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WW 976: Full Thurrottle - Microsoft's Plan To Save Windows in 2026
Microsoft's Plan To Save Windows in 2026
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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard are here and we have lots to talk about, including Microsoft's plan to save Windows this year. Does it really need saving? Maybe it does. We'll talk about a surprise with the Nintendo Switch 2 and how you can get Paul's books for free. That's coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 976 recorded Wednesday, March 25, 2026. Full Throttle. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, all you winners, you dozers too. Wake up, wake up, wake up. Here's Paul Therot from therot.com. hello, Mr. T. Hello, Leo. And from beautiful Seattle, Redmond, I guess. Redmond, Washington, it is Mr. Richard Campbell of Runners Radio. Soon to hit their 2,000th episode Rocks.
- [01:16]
Richard Campbell
We recorded 2,000. It'll publish at the end of April.
- [01:18]
Leo Laporte
Unbelievable.
- [01:19]
Richard Campbell
We had a big party here, but I'm in the green room, so I decided I had to wear green.
- [01:24]
Leo Laporte
Nice.
- [01:24]
Richard Campbell
You know, every time the MVP summit is on, I grab a studio and shoot from there. They decided this year to offer up the studios to whoever needed them. And I couldn't get a three other hour block. And so I sort of pinged my friends in this space and said, you know what, what can we do? And he's like, would you like the green room? I'm sure I'll take the green. So I'm in. I'm in the green room.
- [01:45]
Leo Laporte
Nice. You know, it's funny, I've been in many green rooms in many studios, very rarely green.
- [01:52]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, this one is not that green either. I'm the greenest thing in it.
- [01:56]
Paul Thurat
When the Grand Moff Tarkin calls and asks you to blow up Alderaan, I assume you have those controls.
- [02:03]
Leo Laporte
You know what's interesting? Paul is in a green room. Yeah, there you go. So it was such a big story. We even talked about it on Twitter on Sunday. Pavan Davaluri said, sorry, we're going to fix it all.
- [02:17]
Paul Thurat
Well, so it's funny that's the first thing you said because he didn't say sorry. Oh, that's also one of the little things that comes out of this. Right.
- [02:25]
Leo Laporte
I read into it maybe a little too.
- [02:27]
Paul Thurat
Yes. Well, by the way, there's a lot of that going on. Right. And we're going to talk about that. Okay, sorry.
- [02:33]
Leo Laporte
Okay, well, let's start with Microsoft's plan to save Windows.
- [02:37]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, it's good. I mean, this is good. News, obviously this takes up a lot of space in the notes. We don't have to go through it in this level of detail. But I just, just the history of this sort of is if you think back to 2015, January, when they had the first consumer event for Windows 10, you know, six months before it was released, Satya Nadella came out at the end and he said, you know, we want people to love Windows and then they've done everything they can since then to make people not love Windows. You know, what do you think the
- [03:08]
Leo Laporte
chief error was on that part? Was it copilot? Was it stuffing copilot everywhere?
- [03:14]
Paul Thurat
No, no, it was, it was the, the. Well, it's a cascading series of errors. Right. And so if you speak generally about it, I would say. Or to speak generally about it, I would say it is the need to further monetize users that pay for Windows only once and use it for several years. Right.
- [03:32]
Leo Laporte
Which is in other words and ification.
- [03:34]
Paul Thurat
Well, it doesn't have to be. If it's something that's good for users and they want, they want to pay
- [03:39]
Leo Laporte
for, make it better, they'll want it.
- [03:43]
Paul Thurat
The. Yeah. So there's been a lot of heavy hit. Well, a lot of heavy handed bad behavior. At the time that Satya Nadella said that thing, I wrote an article that was something like, sorry, Satya, no one's going to love Windows until you do this thing. And it was just one of the things that goes into that insertification story. But it's this bundled crapware problem that we have on OEM PCs like Paul PCs basically. But they've really escalated the bad behaviors notion. Desperately wants to record this meeting. I'm not going to allow that.
- [04:18]
Leo Laporte
No notion.
- [04:19]
Paul Thurat
No,
- [04:22]
Leo Laporte
but you know what? It's timely because that's the problem. Everybody's doing it.
- [04:27]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [04:27]
Paul Thurat
Yep. If we haven't referenced this before, I strongly recommend that everybody find and watch the Saturday Night Live skit about Uber Eats wrapped, which is like a spoof of Spotify Raps. And no, but it's awful. Like everyone's like, oh my God, this
- [04:46]
Leo Laporte
is so terrible, I don't want this all year.
- [04:48]
Paul Thurat
He's like, what do you mean? I'm number one in nuggets. He's like, how could that be? She's like, you're eating a nugget right now. But the great line in there, which is I just apply to everything now is like, oh no, I know what it is, I just do not want it is sort of a lot of the stuff kind of falls into that category. So, you know, in Windows 8 they added ads. In Windows 10 they added forced telemetry, bundled crapware, privacy, you know, well, the telemetry is tied in the privacy issues and whatever else. There's a whole list of problems, you know, and in Windows 11, they've escalated it yet again. And so, you know, just as he said that they were taking steps to make Windows so much worse. The big one to me at that time was actually Windows as a service. And you see the cascading effects of that to literally this month they just really. We'll talk about this later, but they released an emergency fix for a Windows update that went out this month. And it's just been a chaotic thing going on. We'll talk about this a little bit more later. But they've renamed these monthly updates we got on Patch Tuesday that's called a security update. Now it includes security updates and feature updates. They always do. In my mind, those things should be separate. We'll. We'll talk about that later. But Windows 11, they changed the name to Continuous Innovation. And it really was continuous. It was continuous like when you had a bad taco and you can't get out of the bathroom and it never stops and it just goes and goes and goes. And Yeah, I mean, you know, we all kind of know the story by the time. Let's see, it was probably like last year, I guess, sometime I wrote that initiatification checklist, I guess it was two years ago. And I listed the major issues I had and I just listed most of them. It's gotten so bad. I wrote a book, I mean, I wrote a book about this, right? DeInsuredify. Windows 11 is a book hopefully telling people how they can get around all this stuff, right? But as I've been mentioning this year, we had one episode in particular where something positive has been happening. And so if you look at the kind of timeline, I saw the first signs of this myself in December when I was either bringing up new PCs or resetting PCs, where that horrible behavior in OneDrive, which led to me two years ago or so, two and a half years ago now, leaving OneDrive and going to Google Drive originally, then going to Synology Drive, not completely fixed, but definitely improvement to that issue of forced folder backup on certain computers. And so that was good. And then tied to their January earnings announcement, they talked about a billion users. And this is when Pavan Davaluri came out and said one of our focuses this year is going to be on quality. And what he called Addressing the pain points that are in Windows. We didn't have many details about that, but I could see this happening. The OneDrive thing is, is part of it. The, you know, the new security features that are all over Windows, like quick machine recovery, et cetera, you know, all these things we've been talking about. Like, you can see the rust in the Windows kernel, et cetera, et cetera. Like, there have been positive changes occurring. And the thing about Windows and any product, really, but we focus on Windows here. There's always two sides. Right. There's the upfront stuff, and that's always been kind of terrible. It's like back when we had like, Creator Update and Fall Creator update and they were putting 3D apps in Windows that nobody ever wanted or used. There's that stuff. But then there's the engineering stuff on the back end. And so I feel like the engineering stuff on the back end, especially in Windows 11, was just left by the wayside to the point where I never thought we were ever going to see deep, architectural, important, fundamental, foundational, whatever changes. But in the years since we've actually started seeing it, and I don't know that I can attribute all of this or even any of, well, all of it to Pavan Davaluri, but honestly, a lot of it has happened on his watch. And so there is evidence that he's doing some good things. Right.
- [08:52]
Richard Campbell
Let me throw a spin on this for you.
- [08:53]
Paul Thurat
Yeah.
- [08:54]
Richard Campbell
Terry Myerson leaves the company in 2018. There is no leader of Windows, effectively at that point. In fact, Windows gets pulled apart. Client goes into one group, server core goes into another group.
- [09:07]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, yeah.
- [09:09]
Richard Campbell
And essentially Windows is in Siberia and has been ever since until Pebang came along. And so effectively leaderless. What's really happened is that every product team that needed to get a hit. Right. Wanted a revenue stream or would push stuff into Windows because they could get away with it without a leader pushing back, presenting an overall vision of the product. You just have a lot of different forces getting stuff by. Right. Why is the insider builds insane? Because there's different teams pushing into them.
- [09:43]
Paul Thurat
I know that will always blow my mind. Yeah, that's a big part of the story. I feel like there are parallels here to the development of Longhorn, where there was too much happening at the same time and it just wasn't going to work. But there's also.
- [09:58]
Richard Campbell
You saw this period of it seemed like junior people were writing code in different stacks and deploying it into Windows C File Explorer.
- [10:06]
Paul Thurat
Right. So we're going to talk about File Explorer, because this is actually a big part of this story. But File Explorer is maybe the best example or one of the better examples of the problems and the possibilities here. But I also, I'm trying to think of parallels to this in other companies. In the 1980s when Apple was trying to push the Mac, it was the apple IIe that was making all the money. And those people didn't have any say in anything that was going on strategically at the company. They didn't have any the ear of the CEO. They didn't get to decide what happened. And eventually that thing disappeared. You know, maybe that. I don't know if that's one good example. But you know, in the case of Microsoft, like when Windows was the biggest thing in the world, it was Windows only was the strategy. Eventually other things started happening. You know, Office was, you know, on the Mac always anyway, but it was, you know, became kind of Windows first and then, you know, kind of. It absolutely was Windows first and then it was, well, Windows best, you know, like it should be best on Windows. And then it became just Windows nothing like, not that it wouldn't be on Windows, but it just wasn't the focus as the company expanded out and then just grew exponentially thanks to the cloud. And we'll see what happens with AI now, but different errors and Windows just was not the focus, you know, even though, you know, consistent money maker. I mean, if you look at the earnings, I mean, thing, you know, I'm sure it's. Well, I guess you're not sure, but it's probably dropped off to some degree. But I mean, Windows is a significant several billion dollars in revenue every single quarter.
- [11:39]
Richard Campbell
But I think there was also a political effort to convince Windows itself you are not the center of the company. Azure is the center of the company.
- [11:46]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. And look, this came up, I think last week and I'm sure elsewhere, but we're not going to talk about this too much this week, but the Satya Nadella has hired from without, especially in this AI era pretty dramatically. And you could make the case internally at Microsoft that at some point the best minds, so to speak, or the best employees, the most aggressive, career wise, whatever they are, would not work on Windows because that isn't where, you know, the money was and the action and so forth.
- [12:16]
Richard Campbell
We even said this about Terry Morrison at the time, which is like, is he just the dumping ground for all the bad news like Windows? He got mobile, like he got everything that was in trouble, effectively. Yeah, I mean, he finally left and nobody was replacing him like the thing I like about imagine, nobody wanting to be the leader of Windows.
- [12:37]
Paul Thurat
That's a very real possibility, by the way, you know that that is what happened or no one qualified. Right. I mean, I'm not sure piano spinning was qualified to run Windows. I, I don't understand what happened.
- [12:50]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I always saw him as the surface guy, right. Like he was much more about making
- [12:54]
Paul Thurat
and that was just a happenstance. He was a keyboard and mouse guy. I mean I. He didn't just come out of nowhere, he came out of less than nowhere. And I don't. That rise will never make sense to me, but it's not coincidental. I think that the most kind of superfluous surface, if you will, level version of Windows ever shipped on his watch. Windows 11 as originally conceived was just lipstick on a pig. Right. There were no fundamental foundational architectural advances occurring right then at all.
- [13:26]
Richard Campbell
Well, the argument for Windows 11 is God, we got to make this look more like OS then.
- [13:30]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, okay. Yeah. And.
- [13:32]
Richard Campbell
And maybe look like everybody banged against it. They just bave it and backed off. Like I think there was a vision to 11. It was just not very good vision.
- [13:40]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, eventually, right. That would have been a kind of a mobile device, UX and in Windows 10X. And that just never happened. And you know, whatever, we take half steps. I don't know. So yeah, so I'm live. Who lives in my place here. But Pavan back in January said very little, but he said this was a focus for 2026. After we've recorded the show last week, I think it was late Friday, they came up with a more expansive version of what that looks like. It's a 2000 word blog post. There's a lot of good news in there. If you aren't super familiar with what has gone wrong with Windows over the past decade or whatever, you might look at this and say, wow, this is a major turnaround. But like all things, you know, some of this was already happening. Right. We talked about that kind of thing. Some of it is just. It's like when you put something on a, like you put a feature in a product so you can have the bullet point. So it's something that people can't complain about. But even though no one's really going to use it that much, but it's the thing someone would have raised, you know, like moving a taskbar to different sides of the screen is something that, you know, 17 to 21 people are going to love. And the rest of us, just both
- [14:57]
Richard Campbell
guys definitely, of course, one of them
- [14:59]
Paul Thurat
being okay, but when you do something like that, what you're showing is that you are paying attention to feedback finally, and not maybe necessarily filtering it correctly, because the loudest, noisiest, most complainiest people aren't necessarily representative of the mainstream. Okay, but you know what, let's not worry about that part of it. Just stepping through what he did say, right? We're going to let you move the taskbar around, right? This is one of the biggest complaints about Windows 11. They're going to improve File Explorer performance and reliability. And this is something, man, you know, Richard brought this up early, but like, you know, here's something anyone can do. I've written about this. This was a tip on the show. I've done an episode of Hands on Windows about this. There's a utility you can run that will allow you to use an older version of File Explorer in Windows 11. So you can use the original one from the original release of Windows 11, which is Pre WinUI 3. You can use the Windows 10 version, which is almost identical but a little old fashioned looking, or you can use even, I think this one from Windows 8 or 7. But either way, all of them run dramatically faster than the current version of File Explorer. And what does that mean? It doesn't mean they copy files faster. It means that when you open this app, you'll see it draw the window and then you can sit there and do the one until it draws the home view. If you turn off WinUI 3, essentially use an older version that happens immediately. It happens faster than you can see it. So tied to this is pushing more and more UIs to win UI3. Now I should point out the asterisk here is that when File Explorer is a special case, right? And so when they first did the WinUI 3 makeover of File Explorer, they didn't use WinUI 3 as we get it, as developers out in the world, they had to make a special. Well, first, actually, I should say first they used XAML Islands, which is a way to bridge the two worlds, right? But they had to heavily modify it. The shipping version of XAML Islands was not going to work for what they needed. This issue educated the people who make this stuff to make improvements in WinUI 3 and the Windows app SDK. But when they went to the full WinUI 3, they also don't use the shipping version. They had to modify that one too. It's not good enough. So what we have is this Frankenstein's monster of a Win32 app, which is probably all CC whatever and then this kind of WinUI front end, but only on parts of it. It's on the address bar stuff at the top and whatever toolbar is there, it's not really a toolbar, but whatever's up there and then the navigation bar, those are when you are three components. The rest of it is still the old fashioned stuff. Still slows the thing down dramatically.
- [17:46]
Richard Campbell
I gotta think every time you call across those layers, you don't.
- [17:49]
Paul Thurat
That's right. It's. It's what we used to call a thunk almost. Right. If you went like 16 to 32 bit code or 32 to 64 or whatever.
- [17:58]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, the thunk.
- [17:59]
Paul Thurat
Yep. Now I will say somewhere in this list there will be a mention of the Start menu. Right. Start menu was just overhauled. It is better than it was before. One thing maybe people don't understand, if you bring up Start menu, you have like a pinned view of icons for apps and stuff. And then you've got this. We used to have a recommended thing at the bottom. Now it's just like the all apps list or whatever. Actually, I might have just turned off recommended. I suspect it's still there. Let me just look. Yep, I turned it off. So these things are all drawn with JavaScript. Right. So this is React Native. It's not native really. The components it's drawing are native, but the way it does it is web tech and it's slow.
- [18:44]
Richard Campbell
React Native is called that because it's not actually running in a browser.
- [18:48]
Paul Thurat
Right? Yeah, there you go. Yeah, right. I guess React Chromeless was too confusing. But going from JavaScript to WinUI 3, maybe that would be a performance improvement. I mean, we'll see. We're going to find out, you know, we'll see.
- [19:01]
Richard Campbell
It strips a couple of thunks away. That's all it does.
- [19:04]
Paul Thurat
There you go. Yeah. Similar improvements to widgets. Although to me the problem with widgets isn't the way it displays things or how you can or cannot have a feed and actual widgets side by side. It's the quality of the stuff in the widget feed which all comes from MSN and other related things. It's garbage.
- [19:23]
Richard Campbell
It's the same garbage in a blank edge browser.
- [19:26]
Paul Thurat
That's exactly now on the side of your screen garbage.
- [19:29]
Richard Campbell
You got to turn it off.
- [19:30]
Paul Thurat
Never addresses that. He said that he's going to allow people to skip Windows updates for more time without saying how much time. So if you're familiar with this UI as a human being, his businesses get different capabilities here. But you can go actually let's go and look at it. If you go into Settings and go to Windows Update, there's a, it says pause for one week and if you click it, it will say pause for two weeks. You click it again, pause for three weeks, click it in, pause for four weeks, and that's as far as you can go. So does that mean you're going to be able to pause updates for five weeks, seven weeks, 50 weeks? I don't, you know, we don't know. I should probably, I desperately want to kind of do this out of order in a way because I'm listing what he said, but then I'm listing the issue. So I'm just going to mention here the thing I mentioned up front, which is that Microsoft recently renamed these updates. Right. And so we have a security update that goes on Patch Tuesday. We have a preview, I think they just call it preview update, but preview security update that goes out on the Tuesday of weekday. And then we have whatever, you know, sometimes there's emergency updates, other updates, whatever. My feeling is that you, Microsoft should separate those things. Security updates should be semi mandatory in the sense that you either do have to install it right away or you only get a very short pause time on it because it's important, especially if it's a zero day type of thing. Right, sure. Whereas feature updates, maybe you could be a little more lenient on how far out it goes. Tied to this though is this notion of CFRs, these controlled feature releases, which are not controlled in any way, but are instead random. Where I feel like you should have a box that says I actually want the new features when they're like right away on kind of the flip side. Because the problem is you download this big update, you get the security updates, you get the feature updates, they're in the system but they're not enabled. You reboot and randomly, tomorrow, two weeks, a month, whatever. I still have computers that have the old start menu.
- [21:26]
Leo Laporte
You
- [21:29]
Paul Thurat
might one day wake up and have a new feature and it's like, guys, there has to be a better system for this. Right. Tied to this is the Windows Insider program, which is a big problem. Right. In a engineering based software development environment, the way this would work is that Canary would get the features first, people would test them, provide feedback and they might or might not change them. Go to Dev, go to beta, go to Release Preview, go to the weekd update and then go out in Patch Tuesday. That would be the progression for every single feature Microsoft adds to Windows. And they do not do that. As we discuss endlessly he didn't say they were going to fix that, but he did say they were going to make some changes there. I think most of it is tied to my earlier complaint, which is that as a Windows Insider, where you say to me, okay, you're going to download this new build. You're in the dev channel or the beta channel, doesn't matter. And Here are the 17 new features that we're going to add to this thing. Sixteen of them are on a cfr. You're going to get them whenever you get them, because there's no way to speed those things up. And there are actually some workarounds for some. Some, but not all. But let's just say you can't do it. And I believe what they're going to do is actually let people get the features right away. I think he doesn't say that exactly, but I think the point is to give you more transparency into what's actually happening and then let you pick the thing that makes sense for you. I think what he's really saying is there's going to be a version of that. There's some step toward that.
- [22:52]
Richard Campbell
I mean, the reason for CFR is because you want to a B test.
- [22:56]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, you don't do that stable, you know, like.
- [22:59]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. I mean, the other part of this is how do you get the feedback? Like, what are you even learning? Yeah, cfr, the whole CFR channel should be an opt in. You want to be part of the experiments. We can't tell you what features you're going to get because it's supposed to, you know.
- [23:13]
Paul Thurat
So glad you said opt in, but non direct. My, my number one point that I will make later, but is about opt in versus opt out. It's. Look, it's hard any platform you have. So you get like an iPhone, like iPhone, the iPhone got the iOS 26.4 update. You reboot your phone, it takes 17 hours to install. And then a little thing comes up says you have new features. You know, the Pixel does this. Chromebooks do this. You know, it's like Microsoft doesn't want to annoy you unless it really wants to annoy you. And then it has no problem annoying you. It's like, you know, maybe show us what's new. You know, I don't understand not doing that. I mean, to me, like, that's just. That just makes sense. But again, it's hard not to like editorialize in every one of these things. They're going to make more relevant recommendations and start. Nobody wants recommendations. Now you can turn it off. Right. This is an opt out.
- [24:05]
Richard Campbell
Really relevant would be. Not at all.
- [24:07]
Paul Thurat
Yep. Don't like this. Turn it off. You know, one of the big complaints I had that got me off of OneDrive, aside from the thing I talked about earlier, which is the folder backup thing, is that you would launch Word and I would configure it to. And by the way, it's 117 steps to get to this point, but I would configure Word exactly the way I wanted it. And one of the ways I wanted it was you're going to save to the desktop by default, and the desktop is not backed up with folder backup, so it's just a local folder. It hates that yellow banner across the top, an info bar. You should be saving to OneDrive. If you save to OneDrive, this thing would auto save, which by the way, could work fine on the local file system. They just didn't do it at the time. I think they do do it now, by the way. There was no option that you could say, okay, thank you, but it would just keep coming back every time you did it. And there was no option. Okay, I get it. Don't show me this. You, you have to understand that for me to make this change, I have to know what I'm doing to even get into this thing, to find it. I obviously know what I'm doing. I obviously want this to be this way. Leave me alone. You know, there's a lot of that kind of harassment in Windows and in Windows apps and I just, it makes me crazy. So, okay. A lot of latency reductions throughout. So context menu. The idea here is you right click and it actually appears. You know, you don't do a one, two step beat, right? File Explorer, like we said, start Menu, yada yada, yada, all that stuff. Okay? Reduce resource usage across the board. This is throughout the system, the built in apps, et cetera, et cetera. This is good for just, you know, freeing up resources is always good. I think this is tied a little bit to that Xbox mode, slash, gaming handheld stuff, right? Where they have the full screen experience. You don't want anything running in the background. Honestly, that's good for a lot of people and, you know, maybe there'll be some sanity there. We'll see. He called out the Windows subsystem for Linux. Who are you getting feedback from? Look, is it a little hard to install? Yes. Should it be a little hard to install? Because my grandmother shouldn't be installing this.
- [26:06]
Richard Campbell
Yes. It's really a dev tool, right?
- [26:09]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, I Mean like, okay, I'm used to pain.
- [26:13]
Leo Laporte
I wonder if it's because the real motivation for this is people moving to Linux. And you really want to make sure that, you know, hey, Linux is going to be great on Windows, right? I don't.
- [26:25]
Paul Thurat
Look, Linux is always going to be. No, you're right. That's why it exists, right? It's for developers to keep them from going to Linux or keep them from dual booting, right? You get this familiar tool chains and all that stuff, if that's what you want. But you know, look, it's like it's a. It's a virtual machine. It's always going to be something like that. I, you know, we'll see what happens there. But I don't know, I don't think grandma's going to be like, I'd really like to run the Linux version of the gimp.
- [26:51]
Leo Laporte
It's too hard.
- [26:52]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, you know, it's like, okay, so we'll see.
- [26:55]
Leo Laporte
It's too darn hard.
- [26:57]
Paul Thurat
Whatever that means. Yeah, I want to run Linux, but it's too hard.
- [27:00]
Leo Laporte
Yeah,
- [27:02]
Paul Thurat
lots of reliability improvements, etc. Windows, hello. This one confused me at first, but I did raise this issue, you know, in the past three months or so, whatever it was, at some point in Windows, hello, it became the authentication method for passkeys, right? And passkeys became the way that your identity on the PC is stored if you sign in with a managed account, meaning a Microsoft account or a Enter ID account. So, okay, that's good. But you could have facial recognition, you could have a fingerprint. You can do a pen, obviously. But the thing is, it does that. You know, the little dialogue comes up, the eyeballs look for you. It's like, okay, we found you. And then you have to click a box to get through it. And it's like you just added a step like this. This is like, what do you call it? The UAC control that they started in Vista, but with an additional step and we hated that. We hated it.
- [27:57]
Richard Campbell
Okay, before I do what you want, agree with me about something.
- [28:01]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, it's you. Click here to make sure it's you. But it's me, you know, to me it should just. You should just go through. I don't know. Yeah, maybe that will be part of that fix. We'll. There is a speed issue. I will say this. Okay, so this is all good news, right? But here's the problem. So the next morning I woke up and I was like, all right, I'm going to write something about this. And I'M thinking I'm mostly. What I'm going to say is this is mostly good news and I'm sure I'll find a couple little things. And I was like, well, where do I start? And I'm like, I know where to start. I wrote this Windows 11 insertification checklist. Let's check it against the list. They only address one of the things that I mentioned, which is the Windows update chaos bit. Right. And then only partially because we don't actually know what they're doing. And I have further suggestions there. Right. Forced telemetry. Never mentioned. Forced Microsoft account sign in. Never mentioned. Bundled crapware. Never mentioned. Forced Microsoft Edge usage. When you choose another browser and it still launches Edge when you go through search through widgets, there's another insight. Whatever. The other thing is Microsoft Edge harassment. Whether you choose it or not, to choose a Microsoft friendly configuration that will open you up to more privacy issues. Not addressed the hardware requirements. Not as much of an issue today, frankly. But at launch that was a big thing with Windows 11, I would say between Windows 11 and TPM 2 and the way that the world is and all those security features we mentioned, that's kind of necessary. You know, Copilot Plus PC has much more aggressive demands, you know, for hardware resources, 16 gigs of RAM, I think it's 512 gigs of storage, et cetera at the MPU, obviously. And then the OneDrive of behavior stuff which like I said, was already kind of partially addressed, like the, the update that I started seeing in December, which by the way, to this moment they have never discussed publicly. Right. Which is crazy. So Richard mentioned opt in because Richard could read my mind and it makes me insane. It occurred to me as I was looking at the high level issues, I said, one of the big problems here is that too many things in Windows are opt out or you have to go find a fix or a switch somewhere in Settings or a workaround or whatever it might be. The big exception to this is Recall. Microsoft introduced recall almost two years ago. Instant furor over this crazy privacy problem they spent. They delayed it for months. I don't know that it's even. I think it's still in preview. I don't, I don't know anyone who uses it, but I think it might still be in preview. It doesn't matter. They made no material changes to it. Technically, everyone stopped complaining. There have been no security vulnerabilities and no hacks or anything since then, but whatever. But they did make one important change. They made it opt in. Right. They were originally going to make it opt out. They were going to enable it by default, tell you during setup they did it, and then you'd have to go figure out how to turn it off. And that's the wrong. I think we can all agree that's the wrong approach. And there's a lot of that stuff in Windows. Actually, apologies. I got to take one step back. I didn't mention one of the big ones. And when Leo said up front, he said, oh, I apologize. I said, actually didn't say that. This falls into this.
- [31:11]
Leo Laporte
No apologies.
- [31:11]
Paul Thurat
No apologies. Is copilot the news and the headlines I saw everywhere was Microsoft is getting rid of copilot in Windows or scaling back copilot in Windows or whatever. And I gotta tell you, that's not happening.
- [31:27]
Richard Campbell
That's not what he said.
- [31:29]
Paul Thurat
They are going to remove the copilot icon from places where it doesn't belong, like Notepad. But that doesn't mean they're removing the writing tools that are in Notepad that are AI based and may or may not require a copilot or a. What do you call it? Microsoft 365 subscription. Right. So there are AI features in Paint, in Photos, in Notepad, in Snipping Tool and wherever else in Windows. Right. Edge is another one. There's a copilot icon in every one of those places. And what they've said is we're probably going to get rid of the copilot icons. We understand that people are a little incensed every time they see it. They get like it makes them crazy. I think most people don't see it or care.
- [32:10]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [32:12]
Paul Thurat
We're talking about the people in the Insider program, I guess are enthusiasts, which is all 100 of us or whatever.
- [32:19]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. My position on AI is you can leave it in. Just don't force it down my throat.
- [32:24]
Richard Campbell
It'll make me use it.
- [32:25]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, yeah. So I would like. When you look at like just three apps I'll just use as an example. So in Notepad, very easily go to Settings and turn it all off. If you don't want any help, writing assistance, summaries, whatever. Turn it, you can turn it off. It's nice. If you go into Paint, you cannot. But there are registry based ways to turn off some of that stuff, but not all. It is a copilot icon, which is the wrong way to think of it because you've made copilot the feature. Whereas the features are the things that are under that menu which are remove the background or help me create a new image or Whatever it is. To me, those are functions of the app and we can debate whether they should be something you could turn off or disable, whatever. But the copilot bit of it never made any sense to me then. Same thing with photos. Photos is unique because you can't actually turn off anything. Features, you get what you get. You have some AI based features on any computer. You get more with a Copilot PC feature computer. But there is actually no way to turn that stuff off in Photos. And I would argue for a photo editor, that's where people are going to want to use AI, but it doesn't get in your face. I mean there's different tabs, you can just not use it. I mean, what's the big deal? But. But back to opt in. Yeah. Look, no one wants a system that's constantly asking if you want to use a feature. Right. That's annoying. And so finding the balance here is tough. I this, I'm not. I don't think we should underplay that. The right way to do this is difficult and may vary and will vary by feature. Right. We got to really think through this.
- [34:04]
Richard Campbell
I think the issue by user. Right? Different people are chasing different ways.
- [34:09]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. I mean there's all these just ridiculous UIs in windows where during setup it's like, hey, how would you like to set this up? Are you a gamer? Are you a programmer? And you click that box and it installs a couple stupid icons. One of the things it could do is say, oh, he indicated he's a developer or some kind of power user. Don't put this stuff in his face. He'll figure it out. Whether if you're a general, you're like, oh, I browse social media and I like to browse the web or whatever. Like, okay, maybe you need a little help, a little hand holding. But they don't do that. So they just do superficial stuff and maybe that will be part of it. I mentioned control feature releases. This is a huge problem. And I really do very strongly believe Windows updates should be split between security and features. And they should have different policies. Right. Different time frames for pausing them or not taking them or whatever it is, you know, but they never address that.
- [35:07]
Richard Campbell
Let me go further with the security updates. Like is this a laptop that you take out into the world? This is a desktop that always lives inside of a perimeter. Like the security hits differently in those contexts.
- [35:18]
Paul Thurat
That's true, yeah. Fundamentally what we're asking for is like actually do the work to make this thing better rather than put superficial features on the surface, that just annoy most
- [35:32]
Richard Campbell
people, you know, or ask them questions they don't know the answers to.
- [35:37]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. And don't give them away to say no. And I mean no forever. Stop. You know, I don't understand that. Even the, the OneDrive feature change that I talked about before, you should be able to at any time go in and say, do not ever turn this on. I just don't want this. I know what it is. I do not want it.
- [35:59]
Richard Campbell
I've closed it every single time.
- [36:02]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, if you're going to enable a feature like that, you got to put something up that says, look, here's why you might want to do this. I feel like a lot of mainstream users would look at that and say, yeah, I do want to do that, thank you. Like, that might make sense for them. It might make sense for a lot of people, but for people like us, people listening to the show, the answer is no. What are you doing? If I want that on, I will turn it on. I don't know what I have to do. Do I have to pass a test? Is there a little like a 10 question questionnaire where I can go through and prove that I know what I'm doing and you can stop harassing me? I mean, whatever. I just do something, you know, and I already mentioned the other stuff in here, the Windows Insider program, which doesn't make any sense. We'll see what happens there. And then, you know, his solution to all of the performance and what he calls latency problems, which are just the, the differential between you click something and when it actually does the thing, which is performance. The solution to him is when UI3, which, by the way, he writes with no space between when UI and the three, which, if you look at the documentation, there's a space, but it's okay, dad. Well, he's an engineer and I'm just saying. I don't know. So look, overall, yes, is a good news. I. Someone, you know, someone looked. I feel like what I've created, I didn't, I didn't set out like, oh, this stinks. I'm going to make a list and blow this thing out of the water. That was my point. I actually thought it was going to mostly address my issues. Right, and then you went and compared
- [37:30]
Richard Campbell
it against your list and realized it's.
- [37:32]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [37:32]
Paul Thurat
And then some guy is like, oh, some people are never happy unless they have something to complain about. I'm like, listen, I would never be happier than if I had nothing to complain about when it comes to Windows. Unfortunately, I created this list two years ago. It doesn't address most of those issues. I kind of wish it did. So we'll see. I mean, look, there's a whole year to come or three quarters of a year to come, and we're going to start seeing. We know about other things I didn't mention, like Xbox mode is coming, et cetera, et cetera. So we're going to have a chance between April and the 26H2 release. Right. So this is about six months there, if you're an insider program, which I suspect a lot of people on the show are, to see what this looks like. And I bet it's going to be better than it was.
- [38:16]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [38:17]
Paul Thurat
But I'm only the beginning of this.
- [38:19]
Richard Campbell
What happens with the next round of feedback. And, you know, now that people, if you really are listening and we see the results, I think a whole lot of people are going to start talking.
- [38:26]
Paul Thurat
Yeah.
- [38:26]
Leo Laporte
Is there any example of Microsoft doing this before?
- [38:30]
Paul Thurat
Well, sure, yeah.
- [38:32]
Leo Laporte
I mean, is this a regular, in other words? This is kind of a regular, yeah.
- [38:36]
Paul Thurat
So XPSP2 is probably the best one.
- [38:39]
Leo Laporte
That's right.
- [38:40]
Paul Thurat
Big public push. That was one they felt they should have and could have sold and, you know, but they did the right thing, so to speak.
- [38:47]
Leo Laporte
They fixed xp.
- [38:49]
Paul Thurat
That's the biggest one, I would say. They did this similar thing. Yep. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The server was even worse in some ways, although obviously XP impacted more people. But, yeah, it's interesting that this year Apple is sort of doing the same thing. You know, Apple's done the same thing across the world's new update is like
- [39:11]
Leo Laporte
the Snow Leopard up there.
- [39:12]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, exactly.
- [39:13]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [39:16]
Leo Laporte
In some ways, the difference between. We talked about this on Sunday on Twitt, between Apple and Windows. We've said this many times. Windows really has a legacy support issue. They have to support all users, famously.
- [39:28]
Paul Thurat
Yep. Yeah. I would say Windows 7 falls into this category. Windows 7, which is Windows Vista Service Spec 2, definitely falls into this. They did this with Windows 8.11 and all the other releases until it got to 10 to fix 8. Right. But. And then I guess I would. I mean, I guess trustworthy computing might fall. Well, trustworthy computing is what led to XPSB2, the secure future Initiative, which is part of. Or, sorry, the Secure Future Initiative, which bleeds into the Windows Resiliency Initiative, whatever it's called, which led to some of those security features I only glossed over earlier, which is, I think, part of this broader effort to fix this thing on the back end. It's good how do you fix problems without acknowledging that you made mistakes? Is maybe a masterclass in communication because I don't blame Pavan Davaluri, but. And he's certainly not going to. Well, he could, but he didn't throw any of his predecessors under the bus. But it's fair to say that you don't make this many changes suddenly without people noticing and being like, well, what have you been doing for the past 10 years? Not him personally. I mean the Windows team or whatever.
- [40:44]
Richard Campbell
Yeah,
- [40:47]
Leo Laporte
I don't know.
- [40:47]
Paul Thurat
It's a fine line, but it's look, it's net good news. There's no doubt about it. But, but some of the big. If you really think about the big problems, like the chaos of Windows Update, we'll see this year so far, by the way, Pretty good, right? The OneDrive stuff, pretty good. Not great, but bundle crapware suggestions and recommendations, essentially. Ads everywhere. Not talking about that. Forced Microsoft sign in. Not talking about that. Forced telemetry. Not talking about that. So, you know, yeah, it's still. It's better.
- [41:22]
Richard Campbell
It does feel like progress.
- [41:23]
Leo Laporte
It's getting better all the time.
- [41:26]
Paul Thurat
Yes. Yes.
- [41:27]
Leo Laporte
The problems I raised.
- [41:29]
Paul Thurat
The problems I raised are the Linda McCartney of this scenario. It's like, I like what you're doing, but I have a problem with this.
- [41:36]
Leo Laporte
It's not the Yoko Ono of this.
- [41:38]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, that's.
- [41:39]
Leo Laporte
Could be worse.
- [41:40]
Paul Thurat
Yep.
- [41:41]
Leo Laporte
You're watching Windows Weekly and I am so glad you are with the now I think we're going to call him Happy Paul Thurat. Well, jolly. Jolly Paul Thurat. It's a whole new. Not making any apologies here, but.
- [41:55]
Paul Thurat
No, no, no, no. My complaints of the past were warranted and religious in nature and Richard Campbell
- [42:03]
Leo Laporte
from Run his radio of runasradio. Fame and.net rocks 2000th episode. Same. So glad you're here. Let's continue on. There is other Windows 11 news, I think.
- [42:17]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, yeah. And this is all terrible.
- [42:19]
Leo Laporte
So, so much for Jolly Paul. Well, that was fast.
- [42:23]
Richard Campbell
That was the good news segment.
- [42:27]
Paul Thurat
I was actually surprised there wasn't. Maybe I missed it, but I felt like there must have been a Canary Dev beta something between now and last week. I didn't see it, so I don't know, but they, you know, January was kind of infamous in Windows. Not quite Windows 2000, 2000 SB4. I think it was famous or infamous. But the January Patch Tuesday update required Microsoft to ship two emergency fixes patches. And now we've done another one for the March Patch Tuesday. Ironically, this one prevented people with Microsoft accounts from signing in which the people can't stand having to sign up with Microsoft account must have found ironic and. Or terrible but whatever. So this what they call it. I think they still call it not a band update like a. It's not a zero day exactly but it's a number. It's an out of band meaning it's not happening on the Tuesday. Right.
- [43:23]
Richard Campbell
They're not going to wait.
- [43:24]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, it's right. This is important enough. We can't wait until next Tuesday, next month. Yeah. So anyway, that's out. I don't, I don't know that I've experienced this problem and I sign it with a Microsoft account on all my PCs so I'm not sure what to say but I feel like if you were prevented from getting into Microsoft Teams and or OneDrive you might be like, you know what, maybe I'm better off.
- [43:49]
Richard Campbell
That's just a hint.
- [43:50]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, maybe I'll take the hint. Exactly. And then there is one Windows Insider release at least. Like I said, unless I'm missing something but if you are in the Canary or dev channels or have a PC enrolled in one of those channels, you will start to get a redesigned Feedback Hub. And I say start to get because guess what, it's a CFR because seriously, Microsoft get the friggin message anyway. It's been modernized with WinUI3. I don't have anything to say about this. I don't really care. Whatever. Feedback Hub, whatever. So that's it. That's what we got, I suspect. Well, I think they might have even said but someday soon, probably before the end of this week, we will start seeing at least some of this stuff appear through the Insider program and we'll see how they communicate this. Right?
- [44:47]
Richard Campbell
Because I think I'm hoping they reorganize the Insider program.
- [44:51]
Paul Thurat
There are hints that that's coming and just for people who are unaware of this problem, aside from what I said earlier, which you know, this is natural bleed down right between today, now this changes all the time and this makes me insane too. But like dev and beta are both testing different build streams, branches, trunks, whatever it is of 25H2 right now, the feeling is that we will eventually switch to 26H. Well we will, right? We'll switch to 26H2 on dev at some point. But then Canary's testing 26H1 which no one is going to get unless they have a Snapdragon X2 based laptop which by the way still had none have shipped yet. And you can test it now on an intel or AMD based PC through the Insider program. And it's like, what. And they get the features last. Like, I don't think there's been a single feature.
- [45:44]
Richard Campbell
I can't imagine this stays. I think as it gets scrutinized. Like, I suspect they're going to reorganize itself.
- [45:50]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [45:50]
Paul Thurat
And I'm missing one too, because they split something else. Where? Well, least preview. Because of the nature. Release preview. If you. You could have any supported version, there'll usually be two. So today it would be 24 and 25H2. Like, you could have a 24H2PC on the release preview channel or 25H2PC on the release preview channel. You would get. I don't know if it's the same update or different updates, but you get the same features.
- [46:15]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [46:15]
Paul Thurat
That's the how that works. Like, that's okay. But I feel like they split. Was it. Maybe it was the dev channel, I can't remember, but they split. They have two different.
- [46:25]
Richard Campbell
The.
- [46:25]
Paul Thurat
The 25H2 is in two different channels, but then one of the channels is split and it's like, guys, just. This is not difficult. Like, but they. I don't know, they make it complicated. It's very strange.
- [46:37]
Richard Campbell
I'm. This flurry of failed patches is interesting because it's been on pavan's watch, right? Like, are they rushing? Have they interrupted the testing flow? Is it a, you know, rebellion against new leaders?
- [46:52]
Paul Thurat
I'm not.
- [46:52]
Richard Campbell
Like, it's really weird.
- [46:53]
Paul Thurat
I don't.
- [46:54]
Richard Campbell
They don't usually mess up these patches and then they've done a string of them.
- [46:58]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, I don't. I don't know. I should say up front, I don't know. I'm gonna just kind of guess that part of it might be that they're starting to touch parts of Windows they have not touched a long time and that there isn't this institutional memory protecting these things from happening. Because the people that understood how this stuff worked before are long gone.
- [47:22]
Richard Campbell
Well, yeah, you know, you hit an interesting point. Maybe there were some folks who left when Pavan came in, and one of them was the guy with all the engineering stuff in his head that knew how to make sure patches didn't break, and now they're breaking.
- [47:34]
Paul Thurat
I mean, well, part of. We alluded to or mentioned this, but part of the reorg that occurred back in, I guess, September was they brought back in Windows Core and Server, and now they're all on the same team. And so when you think about those things being part of Azure and going out on a more leisurely schedule, meaning probably once a year, frankly, they could be introducing code into Windows on a monthly basis now, which just hits at a lower level. And maybe I don't think they're doing major things every single month or anything like that, but it might just be like. I think it's tied to what I said earlier. It's just they're starting to touch things that don't get touched a lot.
- [48:13]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [48:13]
Paul Thurat
And that might be this, that might be the. I'm just, I'm on the outside looking in. So I don't know. But that's my, my kind of gut feeling on that. All right, all right, all right. Almost an hour on Windows fast now. It's pretty good. It's pretty good.
- [48:30]
Richard Campbell
It's a lot of Windows for Windows Weekly.
- [48:32]
Leo Laporte
It's a lot of Windows.
- [48:34]
Paul Thurat
I'm so sorry, everybody.
- [48:35]
Leo Laporte
Lot of Windows, Windows Weekly. Yeah. With Paul Thorat.
- [48:41]
Paul Thurat
Sometimes it happens. What are you going to do?
- [48:43]
Leo Laporte
On we go.
- [48:44]
Paul Thurat
On we go.
- [48:45]
Leo Laporte
Don't let me listen to notes.
- [48:49]
Paul Thurat
There is a new version of Visual Studio code out and of course now I can't see it on this computer. So I'll get back to that in a moment. But actually I think this is a pretty big update here. I haven't written about it yet. Microsoft announced TypeScript 6.0. So TypeScript is the Anders Heilsberg created Super set of JavaScript that adds type support, like formal type support, if you are.
- [49:14]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [49:15]
Richard Campbell
It's a pre compiler.
- [49:17]
Paul Thurat
Yeah.
- [49:18]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [49:19]
Paul Thurat
I feel like. I don't actually know. I should know this. I feel like. Is TypeScript just written in TypeScript? Is that how they do this?
- [49:26]
Richard Campbell
I mean it is now, but yeah, that's the essence of it. Right, I know. The point was that. Yeah. Presenting certain structural behaviors to code that it generates, that makes for more reliable JavaScript.
- [49:38]
Paul Thurat
Yes.
- [49:39]
Richard Campbell
So big organizations like all of Google's Angular is written in TypeScript.
- [49:43]
Paul Thurat
I mean, look, the whole world runs on JavaScript, right? I mean this is important and like people who are serious about JavaScript, you know, are probably using TypeScript.
- [49:52]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, it's about maintainability.
- [49:54]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. So last year Microsoft announced that they were moving TypeScript to a go language based implementation. This was going to take some time. And TypeScript 6.0, which was just released, is the last release of the original architecture of TypeScript 7.0, which the. NET team or whatever team this is. I'm sorry, it might not be. Net. Whoever announces said is actually coming sooner than you may think. So There's a TypeScript 7 coming that will be based on the SCO language. The compiler will be much faster. There's going to be various improvements there. There'll be some deprecations and some problems, I'm sure too, but. So that's happening.
- [50:35]
Richard Campbell
Well, you got to know that it's been in parallel like they've been experimenting with the go mutation for some time. And so it's kind of a finish your feature pipeline in the existing model while you're trying to catch up the other ones.
- [50:46]
Paul Thurat
I got you.
- [50:47]
Richard Campbell
Okay, I mentioned the teams are split in half. So yeah, it's probably happening quickly because it's all about feature and behavior parity.
- [50:54]
Paul Thurat
Okay, so the Visual Studio code update, which just installed on this computer, a bunch of stuff related to agents and that AI chat experience, but also just the basic editor which now supports an integrated browser. You know, it's had the integrated command line and whatever the capabilities for a long time. There's actually a lot of stuff going on here. So I don't know what, what's the. Oh, we talked about this. So this was on a monthly release schedule, so that typically on the first day of the month you would get the previous month update. Right. And they're actually accelerating this because I feel like Visual Studio code is a huge deal and the one Microsoft tool or app or whatever you want to call it, that is popular in the open source space, it's big on Linux, it's big with web devs and people that might not necessarily lean into the Microsoft stack. I was going to use this as a tip, but then I ended up replacing it. So I'll just mention it here. Now, Microsoft last year created something called the generativeai for beginners.net course. It's an online course, you get it from GitHub. And now they have a major update to this which takes advantage of things that debuted in. NET 10 and has lots of. I think the whole thing's been rewritten, frankly. So if you're a developer and you want to learn how this stuff works in. Net across the board, from just the beginnings of using generative AI in your own apps or whatever, going all the way up to agents with the Microsoft Agent framework and responsible AI, etc. Etc. So that's available on GitHub, it's free for anybody. So that's. That's cool.
- [52:35]
Richard Campbell
Awesome.
- [52:36]
Paul Thurat
All right,
- [52:40]
Leo Laporte
I gotta, I gotta interrupt you one more time and say you're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thoran, Richard Campbell. And now let's talk AI.
- [52:49]
Paul Thurat
It's hard to refute what you just said.
- [52:53]
Leo Laporte
You know, you sound great when you're upright. Thanks.
- [52:58]
Paul Thurat
Don't cry. You're so ugly when you cry.
- [53:01]
Leo Laporte
I did explain, by the way, that that is a reference to something that you didn't hear that happened before the show. We were trying to get. I don't know, you have added a wind Schutz, a windscreen to your mic, which is nice. And then we were trying to get, you know, get your voice to sound as good as possible. And Kevin King, our producer, said, you know, just sit up. And you did, and it sounded better. And he said, you sound great when you're upright. And I thought.
- [53:26]
Paul Thurat
I hunch that's a show title. Somebody in a bar last. Not last night, two nights ago. Whatever. Some guy. I know him. This was not a random stranger, but he referred to me as Dos Metros. Two meetings, meaning I'm six feet tall and thus about a foot taller than everybody else in the city.
- [53:46]
Leo Laporte
You know, it's nice to be the tall guy.
- [53:48]
Paul Thurat
I'm like, senor Dos Metros.
- [53:50]
Leo Laporte
Senor Dos Metros. That would be a good show title, too.
- [53:55]
Paul Thurat
It's kind of weird, but.
- [53:57]
Leo Laporte
Are you six?
- [53:59]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. I don't think about it too much, but here I think about a lot because I can look over the crowd. My wife likes to go on the metro, the subway here, the metro. There's a couple of cars at the end of the Each chain of cars that are for women and children. Oh, yeah. I think that's. So sometimes, if it's super busy. Yeah. My wife will go in there, and she's like. I go in there and all the kids are staring at me because I have blondish hair and blue eyes and I can see, like, over everyone's head.
- [54:24]
Leo Laporte
She's a giantess.
- [54:25]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. It's like. She's like. I feel like a freak, you know,
- [54:28]
Leo Laporte
I don't think they would want to call me Los Cincos Dieces.
- [54:32]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, it gets complicated.
- [54:34]
Leo Laporte
That doesn't really have the same ring to it.
- [54:37]
Paul Thurat
Well, I referred to him as Uno a medio Metro.
- [54:42]
Leo Laporte
Medio Metro. Half a foot, half a meter.
- [54:45]
Paul Thurat
Yeah.
- [54:45]
Leo Laporte
I love it. This is like a language lesson. And Windows Weekly, right?
- [54:50]
Richard Campbell
There you go.
- [54:51]
Paul Thurat
Spanish is harder than C plus plus. That's all I'm saying.
- [54:54]
Leo Laporte
Is it really? And.
- [54:55]
Richard Campbell
And 2 meters is like 6. 6. So.
- [54:57]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's actually taller.
- [54:59]
Paul Thurat
Oh, I'm not that tall.
- [54:59]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [55:02]
Paul Thurat
I'm probably shorter now, actually. I'm sure.
- [55:04]
Leo Laporte
I'm sure I'm shrinking at this point, definitely shrinking. Yeah. SEC yesterday and somebody had a mechanical bowl on the show floor. And Lisa very gamely hopped on and wrote it. And then the guy says, what about you? And I said, dude, I'm almost 70. You do not want me.
- [55:22]
Paul Thurat
I was gonna say, I. I heard like that getting out of bed the other day. And I'm not joking. Like, I. Are you kidding me?
- [55:28]
Leo Laporte
No, no. Mechanic. That's a. That's a young person.
- [55:31]
Paul Thurat
I get queasy watching other people do stuff like that.
- [55:34]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, we have video on the beach at my place with the dog.
- [55:38]
Leo Laporte
Oh, no.
- [55:39]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Let me tell you, I'm pretty purple.
- [55:42]
Paul Thurat
Oh, I. No, I tripped on a tree trunk here in Mexico City about a month ago. And I saw purple and black and blue, yellow. You know, it's all about the green
- [55:52]
Leo Laporte
all up and down side here.
- [55:55]
Paul Thurat
I hate what this show has become. Just saying, we're all old.
- [56:02]
Leo Laporte
Fortunately, AI can make us over. Thanks to DLSS5.
- [56:06]
Paul Thurat
Like sentences no one says with any amount of, you know, seriousness. It's like, you know what the good thing about getting old is? Shut up.
- [56:13]
Leo Laporte
No, I don't want to know.
- [56:14]
Paul Thurat
No, there's nothing good.
- [56:15]
Leo Laporte
There's nothing good. Well, surviving, I guess.
- [56:17]
Paul Thurat
Well, I guess. Yeah. Even at some point, that becomes a chore. You know, it's just like, God, it's enough. Enough world.
- [56:24]
Leo Laporte
It's really. It's really God's joke on us all is, you know, we. We. We outlive our body, in effect. Yeah, that's not good.
- [56:33]
Paul Thurat
Well, we all have to. We have to realize the only good. Only the good die young dream, you know, like, I made it. It's like, you must be horrible. It's like, yeah, no, I'm pretty bad.
- [56:44]
Leo Laporte
Pretty bad.
- [56:44]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. I hit that point where you're like, okay, you're right. Youth is wasted on the young.
- [56:48]
Leo Laporte
That is true. That is true.
- [56:51]
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- [57:21]
Paul Thurat
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Leo Laporte
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- [58:21]
Leo Laporte
All right, enough.
- [58:24]
Paul Thurat
Sorry.
- [58:24]
Leo Laporte
Let's just get back to Windows.
- [58:26]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. So last week we talked about two reorgs at Microsoft. One of them had to do with Mustafa Sulaiman, who runs Microsoft AI. So Microsoft AI at that time had two major things it was working on. One was the consumer copilot AI stuff. The other was the foundational model, said it hopes one day can replace or at least augment whatever they get from OpenAI and elsewhere. Now Microsoft AI is just that latter bit and he's focusing on that. And they've released models, but they've released their second generation. It's called Mai. Like Microsoft AI, Image two is their version of, you know, Nano Banana or, you know, whatever the other image generation models are. And it is quite good.
- [59:08]
Richard Campbell
But it's. It's specifically about like realistic imagery. Right. That's not a real good cartoon tool.
- [59:13]
Paul Thurat
But yeah, but you know what I mean.
- [59:16]
Richard Campbell
You want to dive directly into the uncanny valley. We're here to help you.
- [59:19]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, so I've started. Yeah, I've been trying to use this when possible. This is interesting. Like, this is a good one. And yeah, this is for content creators or whatever, you know, and for people like me who just want an image for their web page or whatever. Yeah. I often say to whatever I might be using at the time, I've been using like Gemini a lot lately. Obviously, like, I'll specify, I want a photo, I don't want a cartoon, I don't want watercolor. You know, I want this to be photorealistic and that is what I'm looking for. So to me that's, that's pretty good. This isn't in the notes, but semi related to this. Adobe has their Firefly family of models and they work with third party models, but they're actually start. If you use this, if you have an Adobe whatever subscription, you can train it on the images you've created so that it case creates everything in that style, which is important for brands obviously, but even for people like me, I don't use it, but I might be looking for a certain look and feel and I feel like that kind of thing is important. So that's kind of cool. There's a lot of work in this area and then this is the last thing in the section. I'll just do this next because it's semi related. OpenAI semi surprisingly announced that they were killing Sora as a standalone product. Right. This is their video generation model that turned so many heads, you know, when they first released it two seconds ago, I don't know that they said this, but I assume that this is tied to their sudden desire that maybe we should make a little money. And they're going after the enterprise.
- [60:56]
Richard Campbell
Right? More therant. I mean more relevantly they're looking at anthropic making money and going, yeah, maybe
- [61:03]
Paul Thurat
we need to do more of that. And so they're focusing more on enterprise, less on individuals making fun cartoon images of themselves in a certain Japanese anime style or whatever it might be. So okay, there are obviously many other companies are making those art, including Adobe by the way, but also, you know, Gemini and Google, etc. So there'll be plenty of choices for that stuff. I lose track of timing on things, but Qualcomm and ARM went to court over the licensing between ARM and Qualcomm, but also ARM and Nuvia. Right, the company that Qualcomm acquired.
- [61:44]
Richard Campbell
That they acquired, yeah.
- [61:47]
Paul Thurat
Qualcomm wiped the floor with ARM in this and one of the allegations was that they had lied to them because they assured them they weren't making their own ships. And Qualcomm said, yeah, you are making your own chips. And one of the follow ups, because there's another court case coming between these two companies is going to involve this. And today ARM announced, hey, we're making chips. Yeah, we knew, we know. So they have their first customer. They collaborated with Meta on this. META is going to use some of this stuff. The thing there's. This is interesting because this represents a big shift for them. Right. So ARM in the very beginning, I think. What was it like Acorn or something? Or back whenever it was in the 80s they were making chips for mobile devices. I guess it evolved over time to basically be a licensing company. Right. And so they come up with the designs for the cores and the architecture of these processors and then licensees like Qualcomm or Samsung or else can either just take them and use them, which I think some companies do, or they can modify them heavily in Qualcomm's case. Right. For their own special needs. And this thing scales across different workloads or form factors all the way from
- [63:01]
Richard Campbell
the go off to the foundries to actually have them made.
- [63:05]
Paul Thurat
Yes. So them, I would say returning to actually making their own chips is very interesting. They're not targeting devices or computers and things like that. This is for data centers. They're very careful. I've read a couple of interviews with the guy that runs ARM now who by the way came from Nvidia. Interestingly, yeah, we're not competing with Nvidia. We love Nvidia. They do think this is going to be a problem for the Intels and AMDs of the world. Companies that are pursuing like x86 or x64 now based data center AI. We'll say ARM makes sense in so many scenarios just from an efficiency, performance per watt, however you want to say that, that you could make an argument you have the smallest of it like a little ipod type thing that we don't really have anymore or a phone or a computer like a Mac or now these Windows Snapdragon computers or data centers where by the way they suck up tons of electricity and require massive amounts of power. Having those things be more efficient makes a lot of sense. Right.
- [64:11]
Richard Campbell
And when you're going to put a chip into a data center, it just like looks different. Like Microsoft's Maya, which is their AI chip. It's like the size of a dinner plate. It's huge.
- [64:20]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. And so interestingly ARMS is pretty big too. It's like, you know, it's, it's like what even back if you went back to like the 386, 486, whatever, they weren't this big. Like these are big big.
- [64:32]
Richard Campbell
But because they don't need to fit in a laptop or anything like that, the main, their main issue is cooling. Right. Is there, you know how give it as much surface area as possible so you can pull the heat out of it.
- [64:45]
Paul Thurat
Right, right. So interesting. I don't know. Let me see if there's a list of These, Yeah. So OpenAI. Because they have to be in everything. SAP, Cloudflare. Cloudflare is the secret behind the Internet still working. SK Telecom and some others have said they will deploy these CPUs in their data centers to support agenic AI. Whatever. We'll see.
- [65:11]
Richard Campbell
So, I mean, ARM has always been designing chips. This is clearly a chip they've designed. But rather than go to a partner to go get a customer to do the manufacturing, they've gone and gotten the partner directly. It's meta. And then they've gone to TSMC or Samsung and had it made.
- [65:28]
Paul Thurat
I think they see this as an opportunity, obviously. I mean, they see this as an opportunity to make more money. Right. So if this is successful, they will, you know, they're going to compete with their own customers. Right. We all love when that happens. You know, surfaces like that. On the Microsoft side.
- [65:41]
Richard Campbell
Well, if they heat the market up enough, they could even exit the market on the licensing value alone. Right?
- [65:46]
Paul Thurat
Yeah.
- [65:47]
Richard Campbell
I suspect they were struggling to get one of the Qualcomms to do this. And so it's like, fine, we'll do it ourselves.
- [65:53]
Paul Thurat
Well, plus, you'll be back. There's been a little falling out there.
- [65:56]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, they're not really.
- [65:58]
Paul Thurat
Because Qualcomm also has its own data center plans. Right. They're working on this kind of thing as well. The interesting thing to me here is just like where this might be applied. Like the CEO of arm, I think, explicitly said, look, Amazon has their own chips. They're not going to use our chips.
- [66:14]
Richard Campbell
Microsoft has its own chips.
- [66:15]
Paul Thurat
Microsoft has its own chips, but they also do use other chips. So it's going to be. We'll see. Microsoft seems to be more open. We'll see. They never said. No one said Microsoft. But I feel like of the Big two, five, whatever they are, Microsoft is the one that maybe you could see happening. Like, Google's never going to deploy this. Google has their own chips, they do their own thing. So. But there's a big world out there, right? This isn't just these three, four companies. Whatever. There's, you know, a ton of these companies and you never know. I mean, I do think ARM is the future.
- [66:43]
Richard Campbell
Not to take a cynical spin on this, Paul, because I usually count on you for that, but maybe somebody on the board at ARM said if you don't put AI into this company in some way, you guys are all going to get fired. And so maybe we should be.
- [66:55]
Paul Thurat
So I'm going to have to paraphrase because I don't remember where I read this, but like I said, I read a couple of interviews from this about this, you know, for the CEO, and he said, you know, he's like, you know, I used to come, I used to work at Nvidia, you know, he's like, so I. You come from this world of like, you know, you build things, you have to, you physically make them, you store them, you have to ship around the world. It's like there's all this RMA and all this stuff you have to think about. And it's. He gets to army, he's like, what do we do? Oh, we have 11 people and we license a design. Nice. You know, he's like, it's super simple. He's like, why would I want to go back to this horrible world? And it's like, well, because the opportunity is that big, right? It's. Yeah, you know, it's a big, you know, it's like, why would Nvidia, that makes graphics for PC gaming cards, want to get into data center chips? Oh, I'll tell you why. Because they're the biggest company in the world right now.
- [67:43]
Richard Campbell
Like, so giant piles of money, that's why.
- [67:46]
Paul Thurat
Right. You know, more options is always good. I don't really understand the architectures of various chips, but the way I understand it is that obviously the GPU stuff that NVM makes has its certain architecture and whatever, but I feel like the actual, the actual processor bit in data centers, by and large, like, you want that to be arm. Of course you do. Like, and Nvidia does have some ARM designs, at least. I don't. Like I said, I don't really know too much deeply about that. The new Microsoft stuff, which is first or second gen, depending which one we're talking about now, is ARM based. Right? I mean, of course it is, because they understand this Google, God knows what they do. They have their own thing going on.
- [68:23]
Richard Campbell
Whatever they're doing, they have their tensorflows.
- [68:24]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, like TPU's or whatever. But I don't know what the architecture is. Right. Intel and AMD on the PC side, presumably up on the data center side, have created what I would call like hybrid designs compared to the way they used to do things. So that they take on elements of the ARM type architecture where you have big cores, little cores you can turn, depending on the chip we're talking about, you might even be able to turn off cores when they're not needed to save electricity and power. This stuff is. And whatever we're talking about, like, it doesn't matter what the architecture is the company, whatever the goal is always going to be the same thing, which is like maximum performance on demand, but also maximum efficiency. And, you know, run this thing as cool as possible and for less money. A few money for as little money. There's the word.
- [69:13]
Richard Campbell
And part of this is the pursuit of trying to be profitable is you're going to have to gain these efficiencies wherever you can find it. And more efficient processing helps a lot.
- [69:23]
Paul Thurat
Yep. I mean, look, if this is successful from. I would not be surprised to discover that this leads to other things. You know, I don't know. I don't know. So I keep saying this, I don't know. But, you know, ARM has what I would call reference designs, but I don't know that they span every potential use case there is. I know if you just look at Qualcomm and you look at the way they describe their business, they have chips. The big one right now for them is phones and mobile devices. But phones really. Right, right.
- [69:51]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [69:51]
Paul Thurat
And then it become, you know, then you have PCs, you have automotive, you have IOT other, I would call it like IOT and other spaces. And they're looking at data center. And I'm probably missing some. But the point is, these chips, whoever designs them, whether they come from ARM in like, here's an IoT reference design and you can build off of that, or they just have whatever their V9 or whatever they're on now, ARM, V9, whatever. This is it, you know, we have a couple, whatever it is, and, and Qualcomm is the one doing that work to build them for all these special use cases. I don't know. It doesn't, you know, I don't know. But you know, if you know anything about intel or AMD to some degree, you know, they build up and down the chain. Right. Intel has left certain markets. Right. For whatever reason. Intel used to have some ARM stuff, by the way, for IoT mobile devices. Yeah. X scale. Right. I think was ARM. I think. But it doesn't matter. So we'll see.
- [70:46]
Leo Laporte
I.
- [70:48]
Paul Thurat
Anytime a company competes with their own customers gets interesting. So, yeah, we will see, I'm sure.
- [70:55]
Richard Campbell
And again, it's like the same way Microsoft started making laptops is they kind of weren't happy with the laptop market. For Windows, you're basically building reference designs and they can drive you. If your ecosystem grows and puts pressure on you, you could back out of that market. And if it doesn't, you could end up owning that market. Like both ways work. You're just open to. Okay, what do you guys want to do here?
- [71:17]
Paul Thurat
Yep, yep.
- [71:21]
Leo Laporte
None of it's gonna matter when Elon builds his chip fab on the moon. You just might as well give up.
- [71:26]
Paul Thurat
Well, I mean if you're gonna build it on the moon, start in Arizona
- [71:29]
Leo Laporte
and then, you know, actually starting in Texas. Did you see this?
- [71:32]
Paul Thurat
Oh, there you go. Yeah, there you go.
- [71:34]
Richard Campbell
Perfect.
- [71:34]
Leo Laporte
Of course, massive. But you know, I don't cover stuff nowadays when Elon says he's gonna do it because let's just wait until he does it.
- [71:43]
Paul Thurat
Just talk. What I would call a tugger. You know, he's just likes to be.
- [71:48]
Richard Campbell
I am, I am working on a talk on data centers in space and going through all the logistics on this.
- [71:53]
Paul Thurat
Oh, I think that when you do it though, you have to say it like this. Data centers in space.
- [72:00]
Richard Campbell
And so far it doesn't make any sense.
- [72:03]
Paul Thurat
So do you think we will have data centers in space or smart glasses that make sense first? You know that smart glasses are going to win. Flying cars, paperless office, anything.
- [72:14]
Leo Laporte
Yeah know we're going to have flying cars this year.
- [72:17]
Paul Thurat
Okay.
- [72:18]
Leo Laporte
We're going to have AI glasses next year. We're going to have data centers to
- [72:22]
Paul Thurat
have flying cars though. We have to have flying life self driving cars because I can tell you.
- [72:28]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, that's why we don't have flying cars.
- [72:30]
Paul Thurat
I own, I own a place in two of the worst places for drivers in the planet. Pennsylvania and Mexico City. And. And it's bizarre because in both places very nice people.
- [72:41]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah.
- [72:42]
Paul Thurat
They get behind whatsoever or they turn into imbeciles. Like it's.
- [72:46]
Leo Laporte
They change.
- [72:47]
Paul Thurat
It is. It's like this. It's like a drug gets sprayed in the car and they just turn into idiots. Like it's bizarre.
- [72:53]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [72:54]
Paul Thurat
So yes, they have to be self driving then. That's fine. That's fine.
- [72:58]
Leo Laporte
Then we'll, then we'll be happy.
- [72:59]
Paul Thurat
The cars here will be flying at like exactly six feet. So. Because that's over everyone's head and it will hit me all the time as they go by. Great.
- [73:06]
Richard Campbell
Yes.
- [73:09]
Paul Thurat
Take the metro. I got to get to the metro is the problem. So over in Apple land. So they announced previously that WWDC 2026 will be held from June 8 to 12. Richard, do you remember what build? Oh, it builds the week before.
- [73:28]
Richard Campbell
That's right.
- [73:29]
Leo Laporte
Didn't they overlap like last year? I think they did.
- [73:32]
Richard Campbell
Well, usually been overlapping with Google.
- [73:34]
Leo Laporte
Google, that's right. Yeah.
- [73:36]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. Google is May 20, 19 to 20. So usually Bill is in May. But I think their change of venue, they couldn't get in where they wanted to get.
- [73:46]
Leo Laporte
I actually would think that this year it would make sense for Google and Apple to overlap because the big AI announcement Apple's going to make is that Google's going to be running the show.
- [73:54]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [73:56]
Paul Thurat
They're probably not going to emphasize that too much. We all know, based on my end, I know based on my understanding of how this company operates from a marketing perspective, but I think it was just today or yesterday or Mark Gurman, who, by the way, you know, super reliable when it comes to this kind of stuff. We've been talking about this conversational Siri, whatever they call it, ever since June 2024.
- [74:21]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [74:22]
Paul Thurat
It was going to release later in the iOS at that time, what, 25, 24, Apple, whatever the hell the number was, never happened. We got.
- [74:32]
Richard Campbell
The demo was total smoke and mirrors. Like, Yep. Straight up fud. Like, I just don't expect Apple to do those things.
- [74:38]
Paul Thurat
Yep. Yeah. I think that this will be better remembered because Apple is such a consumer company and then the. The market today is so much bigger than it was at the time. But that was very much like the Longhorn announcement in 2003. It was this amazing, just amazing. It was a great show. Like, it was well done as a demo and then they gave us a build and it's like, this doesn't look anything like this. What is this? Like, the thing they did on. On stage was like a. I forget the name of the product now. It's. It's like a presentation pack. It was fake. It was just. It wasn't real code.
- [75:10]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [75:11]
Paul Thurat
And that's, you know, what Apple did. So in iOS 26, like, I don't remember anymore.
- [75:20]
Leo Laporte
27, the new iOS.
- [75:21]
Paul Thurat
Well, but the new. The one we have now, like, when the initial release, the big, big innovation was that if you hold down the power button, you get like a pink and purple thing going on, which is really pretty. But it's still as stupid as Syria ever was. And they've gone through different things. They wanted to do anthropic, remember? But I think they were going to charge too much, meaning they were probably going to charge what it was worth. And Apple was like, we don't actually pay people for anything. We're going to find out a system where they can pay us. And they found it in Google. But Gemini is fantastic, so it'll probably be good. But originally iOS 26.4, which just came out yesterday, was going to have some of this and that got Delayed again because it keeps getting delayed. But what Apple people are going to get is essentially a standalone Siri app that's going to work like a chatbot, which are in Apple language will probably look, look and work like the messages app. Right. With stupid bubbles and whatever. But whatever Apple. And there's going to be some deep level stuff as well and whatever. And so we'll see. I mean, I'm sure it will be great eventually. It's good timing too because Microsoft is busy not putting copilot everywhere. And they're like, siri. All the things. It's like, okay, I don't know.
- [76:31]
Leo Laporte
Mango lady. Get your mangoes, everybody.
- [76:36]
Paul Thurat
Since you can hear that, that happens.
- [76:38]
Leo Laporte
Sounds like a baby crying, but I know.
- [76:40]
Paul Thurat
So it's a recording. It's famous. So it was a little girl who recorded this. She's an adult now. She's famous.
- [76:45]
Leo Laporte
Oh, really?
- [76:46]
Paul Thurat
Every trash. It's a trash collector truck. So the thing that's driving around is a pickup truck. There's like a mattress and some stuff in the back. It's always preceded with a mattress. I don't know why, but if you have junk you want to bring down, they'll take it. And I think they'll pay some small amount, but that goes by three to five times a day. Right. Everywhere in the city.
- [77:06]
Leo Laporte
And what is the baby? What is the little girl say?
- [77:09]
Paul Thurat
I don't. Oh, Lavadoras is washing machines. What she's saying are the types of things they'll take.
- [77:14]
Leo Laporte
Washing machines, mattresses, washing machines.
- [77:16]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah.
- [77:16]
Paul Thurat
It's a list of the types of things.
- [77:18]
Leo Laporte
It's so.
- [77:19]
Paul Thurat
It's terrible now. I'm used to it, right? So I've gotten used to it.
- [77:24]
Leo Laporte
This is everybody, I'm sure in Mexico City. But this is like,
- [77:30]
Paul Thurat
I hate noise so much. Like, I was like, I don't know if I can be here, you know, But I've gotten used to it. Yeah. The thing is, it didn't just happen now because it depends on who's home at the time, but there are two dogs in our building. When that thing goes by, they're downstairs and they go. They hate that sound so much. It's one of like seven or eight regular sounds, but it's the only one that causes the dogs to freak out. And they just like in the building sometimes there'll be two at once going.
- [77:58]
Leo Laporte
It's like the pitter pat of little feet. When your kids are young, you don't know how much you're going to miss it when it's gone. Right and this is the sound surrounding you. The sounds of life. The vital, exciting life of Mexico City.
- [78:12]
Paul Thurat
It's true, I guess. I don't know. Yeah, sure, let's go with that. You know what?
- [78:19]
Leo Laporte
I just want to thank you for sharing it with us.
- [78:21]
Paul Thurat
I didn't intend to. I'm sorry.
- [78:24]
Richard Campbell
No, I. I got. It made me smile every when I was there, every time I heard it.
- [78:28]
Leo Laporte
I think it's great.
- [78:30]
Paul Thurat
We lived in Makunji. We lived next to a train track, and I was in a zoom call or whatever with some company, and we're talking, and this guy goes, is that a train? I was like, oh, my God. I can't believe you can hear that. I'm like, yep, that's train. Sorry.
- [78:43]
Leo Laporte
I am. My. My Starlink Mini is coming in the next few days, and I swear to God, maybe it'll be next week, maybe it'll be the week after. I'm going to test it out. I'm going to do it. I'm going to. I'm going to sit out in the back deck. So you get all the sounds of life, of Petaluma coming in.
- [79:02]
Richard Campbell
Ambience of petaluma.
- [79:04]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Get the Sonoma aroma. I wish we had a way of sending you that.
- [79:09]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. Why does it always smell like lavender here?
- [79:12]
Leo Laporte
No, it doesn't.
- [79:13]
Richard Campbell
It's manure.
- [79:15]
Leo Laporte
It's exactly what it is.
- [79:17]
Paul Thurat
It's a weird thing.
- [79:18]
Leo Laporte
We have mushroom farms, actually.
- [79:20]
Paul Thurat
So you have a lot of breweries, right? Yeah, breweries. The exhaust that comes out of these places, like, if you make coffees like this, too, is, like, worse than any diesel truck imaginable. It's the grossest.
- [79:31]
Leo Laporte
We have both coffee roasters and breweries.
- [79:34]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. So if you ever walk by a place like that, when they're chicken farms,
- [79:38]
Leo Laporte
which have a certain thing.
- [79:40]
Paul Thurat
They sure do.
- [79:40]
Leo Laporte
But there's nothing like the mushroom farms, because I think once or twice a year, they spray them with liquid manure.
- [79:48]
Paul Thurat
Oh, good.
- [79:48]
Leo Laporte
So it aerosolizes, and then you're creating
- [79:50]
Paul Thurat
what is essentially mold.
- [79:52]
Leo Laporte
And it's a fungus. Okay. It's a delicious fungus, but it's a fungus, so it aerosolizes it and it pervades the neighborhood. So I wish there's no. Even with the Starlink Mini, there's no way I could transport that. What's the lovely Aurora to you? Probably a good thing. That's the next generation of podcasting.
- [80:20]
Richard Campbell
Awesome. We're gonna go on the road, Leo. You're gonna have. You're gonna be online, but.
- [80:25]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Well, we got two Vacations planned this year, which we can ill afford, but we're going to do them anyway. One is to Hawaii in May. So I got this for the trip to Hawaii because I would like to keep doing the shows even when I'm on. Just like you. Just like you, Richard, you.
- [80:40]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [80:41]
Leo Laporte
And you have a Starlink mini, right? That's what you do sometimes. Yeah, yeah. I got the. So, as you mentioned, I think last week you have to have clear sky and, I don't know, trees and stuff. But what I got is the magnetic car mount. So I thought, well, if I can't get clear skies, I will stick it to the car. We're getting a jeep, drive to a clearing, and I'll be doing the show from the.
- [81:04]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, from the.
- [81:05]
Paul Thurat
I'm coming from a parking lot with a clear view of the sky,
- [81:09]
Leo Laporte
but I am in Hawaii.
- [81:11]
Paul Thurat
This is tied to the.
- [81:12]
Leo Laporte
It might be in the lava fields because there's no trees in the lava fields.
- [81:15]
Paul Thurat
There's a fungus that grows on corn they call huit. It's like huitlacoche in Mexico. It's a. Yeah, it's fungus, and it's actually a delicacy. Some people will try to call it, like, Mexican truffle, but the. The most. Which is ridiculous. But the most common term. Because what happens.
- [81:31]
Leo Laporte
Corn smut is.
- [81:32]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, people. Yeah, right. People will be like, what is this thing? It's like. It's fungus. Like. Yeah, I don't want that. No, it's really good. So now they call it like corn mushrooms, you know?
- [81:40]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [81:41]
Paul Thurat
And it's like.
- [81:41]
Richard Campbell
That's more appealing.
- [81:43]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. No, it's. No, it's just.
- [81:46]
Leo Laporte
I love it, though.
- [81:47]
Richard Campbell
Oh, I love it.
- [81:48]
Paul Thurat
Yeah.
- [81:48]
Leo Laporte
It's so good.
- [81:49]
Paul Thurat
Although I keep trying to tell these people, butter and salt, guys, come on.
- [81:52]
Leo Laporte
That's all I need. Then you got.
- [81:54]
Paul Thurat
I don't.
- [81:55]
Leo Laporte
They don't think you're done.
- [81:56]
Richard Campbell
The butter, mayonnaise and tajin.
- [81:58]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, Tajin's good.
- [82:00]
Richard Campbell
I love that.
- [82:01]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. All right. Where were we? I'm sorry, did you talk about Sora yet?
- [82:05]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, we did.
- [82:05]
Richard Campbell
Yep.
- [82:06]
Leo Laporte
I hardly knew ye. You know, I'm pretty convinced that it was really. It was very fast growing and it was huge. And then we all tired of it really quick.
- [82:17]
Paul Thurat
What's up?
- [82:17]
Leo Laporte
And probably nobody using it.
- [82:19]
Richard Campbell
I think they're cutting it because it's costing them money. Well, yeah, like. And they have charging up.
- [82:23]
Leo Laporte
Reportedly, they have. They've just announced they have a new director of AGI. They. They've got a new AGI division Apparently the next model, which I think will be GTP GPT6 is right. Is sentient. So they want to make sure they have enough gpus.
- [82:40]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, don't wake that thing up until you're ready for it.
- [82:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [82:44]
Richard Campbell
They all said sooner or later Altman has to declare AGI.
- [82:48]
Paul Thurat
I think that the CEO of Nvidia literally just declared AGI.
- [82:52]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah. He said it's.
- [82:54]
Richard Campbell
It's good.
- [82:54]
Leo Laporte
Well, he says it's gonna have. Jensen says it's gonna happen. Did he say it's happening? He did. He said.
- [82:58]
Paul Thurat
He said we pretty much achieved it.
- [83:00]
Leo Laporte
He said we pretty much achieved it.
- [83:01]
Paul Thurat
And I guess you would have to say that, right?
- [83:02]
Leo Laporte
It's true in a certain. In certain arenas,
- [83:07]
Paul Thurat
you know, and it's true with certain people, you know, you
- [83:11]
Leo Laporte
know, generally good at everything. Except Richard.
- [83:16]
Paul Thurat
Right. But Richard being an extreme example, he's like, unusual.
- [83:20]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [83:20]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. Look at the typical voter in the U.S. like, we've already well exceeded their intelligence. I mean.
- [83:25]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's right. It's where. Where is the bar? Right.
- [83:28]
Paul Thurat
Yeah.
- [83:30]
Leo Laporte
Anyway, yeah, I think they. I think you're right, Richard, that it was expensive. They want the GPUs. They're very much now, especially now because of the war. GPU constrained because helium is made from natural gas. Natural gas is now cut off to some degree and there's a real. Going to be a real helium shortage. So chip making is going to be suffering. So whatever supply issues there have been to date are going to get much, much worse. So I think OpenAI is probably makes
- [84:01]
Richard Campbell
you wonder about giving up the strategic helium reserve. Huh?
- [84:05]
Leo Laporte
Is there one?
- [84:06]
Richard Campbell
There was, yeah.
- [84:07]
Paul Thurat
Not anymore.
- [84:08]
Richard Campbell
One of the, one of the reasons we had this whole crisis around helium in the first place is that the American government had this huge helium reserve and they decided they didn't need any more, so they just slowly sold it
- [84:19]
Paul Thurat
off because they just let it go into the atmosphere. What did they do with it?
- [84:23]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, have the whole country have a squeaky voice. It wasn't a good. That wasn't a good idea. So they sold. They, you know, that was. Your supply of helium was emptying the reserve off and instead of doing the expensive part of separating it from natural gas. But now we're back to separating from natural gas.
- [84:37]
Leo Laporte
Well, and yeah, TSMC and all the companies that make chips are very, very nervous about this whole thing. So, yeah, there's a. Definitely, there's definitely structural reasons why SORA was probably not the best use of their money.
- [84:53]
Richard Campbell
I think they're only charging $20 a month. For paying GPT, you know, OpenAI.
- [84:59]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, you've made enough pictures of you hugging your dead grandmother. We get it, you know, or whatever.
- [85:07]
Leo Laporte
The biggest one was a Regency drama recreated with people wearing ducks on their heads instead of hats. But the ducks did have hats and there for some reason was a llama playing a flute with a duck as one does. So thank God, you know, we made the world safe for that.
- [85:26]
Richard Campbell
This is what technology is for.
- [85:28]
Paul Thurat
AI slop without people, you know, just saying.
- [85:32]
Leo Laporte
You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell.
- [85:37]
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Richard Campbell
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- [86:33]
Leo Laporte
Time for I believe, if and if I'm not mistaken, the Xbox segment. The long heralded, much awarded wow. Halo accompanied curiously religious, deeply religious Halo segment.
- [86:51]
Paul Thurat
Yeah.
- [86:52]
Leo Laporte
Reverend Theron,
- [86:56]
Paul Thurat
we're gathered here today. Yeah. So Microsoft has begun discussing Project Helix. This is the next gen Xbox console based on a PC like most.
- [87:08]
Richard Campbell
Is this all Asha Sharma?
- [87:11]
Paul Thurat
This one is not her at least this discussion but yeah. She's been obviously a key part of that so far but someone who is just someone on the team, a general manager at Xbox. Talk to IGN about what they talked about at gdc essentially. Right. One of the things I've been meaning to deep dive into and it's just so complicated is Microsoft has kind of opened up the Xbox developer program like previously you had to submit a proposal and explain why you needed so you would get a hardware like a prototype console and you could develop your game or whatever. And for Project Helix, because it's a PC, this is going to be wide open. It's basically anyone's going to be able to do this and they're kind of
- [87:56]
Richard Campbell
like publish a specification for machines.
- [87:59]
Paul Thurat
I think they pretty much, yeah, they've already kind of done it. Right. So there are still questions about the directionality of PC Xbox console compatibility, but Microsoft has said explicitly that this Xbox project Helix will be able to run PC games. They've talked about using other stores. You buy a game, the store, I'm sure it'll just be there in the dashboard if you want it to be. But you could download a game from Steam or buy a game from Steam, whatever, download it from your library, et cetera, play on there. And then the question, and this is the thing I keep looking for, I don't quite see, although this has been rumored and kind of talked around a little bit, is the continuation of the Xbox plan anywhere. The kind of build once run anywhere, you know, the original Java Dream is going to be that. Well, what about Xbox games on PC right now for that gen as it occurs when it becomes the current gen, I think these things are going to be basically the same thing. So it's not that big of a deal. But we have this backwards compatibility thing which is incredible on the Xbox side. And it goes back to the original Xbox. So there's many games OG Xbox360, Xbox One and into the new gen, the current gen, where if you have it in your library digitally, it works, you know, work on the new console. So bringing that stuff to the PC would be amazing. That to me makes this ecosystem that's like the final piece of the puzzle. I think it makes sense regardless, but that's when it really makes sense. So the discussion that this guy had with ign, I don't think expanded on anything they haven't already said. It's just that a lot of it is locked behind this kind of complicated or complex developer site that they have Xbox developer and whatever. And so we'll see. But you know, obviously on an actual Xbox, regardless of the architecture, you're talking about something with, you know, basically instant on capabilities background updating. You press a button, you get in the game and you play using a controller every single time for the most part. I mean, I know you can do other things, but mostly a controller. And it has that kind of. It's not really curated, but like, I guess I'd call it like a streamlined experience. And so if you're interested in targeting a console as a developer, it may make sense to start there and then build it out for other platforms. But I also kind of wonder now there's been a real renewed emphasis on the PC as kind of the best gaming platform for real, you know, for big game like triple A games, not little mobile games, but real games. And I wonder if the reverse isn't going to be the best approach or the approach that companies are just going to take, you know, because that's what's going to make sense. But we'll see. We'll see what Sony does with the PS6, et cetera. But
- [90:45]
Richard Campbell
in the end, it's the most number of seats for your code to run on. Right? Like, that's.
- [90:49]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, I mean.
- [90:50]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [90:51]
Paul Thurat
I mean, the most is to support all the major, you know, like PC plus the consoles. Right. But. Yes, but yeah, if you. If you wanted to select one. Yeah. Increasingly, the PC is the one that makes the most sense, which is fascinating because, you know, it's the most complicated, it's the most expensive, but it also has the biggest headroom and can be infinitely expanded, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, all right. And I am somehow on the wrong notes. That's. No, I'm not. Here we go. All right. And then this just happened as the show was starting. So I haven't. I've only barely been able to look at this, but. But the March Xbox Update is out. And very interestingly, if you go back and find the notes or the show where we talked about the last monthly update, you will probably notice there wasn't anything related to the console, per se. This one is almost all about the console and it's almost like they're like, we're back. We care about you. We really do. So there's some stuff, it's just for insiders right now, but will be rolling out broadly, probably in April, but changes to the dashboard, custom configurations, that quick resume settings thing we talked about where you can do it per game, which is the way it should have always been, et cetera, et cetera, dynamic backgrounds. And so they're starting with a couple of games that I think are all within the Microsoft Games family of studios, but Crimson Desert, Sea of Thieves and Tower Born have like, dynamic background. So it's, you know, like the Vista Ultimate Extra thing. What was the thing called? The background thing that would actually. It was like a video. It would like kind of move like. It wasn't a picture of rain, it was raining. You know, like an animation of the rain.
- [92:33]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [92:34]
Paul Thurat
That kind of a thing. They're adding some stuff for the handheld compatibility program, so they're going to better visually identify those games which have been optimized for handhelds, but also have added actually those three games. Interestingly, the three games I just mentioned with the dynamic backgrounds are the three games that have just been optimized for gaming. Handhelds, meaning right now, Xbox Rog, Ally. But soon, many, many others. There are now over 1500 games that support Xbox Play Anywhere. And Play Anywhere today is basically Xbox console. Sorry, PC and console, but also the handhelds. Right. Which are PCs. Yes, but the idea here is that it's optimized. It doesn't just work like it actually is optimized for each of those platforms, which is great. That's a lot of games. And they also added games to that stream your own game program. So this is the one where you have a game collection in Xbox Cloud gaming. Sorry, you have a game collection in the cloud. I should just say, if you have an Xbox game pass, Ultimate Premium or Essential subscription, you can now stream over the cloud from a library of over 1000 games that you own already. Right. So if you own the game, you bought it at one point, you don't have to install it on a device. You can just stream it. Right. And this month they added. I can't. I don't know. 20 games, it looks like, including some recent ones, like Marathon, the new version of Marathon that came out. Resident Evil 7, biohazard, which is two games ago, but, you know, still a modern game. Let's see if anything else stands out here. No, those are the big ones, but. And then there's more, actually. Resident Evil is coming soon. Sorry. Yeah, Several games are coming soon, including Super Meat Boy 3D. I didn't even. Is that the original. Is that the regular Meat Boy, or is that new. New issue. It is super and it's 3D. They're also. This is scary, almost. I know. It's weird.
- [94:32]
Leo Laporte
Is he made of meat or does he throw meat? Or is meat.
- [94:35]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, he's made of meat.
- [94:37]
Leo Laporte
I guess we're all made of meat.
- [94:38]
Paul Thurat
It's a fun little platformer. It's. It's cool. I. It's been a while since.
- [94:41]
Leo Laporte
By the way, one of my. I can't remember what the science fiction story was where the aliens bleeds blood.
- [94:48]
Paul Thurat
Like, I think it bleeds. We're meat.
- [94:50]
Leo Laporte
And we. We. We're sentient meat.
- [94:52]
Paul Thurat
They can't.
- [94:53]
Leo Laporte
Kind of. They can't figure it out. It's like, yeah, they're made of meat.
- [94:57]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. Someday we're gonna. We're gonna puzzle an alien, you know, civilization that discovers it. Like, they're made of meat. Like Soylent Green.
- [95:07]
Leo Laporte
Sentient meat. Yeah. Meat Boy. He's sentient. Meat.
- [95:13]
Paul Thurat
It's made of meat. Oh. And then so as they bring games to Xbox cloud gaming, Right. Which is the streaming service, those games to date have been running basically on an Xbox Series X. And they're optimized for a console. So if you stream it to a phone or a tablet, this is a smaller screen. You're using touch controls unless you add a controller. And so they've been adding more touch controls across these games when they're played in this fashion, which is great. I think this requires the developer to say, okay, I don't think they can just do that, but I could be wrong about that. But they also support wired USB, mice and keyboards. So you can kind of go in the opposite direction if you want to. Like, you go to like a PC, I guess, you're streaming it. And if you have a PC and a mouse, you can use that with the Xbox game. Right. So they're, they're doing that obviously. Well, maybe not obviously, but it would be nice if they just added Xbox game compatibility. That's the one I'm really looking for tomorrow as we record this. It's Wednesday, March 25th, but tomorrow on the 26th, they're having another virtual event, they being Xbox and this is a partner preview event. It's going to be Sega and some other third party developers. They're going to show off new games from these studios. There's enough. There's updates to existing games like soccer 2 hearted Chernobyl is getting a big update and we'll see what that entails. But that will be tomorrow. And it seems like they're starting to do these pretty regularly now. Right. Which I think is great because the ongoing press on Xbox is like nothing ever happens. That's not bad. And you know, they're talking about new games and stuff, so it's interesting. Yeah. Two months ago. So since the last one. And then in the bad news department, sort of, I guess, you know, obviously the gaming industry has been kind of a tough space for the past couple of years. There have been these success stories though, like the Switch 2, which was the fastest console, like fastest selling console in history when it first came out. Their fiscal year ends next week and their expectation was that they would sell at least 19 million units. They will do that. It will be somewhere in the 19 to 20 million that's cumulative since the launch last.
- [97:27]
Leo Laporte
That seems like a lot.
- [97:29]
Paul Thurat
It is a lot.
- [97:29]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [97:30]
Paul Thurat
It's way faster than the original Switch. But the question with the Switch has always been, well, the Switch 2 rather is like, okay, Yes. I mean there's pent up demand. Of course it's going to do good in the beginning, but I don't think anyone expects it to ever surpass the original switch as far as total sales over lifetime. Right. It's more expensive. It's, you know, it's, it's just never going to get there.
- [97:51]
Richard Campbell
It's a higher end device.
- [97:53]
Paul Thurat
But they've already cut production, which is a little scary because this thing has been out less than a year and you would think that you would never hear a story like this in the first. I'll call it nine months. Ish. But in the current quarter and then heading into April, they're actually cutting back on production. Part of it might be tied. Of course, the price increases that were
- [98:16]
Richard Campbell
triggered by, I mean it's just part supply.
- [98:20]
Paul Thurat
Yep.
- [98:21]
Leo Laporte
So what? It was already expensive. What were they selling initially?
- [98:25]
Paul Thurat
So I don't remember this. After they announced it, they raised prices kind of across the board, including all, most of the peripherals as well. But the problem for the console itself is ram. Right. It's not just components broadly, but actually like the system itself. It's like a big part of the cost is the, you know, the ram. Like that stuff's gone up, I always want to say exponentially. It's gone up 2 to 3x or whatever the number is. But that impacts the profitability of this thing. And at some point you price it high enough where people are like, yeah, I'm just going to stick with the thing I have.
- [98:58]
Leo Laporte
It's funny because I tried to get one but I couldn't. You can buy it and get it.
- [99:05]
Paul Thurat
I was going to say, but you can get it today if you don't mind paying for it.
- [99:08]
Leo Laporte
Well, it's $450.
- [99:11]
Richard Campbell
I, I don't still. That was the, I thought that was the intro pricing.
- [99:15]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, maybe the same.
- [99:17]
Paul Thurat
Okay. I mean that's 50. That's great. I mean that, you know, look, if the Steam, if somehow Steam or Valve or whatever announced, okay, we're going to sell this Steam. What's the Steam computer called? The Steam.
- [99:29]
Leo Laporte
Steam Machine.
- [99:29]
Paul Thurat
Steam Machine. It's going to be 999. People would be like, yikes. You know, I think people would not be surprised by that. But 450 for a switch to. If you look at Xbox, PlayStation prices.
- [99:45]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [99:46]
Richard Campbell
I don't know. I don't know that you could actually get one for 450 right now.
- [99:49]
Leo Laporte
Okay.
- [99:50]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I don't actually know I'd be really interested in. You know, just start like just looking on, looking on Amazon. There's no listed prices. It's all, you know, oh, that's Canada, baby.
- [100:00]
Leo Laporte
It's in the us. It says available tomorrow.
- [100:03]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, I could get it delivered tomorrow, but I'm not in the U.S. let's see what that looks like.
- [100:09]
Leo Laporte
And how much will the. What is it? How much will that cost?
- [100:17]
Paul Thurat
So it's about 10,200 pesos.
- [100:21]
Richard Campbell
So that's 500 and best buy us.
- [100:24]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So they didn't raise the price or did they? I don't know. It seems like that was the price.
- [100:29]
Richard Campbell
No, that was the intro price for sure.
- [100:31]
Paul Thurat
So in Mexico, should I get one? $575.
- [100:33]
Leo Laporte
I guess this is the question everybody's asking.
- [100:35]
Richard Campbell
Beautiful. They are beautiful machines like this. Phenomenal on them.
- [100:39]
Leo Laporte
Is it.
- [100:40]
Richard Campbell
If you're used. If you're going to use it.
- [100:42]
Paul Thurat
I like the idea of a console that you could just take with you and then plug into your TV and use there, like a normal console, so to speak. But I would like to see more of the kind of Call of Duty, you know, that type of thing occur.
- [100:56]
Richard Campbell
I mean, I'm sorry. It's Nintendo, though. Yeah, No, I know, but I mean, you're playing Zelda. You're gonna like it.
- [101:03]
Leo Laporte
Don't they have Call of Duty? I thought they did. No, no.
- [101:06]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, they used to. Long time ago. I always remember Call of Duty three had. You could use the nunchuck thing to throw a grenade. You would actually flick the thing and it would throw a grenade. Because, you know, the reason I'm playing a video game is I want to.
- [101:20]
Leo Laporte
Kevin, do you have a switch, too? You seem like he. He seems like he'd be the natural switch to owner.
- [101:26]
Paul Thurat
I do not. Kevin, you're a child.
- [101:31]
Richard Campbell
I have too many games that are, like, from the past 10 years that I need to finish first.
- [101:38]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. So what do you play games on?
- [101:41]
Richard Campbell
I haven't played video games in the past, like, year and a half.
- [101:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you grew out of it. See, he's.
- [101:46]
Paul Thurat
Get off of my show. How dare you. I have priorities. I played a game as recently as five minutes before I got on the camera.
- [101:52]
Leo Laporte
I love gaming and I feel guilty when I play. There's. It's like, oh, no, I should be doing Claude or practicing the piano.
- [102:00]
Richard Campbell
So much work to do.
- [102:01]
Leo Laporte
There's so many things I should do.
- [102:03]
Paul Thurat
I think the same way, but I'm always like, there's so many people to kill. I'm not going to start a game
- [102:07]
Richard Campbell
if I don't have time. To finish it.
- [102:09]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [102:09]
Paul Thurat
Well. Right. So this. Right. This is the challenge. I kind of. I sort of. I don't know, a month ago or something. I. The reason I play Call of Duty is I can get in and out. So if I'm sitting there playing Call of Duty and Microsoft announces something important, I can be like, yep, I'm out. It doesn't matter. I don't have to remember where I am in the story and what two of the three things. I got to get to the next section. Whatever it is. Like, I don't have to worry about it.
- [102:30]
Leo Laporte
You know, there is no story. It's no kill.
- [102:33]
Paul Thurat
It's a simple story. Yes.
- [102:35]
Leo Laporte
The simple them or me be.
- [102:37]
Richard Campbell
Or be bagging.
- [102:39]
Leo Laporte
Yes. Bag will be bagged.
- [102:43]
Paul Thurat
How many people on my own team can kill me in one match? Let's find out.
- [102:50]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it would be fun to just kind of kick back and do something. Nothing for a minute.
- [102:57]
Paul Thurat
Yeah.
- [102:57]
Leo Laporte
Maybe I need a game like Call of Duty.
- [103:01]
Paul Thurat
I want to be super clear about this as a. As a Call of Duty expert. Nobody needs Call of Duty. Yeah.
- [103:06]
Leo Laporte
I thought you gave it up. What happened? You came to. You fell off the way.
- [103:10]
Paul Thurat
It's not as bad as it was before. Like, I actually do play the game. I've been playing the recent Resident Evil game and some other stuff.
- [103:16]
Leo Laporte
You can stop anytime. I know that.
- [103:18]
Paul Thurat
I have no comment on that.
- [103:24]
Leo Laporte
Finally, in our Xbox segment.
- [103:26]
Paul Thurat
Yes. Oh, yes, sorry. And sadly, more bad news. So Epic Games, which makes Fortnite, which, by the way, is just about to release it worldwide on mobile again. It's in some places obviously already, but it's just about to happen. Announced they're going to lay off 1,000 employees. They said that engagement in Fortnite has gone down. Fortnite. That's weird timing because Meta announced and then said, yeah, we're just kidding. Sort of. That they were kind of not doing the metaverse thing anymore, or at least as strongly as they were before. But you could have made a case, and you still could, that the strongest metaverse, such as it is, might be Fortnite, that this might point to a future where this kind of virtual world makes sense. Neal Stephenson imagined whatever virtual world essentially. Snow crash. Yep. But yeah, these. The challenges that they face are the same that I think a lot of the industry is facing. He did he being a CEO. Tim Sweeney said, look, this has nothing to do with AI. It's that we're not going to try to blame that. Which credit to him for that. But his little announcement, I feel, was pretty Honest. He said, look, Fortnite is one of the most successful games in the world. It is. We talked about the report from last year and Fortnite is at the top of so many lists, it's crazy, so many years later, how big it is and how restricted it's been on mobile. Right. But he says, we haven't really delivered consistent magic with every season, which is how they do things now in video games, which I hate. He's like, we're still in the early stages of returning to mobile. We'll still have to optimize it for all the smartphones out of the world, et cetera, et cetera. So I think this thing still has legs and obviously they have to do more. But he did bring up. I don't see it in this version of the story, but the thing I read was he was saying, look, we've had these challenges in the past, right? And so when the world went like 2D to 3D, they created the Unreal engine and Unreal the game and then Unreal Tournament, the series of games, right? And they did the Fortnite thing, Right. And so Fortnite. It's weird to think of this, but at the time, Fortnite was going to be a. Originally was designed to be one of those kind of creation type games, like almost like a faster moving, more violent version of Minecraft. Right. But then pubg happened and this notion of like Battle Royale type games and they kind of pivoted and Fortnite to me, still is weird. It's like kind of a weird hybrid of it's Battle Royale, but. Yeah, but you also build, you know, you can build.
- [106:07]
Richard Campbell
Cool.
- [106:08]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's.
- [106:09]
Leo Laporte
I love that.
- [106:10]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. See, I see you like it because you like to think and I, I hate it because I'm like, what are you doing? I just want to think like, he's. What's he building? I have to shoot what thing he's building. What is this? I'm an idiot.
- [106:22]
Leo Laporte
But, you know, you know, whatever my mind.
- [106:24]
Paul Thurat
But the fact remains that there are
- [106:26]
Leo Laporte
a thousand people they can lay off that work on Fortnite. What are they doing?
- [106:32]
Paul Thurat
Well, so, right, so you create a game called Fortnite, but then you have to improve the game.
- [106:36]
Leo Laporte
Are they all artists?
- [106:37]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, I think I bet what they were doing. So this all. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff, right? So there's each season because Call of Duty is going to have a new season on.
- [106:45]
Leo Laporte
So, yeah, you have a team working on the next season.
- [106:47]
Paul Thurat
There's new. There's level. Well, not in Fortnite so much, but level and weapons and other artifacts and things and game styles and whatever it might be. I mean, Fortnite has evolved because it's the Unreal Engine.
- [106:58]
Leo Laporte
So the engine's done. They're not.
- [107:00]
Paul Thurat
It's not that. Yeah, it's not that. Although, you know, they are going to
- [107:03]
Leo Laporte
go to Unreal 6. So.
- [107:04]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, I mean, there's evolution there too. But as far as the game goes, I mean, I will say, like, I didn't like this game in particular or really any battle royale game when they first came out. And that would include, you know, Call of Duty has their own version of this. Right. Like Warzone, because you were kind of one and done. So there's all this staging and you fly through the air, you drop through the air, you land on the island, you run around, you have to find guns and whatever else and then you get shot and you're like, great, now I have to wait 20 minutes. I hated that. And now it's not like that. So if you play Fortnite today, you get in and if you die early, whatever, you just enter a new match and it's more of the, the rapid repetition thing, which I think is what makes.
- [107:45]
Leo Laporte
Do you think people are. Is he saying fewer people are playing Fortnite now
- [107:52]
Richard Campbell
that they're implying.
- [107:56]
Paul Thurat
So he. I'd have to. I almost want to reread this now.
- [107:59]
Leo Laporte
Maybe, maybe they're not buying Fortnite in game.
- [108:02]
Paul Thurat
I think what's so stuff as much as. Yeah, that's the thing. So it's, it's an engagement. So there's a difference between slowing growth and then falling engagement, I guess. Right. So I don't know if it's just slowing like they must. They, they have. They're on some trajectory where by and large it's been going up. Has it actually gone down or is it just leveling off? You know, I don't know.
- [108:25]
Richard Campbell
It sounds like they're selling less swag stuff and that's impacting them, which, you
- [108:31]
Paul Thurat
know, for guys like us. Right, I know Richard's a PC gamer. Right. I mean, one of the things that is not appealing to this kind of game and by this kind of game, I mean a game that to me is fundamentally. Even though it's not really mobile in nature, which is the in game app purchase thing, the, the. The box you buy to get the stuff. The, the almost like you pay your way to success. What do you call it? You know, that kind of thing.
- [108:56]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Pay to win.
- [108:57]
Paul Thurat
I hate it.
- [108:58]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. The Fortnite stuff was never affecting your ability to play. It was just decorating.
- [109:02]
Paul Thurat
No, it was just. Yeah. Like maybe you want to look like Santa Claus or, you know, whatever the outfit is, you could pay it like 99 cents or some stupid thing. I don't know. Know, I. I just don't.
- [109:11]
Leo Laporte
You know, Neil Stevenson on Monday wrote a piece because he's, of course, the guy, according to the term Metaverse. Right. He calls it his prodigal brainchild.
- [109:23]
Paul Thurat
So this is his. This is Snow Crash was probably his third book or something, but it was the first one I read.
- [109:28]
Leo Laporte
Oh, so good.
- [109:29]
Paul Thurat
And it's still the best, Steve. Neil Stevenson. But. Well, other than in the beginning, there was the command line. But. But as far as his science fiction, whatever fiction writing, it's still.
- [109:38]
Leo Laporte
I love all of his stuff, everything he's written,
- [109:43]
Paul Thurat
but then they turned into these.
- [109:44]
Leo Laporte
Cycle.
- [109:45]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. Which is like 3,000 pages.
- [109:47]
Leo Laporte
NXM is great. Seven Eves is great. He's writing a new one, Palestine. The second book's just about to come out. That's fantastic. But I'm a fan anyway.
- [109:57]
Paul Thurat
But he did the. Corey, before you say what you're going to say, because I think I know what you're going to say, say he did to the Metaverse what Cory Doctorow did with insidification, which is. When you hear this term, you're like, oh, yeah.
- [110:10]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Nailed it. He says, though, the Metaverse is, quote, dead. But he says what's happening? The reason Meta is stepping back from it is, and this is his headline, people don't like wearing things on their faces. And moreover, don't trust people who do. Which is true. If you go around wearing Meta glasses,
- [110:30]
Paul Thurat
people are looking at the new glass holes. You know, like glasses. You don't know what. There was a guy caught in court last week, I think.
- [110:36]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [110:37]
Paul Thurat
Wearing smart glasses, getting information through his earpiece.
- [110:41]
Leo Laporte
But he's pointing out hundreds of millions of people use the no goggle metaverse. Roblox 380 million monthly active craft, 60 million. Fortnite. I didn't know. There's 650 million revolution registered players.
- [110:54]
Paul Thurat
Right.
- [110:55]
Leo Laporte
So he says the Metaverse is. Is doing very well. It's just not with goggles on your face. It's.
- [111:00]
Paul Thurat
Well, right, so. But in. In that book. And. And what was the earlier. God, I'm losing my mind. The earlier science fiction writer who.
- [111:09]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I know who you're talking about. William Gibson.
- [111:11]
Richard Campbell
Cyber.
- [111:12]
Paul Thurat
Cyberpunk guy.
- [111:13]
Leo Laporte
Exactly. He also had Jacking in, in Cyber Neuromancer.
- [111:17]
Paul Thurat
You know the idea that. Right. The idea there is that you're, you're not looking at a 2D screen, you're in a. You know, you feel like you're virtually in this.
- [111:27]
Leo Laporte
You have a, it's right into your cortex.
- [111:29]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, yeah. So the Matrix, literally. Yeah. So yes, those things are popular still, but they're, they're, they're essentially video games. Roblox is like its own economy. I don't know what's going on there, but yeah. So this company has 650 million active people actively playing this thing. And we have to lay off people. It's like, what? But I'm guessing they've stopped spending money. Right. Or they don't spend and it costs
- [111:54]
Richard Campbell
money to run that rig and you're not paying for it.
- [111:57]
Leo Laporte
Yep.
- [111:59]
Paul Thurat
I gotta drop. They're doing the right thing for these players, by the way.
- [112:02]
Leo Laporte
Okay, we're gonna let Richard go for a moment. I am going to tell you that this is Windows Weekly with Mr. Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. And furthermore, I'm going to tell you that this show, as you may have noticed, is essentially an ad free program. Congratulations. Would you like all your programming to be ad free? It could happen to you. It really could. All you have to do is join the club. Club Twit. And frankly, I think this is. I've always, you know, when we started twit back 20 years ago, I didn't want to do ads. I wanted it to be a listener supported network. That wasn't in the cards, not for the kind of growth we wanted to pursue. And, and you know, to this day we have 13 shows. We still have a lot of programming. We do, but increasingly I think it's possible thanks to Patreon and the generosity of our audience. People understand the Internet isn't free. That more and more people are saying, yeah, I'm willing to pay for stuff that I like, that I listen to, that I want. It's worth something to me. And I hope you're one of those people. That's why we created club twit. For 10 bucks a month, you get ad free versions of all 13 shows. You get special programming we do only for the club. You get access to the discord. You get special feeds just for club members. But mostly you get the feeling that you're supporting something you love, that you enjoy, that you want to have as part of your life. And I hope you feel that way. I know we all do. And we would love to keep doing it. So help us out, would you? Twit TV Club Twit. There's an annual plan, same price. You don't get a discount, but it is an annual plan. There's a two week free trial if you just want to see what it's like. There's corporate and family memberships too, which let you have more people at a discounted price. All of that is explained thoroughly, including videos by Micah Sargent on how to, how to use Club Twit, which you should watch because I know Discord especially can be a little confusing to people. You'll find that at Twitter TV Club Twit. You don't have to do discord if you don't want to. That's not required. You don't have to do anything. In fact, there are club members who still listen to the ad versions of the show. You don't have to do that. But you know, the idea really is you're, you're, you're voting, you're supporting, you're showing your support for what we're doing here and I hope you feel that way. I, I'd love to get you in the Club Twit TV Club Twit. Join the cool kids in the club. Now, ladies and gentlemen, Paul Thurat will kick off what we call the back of the book with his tip of the week.
- [114:42]
Paul Thurat
Before I do that, real quick, Nintendo just announced that starting in May and it will start with pre orders for Yoshi and the mysterious book. Nintendo Switch 2 games will cost less if you buy them digitally than if you buy. Right. Which actually makes sense. And while you were doing that adblock, I was sorry. I'm sure that will conclude quickly. I was looking through the previous three Nintendo earnings announcements because I know that Nintendo, like Sony will often, well, will always say X percentage of our games were digital. X percent were physical and I couldn't find it. So I apologize. I don't know what the number is, but digital sales are not as high as I would think at this time frame. So I don't remember what the.
- [115:31]
Leo Laporte
I'm surprised people want the little, that little chip that you stick in the thing.
- [115:35]
Paul Thurat
I guess people like to have the little pack, you know, the little thing or they can put the little.
- [115:37]
Leo Laporte
I don't have any of those. It's all I want everything digital.
- [115:40]
Paul Thurat
Like I, I don't understand it. But anyway, look, this makes sense and especially in this era of like these components cost more, right? Yeah. So it's actually better for them too. So it's better for everybody. I Think. But anyway, they have. They haven't said what the prices are going to be. Retail prices are set by their partners. I mean, there's obviously a manufacturer.
- [116:03]
Leo Laporte
Are they though? I think Nintendo.
- [116:05]
Paul Thurat
Yeah.
- [116:06]
Leo Laporte
That's the price.
- [116:06]
Paul Thurat
That's what they say. I mean, you know, I don't.
- [116:08]
Leo Laporte
And they're expensive. There's like the Mario kart was like 70 bucks. It was very expensive.
- [116:13]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [116:14]
Leo Laporte
Which is crazy. This is a game for kids. It was $80.
- [116:18]
Paul Thurat
Right.
- [116:19]
Leo Laporte
That's crazy.
- [116:20]
Paul Thurat
How much would you pay to stop a child from crying? You know, an infinite amount of money because we're betting on it.
- [116:26]
Richard Campbell
We're just not screaming. Yep.
- [116:29]
Leo Laporte
Just crying. Okay. But screaming. No.
- [116:33]
Paul Thurat
I told my neighbor, you know, they invented something called a pacifier. You should look into it. Anywho. Okay.
- [116:40]
Leo Laporte
So tip of the week, Mr.
- [116:41]
Paul Thurat
Thrust. After thinking this. Well, no, part of the reason I haven't done this before is just distribution. So I have my books that I publish myself through LeanPub, which is fantastic. 4 or 5 if you include the Eternal Spring book. I do with my wife. Current books I have at time done promotions where if you're a thorough premium customer, you get the book at the time for free and you have to sign in to LeanPub and then you get the updates through there. Whatever. But what I really want to do is just give these books away for free to anyone who paying for throughout premium and now that it's annual only so someone won't swoop in for like a month and grab all the books and leave or whatever. Plus, to get the latest version of the book, you have to download it from my site. So we figured out a way to do this directly through the site. So windows everywhere, the new One D and Shootify, Windows 11 and the Windows 10 and Windows 11 field guides are all there. So if you're a threat premium member, you. You get that now for free as part of your membership.
- [117:42]
Leo Laporte
Nice.
- [117:43]
Paul Thurat
I guess. There's an ad. So you said there were no ads. Okay.
- [117:46]
Leo Laporte
Oh, there's ads on your site? Yeah, I think I had to turn off.
- [117:50]
Paul Thurat
Not if you're a premium member.
- [117:52]
Leo Laporte
Well, I am, but I think I had to. I don't.
- [117:54]
Paul Thurat
We didn't sign in.
- [117:55]
Leo Laporte
I'm not logged in because when I do go in. What's happening here? When I do go in?
- [118:01]
Paul Thurat
I don't know.
- [118:02]
Leo Laporte
Something bad happens.
- [118:03]
Paul Thurat
Well, we also have a very cheap, like threat light thing. I think it's like seven bucks a year or something. It's just.
- [118:08]
Leo Laporte
That's nice. So you don't get the books for that.
- [118:10]
Paul Thurat
No, no, no.
- [118:11]
Leo Laporte
How much is the full. The full Thrott?
- [118:16]
Paul Thurat
I don't even know.
- [118:19]
Leo Laporte
The full.
- [118:19]
Paul Thurat
The full frontal throttle.
- [118:22]
Leo Laporte
How much is that?
- [118:23]
Paul Thurat
60 bucks? I don't even know. $60? Yeah.
- [118:25]
Leo Laporte
See here. No, it's working now. Here I am. I'm. I'm. I'm able to go into the premium stuff.
- [118:32]
Paul Thurat
Yeah. The big one I had to host on Google because, like, we were going to do it through the site, but I couldn't. We couldn't figure out it. Like, it's too big. Yeah, good. Figure out a way to make it work. But when you get that there from
- [118:42]
Leo Laporte
Google, you'll see why.
- [118:43]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, exactly.
- [118:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [118:45]
Paul Thurat
Okay. So there's.
- [118:46]
Leo Laporte
That is very generous. That's really good.
- [118:48]
Paul Thurat
Well, I mean, you're paying. I mean, I. You know, this is one way to get. And this is kind of the way I always wanted it because, like, when I did the D, I'm still not done with it. But when I did the Dnify Windows book, you know, I was publishing each chapter to the site as I did it. And so, like, that's, you know, it's like, what. It's sort of. It's not. It's not like a ePub or PDF download, but it's, you know, it's something. But it's like. It's the distribution that was the problem. So we kind of figured out how to work around that, so I think it makes sense.
- [119:17]
Leo Laporte
Anyway, nice job.
- [119:20]
Paul Thurat
Yesterday, two days ago, I don't remember, Firefox or Mozilla released Firefox 149. They had an announcement, I think, last week, about a bunch of new features coming across the next couple of versions and then later on into the year. And they're really working on the quality and making sure that this thing does what their users actually want. And this is a big update. So Split View, which we already have in Chromium browsers. Yes. But the ability to see two pages side by side on the web in a single tab is huge. Free VPN with 50 gigabytes of data, and then a Firefox Labs feature called Tab Notes, where you can have notes associated with the tab. So if you're doing research or whatever, and that will sync between your devices, so if you go back to that, open that site later, you'll be able to see your notes associated with that. So that's pretty cool. And then this is kind of random, but since we last talked, there have been several major browser releases. So Opera GX is On Linux now, full featured version, which is kind of amazing. Opera gx, I haven't written this up yet, but they have a sidebar in all the Opera browsers. This one now has Gemini integration built in. If you haven't looked at Vivaldi in a while, the new version desktop has something called Auto Hide mode and it literally, it's just full screen with no Chrome whatsoever. Although you could.
- [120:41]
Leo Laporte
That's good. I should look at that because it's actually awesome. That's what I want for the show.
- [120:45]
Paul Thurat
Yeah, right. You just see the actual page. It's really nice. You know, like you could sort of do this in full screen mode in other browsers, but this one, because it's Vivaldi, it's super configurable, meaning it's like I want Auto hide, so it's everything off except for whatever, the status bar or something or whatever. If you want one bit of UI on, you can do that, which is really cool. Opera for Android, they have the Opera AI which they're now partnering with third parties on, but it, they've added a reasoning AI mode, which is free, you know, with limits, so you can do the reasoning thing. And then Perplexity Comet, which is that AI browser that I think was originally trying to think where it was. I know it was on the Mac. Was it on Windows? I don't even remember. But it's on iPhone and iPad now as well. So if you're a Perplexity user and use those mobile devices, you can get that too. That's a bunch. It's like one week worth of like pretty major browser updates, right? It's good.
- [121:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, very nice.
- [121:45]
Richard Campbell
Strange.
- [121:46]
Leo Laporte
Strange.
- [121:47]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, strange just how you.
- [121:48]
Paul Thurat
It's unusual. I mean, I've never seen. I've never seen a week like that, you know.
- [121:54]
Leo Laporte
Well, I've never seen a week where we didn't have a run as radio. Mr. Richard Campbell.
- [122:01]
Richard Campbell
So far so good, right? I mean, somehow every 2000 shows. Yeah, every Wednesday since April 11, 2007.
- [122:10]
Leo Laporte
Yikes.
- [122:11]
Richard Campbell
So this week's my friend Nick Chalebois La Prade, who's French Canadian from Quebec, works for Microsoft though, and he's been working for years and years on a technology called desired state configuration. So back in the day, this was the tool I used if I had a web server farm, like six servers that all. They all have to be configured identically so they behave the same so that if you're floating between them balancing workloads, it doesn't get weird. But DSC has evolved. It sort of understands configuration settings for operating systems and things like that to the point now where Microsoft's actually pulled it into part of Azure. They call it the Unified Tenant configuration in Microsoft Graph, which sticks with the standard Microsoft naming strategy of meaning nothing at all. So what is this actually about? Well, you are configuring your system in you're responsible for a Microsoft 365 tenant. So you have rules in place like MFA is required and certain conditional access rules and where OneDrive instances should exist and how attachments should be handled and emails, a whole array of settings like that. And sometimes those settings can be overridden, sometimes things drift. They just literally change. And so so M365DSC is about setting all those configuration settings in place and then they're routinely monitored and adjusted if they have to change. This is especially important if you're managing a bunch of tenants. So maybe you're a contracted sysadmin who takes care of a bunch of M365 tenants all remotely because it's in the cloud anyway. So you can use this tool to actually maintain, keep track of the configuration and make sure it's correct and be able to apply necessary. So this is just DSC has been around for a lot of years, but applying to ED365 is relatively new. So the conversation was really digging into like how you do this and get involved in the preview version if it's a problem you're dealing with.
- [124:11]
Leo Laporte
Well now I think we have earned a little tipple.
- [124:18]
Richard Campbell
Yeah well I'm at the Microsoft the MVP conference so I'm being delivered bottles of whiskey like as we speak.
- [124:26]
Leo Laporte
Oh my God.
- [124:27]
Richard Campbell
So ye yeah those will come out over the next few weeks. But one of the whiskies I drank this so far this week. We're here at the Aloft Element which is right near the near campus. It has the best bar by far and they've been tweaking their stock and one of their top shelves this this time around though it's not especially expensive. Bourbon is the Redemption high Rye Bourbon.
- [124:52]
Leo Laporte
This is a pretty looking bottle.
- [124:54]
Richard Campbell
I good looking bottle and it is there's a bunch of variants on it and part of this story will explain why they've played with the bottle as much as they have. So this is a relatively recent entity. In 2010 a guy named Dave Schmeer and his partner Michael Kandar started making Redemption. Now they are not distillers, they don't own a distillery. These guys are brand guys. But they are plugged into the whiskey industry in the US and they came across the availability of some aged casks of whiskey from a company called MGP I. Now MGP stands for Midwest Grain Products and the I is ingredients, although it could also be incorporated, so forth. But the MGP I Now this company's been around for a long time. A guy named Cloud Kray Sr. Founded at 1941 in Atchison in Kansas. But all he was doing, he was a distiller. But they're just making neutral spirits starting in World War II. And as far as I know, that factory still does that. But along the way they acquired one of the old Seagrams distilleries, which was originally the Ross and Squib distillery, going all the way Back to like 1847 in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, which was acquired by Seagrams around, around Prohibition times and was scaled up as a very large distilling facility, Seagra being the Canadian entity, and we've talked about them before, who eventually got into all kinds of luxury goods and essentially bankrupted themselves. And then as the company was being dismantled, all of the liquor products ended up underneath Pernod Ricard. And then Pernod Ricard tried to rationalize all of this and sort of looked at the Lawrenceburg distiller, says we don't need this and plan to shut it down. But another group took it over. Then they had financial troubles and then MGP ended up acquiring it essentially at a fire sale. But at that time, MGP wasn't really. They were making alcohol, but they weren't making retail whiskey products at all. They do now. It's become a big business for them. And this factory is kind of legendary for producing a huge number of things. So they've taken over this somewhat broken down distillery. But it had been in so much trouble for so many years at that point there was huge numbers of aged barrels sitting in these warehouses because there had been no bottling going on. And so MGP was trying to unload some barrels. And this is where Schmear and Kandar sort of acquire a bunch of them. And they called their entity Bargetown Barrel Selections and started making different bottlings from the barrels they could get from MGP and hit it on this thing called Redemption Rye. You know, in an interview I read from David Shmear, he said there was maybe 5,000 cases a year of rye whiskey being sold when we started in 2010, and then within a year we were selling more than 20,000 ourselves. To the point where he got a bit of a financial crunch and ended up Selling the whole group off to the Deutsch Family and Wine and spirits group in 2015. And now Shmear has gone on to make a bunch of other whiskey brands because. Because he's not a distiller, he's a brander and a bottler. So he buys his whiskey where he can and then comes up with brands around it that people really like. And this has been a somewhat controversial practice because MGP largely doesn't make its own whiskey products. There's a couple like George Remus and Rossville Union, but they do bottling production and bottling for all kinds of whiskey. Angel's Envy Rye, Bullet Rye, George Dickel Rye Smooth, Iambler High West. They're all made at that MGP distillery in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. And there have been incidences of companies making whiskey and sort of implying that they're making it. This happened with Templeton Rye where they weren't clear about the fact that it was actually made in Indiana from this massive producer. And they got in trouble with the FEC over it, had to change labeling so forth and actually provided refunds to folks folks because you know, these giant factory distillers, they're considered like cheating in a way instead of, you know, everybody wants to believe that the whiskey they're making is, you know, this little distiller, these group of craftsmen are making that whiskey and that's all there is to it. And you know, some of those manufacturers that go on to become much larger and huge production and heck, we talked about Macallan the other day, just how huge that's become. Or even Jack Daniels, which, which you know, I, I have an appreciation of Jack Daniels that they have one facility in, in, in Tennessee that produces all of their whiskey out of one, you know, two pair, a pair of stills. But you know, mgp, the folks will buy from them and then do their own bottling, kind of conceal where they came from. And that's really quite a bad practice. And and to be clear, this is not what Redemption Rye is doing. If you read their bottle, it's pretty clear that it's made that of the way they're going about it. And they, they play with language a little bit there about it's an American made spirit, so forth. And all of that is true do. It's just not a dedicated still to making that product. That being said, it's a cool bourbon because it qualifies bourbon because it's 60% corn on the mash bill and then 36% rye, which would be very, very high by most standards, then 4% barley, because that gives you your amylase, the sort of traditional mash bill. And then they age in new chard oak. It's bourbon. It's made just like bourbon anywhere else. It's just that its rye content is quite high. And yet having had some and I couldn't bring any in here, but I've happily been having it at the bar all week. It is not got that big spice note. It's a very light, smooth drinking bourbon that's been enjoyable in a part of the night so far. And imagine going forward. So not hard to come by. $32 for a bottle. Not incredibly expensive for bourbon, but not the cheapest either. And a 46% ABV. It's funny that this is the bottle they call high rise, because they also have a bottle they call straight rye, which is 95% rye. This high rye is only 36%, but it's a high rye bourbon as opposed to actually a rye whiskey. But yeah, it's now just produced by the Deutsch family as a popular whiskey, all manufactured by that massive facility in Lawrenceburg, Indiana.
- [131:17]
Leo Laporte
I always think of bourbon as kind of smooth and sweet, but rye would make it a little bit more tangy.
- [131:24]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Traditionally we talk about you have corn, which is the sweet side, but not a lot of flavor. You have a little bit of barley because you need that amylase. So it's not really a flavor component, but it's just part of the chemistry. And then you have a flavor grain in between. And traditionally in bourbon, it would be rye, which adds that spice and character to it. And in some whiskies, it would be red winter wheat, for example, in Maker's Mark or in Blanton's. And so, yeah, we've always associated rye with the spiciness. That's not necessarily how it comes across. And I think part of it is that in these large, you know, the small distillers tend not to make rye because it gums up the works in pot stills.
- [132:03]
Leo Laporte
Oh.
- [132:03]
Richard Campbell
But these large producers who have the enzyme controls and so forth, they can handle rye. And so one of the things you notice about MGP is they make a lot, even angels Envy, who has their own distilling facility in Louisville, Kentucky, makes their rye at mgp. So they don't have to deal with the challenges of actually distilling rye. So they. They do that over there. Although when they're finished with. When the. When the production is finished at mgp, then Angels Envy brings it back to their facilities and Puts it into sherry cast to finish, which is the Angels Envy signature. Right. That they.
- [132:39]
Leo Laporte
I love Angels Envy. If I like Angels Envy. Would this be a good, good bourbon to try?
- [132:44]
Richard Campbell
No, this is. This one's nowhere near associated with Envy, but to just point out the fact that like MGP makes a lot of whiskey for a lot of places, although they often will do additional steps to it to finish it their way and do their own bottling.
- [132:55]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [132:55]
Richard Campbell
But I think the main thing is that MGP has built up the infrastructure to do large scale rye distillation because it is so challenging. So it's a profitable business for them. And many major producers and well known brands like, like Bullet and George Nickel and Angel Emy and so forth, leverage MGP's expertise to do their rise for them as rye has become more popular. You know, this Redemption's a funny little group because they were never a big facility. They were literally two guys, you know, a few staff doing the marketing, good labels, good bottles. Like, you notice right away how good that bottle is.
- [133:30]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it's beautiful.
- [133:31]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. You know, that was their business and what they were doing was repackaging some produced rye from MGP and, and turn it into a tidy, you know, success business, you know, so we always get into what. What is whiskey really about? Right. And I do love the craftsmanship and one could argue like the only crafting here was the crafting of that label and how they made the thing look because they were using this bulk produced rye.
- [133:55]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's all branding. I love the name too. Redemption and their logo choose Redemption Rise above and.
- [134:03]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, well, that's. They did all that play and I did all kinds of research on. Is this a family thing or anything? Nope, they fabricated the whole thing just making a brand.
- [134:12]
Leo Laporte
So this guy, Ellen Kennedy, Master blender, it's just, it's not.
- [134:16]
Richard Campbell
Well, and that's. He's so he's going through the barrels that he's getting from MGP and getting to a flavor profile to assemble an addition. But that is so. Yes, everyone does that. That is a normal thing to do.
- [134:27]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [134:28]
Richard Campbell
But when you talk about like a single maltness or this terror or. That's not really the issue here. MGP sits in the middle of Indiana corn country because they got access to all the materials, all the corn scale. Yeah, yeah. And you can pretty much order to specification, like what do you want and how many casts do you want? Like that. And then off you go. Is it cheating? You know, in the end, they're still making a brand, selecting a recipe, getting it produced at scale consistently and making a product they say people seem to like for a reasonable price. It's not what I look for in craftsmanship whiskey. But I'm telling you, I keep drinking this stuff like it goes down just fine.
- [135:12]
Leo Laporte
They also have a weeded bourbon and a cognac cask finish. Yeah.
- [135:17]
Richard Campbell
So you know, they're playing around, they trying some things on. And as like I said, the original guys have moved on now. In fact, Shmer has got a whole other set of brands that he's been involved in and he's still visible in the industry, but as a guy who isn't bound to a distillery, but rather finds sources for whiskey, finds a flavor profile that he really likes with a blender and then does a production.
- [135:40]
Leo Laporte
There's nothing else I've learned from these segments. It's that there's a lot of flim flam and chicanery going on in the business.
- [135:48]
Richard Campbell
There are a lot of different ways to make a beverage that people like.
- [135:52]
Paul Thurat
Yeah.
- [135:53]
Leo Laporte
And you shouldn't probably pay that much attention to it. I mean, Lisa loves her blanco tequila. I know what you've told us now about that, but doesn't spoil her appreciation of a nice margaritas.
- [136:06]
Richard Campbell
So people ask me all the time, what's my favorite whiskey? It's like it's the one in front of me. Like I've done too many now to think ideologically about any of this. And now you, after my experience of McAllen drinking from a ten thousand dollar bottle of whiskey. Like, it's very good, but it's not something I want every day.
- [136:24]
Leo Laporte
Not every day.
- [136:25]
Richard Campbell
So I've done this spectrum. I tried them all and it's, I got. There's stuff I like, stuff I don't, I don't like liars. And these guys aren't lying. Like they're telling the story.
- [136:34]
Leo Laporte
We know the story. It's marketing. It's a, it's a story. Yeah.
- [136:38]
Richard Campbell
It's a pitch and it's a reason and it's a real product. Like this is not water colored water with ethanol in it or anything.
- [136:44]
Leo Laporte
It's actually, I mean, this man once said, I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
- [136:51]
Richard Campbell
It's true.
- [136:52]
Paul Thurat
It's a low bar, but yeah. Okay.
- [136:57]
Leo Laporte
Thank you. Richard Campbell. Of course. Richard's run his radio is@runnersradio.com net Rock's 2000th episode will be coming out any minute now, right?
- [137:06]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. End of April.
- [137:08]
Leo Laporte
End of April. Also at dot net rocks I'm sorry. Runnersradio.com and he joins us every week from wherever he is in the world.
- [137:17]
Paul Thurat
This week, where in the world is Richard Campbell?
- [137:21]
Richard Campbell
I'll be back home next week, but the week after that I think I'll be in New Zealand.
- [137:25]
Leo Laporte
1. So nice. The, the annual summer trip.
- [137:30]
Paul Thurat
Yeah.
- [137:31]
Leo Laporte
Paul Thurat is of course@thorat.com the premium membership gets you even more, which is great, but you don't have to be a premium member to read all the goodness in there. There's lots of good content. It's a great way to keep up on what's going on. His books, if you want to just get the books by themselves, are@leanpub.com and, but you know, become a premium member and then you get the books for free. I think that seems like, like the best, the best deal of all. Windows everywhere, the Field guide to Windows 11 and of course, his latest DNC windows. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard.
- [138:05]
Paul Thurat
Thank you.
- [138:05]
Leo Laporte
Have a wonderful week and we'll see you right back here next Wednesday on Windows Weekly. Bye, all you winners and dozers. Bye, you club members. Thanks. Take care. Hi there. Leo Laporte here. I just wanted to to let you know about some of the other shows we do on this network you probably already know about. This Week on Tech. Every Sunday, I bring together some of the top journalists in the tech field to talk about the tech stories. It's a wonderful chance for you to keep up on what's going on with tech, plus be entertained by some very bright and fun minds. I hope you'll tune in every Sunday for this Week in Tech. Just go to your favorite podcast client and subscribe. Subscribe this Week in tech from the TWiT network. Thank you.