talk about. Hey, the new ISOs are here.
- [28:49]
B
Yeah, I mentioned this right at the end of the show last week because it literally was released while we did the show. But I just want to reiterate this. If you didn't see this, 25H2 is not complete quite yet. It's almost complete. It's in the release preview channel. So you could get the ISO for x64 from the Microsoft Windows Insider site. If you just download Windows Insider, ISO will get you to the page. Oddly, the ARM Version is not there. There is an ARM version, but it's for the dev channel. So it's an older build. It's not near final and I don't know why that is, but I played around with that. The ARM file is not an ISO either. It's actually a dx which is a hyper V virtual hard drive. So you just create a new virtual machine and attach that hard drive to it. You boot into it, whatever. Yeah. So anyway, if you want to, you know, use tools to kind of decrapify Windows and do all that stuff. Rufus has been updated. It works with the latest, you know, with the 25H2. All the other things that we have, like tiny 11, etc. Either are or will be soon updated. I can confirm that all of the workarounds for not having to sign in with a Microsoft account, not having to have tracking enabled by default, et cetera, et cetera, it all works. Nothing has changed there. Despite all those stories that was all going to change. Nothing has changed. It's there. If you want that stuff and you want to play around with it and maybe build your copilot less Windows 11 build, you can do that. Okay, so that's, that's out there. I just wanted to re reiterate that in case you missed it.
- [30:31]
A
Nice.
- [30:32]
B
And let's see. So we have some insider builds. I. I wouldn't be surprised if we got some more today or at least by the end of the week. But dev and beta on the same features. But 25H2, 24H2. Right. We. We all know they get the same features and then release preview 24 and 25H2, which is confusing as well. But the release preview builds are the ones that are going to point to what 25H2 will look like at launch, which should happen. Well, we'll see. What. Where are we in the schedule? Yeah, it's probably going to be the second Tuesday of October will be the preview release and then I would imagine November will be the, you know, the public whatever release, the one they will actually jam down your throat, so to speak. That's not technically how they phrase it, but the one you actually cannot stop. So October, I guess this is what Microsoft would call that is the release who cares. A lot of new copilot or I should say click to do stuff and actually both all of those builds. It's weird watching Microsoft move from thing to thing in Windows and elsewhere. Right. Remember with Microsoft 365, there was a period of time or Office as we used to call it where it just seemed like every month was like this crazy period of like every month was like crazy updates across the stack. It was crazy. And then they did teams and then suddenly it was like, oh, a lot of teams updates. Like it was all teams. You know, it wasn't all teams, but it was like 90% teams. And then Windows 11 comes around and it becomes like copilot, right? Copilot's over here. Now it's over here. Now it looks like this. Now it's a window. Now it's a pane. Now it's another window. They keep kind of screwing with that recall. About a year and a half ago was the big story Recall kind of turned into a big nothing burger. But they came upon something called Click to Do. And now it's like Click to do keeps getting updated all the time. And Click to do is one of those things that integr with those app intents or app actions, actually we call them in Windows. And so this is where a lot of the focus is. You have to have a copilot plus PC so it impacts nobody, you know, or. Well, that's not fair. It's probably less than 10% of people. Whatever the numbers, it's pretty small still, but there's a lot of action there. So that will always be the case, or that will be the case until we move on to the next thing, whatever that's going to be. So nothing major, I guess, unless you care about the gaming handheld stuff, you know, that was going to be running Windows, but a special version of Windows. They've already did the work for the Xbox app and the Xbox or the game bar, which used to be the Xbox game bar, to adapt them for these devices with compact modes. And now they're doing like full controller navigation for those devices. The idea is that you, you know, the thing is a controllers to get a screen with the controller on either side. You could just navigate the UI completely with a controller and not have to fall back to, you know, tapping the screen or connecting a touchpad, mouse, whatever. So no big deal. Let's say what else. That's mostly that. So I've been updating the book for 25H2, which will be a new edition of the book. And I've been. I'm changing the way it's going to look. So I've been kind of going around the table of contents and picking things just to see if everything makes sense in this new format. I have. But I recently wrote about Quick Machine Recovery, which was added in 24H2, but it was a new. It's a new, A new recovery tool of the past. I'm going to call it six months or so. Not a lot to do there. It just will come on when you need it. So if you get into a situation where your PC can't reboot into Windows because you install the driver is usually what happens and it screwed something up or maybe even had malware, whatever it might be, this thing will connect to. Well, you actually have to. If you're not connected with a wire, you have to connect it to a WI FI network yourself in the recovery environment it boots into. But then it will look to Windows Update for a fix. And this is, this kind of speaks to the part of that conversation we just had where with Windows 10, one of the goals was to get as many people as possible on the same version. And this is why, because if we're all on the same version, which we're not, but if we have just a few versions and most people are there, it makes it easy to find problems that impact lots of people. And that's the types of fixes that will go to this quick machine recovery thing, right? Because Microsoft gets this telemetry data and they can see, hey, AMD or whatever driver is causing problems for everybody. Let's put the patch into Windows Update. So if you can get into Windows, you'll get it, but if you can't, this will go into Windows Update and get it for you. And it's, it's, it's kind of, it's funny in a way because the way it is by default as an individual, if it can't find an update, it will just sit there trying to reboot all day long, you know, on some schedule. And if it eventually finds one, you'll be fine. And if it doesn't, you'll, you know, like you just have to sit there, watch it reboot all day, I guess. But. Oh my God, it's not that fast. But it's. But the theory here is something bad has happened, like meaning community wide, meaning for everybody, and they can put that patch in one place and everyone will just get it right. Will happen automatically. It's not a bad idea, honestly. So anyway, there's nothing to say there as far as like what you should do. You can go look at it. You can. Actually, it's my article about that post I put up. There's a command line you can run to simulate a problem so you can see what it does, which is cool actually, but hopefully you'll never see it really. But if you do, the goal is that it should fix the problem for you. We'll see how that works in real life, but that's the plan. It seems reasonable to me then. This just happened right before the show. I haven't looked at this very closely yet, but Microsoft today announced something called the Windows 365 cloud apps which are in public preview. And this is if you think about, I'm going to lose track of these names, but you go back 20 years, Microsoft had these pre Hyper V virtualization technologies mostly for businesses that would go out through like MDOP was one and App V was one of the other ones and they were slightly different. But App V, if I remember correctly, was the one where you could basically deploy a virtual app instead of an entire virtual operating system to a desktop. So somebody signed into at the time would have been an active directory environment. You have this policy set up so when this person is in this group, they know we're going to send down a cloud based version of Word, Excel and PowerPoint or whatever it might be. And it would actually run virtually just by itself. Like it would just be the app, not the entire operating system. So Windows 365 to date has been sort of the whole. Not sort of has been literally the whole operating system, but running virtually in the cloud and then use like a remote desktop connection to get to it. So the Windows 365 cloud apps as I understand it, is sort of like the App v for the 21st century, where it was technically also the 21st century, but just work with it where you are. Your company is deploying apps virtually through the cloud individually. Right. So you may not need full Office, but for some reason it may be around frontline work or whatever. You need a very specific app. I wouldn't probably be worried, but let's just pretend it's worried about. They would just deploy Word to you through the cloud and you would run that, that one app virtually on a machine, which could be an iPad, could be a phone, could be a computer, could be whatever. That's the point. So this will not impact like people, you know, like end users or individuals or consumers. But it's a, you know, it's an extension of this thing they've been doing in the cloud. So. Okay, good.
- [38:29]
A
Hey, hey, hey. Let's take a break. What do you say?
- [38:33]
B
Sounds good.
- [38:33]
A
What do you think? Might be kind of fun right now? Just pause, pause that. Refreshes.
- [38:40]
B
I gotta, I could put it like an ice pack on my neck, get.
- [38:45]
A
One of those Frozen masks.
- [38:46]
B
Yeah, you're right. I'll just sit there with the, like the. I'll just say, I'll just sit. There'll be two, like, it's time to cucumbers.
- [38:53]
A
And I'm talking. And you know what I'm talking about our sponsor, US Cloud, the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. We've been talking for a little while now about US Cloud. I've been getting more and more excited about them. I hadn't really heard of, I'll be honest, I hadn't really heard about them until I had this call with them and then I was so impressed. And since then, they have really become the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. They support 50 of the Fortune 500. What's the secret of their success? I think it's three things. Number one, switching to US Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier support. When you're saving 50% on your support budget, that feels pretty good. But rightly so you'd say, but okay. But is it better? Yes. So I said there are three things. Yes, it's less expensive, but it's also faster. Their average time to resolution is twice as fast as Microsoft's. Twice as fast. And of course the third thing is they've got the best senior engineers in the world. These are folks with more than 16 years of Microsoft experience on average and that includes Break fix. I mean, they really, they know their stuff. So it's faster, better Microsoft support for less. That's pretty compelling. Oh, I'll add a fourth one. US Cloud will tell you things Microsoft might be reluctant to tell you. For instance, are you overspending on Azure? You know Microsoft's going to say no. That's good. Keep up the good work. But US Cloud has a new Azure cost optimization service. Like, come on, honestly, when's the last time you really took a look at your Azure bill? Well, you probably look at the bill, but do you look at what the bill's paying for? If you haven't really dug in, you probably have some Azure sprawl, you know, a little spend creep going on. It's easy. Hey, no reflection on you. It's just, you know, it's so useful. People use it more and more and sometimes they Forget they've got VMs running and, you know, so on. But the good news is you can save on Azure. It's easier than you might imagine. Thanks to US Cloud. US Cloud has an eight week Azure Engagement powered by VBOX that identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. And again, you're going to get that great expert guidance. I mean, you're never on your own with US Cloud. Access to US Cloud senior engineers. Again, the average over 16 years of Microsoft products. At the end of those eight weeks, two months, that's all you're going to get this beautiful interactive dashboard that will identify very clearly, rebuild and. And downscale opportunities and yes, unused resources. You can say, hey, what am I paying that for? I don't use that. This allows you to reallocate those precious IT dollars towards something you really need, right? Or if I may make a suggestion, do what a lot of US Cloud's micro customers do. Keep the savings going. By investing your savings into USCloud's Microsoft support, completely eliminate your unified spend. And that way you're saving every month. Ask Sam. He's the technical operations Manager at Bead Gaming. He gave US Cloud five stars. He said, we found. This is a direct quote.
- [42:11]
B
Quote.
- [42:12]
A
We found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spent on Azure, but once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month, it really started to add up. Yeah. Look, it's easy for this to happen, but there's no excuse anymore for not knowing. Stop overpaying for Azure. Identify and eliminate Azure Creep and boost your performance and do it all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Visit uscloud.com and book a call today to find out how much your team can save. That's US Cloud to book a call today and get faster Microsoft support for less. Thank you, US Clown. All right, Paul has taken the mask off. Now he's skin. You look how beautiful and hydrated. You're just glowing. You're just glowing, Paul.
- [43:09]
B
I'm half drunk, that's why.
- [43:13]
A
When are you leaving for Mexico? Tomorrow?
- [43:15]
B
Friday.
- [43:16]
A
All right. Do you look forward to going to taco bar? Like, oh, I can't wait to get it. I would. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [43:27]
B
There'll be some things I will miss about here. Like the terrible drivers. No, wait, just things. But yeah.
- [43:36]
A
Do you have a car? You don't have a car in Mexico City?
- [43:38]
B
No.
- [43:39]
A
So you don't have to worry about. I'm sure the drivers in Mexico City are equally terrible, maybe worse. But you don't care because you're not driving anywhere.
- [43:48]
B
I care when I'm crossing the street, but.
- [43:50]
A
No, that's true.
- [43:51]
B
It's funny. You know, if you needed any more proof that cars make people insane, understand that. Mexico. And I'm not gonna argue this point with anybody, they have the nicest people on the planet.
- [44:02]
A
They're sweethearts.
- [44:03]
B
But you put those people in cars and just like anyone else, completely idiotic. It's. It's. It's. It's weird. Cars and make people crazy, stupid.
- [44:14]
A
Yeah, we know that.
- [44:16]
B
Very strange.
- [44:19]
A
It's called car brain, Paul. And, yeah, we're. It's epidemic here in the United States, in America. It's epidemic in the world.
- [44:28]
B
I think it is. Yeah.
- [44:29]
A
I remember being in Cairo, and the beeping is phenomenal, constant in Cairo, downtown Cairo. And I asked our guide, I said, wow, what's going on? He said, well, the government realized that nobody was paying any attention to the stoplights, so it made it more dangerous because people would say, oh, I've got a green. And then they would get hit because nobody paid. So they took the stoplights out.
- [44:54]
B
Yeah. No, that's what we have in Mexico. So my apartment is on the corner of two major roads, and we have not been there when it happened. But up here, we hear the, you know, less often than you would think. But. But, yeah, I just. I like the uncertainty. It's like, do I go? Do you go? I guess I'll go. I guess we'll all go.
- [45:18]
A
Let's. This is where you gotta look in the driver's eyes. You gotta understand their intent.
- [45:24]
B
Yeah. And you can't because they're looking at their phone or their problem there, too. That's maybe some food or whatever it is they're doing. Like, nobody's distracted is the worst.
- [45:33]
A
So you have noted. In fact, we were talking about it before the show, and I'm very excited about Ming Chi Kuo, who is one of the Apple rumor guys who has kind of deep connections within the Apple supply chain, has noted that Apple seems to be buying up OLED screens. Touch screens.
- [45:51]
B
Right.
- [45:52]
A
And has projected that there will be a MacBook Pro with an OLED touch screen next year.
- [45:59]
B
Yeah, I've gone back and forth on this one. Internally, I used to argue with, not debate this with Mary Jo. Mary Jo, remember, hated touchscreens.
- [46:08]
A
Hated. She didn't want them.
- [46:10]
B
And I was like, anything that takes.
- [46:11]
A
Your hands off the keyboard, she didn't want.
- [46:13]
B
Yeah, but you don't have to use it. It was additive. Right. My argument at the time was like, who cares if it's touch? You don't have to touch it. Just use it. Like you always use it. The truth Is like, I actually, I prefer, I like getting laptops that do not have touchscreens. I really do prefer that. But the argument I made back in the day about Apple bringing Touch to the Mac was about iOS and now Android or iPad, OS, whatever, development. Because you write the apps on this device, it'd be nice to, you know, touch them on the screen if you, you know, just for quick interactions. I mean, just be efficient. I mean, obviously I know you can connect a device and all that stuff, but I just thought. It just confused me. They didn't do this. But I'm sure this will be one of those virtuous cycle things. But like, yeah, we found out people really like the screen. I mean, who knew?
- [47:01]
A
They'll probably say they invented it, you know, I mean.
- [47:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They'll have, there'll be a cool marketing name for. At the screen. Love a name like Touch O Matic, you know, or whatever. Some, some.
- [47:15]
A
Finger jabbing.
- [47:17]
B
Yeah. But this, I feel like this has been a rumor for at least a decade.
- [47:21]
A
You know, Apple's consistently denied it, but I do think that it is widely accepted Apple will do finally an oled. That's one thing that's really been behind on that beautiful OLED screens on their iPad Pro. In fact, one of the reasons I use the iPad Pro more than the MacBook is because I love the screen so much.
- [47:39]
B
Right, right.
- [47:40]
A
So it's about time Apple did that.
- [47:45]
B
Yes. Yesterday, the other day, whatever, it doesn't matter. I wrote this article which I think will be. Will be taken as blasphemy by most people, which was, as I said, up top with the Windows 10 end of life thing. You know, there are simpler devices. The iPad's one of them. Apple has lots of problems. They're not perfect. I'm not one of those people. But they've really achieved something, honestly pretty magical with this new version of ipados where.
- [48:09]
A
Oh, you like it?
- [48:10]
B
Well, because if you're an iPad person and you use the thing and you're touching it and this is. You don't want Windows and you don't want other stuff. It still works exactly the same. Right, right. But if you do want to attach like a magic keyboard or whatever and use it like a laptop, that works.
- [48:24]
A
That's how I use it. That's how I use it. And now the pointer, instead of being a dumb dot, is actually a pointer. Yeah.
- [48:31]
B
Yep.
- [48:32]
A
So I'm using the iPad more and more as my main PC.
- [48:35]
B
Yeah. And I would too, except for a few things. But one of the big ones for me is it's not big enough. I have an 11 inch iPad, but I know they go up to 13. But, you know, the smallest laptops I use like 14 inches. I prefer 16 inches. So whatever I just said too, I, and this is true, I very much prefer the keyboard, mouse or touchpad interaction. I don't want to touch the screen, right. So I'm like, here's an idea. You should make a 16 inch iPad Pro that you cannot touch the screen. It doesn't do touch, it just does the other thing. And I know people like, what are you talking about? But, but the reason is you've got this simple platform. The app model is now improved to the point we can have background processes for video rendering, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I actually think that this becomes very interesting as a general purpose computing platform now. And it is that kind of magical. Again, not to keep you using that Word thing, which doesn't happen a lot in personal tech where someone has created a hybrid device that is not a compromise in either direction. That's usually not the case. Usually something that does too many things does those things poorly. Right. You know, folding devices of all kinds so far have been kind of like compromising, whatever. But this is the rare instance of a thing where it's like, yeah, if you want to use it as an iPad, perfect. If you want to use it as a laptop with a touchpad and a keyboard, great. You know, so it's, it's kind of.
- [50:08]
A
Interesting convertible, though, isn't that what I mean? Microsoft?
- [50:11]
B
No, because that's. That there are so many, first of all, Windows, complicated fans, noise, bad battery life. And then you flip the thing over and it's like an inch and a half thick. Yeah. What kind of, what kind of a tablet is that? You got like a Popeye ARM over here because you hold the thing all day long.
- [50:26]
A
So you don't think the Surface Pro, for instance, is.
- [50:29]
B
I think the Surface Pro gets about as close as you can get in the Windows space, especially on the ARM versions. But it's still Windows. Right. And Microsoft has made.
- [50:41]
A
Paul, you know the name of the show is Windows Weekly, Right.
- [50:44]
B
I just want to confirm we're talking about. But in the way the world has evolved, Windows, like the Mac, is more of what I would think of as a workstation or C drives, what we call the truck.
- [50:55]
A
Right.
- [50:55]
B
And these other things, these simpler devices are what we think of as like computers or PCs or whatever, cars. And there's always going to be a place I look, I develop software you need a truck. Not well, you know, but I do. Maybe you're a creator with kind of higher end needs or whatever it is and you, you know, whatever people prefer and, or need these things, they're not going away, but I think they're less applicable to the mainstream public. I. If you want to turn the, you know, the frown upside down or whatever on the Windows 10 thing, look at this as an opportunity to move to something simpler. You know, don't just do more of the same. If you're a grandma or grandma should.
- [51:41]
A
Have a Chromebook or an iPad, whatever it is.
- [51:42]
B
Maybe, but you know, whatever. I'm just saying, like I, you know, I. Look, we're power users, for lack of a better term here, tech enthusiasts, whatever. Like we, of course, this is what we want. I mean this is, it is. I'm not switching to an iPad tomorrow or anything like that. But, but I see it for what it is and I, I actually pretty.
- [52:01]
A
Much, I think they've done something unconsciously have switched to an iPad for 90% of my computing. I can't code on it. You're right. And I have a machine running Emacs. You know.
- [52:15]
B
You could do the cloud thing, but a couple years ago, this is before iOS or iPadOS 26. The question came up somewhere, I don't know, it's some forum, some developer forum, whatever it was. Why don't we have Visual Studio code on the iPad? This would be a great system for that. It would be. The reason is because Safari in the iPad does not allow this. You need the desktop capabilities to do the electron stuff. That is what Visual Studio code does. The iPad is perfectly capable of running Visual Studio code effectively. It would be great. But it's limited by Apple on purpose because they want people using apps, not using websites and web apps because that takes away their little app store thing and they specifically limit it on purpose for that reason. So this is something Microsoft would do. Like if the iPad, if the Safari on the iPad was the Mac version tomorrow, Visual Studio code would be out the next day. There's no doubt about it, it would be that easy and that would be an awesome developer device. Whatever. This is not good data, but when we were flying home from Berlin, we were in distant coach, you know, and honestly the, the situation on both flights was fine. Like there was plenty of room. The person in front of me didn't jam their seat into my face or anything like that. But in the back of my mind I was like, well, if I can't open my laptop and get Stuff done. Like, I do have an iPad here and that thing's small and I could, I could use that. Like it would get work done. I could get work done on that thing. And then, you know, yesterday we went to a meeting, my wife and I, and I was going to be out of the office for a couple hours and I was like, well, I'll bring the iPad. It's small. You know, if something comes up, if my phone buzzes into some work thing or something, I can, you know, instead of carrying on a laptop, I can just use that. And I think that's how it starts, you know, for people. And I know there are people who are always going to want to just. I just want to touch the iPad. I just want to play music and I want to.
- [54:07]
A
You know what I do now? So I bring my iPad Pro, but because I want something small and light, I also bring my iPad mini.
- [54:16]
B
Yeah, right. I mean, sure.
- [54:20]
A
And then I think, well, what if I want to do some coding? So then I bring my MacBook.
- [54:25]
B
Yep. Pretty soon you've got like a stack of metal.
- [54:28]
A
Oh, really?
- [54:28]
B
Yeah. It's like, which one do I need? Well, look, you have that ability. I mean, you can do it. But like I, look, I'm, I'm a Windows guy. That's not changing. I, I prefer. That's why I said, like the iPad. I'm like, okay, great, we've crossed the Rubicon here. Like, they've done all the hard work. I didn't think it was going to happen so fast, but they did it. Nice. Now we can get nitpicky. The thing I want, which is basically like a Windows laptop without the complexity and without the touch, is not. Apple's not doing that.
- [54:59]
A
I mean, could Microsoft do that? Wasn't that what Windows S. Yeah, no.
- [55:03]
B
So, yeah, so I started to go down this path a little bit.
- [55:05]
A
I should say Windows X. Right.
- [55:07]
B
If you go. You could go back in time to the mid-90s, right. And say, so Windows is dominant. They pretty much erased all the competition on apps and OSes. They are personal computing. Like I said. This is when Microsoft started doing things like Windows ce, which turned into palm sized PC and Pocket PC and Windows Mobile, et cetera. And for a little while it was kind of up to date. It was obviously running actually on an ARM based system. Basically it looked like Windows 95. They were black and white at first, by the way, but then they were color and they didn't run the same apps, but it was a consistent ui. And it's like when You're a hammer. Everything's a nail. So from Microsoft's perspective, we'll make this thing. It looks like Windows and even the little palm thing had like a start menu in the beginning. It's like, guys, this UI does not make sense on these things. That's, you know, whatever. That's how you see the world.
- [55:59]
A
I remember that. Yeah.
- [56:00]
B
Yeah. So they went through things like that for a long time. The Xbox is an example of a thing that is a device, but it's really a Windows PC. Right. I mean, that's the first Xbox and new Xboxes, but the first one that was. It's a PC.
- [56:11]
A
Yeah.
- [56:12]
B
So that's how you do those things. But Apple, I think, has been more successful. First taking their big desktop os, which was OS X at the time, and bringing it down to iOS now iOS, iPhone, OS @ the time and the iPhone. Right. And then using that as the basis to go back up the chain with iPad and WatchOS and whatever else they do. And those things get more sophisticated. And I think that's kind of interesting because this was always kind of a theory for me and maybe Apple, I don't know if they proved it or at least they were able to do it where Microsoft has been trying for a long time to take this complicated thing and make it simpler. Right. 10 x s mode, like you said, whatever else. I'm losing track of all the stuff they did. But Apple was just like, yeah, we just do it. You know, they were pretty good. They did it pretty well. So I always thought that would be the case. And Apple did do it where you can take something simple, just make it a little more sophisticated, but do it with care and not screw up the thing that makes it, you know, special in the first place. And I don't know, to me, that's pretty good. So, yeah, Macro, Mac, getting a. Of course they do it now when no one. Like, it doesn't even matter anymore. Like, why. Why even bother? But okay, I think the next step of the iPad is going to be they put Xcode on there and they let you create apps for iPhone, iPad, WatchOS, whatever. Right. And I don't know how that works exactly. And I'm sure there are like native Mac OS apps, but really just make an app that runs on the iPad. It will run on the Mac. Right. So you could do that in iPad. It's just Apple just hasn't done it yet, you know, I bet they do it.
- [57:52]
A
Yeah. Be interesting. I wish Window. I wish Microsoft would. Why? Why don't they?
- [57:57]
B
Because this is not their focus.
- [57:59]
A
This is not what they. Yeah, this is.
- [58:00]
B
Yeah. So when. Well, back in the 90s, very much was their focus. Right. And so they were expanding from Windows out to all this stuff. Right. I mean, Office was a long time, but Office got really big, obviously. And then all the other things they worked on, some of it worked, most of it didn't. Right. We had all these consumer electronics things. We had media center and tablet PC and portable media center and whatever else. They did all this stuff, Zune and whatever, none of it worked. But they had great success with businesses, enterprises, cloud, and now they're trying to do the same thing in AI, and that's what they're focused on. And in that world, it doesn't matter what device you use for the most part. Although you see a little bit of the better on Windows thing and Copilot plus PC. Right. That was an idea they had given up for a while. But. But for the most part, you know, Window. We just Talked about Windows 365 apps, got cloud apps. Those are running on iPad. They're running a phone. You know, they don't. Microsoft doesn't care. This is the. This is the. You know, this when Corey Doctorow, right. Who you've talked to, I think, and.
- [59:06]
A
Oh, you know, it's an old friend.
- [59:07]
B
Yeah. His book's coming. He's great. Right. So his book's coming out in October about insidification. And one of the things he talks about is how these business models change the way that businesses do business. Right. Because I wanted to use the word business three times in one sentence. But. Sorry, I'm a writer. I'm good at that.
- [59:28]
A
Quick to the thesaurus.
- [59:30]
B
Yeah. So a simple example is like, you're audible and you're owned by Amazon. And the business. What's the business? Right? So people like. Oh, they sell audiobooks. Like, no, they don't. They sell a subscription. That's 14 bucks a month, 15 bucks a month. And they don't actually care if you ever listen to it.
- [59:46]
A
They prefer you don't.
- [59:47]
B
Probably prefer you don't. But here's the thing. Other than their basic monopoly in audio books, right. If you as a customer went back to Audible, you would. You could have listened to a book. It could be like two weeks later, and you're like, you know what? I don't want this book anymore. And they're like, fine, take it back. We'll give you another one.
- [60:03]
A
They actually, I. There's a. I've read somewhere that that's. They want you to do that.
- [60:08]
B
Yeah.
- [60:08]
A
They don't have to pay the royalty.
- [60:10]
B
They're not paying royalties in the book. But they're still getting your 15 bucks, right? No matter what you do with it, right?
- [60:15]
A
Yeah.
- [60:15]
B
All right. So think about what Microsoft has done now with for. Well for it start. You can see how it starts. It didn't start out nefarious. Right. It's like McDonald's did not set out to kill us all with heart disease. There was convenience in solving a problem and whatever. So Microsoft's first push into what we now think of as subscription services came 25 years ago when they did enterprise licensing. And we just talked about this up top you as a business license, this, you can use any version of Windows that supported you want. You can put do whatever you want. They don't care. They're not interested in selling a version of Windows. They're interested in your money every month forever. Right. So they don't care what you do. It doesn't matter. As long as it's supported you can do whatever you want. Today you have things like Microsoft 365 and this and then the add on copilot subscriptions and that's where the money is. Right. And so it's like well don't they care about the Windows experience? Don't they care about whatever? It's like no, they don't care about that. They don't care. This is, this is not the focus anymore. There's a licensing business they still have with businesses. There's a licensing business they have with PC makers. There is no such thing as a business where Microsoft goes to you as a person. Like you're at a yard sale or something. It's like here's a copy of windows for 15 bucks. We used to have, it was indirect but we used to have that kind of relationship. You buy Windows and then three, five, ten, whatever years you would buy another version of Windows. But we don't do that anymore. And the reason is they don't care. That's not where they're making money. It's just a different business. It's so no, they're not going to do it. You know, why won't Microsoft make a. They might have some half hearted attempts to do stuff they have.
- [61:55]
A
Just doesn't matter to them. There's no money.
- [61:57]
B
It's not even the B team anymore. It's who are these people? They're like the, an intern. Maybe they brought them up from the minor leagues or something. Yeah, I don't even know who's working on this anymore. It's kind of weird.
- [62:06]
A
It's interesting. They did think about it for a hot minute.
- [62:11]
B
No, it was active for a long time. You know when you could tell when this was an active concern? Right. Because of the Windows CE thing or because of Media center or because of curry tablet PC. This was. Well, Courier was right in the line where it was like, it's gonna be X. You're like, I, we're not doing this. What is, what's the model here? There's no money to be made here. Like, what are you talking about? But it's cool.
- [62:32]
A
Yeah. There's barely honestly any money to be made in Surface.
- [62:37]
B
Yes. Well, which.
- [62:39]
A
Or Xbox for that matter.
- [62:42]
B
Well, yeah, Xbox is a hardware console. Yeah. Yeah.
- [62:45]
A
And I think software wise, they've, They've pivoted. Oh, right. They've actually decided to do that.
- [62:49]
B
And they, by the way. Right. And they figured that's the thing. And by the way, what did they pivot to in that business? Game pass is subscription.
- [62:56]
A
Right?
- [62:56]
B
Subscription games.
- [62:57]
A
That's the thing.
- [62:58]
B
You give them 10 to 20 to 30 bucks a month. That's what they want.
- [63:01]
A
Yeah.
- [63:02]
B
It's like if you don't ever use that thing or if you just play the same game every day, all day long, like I kind of do. They don't care. They don't care. You do whatever you want as long as you pay me the money. You know, Netflix, this is the Netflix model. It's the Spotify model. All of these are. It's the same thing. They don't care about the product. You know, you're the product or whatever. You're paying them for a service. They don't care about the thing. Microsoft 365 you. Microsoft would be better off if you didn't run it on Windows, you know, because it's going to work more reliably on this device anyway. Who cares? You're still paying us, right? Yeah. Good. Don't. Don't you have to use Windows? Nobody cares. So. Yeah, it's just a different era. It's just the way it's evolved, you know, this is our world. It's too bad. I hate being this. No, but it's just.
- [63:52]
A
You chose it, Paul. You could have been the Amiga show.
- [63:54]
B
But no, the only thing I could have done in life that would have been more frustrating than my current career would have been to become a programmer.
- [64:02]
A
Oh, do you think, do you think it's frustrating? I think working a big company probably is a nightmare. I love coding so much.
- [64:12]
B
I do. So I do too. But here's the thing.
- [64:15]
A
But not if you're doing it.
- [64:16]
B
I brought this up so many times. You know, ones and zeros, right? This should be logical. This should always make sense. It should just work, right? So if you do something like, I'm trying to redo this app in the most modern Microsoft framework there is, it's terrible. It's. No, it's terrible. And there are things in this ancient thing that is literally 20 years old now that work better than this new thing. It's a lot.
- [64:38]
A
Why do you think I stick with Common Lisp? It is a programming language that is unchanged for 40 years.
- [64:45]
B
I'm going to get there and I'll be doing like VB3 apps or something.
- [64:47]
A
But like Common Lisp and Emacs is eternal. It is, in effect, the, you know, the pyramids, man. It's ancient. It's as old as me.
- [64:57]
B
Someday I'm going to get there because this is how I get there. It's like I run into these frustration points. I spend months and months learning this technical thing, which is data binding, which by the way, is not new. And I get it to work. I get it. I figured out I have a framework. No, no, nothing changes. But you have an app and you can data bind to multiple controls that have to do with the display of a status bar. It always works. It works fine. It's perfect. They're like, I've done it.
- [65:25]
A
Well done.
- [65:26]
B
All right, now I'm going to do it for word wrap. That doesn't work. Doesn't work. It's exactly the same code. It's just a different property and a different control. And the error message is, yeah, you can't do that.
- [65:38]
A
No, this is why frameworks, people hate frameworks. And this is the bane of modern coding, is trying to work with these.
- [65:46]
B
It's the worst.
- [65:48]
A
I'm convinced this is why Vibe coding has taken off. Is. Yeah, it's not as good, but at least you don't have to grapple with the frameworks.
- [65:56]
B
These little rabbit holes that I get into betrays the problem with these programming tools, AI based programming tools, which is you're like, okay, I just wanted to figure this out. Apparently I can't. I thought I did it, I didn't do it. So, okay, I'm going to ask AI and it's like, oh, here's what you got to do. And, oh, here's your problem. And you're like, oh, yeah, no, that makes sense. I can see that. Okay. And then you plug it in, that has a new error. And then you throw it by the thing and it goes, oh, I can see the problem here. You're like, you made the problem. What do you mean? And then it's like, we'll do this. And you're like, that's what I had before. That's what I did. And I know it's not gonna, all right, I'll do it again. Nope, still doesn't work. And so you just play this game, you go back and forth, and then the next thing you know, it's six hours later, you did nothing except you just want to cry. And that's what programming is. So, yeah, I, I feel like I, I feel like I actually could be good at this. I, I, I may, I don't know. I don't know. The Microsoft Windows developer stuff is.
- [66:53]
A
Yeah, tell Emacs and Lisp.
- [66:58]
B
I have no doubt that I will. I'm going to get to a similar place. I can't.
- [67:02]
A
Parentheses are your, are your best parentheses.
- [67:07]
B
Anyway. Okay.
- [67:08]
A
Coding makes him cry, ladies and gentlemen. I think that's what we've learned here today.
- [67:14]
B
I Technology makes me cry.
- [67:16]
A
Yeah. You know what? You know what? Why do we do this to ourselves?
- [67:20]
B
Yeah. I don't know. Well, what else do I got? What am I going to do? What do you mean? I'm going to go buy.
- [67:23]
A
I know. We got to make a living, right?
- [67:26]
B
I. Yeah.
- [67:27]
A
So it's frustrating. All you winners and dozers, what are you doing?
- [67:31]
B
Yeah, we have to do this.
- [67:34]
A
Why are you.
- [67:36]
B
I also, I recognize the grass is greener problem. Right. I know that. I. And because I look at this stuff, I look at what Apple does, I look at what Google.
- [67:42]
A
Oh, you don't want to code for Mac. That's worse.
- [67:45]
B
There's, there's other issues, you know? Yeah. So I don't know.
- [67:50]
A
Anyway, yeah, it's just like, it's the nature of life.
- [67:54]
B
Yeah.
- [67:54]
A
We always want what we don't have.
- [67:56]
B
Yeah. You know, so I did, I said this to my wife the other day because actually, I was working on this last night and I wanted to hum this laptop through a window. And I said, you know what this is like when you have a kid. Right.
- [68:07]
A
That's why they make them so flat, by the way. Yeah.
- [68:10]
B
They fly. They actually, they do, yeah. They skip on the water. Kids become teenagers and they look little dicks and you want to kill them. And then it's time for them to leave the house. Right. They have to go to college maybe. And no, by that time, you're like, you're both ready for this.
- [68:24]
A
Oh, yeah. Life does that go. Just push them out of the nest. Yeah.
- [68:27]
B
And I think that this is where people are like, you know what? I'm just going to retire. I'm done. Like, I'm, I, I can't, Like, I'm not gonna f. I can't solve this problem. And it, it's a, it's a, it's a logic problem. It should be solvable. I think I have the right answer. Nope. You know, but enough of that. It's like, how many times you want to get punched in the face?
- [68:49]
A
I am going to give you motivation, sir.
- [68:52]
B
Okay.
- [68:53]
A
Remember the great endorphin rush you get when you finally figure it out. And I always kind of keep that in mind because I know this is hell, but at the end is a pot of gold.
- [69:06]
B
Yep. Yep.
- [69:08]
A
And it's really satisfying when you find that bug and you go, oh. And you fix it and it works and it's just so satisfying.
- [69:15]
B
Yeah. But then you get.
- [69:16]
A
So then there's another bug.
- [69:18]
B
No, I was gonna say my wife doesn't care about any of this stuff. Right. So.
- [69:22]
A
No. That's why you and I, we gotta talk.
- [69:23]
B
Yeah. But I'll occasionally be like, every Wednesday, I get so excited. I'm like, oh, my God, I did it. I made this thing. It's awesome. And I'm like, look at it. You gotta look at it. You gotta look at it. And she's like, huh, huh?
- [69:34]
A
What's that?
- [69:34]
B
I'm like, I worked on this for like 18 months. She goes, that's cute. It's working. The button makes a little thing when you press it. Is that what you're showing me? You're like, yeah, that's what I'm showing you. I don't know what I'm doing.
- [69:47]
A
I do exactly the same thing.
- [69:49]
B
You know what I mean? Like, you can't learn. Like, I, I, I know, I know. She doesn't care. I don't even know what I'm doing. What am I doing? She doesn't care.
- [69:55]
A
But you just want to share with somebody.
- [69:57]
B
You want someone to be like, I don't even want the. I don't want to be applauded. I just want someone to understand it was work and it. And it. I solved it, you know? Like, I'm, I'm happy with myself, you know? Like, I just want it to, you know, to matter somehow. I don't know what I'm talking about anymore.
- [70:15]
A
This is why people do open source software.
- [70:18]
B
Yeah.
- [70:18]
A
People wonder well, you got. Getting paid for this. It's a hell of a horrible thing. And the users are awful and stuff. Yeah. But I get recognition. Well, among my peers. They go, hey, you got that button to work.
- [70:31]
B
There was a story about a year ago, year and a half ago, whatever it was, it was a guy from Microsoft, coincidentally, but not like a, A, like a. Oh yeah, I don't know.
- [70:38]
A
I know where you're at.
- [70:39]
B
He found a. He found a bug in. In Linux, right? It was Linux. Yeah. And it was a. And he was doing like a. Some like performance tuning or something.
- [70:50]
A
Exactly.
- [70:51]
B
This is wrong.
- [70:52]
A
It was a weird timing problem.
- [70:53]
B
It was a. It was like a malware that was going to affect the planet he defounded by mistake. And he solved this. Like he fixed the world. You know, like. And I mean, talk about like, like Andres Floyd. Yeah, just like. Like doing something like that is awesome. Like, it's just awesome.
- [71:12]
A
Yeah. You know, and he got, you know, good on Andres because he did get some recognition for that.
- [71:17]
B
Yeah, he should. I mean. Yeah, he saved the planet from that. From a massive cyber attack. I mean, he really did. You know, this was like sitting there waiting to happen. It was gonna be deployed to all of those major Linux versions, right? Yeah. It was gonna destroy everything. And he found it by mistake.
- [71:35]
A
It makes you wonder like, what else is. What time bombs are lurking in there.
- [71:39]
B
Oh, yeah. But still, I. This is. This is a neat.
- [71:41]
A
It's a wonderful story.
- [71:42]
B
Yeah, it's really good.
- [71:43]
A
Yeah. All because the timing was just. And by the way.
- [71:47]
B
Right.
- [71:47]
A
Yeah, it was off by microseconds. It was like.
- [71:49]
B
But he was like, this isn't my code. There's something wrong here. Like, it's something with the system, you.
- [71:54]
A
Know, something in SSH is just.
- [71:55]
B
It's. Yeah, something's not right.
- [71:57]
A
A little too slow.
- [71:58]
B
Yep.
- [72:00]
A
Brilliant.
- [72:00]
B
Pretty good. It's pretty good.
- [72:01]
A
Brilliant. You fixed ssh.
- [72:04]
B
Get word wrap working in a frickin when UI3 app and I'm gonna like, you know, I'm gonna murder some hardware here in a second. Like, I can't. It's. Why doesn't this work?
- [72:13]
A
All right, I want to take a break and then we gotta get back on track. We have Microsoft 365 to get through. We have AI. We have a little hardware talk. We got Xbox. We've got a lot of stuff.
- [72:25]
B
Stuff.
- [72:26]
A
There will, I am sorry, not be a brown liquor pick of the week. Okay? Stop cheering. Okay. Every once in a while I get an email that says, why do you spend half an hour of every show talking about whiskey. And I say, that's why we put it at the end. Think of it as a shortened show for you.
- [72:45]
B
It's a bonus. It's like having a cartoon short at the end of a sitcom or something.
- [72:50]
A
I would say most people enjoy it because Richard has, you know, it tells those great stories and it's so much fun.
- [72:56]
B
Yeah.
- [72:57]
A
All right, we're gonna take a break and come back. We got lots more to talk about. Paul Thurat is here. Richard Campbell's stuck at an airport somewhere in the low country.
- [73:07]
B
Yeah, maybe he. I mean, it's possible he's in the air by now. I don't know.
- [73:10]
A
We don't know. He just. His plan was canceled and he. He said, I can't make it, man. I tried. He'll be back, I'm sure, next week as he travels.
- [73:18]
B
Yeah, he really tries hard to make this. I mean, more than a normal person. And I've told him this. I'm like, I. You don't have to do this. Like, if you travel a lot, like, just, you know, you can, you can call a pass. It's okay.
- [73:31]
A
Incidentally, I mentioned this before the show to you, but I'll tell everybody. I was planning to be on vacation for the next three weeks, and that vacation has been canceled due to circumstances beyond our control. AKA general contractors.
- [73:49]
B
Okay.
- [73:51]
A
AKA the south wall of my home is missing.
- [73:55]
B
Don't you have, like, children that could live there or something?
- [73:58]
A
Yeah, there's a kid, but we don't trust him to really.
- [74:02]
B
They boarded up security camera thing. It's like him and the contractors partying in the living room.
- [74:08]
A
Yeah, exactly. Imagine if you will, there's three stories. It's the biggest wall on the house. It's the three story wall because the house is on a hillside and there are three sets of sliding glass doors, one for each level. There are three balconies, one for each level. There are also windows. There are a total of, I think eight or nine doors and windows that. So the first step was to remove all the stucco. That happened in June. It was like jackhammers. Hammering away for. For three weeks was a nightmare. Then it got suddenly quiet. The scaffolding remained. The plastic flapped in the wind for three months.
- [74:46]
B
So here's the problem. You enjoyed that peace and quiet life, discovered it.
- [74:52]
A
Yes.
- [74:52]
B
And said stucco was gone.
- [74:54]
A
It looked like an open wound, but the windows and doors are still there. Well, guess what's happened now. Right before vacation, which was supposed to start on Saturday, I was going to fly To New Orleans. They removed the windows and doors because they got to take those out, they got to scrape them down, they got to polish them up, they got to reseal them and put them back. So basically the entire house. Now, the south wall is a piece of plywood. You can see little gaps of light streaming in. So it's not the most. Anyway, we thought be best not to leave at this critical juncture. It's like. Like abandoning surgery after you've opened the patient but before you suture them back up.
- [75:38]
B
Right.
- [75:38]
A
So we're gonna. I'm gonna. That's the long way around saying, I ain't going nowhere.
- [75:43]
B
That's too bad.
- [75:44]
A
Yeah. Well. And as I mentioned, the good news is this. This cruise, this riverboat trip up the Mississippi that I was really looking forward to seeing, you know, all these historic places and Graceland and Vicksburg, and, I mean, I was just really excited about this. Jeff Jarvis's boyhood home. It was going to be an amazing trip. Has been now rescheduled. We booked it in. The good news is we booked it and paid for it in 2021. So the sting of the cost is long gone. In fact, thanks to inflation, probably we're making money. That's not true. But fortunately, we had insurance. We've canceled the trip, and we've moved it to 2027. So this will be a trip planned six years earlier that will finally come to culmination in June of 2027. So a warning. I won't be here in 2027 for a couple of weeks. Just. I wanted to let you know ahead of time, we will continue with Witness Weekly in just. Paul's thinking, if I'm still here in 2027.
- [76:54]
B
I mean, that's. Honestly, that would be a huge victory. But I guess we'll see.
- [77:00]
A
I have to tell you, you've been here for 15. How long has this show been on the air? 15, 18 years?
- [77:05]
B
I don't know. Yeah.
- [77:06]
A
Can you believe it? I mean, just. You do it day in, day out. After a while, the years start to mount.
- [77:11]
B
Well, I said, you know, my kid was a baby when I went to that workshop, and now he's. He's an adult. Ish. I don't know what you call it.
- [77:19]
A
The first episode. Actually, we're coming up on our anniversary. The first episode of Windows. Yeah, weekly was September 28, 2006.
- [77:28]
B
Okay. Yeah, 19 years.
- [77:30]
A
So our 19th anniversary is in a week.
- [77:33]
B
It's crazy.
- [77:34]
A
What?
- [77:35]
B
Crazy?
- [77:36]
A
What?
- [77:37]
B
We were still talking about Windows xp.
- [77:40]
A
It was Vista, the first show Said here's the Vista ship date.
- [77:46]
B
It was still coming and that turned out great. So everything went great.
- [77:52]
A
And apparently, apparently RC1 of Vista was coming out and apparently the office ribbon had made its appearance.
- [77:59]
B
Yeah.
- [78:01]
A
And we were doing it exactly the same day. Oh no, we were doing on Wednesday. Yeah, Wednesday, 11:00am no, you know, I think they, I think they changed this retroactively to be the current time because I don't think we did it on Wednesdays.
- [78:13]
B
No, we used to, we moved it once. I feel like it was Thursday.
- [78:16]
A
Yeah.
- [78:17]
B
For quite a while.
- [78:18]
A
Yeah.
- [78:18]
B
I take this it's been Wednesday for a long time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [78:22]
A
Anyway, we will continue with this 19 year old show in just a bit. But first a word from our sponsor. You know what, I may be a little. I'm. I think you think you're probably thinking. I know you're thinking, gee, Leo seems a little peppy today. He's got a little hitch in his little zing in his step there. And it's because I got a great night's sleep thanks to my new mattress. I love it. It's Helix Sleep, our sponsor for this segment of Windows Weekly. Your mattress is very important. I had realized, I don't know, there was just something fellow off it was a little saggy and I looked it up and it said, you know, you should replace your mattress every six to 10 years. Our mattress is eight years old. I said I think we need to replace our mattress, honey. And the thing is your mattress is more than just the place you lie down to sleep. Your mattress is kind of in some ways the center of your life. Movie nights, you know, the Netflix and chill. The morning cuddles with your pet Rosie loves to get in bed about 5:30am and remind us that breakfast time is just around the corner. Your wind down ritual after long days. I love curling up with a good book and I do it in bed is just the best place. And you kind of get sleepy. It's not. Your mattress is at the center of it all. Unless it's an old beat up not working so well mattress. If you're waking up in the middle of the night sweating bullets, your back when you get up is killing you because the mattress has this sag in the middle or you feel every toss and turn your partner makes. These are classic mattress nightmares, my friends. But I'm going to tell you I have woken up into dreamland. Helix sleep is the key. It changes everything. No more night sweats, no back pain, beautiful support. That's not hard. Well, one of the things Helix Sleep does is great. Do the questionnaire because they find out what kind of sleeper you are, right? And you get the mattress, it's right. If you're a side sleeper, back sleeper, front sleeper, no motion transfer, you will suddenly be getting the deep sleep you deserve. And we all know how important that is. One of the things that convinced me to get a Helix was the reviews. I couldn't believe how positive the reviews. Like this one guy who said, 5 stars, I love my Helix mattress. I will never sleep on anything else. I thought, well, that's, that's dramatic. You know what? I think I'd say the same thing today. He was right. Time and time again. Helix Sleep is literally the most awarded mattress brand. Just this year alone. Wired's Best Mattress. 2025 Good Housekeeping Betting Awards, 2025 for Premium Plus Size Support. GQ Sleep Awards, 2025 for Best Hybrid mattress. The New York Times Wirecutter Awards 2025 featured for plus size folk. And let's face it, we're all plus size these days, right? No. Everybody's a little plus size. Oprah Daily sleep awards for 2025. Oprah liked it. Best hotel like feel. Now you better believe Oprah does not stay in a Motel 6. Oprah stays in the best hotels. And when she says this mattress feels like the mattress is in the best hotels, I have to say I agree. You know when you go to a really nice place and you get in bed that first night and you go, wow. Oh, this feels great. This is so nice. Imagine that every night when you're at home, that's what you got. Go to helixsleep.com twit for 25% off sitewide during the Labor Day sale extended. That's helixsleep.com twit, for 25% off site wide. Now this offer ends September 30th. Okay? So make sure you enter our show name after checkout. That way they know we sent you. And of course, if you're listening, after the sale ends, still, check them out. Helixsleep.com TWIT helixsleep.com TWIT and when I say we thank them for their support, I mean it literally. My back feels great. Thank you.
- [82:29]
B
Healing sleep.
- [82:30]
A
All right, back to the 19 year old episode. You know you're supposed to change your podcast every six to 10 years. Did you know that?
- [82:39]
B
Yeah, I never do that.
- [82:40]
A
No, do not. Please, I beg of you, do not. Let's see, we're up to Microsoft 365.
- [82:49]
B
Yes. So Microsoft following in the Footsteps of their other big tech siblings there has been involved in a little antitrust drama in Europe for the past couple of years, thanks to Slack and its decision to bundle Teams in Office, which is now called Microsoft 365. But speaking of things that have gone, you know, have given, taken a while to come to fruition. They first filed a lawsuit in 2020. The EU investigated in 2023. And you know, I get it, I mean, I mentioned this earlier, somehow these things keep coming back again and again. But Teams was the big focus for Microsoft for quite a while there. And of course the COVID pandemic had happened right in the middle of it. And so at the start of the pandemic, I think it had 44 million users, literally like the month the pandemic started by a couple of years later, they had 300 million users. Like it just exploded.
- [83:51]
A
Just exploded, Absolutely, yeah.
- [83:54]
B
And they, they improved it a lot. I mean, it was fair to say. Look, there's two things that are fair to say about this. One, Microsoft Teams is based on these technologies they've had in Office well before Slack was even an idea. And it had different names, but they put that all together, they added the chat part. And yeah, I think it's fair to say the first version looked a lot like Slack for sure. Today it is a much more powerful platform and it's a big thing. But anyway, the EU moved slowly and eventually they came back and said, yeah, I think you're bringing the law here, bundling and whatnot. The classic Microsoft strategy from back in the day. And so Microsoft said, fine, we'll, we'll just unbundle it. You know, we'll let companies, this is for companies, by the way, not people. But we'll let companies buy Office or Microsoft365 with or without Teams. It will cost less if they don't have teams. The EU was kind of quiet on that one and they said, all right, we'll do it. The whole world, we'll let everyone do this. Like we won't even just do it in the eu, you know, like, nice. And the EU was like, yeah, that's not good enough. But they never really said why. Remember we had that kind of six month period. It was like, yeah, we didn't like what you did. And it's like, all right, but what do you want us to do? Throw something else at us. Let's see how that goes. You know, it's like they weren't really giving them any feedback, but eventually they worked together on a solution and then I think it was three, four months ago, the EU published the proposed commitments that Microsoft made which it had accepted so that competitors like Slack, et cetera, could look at it and provide their feedback and see if they had any problems. And so just past week they, it was accepted. And so Microsoft has, I don't think they actually use this term in the eu, but they've settled this case. They're not going to be fined for this. There's not going to be any sanctions or anything like that. So really nothing is changing. So you can buy a version or soon we'll be able to with or without teams. That's actually true. Today they're going to continue having a marketplace so third parties can distribute their teams, add ins. They're going to make available APIs so third parties can build solutions that integrate into all these products the same way that team does, you know, so Slack could do that if they wanted. They're going to make APIs available so that developers create apps for customers who want to move their data outside of teams and into Slack or whatever other solution and then just basically documentation and that kind of stuff. So all this time and it's like, okay, nothing is really changing. I mean, it's the same. I don't know. This is basically what they came up with like three years ago. I don't know what took so long. But anywho, this all goes into effect November 1st, by which I mean it went into effect about two years ago. So whatever. It's not really that. I don't know. This is. It's a weird kind of wind down to what was a very serious problem for a little while. And it's like, okay, now it's like, whatever. But you know, part of the deal here is Microsoft of course has moved on. You know, we just talked about this in terms of Windows, you know, in the same way that Microsoft 365 is this giant kind of suite of services and apps and so forth, was a big, big focus for a long time. And then teams was a big, big focus for a long time. The big, big focus today is not teams, even though it still has whatever the number is, 350 million plus users. It's AI. And with AI, Microsoft is. They're doing the same thing, folks. They're bundling it. It's like what is going on here? And what they're bundling is Copilot right now, technically, to date as a business especially, you've had to pay extra to get those copilot features, right? So if you want copilot for Microsoft 365 copilot, as they call it now. It's an additional 30 bucks per month per user, typically. And you have to have a certain level of SKU to even get that. So these people are typically. Or these companies are paying. I don't know if the average is. But I bet the average is somewhere around 50 or 60 bucks a month for all this stuff. So maybe that's what saves them, I don't know. But if you are following what's going on with Windows, and I guess you are, if you're watching or listening to the show, you know that they've been doing the same thing in Windows. But the Windows stuff has been kind of strange because there's free bits like there are in the web. There are paid bits, which you get by having a Microsoft 365 subscription. As a consumer, you get more if you pay for literally a Microsoft 365 copilot subscription, which in the consumer space is what? Pro, I guess, Copilot Pro or whatever. But now they're adding. Let me see if I can get this right. A Copilot chat sidebar. I don't know if they're calling it that, but a chat box or whatever to the Office apps that are part of Microsoft 365 for free.
- [88:55]
A
So you can actually get some work done here. I don't want to talk to Copilot.
- [88:58]
B
It looks like you're trying to get some work done here. Leo, would you like.
- [89:02]
A
I want to chat.
- [89:03]
B
Yeah. I mean, we've kind of come full circle, right? Like, this is, you know, it's going to be limited, right? This, you can't do everything. But the. The thing that kind of cracks me up about this is they describe this chat thing as being grounded in the web. So if you're familiar with the language of AI, you know that we ground AI models to limit the amount of data that it works against that improves reliability, right? So grounding in the web is not grounded. That's just everything like that's grounding in the web is ungrounded. Right. I mean, this is like what you get when you go to Copilot on the web and you just start chatting with it. Right? Like it's the same thing. So they're building it into their app. So you just mentioned the first, very first episode of Windows Weekly. We talked about the ribbon, which at the time was a brand new UI they were adding to Office. Remember the first version, Office 2007. Most of the core apps got the ribbon. It was the next version, I guess 2010 got, Outlook added it as well. Controversial, but it was actually a fairly innovative solution to a really big problem with Office, which is that the number of commands in each app had ballooned to some hundreds, thousands, whatever. There was no version of toolbars and menus and dialogues that was ever going to make Census or actually sidebars. And they came up with the ribbon, which I have to say works, although I use a much more kind of minimalist tools than this now, like Notion or Typora or whatever. So when I look at a screenshot of like Microsoft Word or something today, I'm like, like, it's like. It is to me, it's like this big thing. So now you have this big thing on the top, which is the ribbon. You have this big thing on the side, which is the copilot chat window. And it is sort of. It is sort of, not sort of. It is very much like the Clippy thing, right? Except that. Well, no, it is. It's a lot like Clippy. It's just a different, slightly different UI and it's obviously more sophisticated. But it's.
- [91:01]
A
What do you. What would you use it for? What would you. How would.
- [91:04]
B
So this is always about. You're, You're. I'm just going to use writing because it's what I know the best. So you're writing in Word and. And you just said. You just asked. Someone asked AI like, when was the first episode of Windows Weekly? So maybe I'm writing this article about Windows Weekly and I'm like. And we did the first episode, do the research that. So you go to the web browser, you type it in and you look it up, The Google search results come. You're like, you click, click.
- [91:26]
A
And you copilot actually came up with exactly the right answer, I might add. I don't know which copilot he was using.
- [91:32]
B
But yeah, this is about not leaving the app. And this is kind of the point of these. When you think of the copilot as this notion of a thing over on the side is you don't like context switch. You don't go to the distraction. Because if I'm writing and I switch to my web browser, I'm going to see things like a little notification icon on the little Gmail thing. I'm going to see a number on my newsfeed because I might. There's articles I haven't read yet and I might get distracted. But now you can kind of stay in the flow to use a Microsoft term. And you're in Word in this case and you're doing your thing and you just kind of do it in line. And there's something to be said for that, I guess, right? I mean, this is to me what this looks like very much is GitHub copilot in visual Studio. It's this thing on the side. It appears elsewhere in Visual Studio, but it's a pane or a sidebar. And you go over there and you type a prompt, you ask it a question. You might be copy and paste some code. You say, ground yourself in this, use that language. But you tell it, I only want you to look at this document or maybe look at the whole solution, whatever it is. But the free version, of course is going to be a little more limited. By limited I mean it's grounded in the web, which to me is not grounded, but. But whatever. It's a general purpose AI chatbot, but it's side by side now inside the app you're using. So is this a good idea? I don't know. I don't know. It's an idea, I'll put it that way. It's whatever. So, okay, fine. The language is terrible on this stuff too because of course to most of us, I think this thing is still Office. To me, you download this suite of desktop apps. That's Office, right? This is Office, it's Word, It's Excel, it's PowerPoint, it's Outlook, etc. But now they call them the Microsoft 365 desktop app. So whatever. Okay, fine. And so there is a version of the Outlook mobile app called Outlook Light, which as its name suggests is a lightweight version of it. It was primarily for third world country, well, or developing nations or whatever, where maybe you have a really low end phone with not a lot of RAM, slow networks, etc. That kind of thing. And so they are getting rid of that because I guess we solved that problem. I don't know what that's all about because I think those situations still exist. But this was optimized literally for like 2G, 3G at the time. But they're getting rid of that. And so now you just have the single I'll look mobile app, right, on iOS, Android, whatever. Okay, fine. Then again, it's weird. I keep bringing these things up and they keep coming up again. But when Microsoft first started rolling out Copilot in Windows, which, remember, they kind of jammed down our throats in 22H2 right before 23H2 came out. So this would have been what, two years ago? Now, in the interim, they've updated this thing a million times, right? They move the icon around, they change the app, they change the type of app it is. They've changed the triggers for it with keyboards and whatever. It's unbelievable. And they've been doing this on mobile, too. So before the name switch thing From Office to Microsoft 365, Microsoft had individual apps on mobile. For Word, PowerPoint, Excel, they had an Office app. Remember Windows Phone back in the day had that Office Hub, which was like one integrated experience with kind of a Panorama thing. They had a similar app, wasn't a Panorama, but they did something like that on mobile as well that combined those capabilities into a single app. So it was like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote if I'm not mistaken. And then they changed that to the Microsoft 365 app as that thing, as the branding evolved. And then it became the Microsoft 365 copilot app because, you know, we can't have nice things. They still had standalone Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote apps at the time and still do today. But the advice was just use this app. Even though it's. Even though has Copilot in the name. It was kind of. They did this on Windows too, right? There's a Windows. I'm sorry, Microsoft 365 copilot app on Windows. Same thing. It used to be the Office app, right? Remember? And now. This is so stupid. I can't even say this out loud. This is like crazy how stupid this is. They're taking away the ability of this app to edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. You can view them, but you can't edit them anymore. And so the advice, which is exactly the opposite of the advice one year ago, is if you want to edit those things, install those apps. So you used to be able to do everything in this one app. Maybe this got too big. I don't know. And now you actually have to have to go get the standalone Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps if you want to edit in OneNote actually too, if you want to edit those documents. So, okay, so I. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know the point of it. I. I don't know. I can't. I have a hard time to keep track of what the heck they're doing here. But yeah, we've come full circle or something. I don't know. Yeah, because originally we had the standalone apps, right? Now then, you know, okay, Microsoft, okay.
- [96:47]
A
Can you buy us an app that will edit it on the iPad.
- [96:51]
B
Yes. You can just get the standalone app.
- [96:53]
A
Okay.
- [96:53]
B
And if you have a subscription, obviously that's stuff passes through you get more capabilities, etc. Etc. So, yeah.
- [96:59]
A
Okay, let's keep talking AI. I think it's going very well so far.
- [97:06]
B
Yeah. The AI section this week is small. I apologize. That was not my doing. I just. It's just the way the week went, by the way. There is one crumbles. Yeah. There's one major item or potentially major because we really don't know what's going on. But there's a lot of rumors swirling around that Microsoft and OpenAI are going to restructure their partnership again. Right. Another big thing.
- [97:27]
A
Yeah. A big cut in, in Microsoft's participation. It looked like.
- [97:31]
B
Well, your report. Right. So they've not actually announced anything. If you go and look at their. They did announce something and, and by announce I mean they wrote the identical two sentences in the shortest press release of all time that said, we, we're working together, we made some progress, we'll have something to announce soon. Literally, I think that's all it says.
- [97:51]
A
So this whole news cycle, which was earlier this week about was just kind of speculation.
- [98:00]
B
No, I'm sure he has sources and I'm sure he's correct. But the primary point here is that Microsoft obviously has made approximately $13 billion of investment in this company. They have certain rights to all of their technologies. There's a revenue share, I think Today Microsoft gets 20% of whatever revenues that OpenAI generates. There's kind of a quid pro quo is the right term. But there's a return or OpenAI gets infrastructure capacity at Microsoft on Azure. That's not been going great for anybody. So their first major change was to allow OpenAI to use other infrastructure. Assuming Microsoft okayed it.
- [98:40]
A
In the beginning, they bought a big chunk from Oracle which set the Oracle stock skyrocketed.
- [98:46]
B
Yep. So you might have seen numbers associated with this, but there's been some math like assuming that the revenue share that Microsoft gets goes down from 20, I think it's to 8% or something. $50 billion over X number of years, whatever it might be. So as of this moment, they have not actually announced what the changes are. I suspect this is going to come literally any day. But yeah, they're, they're changing their relationship. This is one of those love, hate things. They need each other, they depend on each other, they really can't stand each other. And it's weird because Microsoft is obviously investor and a partner, but they're Also a competitor and they're competing with OpenAI using OpenAI's technologies. Right. And so when OpenAI had that little event you might have heard of, where they booted out Sam Altman and then he came back, that was a wake up call for Microsoft. And that's when they started doing their own in house AI stuff at scale. And so there's a Microsoft AI. Org with Suleyman from Inflection, that's sort of consumer based. There's another group, I always forget his name, I'm sorry, Jay, whatever his name is. The guy who used to run AI over at Meta, who is working on their foundation models. No, actually, I'm sorry, Microsoft AI is doing the foundation models. He's doing. They're basically working to replace OpenAI as much as possible across the stack. Right. So they'll, I mean they'll probably still use OpenAI but they're going to, you know, probably make this agnostic.
- [100:20]
A
What's interesting is OpenAI really has no moat. They have no technical expertise that Microsoft doesn't also have.
- [100:27]
B
Well, right, but what they have is like the world's best brand for AI. Brand. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, and this is a weird, I can't explain this, but OpenAI is incredibly popular. Microsoft is using everything they make. They're basically just duplicating it. And maybe there is some secret sauce that makes it better, worse than different, I don't know. But man, they get no press or no play, no interest, no attention, nothing. Like they just don't care. They meaning the world. Nobody cares what Microsoft's doing. And it's a weird problem. But I'm sure there's some resentment there as well. But yeah, these companies are diverging. I mean there's no doubt about it. So I suspect what's going to be announced is further freedom on OpenAI's part and less reliance on Microsoft and less reliance on Microsoft's part on OpenAI. I think is where this is going, but we'll see then related to this, just yesterday the other day Microsoft announced they were bringing a feature called auto model selection, meaning automatic AI model selection, to Visual Studio code. If you're familiar with Visual Studio code, you know that originally there was an extension that would bring these AI capabilities into the product, that they're now making it a core part of the product. If you're coding in Visual Studio code, you get a model selector and the model selector is they're not all OpenAI models like Anthropics in there. There is OpenAI and then you can add your own to it. So if you're paying for models from some what, it doesn't matter what company really. You can add your API key to this and you can use that instead. You have this choice. But what they're going to do now is actually, I have it. This is rolling out over weeks. But actually I just looked. I'm like, I have it by default now. Visual Studio will be set to auto. They will do what I think of as orchestration to on the fly. Evaluate the question you're asking the chatbot and then route it to the one to the AI that's best able to answer that question or deal with your request asterisks, because that's not actually what they're doing right now. If you've ever used Google Maps, and you probably have, probably, right, you go on some trip and you, you know, follow the directions, right? And you're driving along and it says something like, hey, there's an accident up ahead, or the something's happened. This is going to be whatever. We found a faster route. And depending on how much you trust Google or how often you've used this tool, you will either select that or not. And then suddenly you're in, like, the back roads of Connecticut and you're like, how come I'm not a highway anymore? What's going on? I'm driving by people's houses over here. What is this? And it's kind of weird, right? Like, we've all had this experience, probably, but I also think we've also had this feeling that over time, we're not really sure. It's like working for me anymore, right? Like, Google Maps, especially to me, is something that works so well for so long that you just trust it implicitly now and you don't think about it, but then it starts rerouting you and you're like, are you rerouting me to even out the traffic or are you rerouting me because this is best for me? In other words, are you looking at the situation globally and saying, I'm going to send some people here, some people here and some people here because that would be better for everybody. Whereas I selfishly, I want to check boxes. No, no, no, just do this for me. This is for me. Like, what are you doing? And that's actually what Microsoft's doing, at least for now, because it's not actually going to the AI that's best for you, it's going to the AI that's best for Microsoft because it's based on capacity and whether or not their servers are overloaded and they're going to route you based on which will be more efficient for them. Now, assuming these things all work pretty well, that actually might be better for you too, right? Because you might get a faster response from anthropic instead of OpenAI. Because OpenAI is getting hammered right now. Maybe, you know, I'm just trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. But the idea over time is that as this stuff kind of normalizes, it will be more based on, I'll call it efficacy rather than just raw, I don't know, performance slash efficiency, which is Microsoft's thing. Right. But it's still orchestration, I guess. I mean, it's, you know, so it's kind of, it's. It's an interesting thing. Like, I think this is. You're going to see this happen in Microsoft 365 copilot. I think you're going to see this happen across the board for all their AI stuff. I think this is how it's going to go. Because right now when you do, I don't know, you're doing whatever you're doing in Word or whatever app and you're using some AI to whatever it is, summarize text or rewrite something you don't really know or think about the model you're using. There's probably a very specific model that it uses, but in the future there'll probably be a choice of models and it will probably be the back end that's deciding, not you. That doesn't make sense to ask a normal person to orchestrate AI models. But that's what they're doing. Then this came up, I guess a week ago, two weeks ago maybe at most. But there's also a preview version of Visual Studio full visual studio out 2026 Richard in addition to doing, in addition to doing the podcast he always promotes on this show, he also does Net Rocks with Carl. And they just interviewed the guy who runs Mads Christiansen at Microsoft who runs a Visual Studio business. And they talk about this new version of Visual Studio which I've been using for the past week or two now in preview. And it is pretty good. It's actually pretty good. Like it's the same basic app, but you know, look and feel or whatever, it's prettier or whatever. It's winui and all that stuff. But it's.
- [106:23]
A
They actually more AI in it now.
- [106:26]
B
It's doesn't feel like it, but it's. I guess it's better integrated. It's not like slapped on the side anymore. I mean, it literally is still a panel on the side, but I mean, it's like it's more integrated into the product now. But the biggest thing, honestly, is that the app itself is more modern, so it doesn't like hanging. I know that sounds weird.
- [106:48]
A
That's good. That seems like.
- [106:49]
B
I know, as I said that I know what that sounds like. But depending on the type of thing you were doing, literally, you click the button to start the process of running the app you're making. And Visual Studio would kind of like grind to a little halt. And now it's just like, yeah, go for it. It's like they turned on multithreading or something. I think there's more than one UI thread maybe or something. The app itself is actually much better than it was. So anyway, if you're a developer and you're, you know, not hating yourself as much as I do, I definitely take a look at it. So it's a big deal. And then Richard does a did a podcast episode about it, which is very good. Okay.
- [107:33]
A
Okay.
- [107:34]
B
Yeah.
- [107:34]
A
I just want to pause here to tell everybody you're watching Windows Weekly with the fabulous Paul Thurat. Richard. Richard is stuck in an airport somewhere in the low country, but he will. He will be back once he gets his thumb out of that dike. He's going to be back next week and we will have more Windows Weekly in just a moment on the Twit Podcast Network. Today's show is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundled your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
- [108:25]
B
Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
- [108:29]
A
Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom offer. That's not the itinerary we're following. Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.
- [108:53]
B
Bon voyage. Introducing Family Freedom. Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card. Typically takes 15 days free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement. Eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte 8, 2999 eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or.
- [109:20]
A
Cancel contact T Mobile continuing on.
- [109:23]
B
Yes, with hardware. Yeah, I just, I'm just throwing this out kind of quickly because we just. Google did their Pixel event back at the end of August. Apple just did their big iPhone event last week. They're shipping those devices this week. But there's a lot more coming. So we know that Google's already said we're having an event in October. It's going to be Gemini on the home devices. There was a image of a new smart speaker they never talked about. They're clearly going to announce something there. So that's kind of interesting. Apple also has a bunch of new stuff coming out. Amazon just announced a devices event on September 30, which isn't technically October, but for close enough stuff. But I just went to IFA and something didn't happen. I don't know if anyone noticed this. I think it says something about our industry in a way that like this wasn't news. For some reason, there were no new chips announced at this show. Like last year, intel announced Lunar Lake with great fanfare. Amd, well, they. AMD had kind of announced it ahead of time, but they did their big reveal at IFA for the Zen 5 series chips, right? And then later at CES they did like the Pro versions, which are even better. It's crazy. Intel released Arrow Lake. I guess Arrow Lake might have been like a CAS thing as well. And then IFA came and went. There was nothing. Neither company announced like new chips. I guess they're taking a pass. I don't know what's going on here. The one outlier is Qualcomm, right? And we know that Qualcomm next week is having an event in like they have their annual event, which used to be in December, by the way. They've been kind of moving it up. So now in September, I think for the first time they're going to do their Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii. And they almost certainly. I don't know, I mean they're absolutely going to announce like the next gen of their Snapdragon X chips, which is the version for the PC. So I'm really eager to see what that looks like. But I think we're going to come and go through the holiday season with barely nothing happening. I mean, the one Possible exception is it's possible that intel will release probably like an, I guess it would be an Arrow Lake Rev in December maybe. But it's weird to me like this last quarter of the year we're not getting anything like in the PC side. Right. It's been a while since that's been the case. I don't know why. So it's kind of curious. So there's a bunch of hardware stuff happening, just not the hardware I care about. But you know, it's okay. Okay. And then we have some Xbox stuff or some game stuff anyway. And this, the first one here is. This is. This is going to feel like you've heard the story before because we actually have been talking about this, but there were rumors and then people saw it in the ice art in the app before they announced it. But it went into the insider program at some point and then went into preview and now it's just out in stable and that is the ability to access other PC game stores from within the Xbox app on Windows. And this is good for everybody. I mean if you, you know, you have games on Steam, you have games on Epic, you have games on gog, whatever the supported stores are, you can have like One View into all of that. Right. This is like what Apple TV tries to do on their devices. You know, you have one interface, it brings in hopefully most of your the apps and services you subscribe to. Not everyone wants to do that like Netflix. But this is always the dream. Like you want One View, I buy things or have stuff from all these different places. I want One View. And so they're doing that. And it's good, like I said, it's good for everybody if you play games on PCs. But what this is really for is those people that are going to be buying these handheld gaming devices, right? Like the Rog ally Xbox devices that are coming out next month or beginning next year. There'll be more, including the recently announced Lenovo Legion Go2 which is just shipping with straight up Windows, you know, whenever that ships in October, but then I think in January they're going to get the update for this as well. Tied to this is that thing we talked about at the top of the show where in the release Preview channel for 25H2 and 24H2 is full controller navigation of Windows and not for Windows Windows, but for these handheld gamers. Right. The gaming devices. So in other words, you'll be able to use the controller, you'll never have to touch the screen or use a mouse, whatever. So these Two things will help make this interface like the shell essentially on these devices. So to me, this is pretty cool. So that's good. And I've done this to a minor degree, although I don't. This is something I don't 100% understand. But like, I installed Steam and I downloaded a game and they show up in this. In the Xbox app. Great. But then when I'm playing, when I play Call of Duty, the command, the keyboard, I don't even. I can't even picture what it is like when I use the Xbox controller and you slam the player, you know, your avatar down to the ground, because you're going to lay on the ground, it launches Steam.
- [114:29]
A
It's like, whoops.
- [114:32]
B
When it's in compact mode, which is the mode it would be on in this gaming handle thing. And it's like, what the. What is this?
- [114:37]
A
You can't change the key assignment.
- [114:40]
B
I think I just haven't done it. So I took it out of compact mode, which makes it a little harder to navigate with a controller. But it. But I have to. The truth is I lay down in the ground more in Call of Duty than I want to access the game bar or whatever it's called. So it's just. It's a weird. It took me a while. I'm like, what is.
- [114:58]
A
Why does this keep popping up?
- [115:00]
B
And it was. It's bizarre.
- [115:02]
A
I just want to snipe somebody somewhere out there.
- [115:05]
B
Most people are like, what is he talking about? And there's like two or three people out there. Like, oh my God, I'm seeing the same thing. Yeah, I know this is happening to other people. It's bizarre. But I'm trying to think of like, how do you lay down? I can't even pitch. I just, you know, like you use the control and don't think what you're doing.
- [115:17]
A
I know it's in your skin.
- [115:20]
B
If I had a controller here, I could probably do it, but like, it's really scoopy. Anyway, I like watching this come together. This is pretty cool. And then now we're in the second half of the month, so we're getting more games into game pass. This is a pretty big drop of games.
- [115:35]
A
Huge drop. Holy cow.
- [115:36]
B
Yeah. Most of these games, not particularly interest to me. A lot of cartoony looking things, but.
- [115:41]
A
Some good ones, big ones. Hades, Modern Warfare 3.
- [115:45]
B
Yeah. But yeah, the Call of Duty game is in there. Yeah. So that's some good stuff. Peppa Pig, the new. A recent. Well, it says Laura Crop, but that's a Tomb Raider game. Right. So I don't know. Usually when you see. Yeah. What is this thing? I'm not even sure what that is. Lara Crofton, the guardian of light. So oftentimes with Tomb Raider it's always like that same game, like this eight year old Tomb Raider game that's like on everything. It's like the new game that runs great everywhere for some reason.
- [116:13]
A
Yeah, because it's not, it's eight years old. That's why.
- [116:16]
B
Yeah, I know it's, it looks pretty good, it's a good game. But. And then this is kind of random. This actually happened on Friday, but they didn't unseal the, the ruling or whatever it was until I guess it was Monday. But Epic and Google and Epic and Apple are, you know, crossing each other. Antitrust case. Epic did okay with Apple, but then much better later because Apple screwed everything up later. But Epic destroyed Google in court one Google appealed, lost. Google filed an emergency stay of that and they just lost that too. So basically, if the Supreme Court doesn't step in, they have 30 days to completely crack open the Play Store to anyone and everyone that wants to make their own store, that wants to use other app payment systems, that want to, you know, this is the whole thing, it's like they have 30 days. So, you know, we'll see. I don't, I guess, you know, the way things are going right now, I, I can't predict with any certainty what will happen. But it is astonishing to me how badly Google has done in this case. Like they just get smacked around every single time and it's been really lopsided.
- [117:28]
A
But I can't imagine the Supreme Court weighing in on this. They must be baffled by the whole problem.
- [117:35]
B
They have in the past declined to intervene in this type of thing. We'll see. I think the Supreme Court might have a lot to say about Fortnite, you know.
- [117:48]
A
Well, I think.
- [117:49]
B
What is it? What does it do?
- [117:51]
A
I think they feel fairly strongly about the Sabrina Carpenter skins, but other than that, I don't know if they really care.
- [117:59]
B
Yep.
- [118:02]
A
Hey, guess what? Without much ado, we have skimmed right along to the back of the book. Paul has some tips and an app pick of the week, of course, because Richard's not here, there will be no whiskey. That's okay. That's okay. We leave the whiskey pick up to you and your own.
- [118:21]
B
I will point out, you know, there was a peanut butter whiskey phase that I went through.
- [118:25]
A
You did? Are you over that?
- [118:27]
B
I am. Except for there's now peanut butter and chocolate whiskey. Oh, Man, I gotta tell you, two.
- [118:34]
A
Great flavors in one whiskey.
- [118:37]
B
That's dangerous.
- [118:38]
A
It's like a peanut. They call it peanut butter cup whiskey.
- [118:41]
B
They should. But they don't. But they should.
- [118:43]
A
Reese's whiskey pieces.
- [118:45]
B
I know. Exactly, exactly. It's. No, it's not. It's not that. But it should be. But yeah.
- [118:49]
A
Yum.
- [118:50]
B
Anyway, all right.
- [118:52]
A
Hey, I did want to just put in a little bit of a plug for Club Twit because frankly, that is so important to how we continue on in this world. Advertising support is great. We appreciate our advertisers, but we appreciate you even more and more. And at this point, the club makes up about 25% of our operating expenses. That's how important you are, and I love that. I'd like to see even more. Right now. It's about, you know, somewhere hovering between 1 and 2% of our audience is a member of the club. If we could get that up to 4 or 5%, man, we wouldn't even need advertisers. You'd be just, you'd be covering the costs of doing this, plus giving us the opportunity to add more shows, more team members, more great hosts, and to pay our wonderful hosts a little bit more. So that's one reason to join the club. The other reason is you get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Club Twit Discord where a lot of special programming goes on. In fact, tonight we're going to have a special on the Club Twit Discord right after Intelligent Machines, we'll be covering the Meta Connect event. And as we've done lately, and you can blame Apple for this, Apple gave us some copyright strikes on YouTube and Twitch when we did our traditional commentary about the Apple keynotes in years gone by. And we decided, well, we don't want to risk losing our access to those platforms. So we've decided to do all of the streaming, you know, coverage of live events in Club Twit Discord in the private Discord channel. So if you want to watch Meta Connect with us with Paris and Jeff and me, I have to join the club. I mean, you're doing it for a good reason. 10 bucks a month, $120 a year. There is a two week free trial, so you could join for free and watch the keynote, browse around in the Discord, see how you like that. I think it's a lot of fun. I really think it's a great hangout with some wonderful people. I love our club members ad free versions of all the Shows, special programming you don't get anywhere else. The Club Twit Discord. Can I ask you to go to Twitter? TV Club Twit. Learn more. Join the club. We would really like to have you and it makes a huge difference to us going forward. Thank you in advance. And now we return to the Back of the book with Mr. Paul Thurot and your tip of the week.
- [121:26]
B
Did you actually have a mustache? When, like, I don't know. There's a picture. Joe Esposito put up a picture of you into the Discord.
- [121:33]
A
I have never in my life, but I know now you got me. I want to. I want to see.
- [121:39]
B
This looks like a. Like you were trying out for Super Mario Brothers, the movie.
- [121:43]
A
I look like maybe Gene Hackman a little bit. Yeah, actually you really do that Gene Hackman look.
- [121:50]
B
Yeah.
- [121:50]
A
Joe is a master with Photoshop. This is not AI. He takes old ads. I don't know where he got this one.
- [121:58]
B
Have you ever contributed Office or something.
- [122:00]
A
To keep a network of shows? It's that worst bookshelves falling apart, growing and alive from the comfort of your desk chair. Have you ever helped support creators you enjoy with just the click of a mouse? Have you ever been part of a fantastic community? Community of people who love technology as much as you, Joe, you could be a copywriter. Have you ever subscribed to a podcast club without having to leave your home? You can. What was the original of this one?
- [122:28]
B
Joe?
- [122:29]
A
That's wild. I. What do you think? Should I grow a mustache?
- [122:33]
B
You really do look like Gene Hackman. I. I feel like there could be a new. Like, I got just like, you know, Gene Hackman passed sadly recently. I mean, like, you could almost do like a. Like a sequel to one of his movies. Like, we could do it like a new Unforgiven or so. I guess he passed.
- [122:49]
A
I just watched Night Moves last night. I love. Yeah, Gene Hackman. Every movie, the conversations, French Connection, even.
- [122:56]
B
Like movies like he did that espionage movie late in his career with. I think it was. Was Will Smith or whatever. Like the. Like, he was just like, okay, I'm really bad with names of things. But yeah, even like he was always excellent.
- [123:11]
A
He was never anything but great. In any movie, even crappy movie. He was great. You couldn't take your eyes off of him. You know, Robert Redford passed yesterday. I mean, we're losing some of the legends. And us old timers, remember those good old shows. Enemy of the State out of sync says Enemy of the State.
- [123:29]
B
Yes, that's right. Yep, yep.
- [123:33]
A
Well, maybe I will grow a little mustache. I don't know.
- [123:37]
B
Just in honor of Gene Hackman, one.
- [123:41]
A
Of our club members says if we hit 30% club membership, you have to grow the mustache. Okay, that's a deal.
- [123:46]
B
Like, it's the Tom Selleck mustache, which is, of course, I still. I have somewhere in my closet. It's like a. It's like a Tom Selleck mustache kit. It's like the sunglasses. They're plastic, cheap for kids, and like a fake mustache. It's like the cheapest. Like, it's like the worst Halloween costume of all time.
- [124:04]
A
That's pretty funny.
- [124:06]
B
Yeah.
- [124:07]
A
Did you have a Hawaiian shirt, too, to go with it?
- [124:11]
B
No, I just found it somewhere. I'm like, I have to buy this. I found it as an adult.
- [124:14]
A
You never wore it.
- [124:15]
B
Oh, no, no. This is still in his package. It's crazy. Awesome.
- [124:18]
A
That's hysterical.
- [124:19]
B
I had a friend who showed up at a party in a Hawaiian shirt. I said, it's. Is TC going to pick you up in his helicopter afterwards or do you need a ride home?
- [124:28]
A
Here's the. Here's the original. Who's that? Is that the most interesting man in the world? I think it is. But that is the most weird book bookshelf in the world. I don't know if that's a good.
- [124:39]
B
I know what's going on there. It's like. It's for effect.
- [124:41]
A
It's haunted. Yeah. It's not a real bookshelf.
- [124:43]
B
I don't like it. Yeah. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
- [124:49]
A
Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Freedom offer.
- [124:57]
B
That's not the itinerary we're following.
- [124:59]
A
Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones.
- [125:08]
B
Up to $3200 and gave us four.
- [125:11]
A
New phones on the house.
- [125:12]
B
Bon voyage. Introducing family freedom. Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom. Up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card. Typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte 82999 eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits End and balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact T Mobile.
- [125:40]
A
Running a business online. Look Legit and own your own brand with professional tools from GoDaddy. Instantly buy, build trust with your customers and boost your credibility with an email that matches your domain so people know you mean business. There's never been a better time. Just go to GoDaddy.com GDnow and choose from a wide variety of popular domains. To find one that's right for you, pair that with a professional email that works for all your business needs from daily communications to email marketing and everything in between. That's a little price for a lot of credibility. For a limited time, get a domain and matching professional email for just 99 cents a month for one year. Go to GoDaddy.comGdNow and look legit with GoDaddy. That's GoDaddy.comGdNow again. GoDaddy.comGdNow there's never been a better time to choose the domain and email that's right for you. New customer purchases only products Auto renew separately See terms on on site GoDaddy.comGdNow all right, did we do the tip of the week or was that.
- [126:45]
B
No, we did. I'm sorry.
- [126:46]
A
Okay. That was the tip. Look at my mustache.
- [126:49]
B
Look at the mustache. Yeah. So, you know, I've been working on this 25H2 book. We've gotten to the point where all of a sudden there are several features, security features in Windows 11 that are in the system, that most of them are pretty great, not all of them, and they're not enabled by default and I don't know why. So I'm going to list a few of these. I might actually do an episode of Hands on Windows about this. As I sort of threw this together, I was like, you know, this might be good for that show too, actually. But I'll just list them out here and then. And we've talked about a few of these. So the first one is Smart App Control. This has been in Windows 11 now for a few versions. It was supposed to be enabled by default in, I think it's in 24H2 and wasn't and then supposedly in 25H2. But it is not the first three. This one and the next two are all inside of the Windows Security app. So Windows App Control uses what Microsoft used to call heuristics and probably today calls AI to examine apps running and determine if they might be malicious. And if they are, we'll just block them. And this is something you. This one you should probably turn up, right? This one. This is a good idea. Unless you're A developer. So I find that the apps I write in Visual Studio, I'll go to compile and run it. We'll be like, you know, part of this app is not okay, so we're going to block it. It's like, guys, I'm writing an app. What are you doing? But anyway, this is a good one. It's in the. Let me just bring up the Security app and tell you exactly where it. Yes. If you go to Windows Security app and browser control, you'll see it there. Smart app Control. And the problem is if. Let me go and see what this one says. Yeah. So on this system I'm using, it's off. And the problem with this is, unless you do a little Registry hack, if it's off, you actually can't turn it on without reinstalling Windows. Oh, yeah. So the way it works is when you first use Windows 11, it goes into evaluation mode. You can turn it on and then it'll just stay on, or you can turn it off if you don't like it. But once you turn it off, the other options are grayed out. You actually can't go turn it on. Now, like I said, you can Google this. There are hacks to get around this, but I don't know why they do that. But you can't just toggle it on and off.
- [129:06]
A
Okay, so I'm going to. So you go to Smart App Control. Is that where you go? Yeah, well, yeah, mine's off.
- [129:13]
B
Yeah, it's off. Yeah. So if it's off, you have to Google the workaround. This is a Registry change you can make that will make it go. So you can see.
- [129:20]
A
It says you have to reinstall Windows. Holy cow.
- [129:22]
B
I know.
- [129:23]
A
So you'd want that on, right?
- [129:25]
B
Yeah. I think this is one that most people should turn on because they've actually been tested, or testing as they've been. This has been around for years. It's just that they've never enabled it globally for everybody by default, like they said they were going to do. I don't know why. Maybe they're getting. Maybe it's false positives or something. I'm not really sure. I've only seen it trigger from my own apps.
- [129:46]
A
So it says during evaluation mode, we determined you weren't a good candidate.
- [129:51]
B
It. Oh, she's okay.
- [129:52]
A
Because I didn't turn it off manually. Yeah, I wasn't running in S mode. It must have been. They decided I wasn't a good candidate. What does that mean?
- [130:00]
B
It means that you never did anything suspicious like Download a bunch of apps that were kind of sketchy, maybe weren't digitally signed or whatever.
- [130:07]
A
Pretty careful. Yeah.
- [130:08]
B
So they were like, all right, this guy's probably not going to do anything stupid. He's probably okay. But anyway, most people actually, I think this would be a good thing to turn on. If you can turn it on, I.
- [130:17]
A
Could reset the PC instead of reinstalling Windows.
- [130:20]
B
Well, that is.
- [130:21]
A
Yeah, but that's basically reinstalling.
- [130:23]
B
Yep.
- [130:23]
A
I don't think I have anything on here.
- [130:25]
B
But if, like I said, if you Google this, there's a way to. You can enable it if you want to.
- [130:29]
A
I'll ask Copilot. It'll probably.
- [130:32]
B
I'm going to put it in my book, so.
- [130:33]
A
Oh, okay. Good.
- [130:36]
B
Ransomware protection is another one. I feel like this one came up pretty recently. But if you same app, if you go into virus and threat protection at the bottom there's a fee, you'll see a feature called ransomware protection. And this one is off by default. And it's like, well, why is this off by default? It's actually because it has to transfer information to Microsoft. It's not anything that's like data privacy related exact per se. But it is sort of. And they tend to be on the conservative side with this kind of thing. It's just weird to me. They don't prompt you ever to turn it on. It's just sits there. It's off. I don't know why you wouldn't just turn this on. If you are using OneDrive folder backup, you're already getting it. Get some nice ransomware protection from that as well. But I would turn this one on, frankly. But this one you can toggle on and off like you don't have to worry about it. It's not weird like smart app control and then this one. Most people probably won't see this yet, but if you same app, if you go into app and browser control, there may or may not yet be an option called administrative protection. And this is the one I talked about, I don't know, two, three weeks ago. This one's a problem. Administrative protection is like the next level UAC user account control. It is going to be enabled for everyone by default. You will be able to turn it off. You will probably want to turn it off. It's annoying. This is the one where instead of you getting the UAC dialog where you kind of click into it, you get a Windows hello authentication. It will do facial if you have that, or fingerprint whatever you have. And it takes a Little while. It happens more often than UAC and it takes longer to get through it. So I think a lot of people are going to be like, what is this thing? Also, if you're a developer using Visual Studio like I am, it actually triggers more often because that too. And that's not great. So depending on what you're doing, you may not. This is the one. It's like you might not want to turn this one on. And then the next two are. Well, the next two are elsewhere, I guess is the way to say this. So. So if you're using Windows hello or Windows hello ess, you would have enrolled yourself right through the process of fingerprint and or facial recognition. In both cases, I'm going to go look and see what the exact language is. You can. Let me just look. This one has. This one doesn't have either. So actually this computer is not a good example. With facial recognition, you'll see two options. One is like enhanced facial recognition. This makes it a little harder to work, like quickly, but it will be more accurate, which actually I think is a good trade off. And then you can improve recognition where you go enroll again. And this is something you would want to do anyway. Like if you wear glasses sometimes but. And then sometimes not, you want to do it twice, like one with and one without. But you could just do it twice anyway. Like just enhance it, though it will get a better scale, have two different scans. It will be. It will have better reliability. And you can do the same thing with your finger, even though it doesn't say that. It will say enroll another finger, but you can just enroll the same finger twice. And that actually, in my experience, actually does improve reliability, although the fingerprint readers have gotten really good. So you can do that with both. The other one, this is more of a tip. This is not really something that is disabled by default or whatever. But one reason you might want to connect your phone to phone link in Windows, other than the obvious stuff like text messaging and phone calling and all that stuff, is because you get text messages and other phone notifications as notifications in Windows. When you have to get a security code notification that pops up in a little banner ad and you can actually click a little button on there that says copy it to the clipboard or whatever. And that way you can paste it into the site. So you're logging to a site, so you got to get a security code. It will go to wherever it goes. It might go to your. It might go to text, it might go to email, but it will generate A notification on your phone, which will pop up in Windows and ending copy to the clipboard. So it's kind of an easy way to do that without having to pick up the phone and, you know, use two devices. So kind of interesting. Yeah.
- [134:42]
A
By the way, I did that Registry hack while you were talking, even though Copilot said, don't, don't do it, don't do it, Leo. But it worked. It turned it on.
- [134:53]
B
Yeah, there you go.
- [134:54]
A
But I'm worried because it didn't turn it on initially, right?
- [134:59]
B
No. So you just wouldn't have noticed this. This is the problem. So this thing is buried in this app that no one ever runs, by the way. Just as a general tip too, I will say, like, when you. You should just look at this. Now you've already looked at it. But when you first bring up Windows 11, in this case, or whatever version of Windows, the Secure, the Windows security app will often have. The little icon will have like a little yellow bang on it maybe. And what you do is look at the top level sections in the app and you'll see what is causing it. There's a couple of things in Windows that are those types of features I mentioned before, where, because it has to transmit some data to Microsoft, they're like, oh, we can't do this by default. And you actually do want to enable those things.
- [135:37]
A
Oh, it's probably because I said, no, don't send any telemetry. I don't want.
- [135:42]
B
Yeah. But in this case, it's like, actually, you do want this one, so you might want to just enable those things. And what you're looking for is that kind of little green light, you know, the little green icon thing on the, on the Windows security icon. So in this case, though, if you. The first day you brought up Windows 11, however you did it, this thing would have been in evaluation mode. And the theory here is that if you do enough things, like you've downloaded one too many kind of suspicious apps or whatever it is, it will just be like, all right, we're turning this thing on. Like, you clearly need this. You don't know what you do. No, it's. It's not that. It's just like, look, you might be a security researcher, you might be doing this on purpose. Who knows? But I don't understand why this isn't just on by default. I think people actually need this kind of protection. Most people. But if you find that it's annoying, right. If you actually get this, like you're running an app, you're like, I want this app. Let me. You rely on some third party utility that you download from the web. It hasn't been updated in eight years or something and it looks screwy to Windows. So it's like, I don't know about this one. One you can turn it off. You know, like if you know it's okay and you're not worried about it, you can turn it off. And that's the nice thing is if it's in the eval mode or on, you can turn it off. But once it goes off, you can't turn it back on unless you do.
- [136:55]
A
What you just did, which is it's actually pretty simple. There is one regedit entry that controls whether it's on or off and you just override it and say it's on. This is from wisecleaner.com which is what Copilot sent me to.
- [137:13]
B
Funny.
- [137:14]
A
Ironically. Yeah, it's just a regedit.
- [137:17]
B
Yeah, it's just a reg edit and.
- [137:18]
A
It'S a fairly simple regedit. There's just one value turn on.
- [137:21]
B
So yeah, and this is the big change for me with the book like the past year ish. I've started doing a lot more of these registry things because there's just at some point it's like, look, it's going to be okay with this. You want to fix a problem, whatever it is, you're going to do it.
- [137:38]
A
For this suitable warning, which is changes to reg edit take place instantly. There's no taking it back, there's no undoing. So you know, be careful, don't go the wrong place and turn on the wrong thing. You know. That's right.
- [137:55]
B
I like to, I, I'm not sure if this will be in the book or not, but like I, I, this little. You can make registry shortcuts that are like do the change in the registry. So it's. You just double click it. You, you ac.
- [138:06]
A
Yeah, my. Microsoft has distributed those. Right. They're just files. They're registered files.
- [138:11]
B
They're tiny. And this is just like three lines of text in a text file. And I have a bunch of those. I have one that turns off caps locks. I use a bunch like when I install Windows I always do a couple of those things.
- [138:22]
A
I should save some of those because.
- [138:24]
B
I always Caps locks. Yeah. If you do it all the time, just save those things and then the app pick. This came out of nowhere. Google yesterday announced.
- [138:36]
A
This was wild. I'm so glad you're covering this because I saw this and I thought what.
- [138:41]
B
You'Re like, what is this thing? So I don't know if people remember this, it was so long ago, but in a million years ago, before there was a Chrome, when IE was the biggest browser in the world and Google was kind of coming up in the world. Google, they used to have a couple of these apps, but they released one of the apps they had for Windows was called, I think it was called Google Desktop Search. And it was. XP was still around. It was like Microsoft was trying to figure out search for like Longhorn and they were going of port it back to long to xp and they did, but it was, you know, not that great. So Google did their own version of this and it was like it was just an app, you know, it was just using Google algorithms to search your hard drive, basically, right? So Flash forward, whatever that is, 20 plus years. Google doesn't do a lot in the way of desktop apps on Windows, although we have Google Drive, we have Quick Share. What else do we have? There's not too much. There's a web app to do, Google Messages, which isn't really a Windows app. There's not that much. I mean, there's a Google Play games for PC, that's whatever. But these guys don't really get together too much, that's for sure. So out of nowhere, Google announced an app for Windows. And I think it's just called the Google App for Windows. It might be Google Search, I don't really know.
- [139:56]
A
But this is the Google Search bar from Android, it looks like is what it is.
- [140:01]
B
So if you're familiar with every app on Windows that does this sort of thing, or if you use Spotlight Search on the Mac, you know that that on the Mac command space brings up the Spotlight Search in the Windows world. Unless you've changed something that will actually bring up Copilot now, right. If you install PowerToys, that will bring up, depending on how you configure it, either PowerToys run or the Command Palette, which is the new version of PowerToys Run. The idea is that you get this little floating window, you can type in it and it searches for things. Google has now released an app that does the same thing, except it's using Google and it integrates with Google Drive. You don't have to have the client installed. It can search your local hard drive, it can search Google Drive on the web. That's Cloud. It can use Google Lens to look at things on your screen and with Gemini and figure out what's going on there. Meaning this is actually like Copilot as well. Right. So you can search the web. You will do Google search, which is what most people do want. This is actually kind of fascinating. I. This came out. I this. There was no hint this was coming. There was very little explanation of what it was. If you look at the blog post they put out, it's like it doesn't say much. It's like, hey, we can search the web.
- [141:19]
A
It's in the labs. I mean it is not a finished experimental. I think they even said it's a limited number of people will be able to download.
- [141:25]
B
Yeah, it's possible. They've. Yeah, actually that's true. So I. Yes, it is possible they're going to cut it off at some point if they haven't already. So if you do want this, move quick. It doesn't work on Windows Unarmed, by the way right now, which is.
- [141:37]
A
Oh, interesting.
- [141:38]
B
Yeah, I don't know why. They're actually pretty good about supporting that stuff and there are few Windows apps. But yeah, I've only just started using it. Of course I have to use an x86 computer, so I haven't used it that much yet. But yeah, same thing. I don't like Alt plus space as a keyboard shortcut so you can remap it. I remapped it in my case to Windows key plus space and it works exactly like these things work. Except you're using Google. Right. I think this is interesting. This is. I just mentioned, you know, whatever. I can't explain it, but Copilot, for whatever reason is not super popular. Google Gemini is having a moment now. They. They've had a couple of rough years there, perception wise, but once they put out that Nano Banana thing or whatever, people are like, oh my God, like they're doing something really good here. And maybe this, they sense a moment of weakness here with Copilot or something.
- [142:39]
A
Nano Banana made Google the number one AI app. Gemini, the number one AI app.
- [142:44]
B
It is actually very good. I did a. I. Well, I guess this is not Nano Banana, but I went into Google Photos. They have that VEO feature where you can take a photo and turn it into a 12 second video. Yeah, we played with several of those which we shared in the family between us and the kids and stuff. And there's one. It's like this is really cool for old pictures. Like you might have a picture of your grandmother who's passed on or something and her husband at the time and they're interacting and moving. Oh my God. It's crazy. But I did some where it was like, you Know, Stephanie and I or the kids, whatever. And it is, you know, every once in a while like the person turns sideways and it's not exactly. It doesn't look exactly like them, but my God, some of these things are amazing. Like, they're amazing, amazing. And man, we are in a new world when it comes to this stuff. It is.
- [143:30]
A
Yeah.
- [143:32]
B
If you're kind of leaning toward the Google side of the fence with AI or whatever and certainly search, I mean, which I think everyone is, if you can get it, I would try this out. It's very interesting.
- [143:44]
A
I think you. Where do you. I'm looking where you get that. How do you.
- [143:50]
B
Yeah, so my article is a link, I'm sure to the place, but let me look because it's probably labs.google.com or whatever. Yeah, labs.google.com search. Yeah, yeah. You have to have a personal Google account. It doesn't work right now with like workspace accounts and so forth. Right.
- [144:11]
A
Yeah. That's going to make Jeff very upset.
- [144:13]
B
Yeah. Oh, this is my long standing complaint. I mean, it's like, oh, I'm paying, I'm paying you and I don't get stuff. That's fine.
- [144:19]
A
Isn't that funny?
- [144:19]
B
Yeah, it's not good.
- [144:20]
A
Only the free people get it.
- [144:22]
B
Yep.
- [144:22]
A
Sorry. Sorry.
- [144:26]
B
But yeah, but anyway, that's, yeah.
- [144:31]
A
That'S about it for the show. Thanks for joining us. See you later, everybody. Bye. Bye. No, I won't end it that fast, but we're pretty much done here. Would normally chime in here with Run his radio and all that. We already gave him a Run his radio plug.
- [144:48]
B
We don't just like the Apple event was like this. Right. Do you want, you want to. You have. Yeah. So the thing goes on for whatever, 45 minutes and it's like, all right, we're done. You're like, wait, what happened? Like, didn't it seem. Didn't seem like it ended really quick.
- [144:58]
A
It was an hour and 15 minutes and.
- [145:00]
B
Okay.
- [145:01]
A
But the way I am still of the opinion, although everybody said, no, Leo, you're wrong. Yeah, they faded to black. I can't remember who was talking, Craig Federigh or Eddie.
- [145:10]
B
It just kind of ended.
- [145:11]
A
They faded to black beat. Then.
- [145:15]
B
Yeah.
- [145:16]
A
Tim Cook pops up and says, okay, thanks, bye. And I thought there must have been something there, something cut out.
- [145:22]
B
Right. I think so too.
- [145:24]
A
That was my reaction. I mean, I haven't.
- [145:26]
B
Yeah, I didn't pay attention. I watched it again, but the. When it first came on, there was like a Apple TV remote in the video at the very beginning. And I was like, nice. They're gonna. They're gonna announce that. And then they never talked about it.
- [145:40]
A
Yeah, it was just. Which is ironic because that is the worst design remote in the history. History of remotes.
- [145:46]
B
They. They must have caught the perfect. One second where he had it in his hand. Didn't drop between the two parts of the sofa or whatever it is, the word.
- [145:53]
A
And this is their video touting their brilliant design. No, that remote is not a good design. There's nothing to be proud of.
- [146:03]
B
It's perfectly shaped to fall between the two cushions of a. Of a sofa and never be seen again.
- [146:08]
A
They've made it marginally better. But you know what? That's not. What you should show is your design prowess. Just shows how little they know about themselves and their users. Paul Thurot, we know he is@thurrott.com you should become a premium member. Not just to support Paul, but there's lots of extra stuff hidden behind the paywall. Most of the good stuff is there for free, but he does a lot of really more, longer, deeper stuff. In the premium section. You can also get his books, the Field guide to Windows 11, which is, as you heard, constantly being updated with all sorts of new features. And yeah, if you buy it@leanpub.com, you get all the updates. You're not left out. It's not one time only. He also has another book there that's really fun to read. Windows Everywhere. If you have been around for a little while or you're just interested in the history of Windows, this is a great way to look at it through the history of its development frameworks. Windows everywhere. Mr. Paul Thurat is headed to Mexico. That's where you'll be next week. Richard should be back.
- [147:11]
B
I'm not sure where he's going to be in Hawaii next week because I. We're gonna.
- [147:14]
A
Oh, that's right. The Snake Dragon event.
- [147:16]
B
We're gonna. Yeah, we're gonna be there for like two days. We gotta go there and then we'll be back. But. Yeah.
- [147:20]
A
Will Stephanie go with you?
- [147:22]
B
Yeah.
- [147:22]
A
That's a hell of a junket. Nice. Yeah. Qualcomm is famous for these.
- [147:30]
B
Yeah. I don't know why they do it, but.
- [147:31]
A
But they spend a lot of money. They're paying the. They're paying the freight. Right? They're flying you out and everything.
- [147:37]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Y.
- [147:39]
A
How do I get on that list?
- [147:41]
B
I don't know how I got on that list. I don't know.
- [147:45]
A
A couple of Program notes. Coming up, Intelligent Machines. We're going to interview the author of a new book called He's a Futurist. It's very interesting. Might, could, should, won't. About what we should do, maybe should do, maybe shouldn't do, and how to think about the future in a sane way. Right after intelligent machines at 5pm we're going to go to Mountain View for the Meta Connect event. And there seems to be strong rumors they are going to announce what will probably be the most advanced AR glasses yet with a full color screen. This should be very interesting. And somebody's gonna have a weird time.
- [148:27]
B
Of the day, isn't it? Or what?
- [148:28]
A
Yeah, it is. Honestly, I'm not sure why they're doing it. Maybe they want to get the primetime audience, I don't know. Well, I'm very interested now.
- [148:35]
B
After the markets close.
- [148:38]
A
That's it.
- [148:38]
B
It's kind of weird.
- [148:39]
A
Like it is odd. Everybody else does it in the morning.
- [148:42]
B
Yeah.
- [148:44]
A
We will be covering that in the club only you have to be a club member to watch that because we don't want to get in trouble with anybody. And then right after club members stick around because Scott Wilkinson is going to do his famous Q and A episode of Home Theater Geeks. He did this last month and it went so well. The chat room can ask any question. If you're interested in home theater, high end audio and video, you want to know what the best TV is? If you want to know what the best deals are, you want to know what the best sound systems are, this is a great time to get a real expert and talk to him. Scott Wilkinson will be doing his Q and A Home Theater Geeks live immediately after the Facebook Connect event. So it's a big jam packed day today. Yeah. Yeah. Paul Thurat, thank you so much. We'll see you next week. You won't be in Hawaii next week. You'll be. Finally made it to Mexico.
- [149:37]
B
No, I will be in Hawaii. I gotta go to Mexico first and then. Yeah.
- [149:40]
A
Hey, that's awesome. We will get the latest on the Snapdragon whatever, the new Qualcomm channel.
- [149:46]
B
I hope so. I wonder what, I don't know what day, what happens or whatever. But yeah, hopefully.
- [149:51]
A
Well, by then you should have. You'll have your ear to the ground and you'll be.
- [149:54]
B
Yeah.
- [149:55]
A
Hearing the drum beats as they say.
- [149:58]
B
It's been a long time coming. I'm really curious.
- [150:01]
A
Yeah. Yeah. And of course Richard Campbell will be back. We don't know where he'll be either. He could Be in Hawaii for all we know.
- [150:10]
B
Yeah, next week we'll be going to that.
- [150:12]
A
I don't know that. No, no.
- [150:18]
B
Yeah, he'll be somewhere. I don't know.
- [150:20]
A
I'm not sure he'll be somewhere. Ladies and gentlemen, we thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate everything you do to keep this show running. I'm going to show a VO picture that I make, made on intelligent machines of myself and my orange shirt.
- [150:39]
B
Shirt.
- [150:40]
A
Like, remember that shirt I had that was like fresh oranges cut in half?
- [150:45]
B
Yeah, yeah. In celebration of the Apple event.
- [150:49]
A
Yeah. Well, I did buy the orange phone and I realized.
- [150:52]
B
Oh, you did?
- [150:52]
A
Yeah, I bought the orange Beats Pro. I like orange, apparently. And this is the still picture that I took.
- [150:59]
B
I literally just got a retina problem from that.
- [151:02]
A
I know it's very orange. Here's what Veo did with that. I don't know know. That's disgusting. I don't know. I don't know why it did that. I don't know. Anyway, thank you everybody for joining us. No, that's enough. You don't need to see that anymore. Goodbye. We will see you next time. Oh, I didn't say all the stuff I have to say. Like, we do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern Time. We've been doing this for 19 years, kids. Two weeks will celebrate as we get become 20 years old. Oh, how exciting. 11am Pacific, 02pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. We stream it live in the club, of course, but also YouTube, Twitch, X.com TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn.
- [151:50]
B
You know what's interesting?
- [151:51]
A
Lots of places.
- [151:52]
B
This is episode 950.
- [151:54]
A
Yeah.
- [151:55]
B
So in 50 episodes we will be at episode 1000. 1000, which is almost exactly a year from now because we take, take, you know, a couple of weeks here, off here and there.
- [152:04]
A
Roughly 50 episodes a year. Yeah, Possible.
- [152:07]
B
Right. That week that we hit the 20th will be episode a thousand.
- [152:12]
A
Oh, that would. Let's, you know what, let's work it out so it, it comes out that way if we have to do, you know, 999A, 999B. Let's make sure.
- [152:22]
B
It's like. It's gonna be pretty close, you know.
- [152:25]
A
Yeah, well, it's roughly 50 episodes a year. Yeah. So that makes sense. It should be be the 1000th episode. Thank you, Paul. You don't have to watch live, by the way, on demand versions of the show available at Twitt TV, WW. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to it. You should subscribe though. In fact, if you subscribe, please leave us a five star review. Pick the audio or the video or both. It is FREE that all we ask is you give us a good review to spread the word about Windows Weekly. Thanks Paul. Have a great week. Have fun in Hawaii. We'll see you there in just a little bit. One week. Take care.