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WW 984: For Entertainment Purposes Only - Price Shock With Surface Laptops?!
02:44:28
Price Shock With Surface Laptops?!
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- [00:00]
A
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul's here, Richard's here. We've got things to talk about. Winheck is back for the first time in eight years. Paul talks about his experience vibe coding a program yesterday and what he thought of the Google I O keynote. That and a lot more coming up next on Windows Weekly. This episode is brought to you by Outsystems, a leading agentix systems platform built for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are building, orchestrating and governing agentic systems on the Outsystems platform with good reason. Architect, deliver and scale governed agentic systems with agility and trust using one open and unified platform power secure company wide agentic orchestration for core business operations. Teams of any size and technical depth can use Outsystems to build, deploy and manage AI apps and agents quickly and cost effectively without compromising reliability and security. With Outsystems, you can rapidly launch ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading agentix systems platform that's unified, agile and enterprise proven, allowing you to accelerate growth, reduce operational friction and deliver real Enterprise impact with AI OutSystems build your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com TWIT that's outsystems.com TWIT podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWIT. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 984 recorded Wednesday, May 20, 2026. For entertainment purposes only, it's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Microsoft. And ladies and gentlemen, winners and dozers alike, here they are, your champions of
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B
Microsoft journalistic fortitude, boy, your hugadores day, Microsoft.
- [02:06]
A
You know what? I'm going to adjust a little bit because you guys are a little lower than me. There we go.
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B
Yeah, right. I don't know why.
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A
No, don't do that.
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B
I'm slouching.
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C
There you go.
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B
Oh, the ball's deflating.
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C
That would have been done.
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B
Okay.
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A
Okay, I think we're good.
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B
Head height.
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A
You're kind of in the middle there. Paul, you might want to sit up. Just sit up.
- [02:31]
B
I don't know what I can do.
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A
You know, you have big hair. It should reach the top of the screen. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce to you our dear friends and Compadres in arms, Mr. Paul Tharat of tharat.com.
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B
hello.
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C
Hello.
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A
Paulie T. And little richie c of runasradio.com.
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C
there I am.
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B
Happy days reference.
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A
Yeah. Richie Cunningham. Hello there, boys.
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B
I found my thrill.
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A
You came back to Pennsylvania.
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C
He's in Penn.
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A
That's such good news.
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B
You know what the worst part about coming back is? I have to go through Newark
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C
Fair.
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A
I hope America welcome you back with open arms. That the CBP folks said. Paul, we. We've been missing you. Welcome back. Can we see your Twitter account?
- [03:20]
B
Yep. The only part of our government that's functioning correctly right now is the whole TSA Global entry thing.
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A
Oh, you've got.
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B
Oh, my God. Right? It was, like, right through. Yep.
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A
All you have to do is show them your eyeballs and you're.
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B
I spent more time waiting for an Uber than I did getting from the plane to the Uber.
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A
Isn't that great?
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C
Yeah. As it should be.
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B
Yeah. Yep.
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A
Well, on behalf of Newark, I welcome you home.
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B
Screw yourself, buddy.
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A
Get out of here.
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C
What's that spell?
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A
And, Richard, you're in B.C.
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C
nope, I'm in the Netherlands. Ah.
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A
You were in Antwerp last week. So you've just crossed over.
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B
That's right. You're on the way to Berlin, right?
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C
I already did Berlin. Yeah, I went up. I went up to Alkar for the weekend, and then I popped over to Berlin, did the show there, and then came. I took the train this morning. The fast train from Berlin.
- [04:12]
B
Yeah, that's us. The big yellow train or whatever. Yeah.
- [04:15]
C
Yep. Boogie. 200 kilometers an hour.
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B
Wow.
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C
Yeah.
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A
How fun is that?
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C
I'm back ensconced in my friend's home. The guy who owns his own whiskey shops and needs to say, this week's whiskey is amazing.
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A
Amazing.
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C
And it's always good to be. You know, this is my home, too. I get very comfortable here.
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A
We put the whiskey segment at the end of the show so that you don't have to listen unless you want to. And I'm making sure Paul says nothing of value after it, so there's no reason to stay tuned if you don't want it.
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B
I mean, that's a pretty good chance.
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A
All the complaints. Actually, there are zero complaints about the length of any of our shows.
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C
Right.
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B
Well, except for me, you know, except for our hosts.
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A
The hosts are constantly.
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B
For the host, this is a living hell. But, you know, whatever.
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A
I wanted to listen to Lex Friedman's latest podcast with David Hennemeyer Hansen of the Ruby on Rails guy, till I saw that it was six hours long.
- [05:07]
B
Oh, yeah. And the way that guy talks, it's going to feel like 12 hours long.
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A
Yeah, he's a slow talker.
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B
Yeah. I don't like. I don't know what his deal is.
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C
Definitely run that one at two times.
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A
Maybe that's the theory is that. Well, you're really only going to listen for three hours.
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B
I don't know. Yeah, they bury something important.
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A
I know. I'm just going to say I no longer feel at the least bit guilty about the length of our shows which are really pretty, you know, concise compared.
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B
That's the word I always use.
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A
Concise. The concise Windows Weekly. Let's talk. I don't know, I'm thinking Windows.
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B
Yeah, I got a lot of stuff.
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A
Oh well, forget concision folks. You're going to get concision detail.
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B
We live in interesting times. So Microsoft seems to be getting back on a normal. Normal. I almost put that in air quotes. But an actual normal release schedule for Windows. So sometime in the past, I don't know, it was Friday, I don't remember what day it was because I just traveled and I'm out of my mind. But there is a series of Release Preview channel updates in the Windows Insider program, including what I think is the first 26H1 build to make it into Release Preview. And I know, I think last week it came up that 26H1 which is on all these new Snapdragon X2 laptops is like a month behind the rest of the planet from a Windows Update perspective. And so the 26H1 release preview update is like last month's patch Tuesday and is a preview of the next patch Tuesday which will be the second June and second sorry Tuesday in June. June Pat. Yes. And it's not. There's nothing new here. You know we talk about all this stuff a lot but to me it's interesting they're finally doing this so shared audio from over Bluetooth if it's supported MPU usage which is already in Task Manager but I think I'm more expended view of that multi app camera support if your camera does support that and some magnifier improvements et cetera so whatever anyway that's happening of more note however was a set of updates that went out before that across the new channels like experimental and the new beta I believe which is our first look at the new taskbar features they were talking about as part of that pain point thing and this is a weird Paul problem I guess I'm going to call this but I came from a small apartment in Mexico City where I have 10ish computers to this place where I have 40ish computers and man I spent a long time trying to get this update on something the computers I'm actively using right now for the most part Are these new Snapdragon X2 computers and I can't get. Well, I could but I'm not going to screw around with one of those. And then as we'll discuss later in the show, I.
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C
You've been gone for five months. Like every single one of those machines needed an update, maybe three or four.
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B
Right. So.
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C
And they were just start plugging them in. Not even the new ones.
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B
I did have two computers and boxes waiting for me and then I brought I don't know, four home, I think. I don't remember. But yeah, I mean they're all over the place. So I, I think between Google I O which all the AI going on there, which we will talk about a little bit, I think took down the west coast. Me bringing up all those computers at the same time and updating them brought down the east coast. And I'm still not done but I finally got one. I have to do some hands on Windows stuff tomorrow and I'm pretty excited. I finally got it. It's a good computer too, so it'll be good for the show. But finally got that installed. So. No, this is. No, no, the Asus talks secret.
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A
It's okay.
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B
No, no, no, it's not. It's just. No, it's just a standard X64. It's a X64 computer is a pretty good GPU. So it's a good computer to do like screen recording on. It's like a Ryzen AI7 something something. I don't know. Anyway, so yeah, so everyone, you know, it's a lot of. It's big news, I guess that you can move the taskbar around again, you know, like I don't think anyone does that. I mean, I don't mean literally anyone. I don't want to hear from all seven of you. But to me, the bigger deal that's in here and it is in here is the ability to make the taskbar small again, which is something we lost, I guess from Windows 10. I don't even remember it was in 10, but I get it probably was. It's been a while but you know, certainly before then because the default Windows 11 taskbar is actually pretty tall. You know, it's big, it takes up a lot of space. So one of the things I spent a bunch of, I probably spent over a year doing this is just like hiding the taskbar. And then I had to put some little clock app that appeared over everything up in the corner because I couldn't see the time anymore because the taskbar was gone. And I Found out that I actually look at the time a lot, you know. So anyway, having that be like a little skinny thing is awesome. And I used. One of the other things I tried was if you install Starduck Start 11, one of the many options in there is you can have a small taskbar. So I was using that too. But now it's going to be built into. Into Windows, you know, directly Windows 11. So that's. That's great. You know, there's no new Start menu stuff. Right. So they're going to be changing that too. You're going to be able to resize it and do different things there. That's not part of this. But, um. But if you like your world upside down, you can put your task for the top of the screen. So that's fun. Nom. No, no, no, no. And I guess that one also came to Canary later in a separate update or whatever. A couple of days or a day later, but who cares? Okay. And then I just put this in sort of in certification remedy section because I wasn't sure what else to call this. But they all these things all. And actually that last thing kind of address that notion that, you know, window exactly what people want and Microsoft is finally paying attention and they're doing things right. And so the first one on this list is Microsoft just held its first winheck since 2018.
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C
Such a flashback name, man. Like I know. So when admittedly it was an online event.
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B
Well, no, they were somewhere. It was in. Not Shanghai, it was somewhere in the middle the Far East.
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A
Hardware.
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B
Yeah. So when this thing began, if you think about the natural progression of things back when Microsoft made sense, you would win hack would be the lead place where you'd find out about some future version Windows because they had to do the low level stuff first. So if there's going to be some hardware advance, like when they were doing TPM stuff maybe or you know, a graphics driven user interface or whatever it might be, you know, winheck would be the first place where they would talk about that stuff because that's where the driver developers would go, the hardware guys, etc. It became newsworthy enough that the press used to go all the time. So I've been to many Win Hex,
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C
although I not to be it was in Taipei. Wow.
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B
Type thing. There you go.
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C
Yeah,
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B
but. And then they would go from there and then they would have really like
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C
to have gone to that. You know, that would have been fun.
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B
Well, except I have to go there and it's like, yeah, no thanks I'd love to be there, but I don't want to.
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A
You know, you should go there while you still can. That's what I'm thinking.
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B
Oh, good point. That's true too. So anyway, back in the day, after that they would do a PDC and now a build. But you know, you now you're talking to application developers and they'd usually put a beta out and then whatever that was the progression. So they haven't done this a long time. They haven't done a win hex since 2018, like I said, and they just did one. So among the things that occurred there, they announced something called the window, I'm sorry, the driver quality initiative for Windows. And this is, you know, Microsoft basically kind of doing what they not taking it over like they did with printer drivers, but rather doing the work that this probably came out of. CrowdStrike where, you know, you have, in that case security vendors who are able to write kernel code and they can screw things up and did in that case, etc. And of course one of the problems with drivers is that there's a transition between kernel mode and user mode in many cases. And so what they want to do is kind of raise the quality bar there so that, you know, drivers won't crash your computer. Essentially. There's a, I mean, they added this in Windows me originally, but there's long been this notion of if something hardware related caused your computer to crash, you just installed a new driver, you could roll it back when you came back. But now what they want to do is constantly monitor this and get you the latest updates through Windows Update, obviously, et cetera, et cetera. So, so that's good. Yeah. I mean, again, I don't think this is something a lot of people were clamoring for, but it's hard to look at this and be like, okay, this is, this is nice. Microsoft also revealed through a support page, so they didn't reveal, but they, but in a support page they're going to allow users to remap the copilot key to write control, which if you think about it is sort of what it used to be before. So we used to have a control key to the right of the keyboard with a right alt. It turned into a right click menu key or whatever you call that the context menu key for quite a while and then it became a copilot key. And of course everyone hates the copilot key. And you know, Microsoft, blah, blah, blah, you know, they try different things, they don't really want to change it. They kind of forced the entire industry to adopt this. You see this in all kinds of new computers. When they originally announced this, I thought it was going to be a something you only saw on copilot plus PCs. But no, it's on pretty much all computers now. Yay. And after a lot of complaining, they put a control in into Settings where you can change it away from Copilot, but only have it go to Search or some custom app. And what I wanted to do is nothing. You know, I don't want to gouge it out with a knife like I'm Steve Jobs taking the Apple logo out of his Mac when he went to Next. But I hate this key so much. And I've been using the PowerToys Utility Keyboard Manager to remap it. I usually map it to the right arrow, I'm sorry, the left arrow key, whatever is to the right of it on that keyboard. Actually, this keyboard, that's not even close. This keyboard has all kinds of additional things going on. But a traditional laptop keyboard, typically that
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C
would be the next one right beside my left arrow key on my search.
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B
Yeah, because I'm like, you know, I type like an ape, so I'm gonna, I'm making mistakes and that's probably what I meant to hit.
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C
But yeah, when I'm rolling my face on my keyboard, I generally want the
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B
keys or my cat walks across it, whatever it might be. Since they announced this or said this, I've been sort of, look, I've been on a couple of computers remapping it to write control just to see if that makes any difference or does anything.
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C
But the goal for me is key. That does nothing.
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B
Yeah, right, exactly. I'm typing, like I said, like an ape. And I just want to keep going and whatever.
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C
Just don't interrupt me. Don't flip up a dialogue, don't, don't. Just don't.
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B
Right. So this is my, my goal in life is not to just write articles that rip on other human beings. Like, I really am not into that. And, you know, there was a thing that came, came up recently I would have talked about on the show. There was a. An article on, you know, PC Mag or PC Computing, whatever. It was some former magazine guy who's been around for a long, long time. Neil Ruben King, who I like and respect. I'm not trying to criticize him, but, you know, he basically said, you can't trust what's built into Windows. You need like a third party antivirus. And we talked about this. I was like, yeah, no, you don't yeah. And I went through the whole thing that he wrote and looking for some, like, kernel of justification where I could say, okay, he's making a point here, and I didn't find it. And, you know, you can't write something like this without, you know, you got to mention who it was and whatever. And I'm like, I, you know, I hate it. I just wanted to be really clear up front. Like, I'm not disrespecting this person. I just disagree with this opinion, you know, whatever. So that kind of came and went, and I thought, well, okay, good. You know, be like another year, you know, or something, before I have to deal with that kind of thing again. Then I go on YouTube and I watch this video from this. Like, I've been watching a lot of Linux content lately because I'm doing that Switcher series. And there's this guy who most. He's a privacy expert, I guess, or a privacy nut, at least. But he does a lot of Linux videos. And I respect his opinion. I like his content. I guess he's kind of a weird guy. But of course he is. I just described what he is. And, you know, those people are what you think they are and then come out of nowhere. Yep. So, of course, because I'm watching his videos, YouTube recommends a video to me that he made about Windows. And just, like, the antivirus, when I'm like, yeah, don't do it, don't read it, don't watch it.
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C
Why would you. What do you.
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B
And it kept coming up and I'm like, okay, I don't value my own time. I'm going to do this. And then I, yeah, the only way
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C
to get it off the roster is to actually watch it.
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B
So people listening to this podcast pray. This experience with me, which is meaning I'm in this case, listening to this guy, and I'm like, no, no, no, God damn it, no. And then I'm like, all right, so I have to deal with this now.
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C
Now I must respond.
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B
But I decided in this case just not to go through his thing point by point. I just kind of. He's conflating privacy and security, which, you know, obviously they're interrelated. But my central argument here, and this is very general, is that if you care about your privacy, you need to properly secure that thing first. In this case, a computer, that. That will go a long way to protecting your privacy. Now, obviously, if you're using Windows, you have other concerns because there's telemetry and other things you may not like. Etc. There's tracking going on where they're, you know, going to serve you ads because of that, yada, yada yada. So there's additional things. Absolutely. I, you know, that's, that's true but I, I went through this and I was like, oh, try not to do this, try not to do this. And so I, I wrote an article just without going into every little point he made, you know, the Internet privacy guy, just about, you know, how this matters and whether it matters if you're going to stick with Windows or go to another platform, etc. Etc. But then, you know, because I can't help myself, I wrote a very long article about configuring Windows from the get go. Meaning you buy a new computer has Windows on it, you're not going to install Linux or something else, you are actually going to use it, but you
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C
know, you don't want to use the pre installed version of Windows.
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B
Yeah, but you, you don't want Microsoft in there as much as possible. In other words, you're not going to use OneDrive, you're not using Edge, you're not going to use Teams or whatever else is in there. You want to turn off the telemetry, you want to do all that stuff. You know, I just wrote a book about distance certifying Windows 11. And you know, because I feel like normal people are going to read this, you know, one of my bits of advice in there is, you know, just use a Microsoft account for all the right reasons, but then do the things to protect yourself as well. And in this case I was like, all right, look, these guys, when you, you go on a Linux, it's a local account, you sign into a Mac, it's a local account, you can sign into Windows with a local. Let's just do this from the get go. So there's, there's problems with this configuration, including such things as your disk does not get encrypted when you do that and you can encrypt it after the fact. And this was part of the thing where in his video I was like, nope, nope, no. And so I was like, I'm just going to write the one where it's like now this is right. And so if you're interested in that configuration, I've written a pretty long article about it and I have two computers here that I'm using this way. I didn't use anything like window bloat or tiny 11 build or anything like that. It's like I said stock Windows, but then do all the right things. I never used the Microsoft.
- [21:11]
C
All the configuration settings.
- [21:12]
B
Yeah. Winget for every app. I don't. And, and from the web, not from the store, no Microsoft account, no one drive, no Edge, no whatever. And you know, the thing is, I, I think for a lot of people, I, I watch videos where people freak out about, like, all the ads in Windows and all the times things pop up and everything. And look, I, I live this nightmare more than anybody. And it's not as dramatic as people are making it sound, but, but I get it. Right? And so in one of the little Zen of Linux things for me is that there, there is a certain. If you're used to Windows and you experiment with Linux, even you can kind of see like, oh, wait, this is my computer again. That's fun. You know, there is that kind of aspect to it and you can, you can actually kind of achieve that with Windows. So that was the, the point of this. So I'm, I'm doing that and we'll see how I'm going to keep doing it and we'll see how that goes. But it's, it's very long. And yeah, if that appeals to you, there it is. And then I think last week we talked about. Yeah, last week Microsoft was found to be loading every password you own into
- [22:17]
C
clear text as designed as on purpose.
- [22:22]
B
Which sounds crazy. It's like, why don't you punch yourself in the face? You're like, that was my design. Relax.
- [22:26]
C
Yeah,
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B
And I, you know, I, I probably compared it a little bit to the recall thing that came up recently. Only because Microsoft came back and said, actually this is by design, and in that case was not a security vulnerability. And I will say, look, one of the issues here is that you have to be signed in as a user to even access this information. But that's how virus, you know, malware works, right? I mean, and it will run in the context of your user account. So if you're an admin, which you are in Windows, you know this, that obviously is a problem. So I don't remember exactly how I phrased this last week, but I do know that my initial reaction to this was like, that doesn't sound smart because, you know, all of the browsers don't do this. You know, Google Chrome encrypts these things and decrypts as needed as you access each password, you don't load the whole thing into a plain text file or whatever. Anyway, Microsoft, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of worse than lazy. It Feels like an oversight. You know, I don't feel like there was a bunch of meetings where everyone discussed it and we're like, yeah, no, let's leave it as it is, you know. So I still feel very strongly that you should use the third party bastard manager and not use whatever nudge.
- [23:38]
C
But that's what we agreed on last week too. It's like, yeah, yeah.
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B
Which by the way, will encrypt stuff and decrypt on the fly. But Microsoft is going to fix this. So if you do use Edge and use it in the default configuration, you're probably not watching this podcast. But if you know anyone in your family or whatever who is doing this, just know that this will soon be safer than it is.
- [23:59]
C
Yeah.
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B
Today. So I guess that's good. I don't know.
- [24:03]
C
Fair enough. Safer.
- [24:06]
B
I don't.
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C
There is, there is.
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B
Don't recommend using Edge personally, but, you know, whatever.
- [24:11]
C
And then chance. They had a chance to make a great privacy, they just chose not to.
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B
Yeah. Right. So maybe as part of this pain point thing Microsoft is doing in Windows, there'll be some Edge work. Well, this is an example, right? I mean, we'll see. Well, while I was in Mexico, I got two Snapdragon X2 laptops from Lenovo, which I flew home with because I like to carry hardware back and forth and Asus offered the Zenbook A16. So this is the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip. Right. The.
- [24:46]
C
And the only one you've gotten.
- [24:47]
B
Right, I like that. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's the only one in the market. I could be wrong, but I think right now, one thing. We'll talk about this in the next section, but there appears to be like a, a supply issue with X2 chips.
- [25:02]
C
And I thought, I thought Asus had an exclusive like they. Oh, they could.
- [25:06]
B
I mean, yeah. So in the last gen, the Galaxy book, whatever from Samsung had the only. Not the one that was in the dev kit, but the next one down, I believe was the only laptop that ever shipped with that one chip. So maybe they're doing. I can't imagine they're going to relegate this chip to one computer. There are two tiers of the Extreme Elite. The notable thing there is that these things have the memory integrated into the SoC. The bandwidth on that RAM is dramatically faster. And I, I have this in the article somewhere because I looked this up. I was really curious about this. But for example, if you have a Snapdragon X1, you know, the original family, no matter which version, the bandwidth for RAM is 135Gbps, which I believe is roughly the same. Let's see if I can find it. I think that's roughly what like an M3 MacBook Air is, you know, so it's got like, I think all MacBook airs. That's the speed of the RAM.
- [26:04]
C
Yeah, I think that's. That's PCIe 2 times 8.
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B
Okay. So on the X2 family, other than the elite extreme, the normal elite and the plus chips all run, the memory bandwidth is 152 gigabits per second. So it's a small whatever. But the elite Extreme chips run at 228 gigabits per second.
- [26:27]
C
Okay.
- [26:27]
B
And that's a 50% improvement over the normal X2s. Right. So money compared to the Apple side. I had to go look this up. This is something I hadn't thought about too much ever in my life, I guess, even though I review these things all the time. But to get a Mac that has that RAM that's in the rough, you know, roughly the same category, you have to go up to a MacBook Pro, but then you also have to go to an M5 Pro chip. Right. And so the base MacBook Pro, the RAM is not as fast as it is on the X2, but if you get a Pro chip that's faster, it's 307 gigabits per second of bandwidth for RAM. And if you get the M5 Max, it's 460 or 614. Yikes.
- [27:08]
C
They start to understand why that machine is that expensive. Because it's a $7,000 machine.
- [27:14]
B
The cheapest MacBook Pro you can buy that would compete with this from this perspective, which granted is not how anyone buys a computer, is over $3,100. Yeah, double.
- [27:26]
C
But the max is almost twice that.
- [27:29]
B
Oh, it's probably three times that. Yeah, it's a lot more. I didn't even look it up. I don't even care. But no. So this computer is a 16. It's 16 inches. It doesn't have a numeric keyboard pad, which I love. It's so light. It feels like an engineering sample. I had my wife like pick up just two 16 inch laptop side by side, and I showed the first one normal. She's like, yep. And I'm like, now pick up this. And she's like, woo. And I was like, yeah. I'm like, it's like it's. It's like there's nothing inside it. Like it's that light. It's. It's crazy light, especially for the size. And look, I review a lot of laptops and I gotta tell you, they're gonna have a hard time getting this one back for me. I. This is this laptop.
- [28:08]
C
I think I might need one of those.
- [28:10]
B
It's awesome. Yeah, it's really, really good. So I mean I'll go through the whole process, but I'm using it for this. But it's. It's awesome. It's just awesome.
- [28:22]
C
It's nice to see. I mean, I have nothing bad to say about how brilliant Macs have been for the longest time because I thought it would just push the whole.
- [28:30]
B
No me. By the way, I would say me too. The exception being the os. Like I. I hate Mac OS so much. I mean I just hate it. And if I could deal and I do everything I can to make it work the more like I want it to and I just hate it.
- [28:46]
C
And the A16 has an HDMI port on the side of it, so.
- [28:49]
B
Yeah, it does.
- [28:50]
C
That's one less dongle I need to carry.
- [28:52]
B
Yeah, I think there's a. Yeah, there's like a normal USB port, then 2 thunderbolt 4/ USB for it ports is a head, you know, like a headphone jack thing which is becoming less and less common. Whatever. Yep, it's. Yeah, it's mostly pretty great.
- [29:09]
C
You know, eventually your Bluetooth earbuds run on a battery. Ask me how I know. Plug regular wired headphones in like an animal and let your headset charge, I guess two and switch between them. Like I don't know the answer to that. Right. I put the wired headset on.
- [29:27]
B
I have USBC wired headphones that I keep in a, in my travel bag just in case.
- [29:32]
C
Right.
- [29:33]
B
You know, and I, I don't like to use them unless I really have to, but. But I love using these things, so. And that's why I connected and disconnected because I had plugged in the headphones after I connected to the screen. Whatever we're using here.
- [29:46]
C
Yeah, I should get the. I should get a pair of my over ears with the USBC connector on it. Yeah.
- [29:53]
B
So anyway, that works great. So I'm super.
- [29:56]
C
I'm glad it was worth the wait then.
- [29:59]
B
Well, I mean not waiting would have been good, but yeah, it's. It's a good one. Yeah, I feel like this thing, you know, before the. So this configuration I think is this non touch and touch versions of it. And this is the non touch, which is what I want. And it's probably 16, maybe 1700 bucks, which is probably 2 or 300 bucks more than it might have been a year ago because of the component stuff. But it's still. I don't care. I mean it's realms.
- [30:29]
C
I might be buying one, but 48 gigs around.
- [30:32]
B
Yeah. Which is curious. Right. And so I, I saw someone in
- [30:35]
C
the comments compromise in price.
- [30:38]
B
Yeah.
- [30:38]
C
32 be too little. 64 would be too expensive. 48.
- [30:42]
B
So yeah. So someone had said something like, well, the X2, the normal X2 elites come with 32. The extreme comes with 48. And they're like, no, that, that's not a hard. You could put any amount of RAM on any of these computers. It's just that that's what they.
- [30:57]
C
I just double checked. The M5 Pro Max comes with 128. So.
- [31:01]
B
Yeah, right.
- [31:02]
C
So you got thousands dollars. Right.
- [31:04]
A
So in a chip they might actually have.
- [31:08]
C
It's hard on.
- [31:09]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [31:10]
A
So it might be that they don't make that. That's the part they made, right?
- [31:13]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [31:14]
A
I mean Apple, Apple has that issue with the Neo, Right. It's only eight gigs because that's the part they have.
- [31:19]
B
Right? Yep. No, I mean that was the decision here. But the point is a PC maker could say 164, I want 128.
- [31:27]
A
If they can get the SOC with that in it.
- [31:29]
B
But the point is they could do it.
- [31:31]
A
They just, I guess the constraints are pretty tough.
- [31:33]
B
But no one's building those things because they're going to sell eight of those. And what they want to do is sell a billion of whatever. The other thing.
- [31:38]
A
Who makes this one?
- [31:39]
B
Asus. Yeah, the laptop.
- [31:42]
A
I'm sure they went to TSMC to get it, right? I mean, who else?
- [31:45]
B
Well, I'm sure Snap or Qualcomm did and Acer's got it through them, but. Yes, I mean the effect is still the same. I mean in the. Qualcomm is humongous. In mobile, they're the biggest company by far, but in the PC space they're not much. Right. So you know, so they're at the back of the line, right next to Microsoft.
- [32:04]
A
By the way, Nvidia and Apple are eating all the capacity.
- [32:06]
B
Yeah.
- [32:07]
A
So more.
- [32:09]
B
More.
- [32:09]
A
So Nvidia. I wonder, I mean, do you see part people making this with more ram?
- [32:16]
B
Yeah, but probably not this year. Certainly not in the.
- [32:18]
A
Yeah, someday.
- [32:19]
B
Not before the end of the year. Yeah, no, this is. I can we have the six.
- [32:22]
A
Whatever TSMC offers them.
- [32:24]
B
Yeah, no, I mean when we went out to the Snapdragon Summit last year, someone that. This actually came up that not in the context of the component crisis, because that wasn't really clear at the time, I don't think. But rather, you know, are, are they restricted to this, this or this? And you know, what they said was like, no, you can, you can connect this to any amount of RAM you want. It's just that it has to be made. And then in the X2 Elite Extreme or yeah, lead Extreme variant, it's on the, you know, it's on the SoC. So that's a special, that's a special order right there. So, yeah, so for this particular computer, yes, it is 48. And I think that was just an attempt to further differentiate it from a, like a normal X2 Elite. Right. And they'll come with 32 or 16 to 32, depending on the laptop. And then this one comes with 48 because 48 is a bigger number than 32.
- [33:14]
C
So.
- [33:15]
B
Weird. I don't know.
- [33:16]
C
It must be better. Yeah.
- [33:18]
B
Oh, Richard, it's better. It's. It's
- [33:24]
C
better.
- [33:25]
B
It is better.
- [33:26]
C
So much better.
- [33:29]
B
I don't have any kind of battery life estimate yet. I've only, I, I did a couple of rundowns on it. It's been in the 9ish hours, which is not high for a Snapdragon, but it's early days too. And I. My experience with the previous gen is that that actually goes up over time and so we'll see what happens there. But I guess it's not unreasonable to expect this thing to maybe not get as good battery life. And that's part of the trade off. Right. You're getting to performance levels that are more typical for much more expensive computers. So especially. And not just like the M whatever on the Apple side, but they also are competing with intel and AMD chips that have very good integrated graphics. And you know, you can buy. It's not really, it's not a mobile workstation or anything, but you can buy like a pretty pedestrian laptop with one of those newer chips and play AAA games really well, you know, so that's the, that's the competition for them really. I don't think anyone's shopping like Mac against Snapdragon X2. Only in my dreams. But you know, maybe someday. I think really what they're shopping it against is other, you know, exit or against x64 laptops. But we'll see, we'll see where, we'll see where that lands.
- [34:44]
C
Yeah. The conversation about Snapdragon and the Enterprise is still an interesting1. The x2 is the great promise, but we're not seeing enterprise style machines so far. Just.
- [34:54]
B
Well, part of the reason I think is the component crisis and in this case because specifically in the enterprise they're in a holding pattern. Right. It's like we're going to eke out more time with the things we've already purchased as much as we can.
- [35:07]
C
Yeah.
- [35:07]
B
And yeah, look, there's all. Snapdragon has always suffered from that kind of fear of the unknown or you know, resistance to change kind of problem. And this only exacerbates that.
- [35:17]
C
But I, well, the ARM machines into the normal windows up by pipeline now and that's. Yep, that's maybe next.
- [35:25]
B
That's the next story.
- [35:26]
C
It's another piece of the prop pie. So. But I'm waiting on the hardware in that degree that this is the market
- [35:32]
B
that should embrace it. Like I, I would imagine uneducated with regards to tech. Normal mainstream consumers do not understand the benefits and not, you know, maybe be nervous about it. But to me, and this is not what has happened but it seems to me like the, this should have been embraced immediately by the enterprise. This is a better computer. It wasn't much more reliable, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
- [35:58]
C
It was just a bear to maintain like your normal maintenance tool. You needed to have a separate process for our machines and I don't know in a minute we're going to willingly embrace another process. Yep.
- [36:06]
B
They're so lazy.
- [36:10]
C
They got enough to do.
- [36:11]
A
Let's pause for a moment and we will have more of Windows Weekly in just a bit but Paul needs some more cranberry juice and Richard, we don't know what he's drinking but I'm sure it's delicious.
- [36:22]
B
I feel so.
- [36:23]
C
Water.
- [36:23]
A
What time is it in the Netherlands right now?
- [36:26]
C
It's 10 to 9.
- [36:28]
A
So it's early p.m. oh good. Oh good. So the sun's gone over the yard. Arm is my grandpa.
- [36:34]
C
It's still a little light out there, but it's getting down that way. Not that it's ever held me back before.
- [36:39]
B
Well, you're also like heading toward the middle of the year. So this is going to be one of the longer days of the year. The sun will probably set pretty, pretty late.
- [36:46]
C
I remember being pretty late around here
- [36:48]
A
on the 4th of July and it was like wow, it's, it's mid.
- [36:51]
B
So you know, so you know, I've lived in the northeast United States for my entire life. Basically we lived in Phoenix for several years and whatever but you know, this should be normal to me. Right. But we got home, we went to our favorite restaurant. We walked out of there at 7:30 and it was full light.
- [37:08]
C
Yep.
- [37:09]
B
And I was like, what the hell is wrong with this place? Like, it's weird. It was, it was like three o'clock in the afternoon. Yeah. And I'm like, you know, Mexico, you walk. It doesn't matter what time of year you walk to the place, it's dark at, you know, 7pm and then you walk out and it's really dark. And that, you know, that's feels normal to me. And like now I know this is nor. I mean, like, I'm like, I say I'm. I recognize how stupid.
- [37:34]
A
You need one of these. You strap this up.
- [37:35]
B
Yes, that's exactly what I mean.
- [37:37]
A
And good luck.
- [37:38]
B
Yeah. What am I like a Chilean Mayan? What is, what is that?
- [37:43]
A
You know, like this one has red so it won't blind you.
- [37:46]
B
What is that thing? Actually, what is it?
- [37:48]
A
It's just a headlamp. It's so you can walk to the taqueria at 8pm and not get fall off the curb.
- [37:58]
B
Yeah, I have done.
- [37:59]
A
A friend gave me this and I thought. I don't know what you're trying to tell me, buddy, but thank you.
- [38:03]
B
If you're worried that, you know, expats, whatever they're called, like stick out at all and this would, this would, that would do it. Yeah.
- [38:12]
A
I have the San Miguel shirt. So you know, with the mariposas on it.
- [38:16]
B
Yeah. You say cyclops in Spanish, but I can assure you that some of the ragging you would get would involve that word.
- [38:22]
A
It's funny because you go to Hawaii and people, you know, the Hawaiians aren't wearing Hawaiian shirts. It's just like a big fat sign on you that says tourists.
- [38:30]
B
Yes.
- [38:30]
A
I wonder if that's true in Mexico. If I wore this shirt in Mexico, would I stand out? Especially if I wear the headlamp.
- [38:37]
B
I was wearing a shirt that would look nothing like that. It had a pattern, but it was a short sleeve shirt. It was not a Hawaiian shirt.
- [38:44]
A
Yeah.
- [38:44]
B
And. But I had my sunglasses, you know, hanging in the front. And one of my friends there walks up and he said, hey, Magnum, are you gonna get a ride home in the helicopter after dinner? And I was like, what are you talking. I didn't even understand what he said.
- [38:56]
A
I was like, what?
- [38:57]
B
Because I've made this joke to a friend of mine, like years ago, but he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. So I actually got this thrown back in my face. But it took me a sec. He had explained what he meant I was like, oh. I'm like, what? This is not a Hawaiian shirt. I mean, it's.
- [39:09]
A
I mean, this is a. This is made in San Miguel de Allende. This is a Mexican shirt. But I think, you know, probably on cursory examination, you might say, well, you're wearing a Hawaiian shirt.
- [39:18]
B
No, it's very colorful. I mean, it's funny because when I
- [39:20]
A
went to Hawaii, I forgot to bring any of these shirts to Hawaii. I just said, boring shirts, right? I mean, yeah, yeah. We ended up buying a couple just so I would fit in with the tourists.
- [39:33]
C
Nice.
- [39:34]
A
No, Everybody there is wearing a T shirt. They're not stupid.
- [39:37]
B
Let me tell you what would happen if you walked into, like, a place. I'm going to dinner tonight in the Pennsylvania kind of Philadelphia area with a Hawaiian shirt on. You know, be like, what are you, a Mets fan? Like, you know, okay, good to know you're in danger.
- [39:53]
A
Time for a little break. Then we'll come back with more Windows Talk. Actually, Microsoft announced some new hardware. We could talk about that in just a little bit. But first, a word from our sponsor, Trusted Tech. If you are listening and you're managing Microsoft 365 for your company,
- [40:12]
B
I'm not
- [40:13]
A
telling you something you don't know. You're responsible for both the cost, ongoing cost of it, and whether it's set up correctly. And you probably know, I hope you do that on July 1st. Microsoft is raising prices. That means two months from now, any mistakes in your licensing are about to get more expensive one way or the other. Most companies using M365 are either over licensed, means they're paying for unused seats and features, or under licensed. That could be costly, too, because it creates compliance and security risks. Sometimes it's both one department over one department under the result, wasting thousands, sometimes tens of thousands a year on tools your team doesn't use, or worse, missing critical security features you thought you had. You don't want to get that question from the boss. I thought we were covered. Trusted tech helps businesses understand what they have, what they actually need, and how to lock in the right setup now before costs go up. Yes, they are M365 licensing experts. Their team ensures your M365 environment is well supported and aligned with how your business actually operates. Now, they do more than that. If you need ongoing help, they also offer reactive support for your Microsoft environment. They are. They have certified support services. So it's really two things, but I want to focus on licensing because the clock is ticking. July 1 is not very far away. Microsoft licensing already is crazy. E3 versus E5 versus business premium add ons. The new E7 very confusing, very easy to misconfigure, very easy to overpay or underpaid. Licensing mistakes don't just cost money. They can create compliance exposure that gets more expensive after July 1st. So even if you think your licensing is dialed in, it's worth a little, you know, consult a little second look. And if you wonder who these Trusted Tech guys are, listen to Kevin Turner. You know him, former Microsoft coo. He was talking to Trusted Tech. He said this quote, you have an incredible customer reputation and you have to earn that every single day. The relentless focus you guys have on taking care of customers gives them value and differentiates you in the marketplace. Kevin likes them. After July 1st, you're going to be stuck paying more. This is your last chance to fix your licensing before the costs go up. Trusted Tech is offering a free Microsoft 365 licensing consultation right now. But all you have to do is visit TrustedTech team WindowsWeekly365 and you'll get a clear data backed view of your current licenses, what you're wasting, and how to lock in savings before the price increase. Now's the time. Go to TrustedTech Team WindowsWeekly365, submit that form, get in contact with Trusted Tech's Microsoft licensing engineers and let them help you dodge a bullet. TrustedTech Team Windows Weekly 365 we thank them so much for supporting the show. Windows Weekly couldn't do it without them.
- [43:36]
B
Who was the guy from Microsoft who was comparing?
- [43:39]
A
You ever heard of him?
- [43:40]
B
No, I have, I have. I was just wishing he would turn his attention to the parts of Windows I care about, maybe give them the same advice.
- [43:47]
A
You know, I think he's. He's at. He's retired.
- [43:50]
B
He's gone. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [43:51]
C
He does not work there anymore. He left around when Satya came in. Yeah, yeah.
- [43:55]
B
I think he was kind of hoping maybe he was going to be the guy.
- [43:57]
A
He's kind of legendary though.
- [43:58]
C
In his time he was the stack ranked guy. Oh really?
- [44:02]
B
Oh yeah. Ex Walmart legendary for all the wrong reasons.
- [44:10]
A
Anyway, he never bothered me.
- [44:13]
B
He was a, he was a regular appearance at all the shows and stuff.
- [44:16]
A
Yeah, we talked about him a lot.
- [44:17]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [44:19]
A
On this show. That's how I know the name. So Microsoft announced new hardware.
- [44:27]
B
Yeah, so someone was just asking me about this last week in that weekly as Paul thing I do and I knew this was coming and I couldn't really talk about it at the time. But of course the question is when is Microsoft going to rev its Surface hardware for the latest gen processors? Be them intel, which is what they usually use in the X64 side or the Snapdragon X2. So what they've done is refresh the business line which uses the intel chips and so they're, they've moved on to Pantalake. I have to say, you know, for, you know, I don't, I wouldn't use intel on your computer but if, you know, if you have to go that route or you want to go that route, that's. It's a good choice. Like the, the Panther Lake stuff is actually very.
- [45:13]
C
Yeah. Of all, of all the intel chips in this line. Yep. This is like the most impressive.
- [45:18]
B
Yeah. On the mobile side. Yeah, for sure. It's, it's a good chip.
- [45:21]
C
The first since Lunar Lake that really wowed.
- [45:23]
B
Yep. Yeah, it's, it's, this is, it's good. I have limited experience with this particular chipset, so I can't make any broad statements about reliability, etc. But my experience has not been great in that capacity. But you know, we'll see, we'll see how things go over time. The problem though, and the thing that really stuck out in my brain when I read through this thing, the announcement is these things are wicked expensive. Wicked, wicked expensive. And I don't mean like 20, 30% more than last year. I mean in some cases like you know, 50 to 70% more expensive, like really expensive. For example, a 13 inch surface laptop. This is the kind of the newer version like the when as originally or as before the previous gen, like when they did the Snapdragon Gen 1 chips, there was a 13.5 and a 15 inch model. They still sell the 13.5 but now they sell a smaller 13 inch as well. So you could make a pretty good argument that this thing is competing with like a MacBook Neo. Except it's not at all like, not even close that price point because. Yeah. So in, in the markets it's available in today it starts at 16 gigs of RAM. It's a 24 gig configuration as well. It's a copilot plus PC. That's a requirement. Right. The base price of that thing is fifteen hundred dollars for this. I mean I'd have to go look it up, but yeah, like, come on, like this, this should have been $900, right? Yeah, but they're gonna sell a version with eight gigabytes of RAM later this year. I wonder what really, what made Them think of that. Wow, $1300.
- [47:07]
C
That's too much.
- [47:08]
B
It's way too much. So I, I look, I like this
- [47:12]
C
is not the question is what's the full load? Right.
- [47:15]
B
Like well the one of the, that's one question. Right. So part of one of the. Look, they're doing work in Windows now to reduce resource usage, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, that's cute. That's cute. We do have a Snapdragon. I'm sorry a copilot plus PC spec which you know, granted is semi arbitrary but 16 gigs of RAM, at least 256 gigs of storage which I think is inadequate but whatever. An NPU that could do at least 40 tops. Right. So yep. That thing will not be a copilot plus PC. So in 2026 they're going to sell a business class Surface laptop that does not is not a Copilot plus PC unless they arbitrarily change the spec. Right. Or do what they should do which is make those capabilities across whatever computers, if you have a gpu, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, no word on that. So I don't know what to tell you there but I don't know, I mean. And you could spend a lot of money like the. On these things. The 13.5-inch version 13.8 I guess starts at almost $2,000.
- [48:20]
C
Wow.
- [48:21]
B
Look in the scope of the PC maker space, Microsoft is a boutique PC maker. You know, they don't qualify.
- [48:30]
C
There was always a case for them to be sort of reference hardware, high end price.
- [48:34]
B
Yeah. The problem is with this component shortage you're seeing how this can be a real Achilles heel. And you know, look, whatever anyone thinks of this stuff and whatever anyone thinks of the quality, whether that's up to date or out of date information or whatever, I will say, you know they, they did kind of formalize this kind of three by two tablet form factor with the Pro starting with Surface Pro 3 many years ago. Now this is like 12th edition. To give you an idea. Yeah, it's. This is, this is gonna do. This is almost like the final death knell for this brand. Right. And it's not their fault in this case a 13 inch Surface Pro for business. The base model is 1950 before you buy the keyboard pen. And guys. No like just no. And by the way, businesses are not buying computers right now.
- [49:35]
C
Yeah.
- [49:36]
B
So I, I don't know, it's. Again I'm not blaming Microsoft. I. They've made mistakes or whatever and Surfaces, whatever it is and now you're seeing Like I said, the kind of Achilles heel here is they just don't get preferential pricing anywhere. So now you're seeing what that looks like in this component shortage era and.
- [49:55]
C
Well, yeah, and this is. You have to wonder if Panos was still around, what if he. Would he have fought for this, would have cut a better deal, been a part of the launch of the channel.
- [50:06]
B
Right. I don't know that this world is completely gone, but there's always been this argument with Microsoft hardware and certainly with Surface, where you're essentially betting on some percentage of the customer base to have Microsoft 365 subscriptions. And that can in some way make up for you breaking even, losing money or whatever it is on the hardware.
- [50:28]
A
Sure.
- [50:28]
B
And I just feel like they're like, yeah, we're not doing that anymore. Like this. You know, just like with AI, where you're starting to see as pricing on AI moves to more of a consumption model, like actual consumption. Yeah. You're starting to see what I think of as the true cost of the thing.
- [50:42]
C
Yep.
- [50:43]
B
And I think that's what you see
- [50:44]
C
exactly how we're talking.
- [50:45]
B
Yeah. This is the same thing. It's. It's unfortunate because I feel like a Lenovo could sell a laptop with this exact spec and it would be 11, maybe $1200.
- [50:57]
C
Yeah. 30% less.
- [50:59]
B
Yeah, it's. It's gross. Like, how awful. I mean, it's just awful. So it's too bad. I, I feel bad about this because, you know, these are. I don't have one and I'm not going to get one. But these are probably really good computers. They're just stupid, expensive and it's just a shame.
- [51:15]
A
Who would buy this?
- [51:17]
B
An idiot. No, I don't know. I don't know. I really don't. I. Well, I will say this. One of the reasons you go out to businesses first with this, because they're, they're obviously taking it slow now because the component prices is they get volume pricing just like they do. And what you can do, and this is where you can kind of make up for it, is this is a customer who's already paying for multiple seats of Microsoft 365, various SKU levels, etc. And they're doing a service contract and whatever. And so you can cut them a deal maybe on the heart. Like the. These are retail prices, like the businesses that buy.
- [51:49]
C
Yeah. I have to wonder. And when it's sold internally, do they get better deals? I don't know.
- [51:56]
B
Yeah. Like an IND. You could, as an individual go to surface.com and configure one of these things out probably and buy one. As a person, that would be dumb. Unless you super, super need a new computer and you, you know, whatever, it's for work and you have to do it and whatever. But I mean as a person, this just doesn't make sense as a purchase. These are, they're just too expensive. Buy a MacBook Air for Chronolog. It's just stupid. It's too bad.
- [52:20]
C
Well, goodness my friend, when it comes to enterprise PCs, we're even stingier because we are buying 100 of them. You know the big argument last year was I'm not paying for an NPU if I'm not using it for, for enterprise machines because that's another $100 I can cut out of that machine.
- [52:38]
B
Yeah, and that's a good chicken egg problem too because then, you know, it's a non virtuous cycle. You know, there's no one's paying for the mpu, no one's developing software because no one's paying for the npu. It doesn't have the npu. A lot of questions around. A lot of people have GPUs though. You know, that keeps coming up. It's like, I don't know. So I don't know. This is what you know. Look, the, the fact that Microsoft's going to let you configure a copilot key on a keyboard to a control key is a minor step in the right direction. But it's a step in the same direction as. How about letting those things work on a computer with a good GPU or an integrated modern GPU that you might have on an intel or an AMD chip? You know, just a thought. Let them, let people do what they want to do. I don't know. Weird. I know. That's not how the world works. I couldn't recall did we talk about M Dash at all last week. This is the Microsoft.
- [53:34]
C
No, it's just being an mp.
- [53:35]
A
Steve did yesterday. Of course.
- [53:36]
B
Course.
- [53:36]
C
But yeah.
- [53:37]
B
Okay, so everyone knows. Well, most people probably know. Anthropic has a model, very mysterious and secretive model.
- [53:44]
A
Mythical.
- [53:45]
B
Almost mythical. Yeah. One might. And obviously people at different companies are trying to get involved with that. One of the questions I had with last week's patch Tuesday updates were is Microsoft using any of this stuff yet? Right. And so it turns out Microsoft has been working on an in house multi modal not model agent. Well, I guess it is multimodal agentic scanning harness. This is this word if you watch the Google IE keynote came up 115 times if you were going to have a drinking game. Harness is the new term in AI that everyone's using. But anyway, it uses 100 specialized AI agents across various frontier. What we used to call like just LLM models and distilled models to discover debate and prove exploitable bugs ended. In other words, they made their own version of Mythos. So I don't remember the exact number, but I think that it found 16 of the 20 something Windows vulnerabilities or whatever the number was that Microsoft patched last Tuesday. I expect that this month and our coming month and then going forward, these will be much, much bigger numbers. One of the things we're starting to see, and this is coming up in the context of Linux now, is AI generated bug reports overwhelming companies or individuals or organizations or whatever it might be in the Linux world that are working on these distributions or working on the kernel or whatever it might be. And that's, it's going to be a tsunami of this stuff because it turns out AI is actually very good at this kind of thing. And of course individuals will do it and they'll send in their things and it will. You know, the, the nice thing about the Mythos thing is it was not just here's a vulnerability, it was like, here's how you can prove it's a vulnerability and here's how you fix it and you can test to see that this is in fact the case. And anyway, Microsoft will do that. It's closer. So this is not out in the open. Right. But I guarantee you that you will see astronomical numbers in the coming months for fixed vulnerabilities on patch Tuesdays. There's no, no doubt about it.
- [55:57]
C
We're already seeing numbers going up. I mean obviously Firefox was the most public with their increased patch rates, but even the rate on Windows Update has gone up.
- [56:07]
B
Yep. Yeah. And you know, they, they won't be as vocal about it. I mean they'll, there's a marketing case to be made. If it's like RM Dash thing is so great. It did this and it's awesome, you know, okay, that's fine. Firefox is relatively small. It's a big code base, but I mean compared to like Linux or any operating system, it's, you know, relatively small.
- [56:24]
C
But it's not a publicly traded company and it has no money.
- [56:28]
B
Right. Yes. And, but they can get ahead of this and probably will, like sometime this year. They're going to be just pretty much proactive at Some point Linux and Windows are going to. And you know, those are. I think Mythos found something in Mac OS as well. This, this can be a problem. These are, these are big. Very well.
- [56:48]
C
And the other, the corollary to this is the black hats have, are playing with these tools to exploit vulnerabilities as fast as they can.
- [56:55]
B
That's right. Which is why it's all the more important for the white hats on the other side to be using this to,
- [57:00]
C
you know, and moving fast, trying to get the patches out there as quickly as possible.
- [57:04]
B
Yeah. So. Okay, that's fine. What else we got? Oh, and then. All right, so moving into AI, My favorite topic I've avoided writing about this Elon Musk trial other than when it started. There's been a lot of terribleness that's come out of it, which is what happens when you go to trial, right. You, you have discovery, people look at emails. These people are terrible human beings. I've made this case a lot. I'm not even sure Sam Altman is a human being being. But, you know, a lot of bad stuff comes about out about everyone. But the thing I kept sort of not understanding because it doesn't actually make any sense was how he was even able to bring Elon Musk to bring this to a case. What, like what's the legal standing for. You said you were going to do something, but you didn't. But you're not. You don't have an ownership stake in the company. You're not an investor, you're not involved with the company. It's like you wanted to do the thing you're accusing him of actually doing. It just never made sense to me. Like what's. Isn't there a bar for like a.
- [58:11]
C
Well, he was an owner. They booted him.
- [58:14]
B
He was. Okay, but that's like saying, you know, I know it's been 40 years, but I wrote the version of BASIC that was included in Ms. Dos and you.
- [58:23]
A
And I don't know why I'm in the position of defending Elon Musk, but I shall. Okay. Was that he gave him a billion dollars to start. They all along knew that they were going to go to a for a profitable model, but they didn't want him to participate in the profits, so they misrepresented their plans and got rid of him before they would have to give him any profits.
- [58:51]
C
That's not how that happened.
- [58:52]
B
That's not.
- [58:53]
A
The jury decided that. And by the way, it's an advisory jury, not the kind of jury that decision they Tell the judge this is what we think. Judge agreed that the decision to go for profit occurred more than three years ago. So that the statue of limitations had run out. So there was only a technicality. It wasn't that they didn't really rule on.
- [59:17]
B
There was no for this. But this.
- [59:19]
A
There was no but they didn't say that. They all merely said all this happened more than three years.
- [59:23]
B
No, no. The evidence that did come out in court was that Elon Musk wanted to take it public himself and he wanted to leave it to his children.
- [59:30]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [59:33]
A
Competing for profit AI now. So maybe he has a motive and
- [59:37]
C
kind of failing terribly.
- [59:40]
A
But the, but the jury of all
- [59:42]
B
that, no, of course they didn't have to. But it doesn't matter if you paid attention this trial at all, I mean
- [59:48]
A
it is going to be appealed. So well, congratulations come up.
- [59:51]
B
You know what else is going to happen though? OpenAI is going public as soon as Friday, so whatever.
- [59:57]
A
And Elon by the way is going public on Monday with SpaceX.
- [60:00]
C
Yeah, great.
- [60:01]
A
Xai.
- [60:02]
C
So this whole thing, Twitter, this has
- [60:04]
B
been, it's just, it's a farce. This is just a waste of what it has money of the legal system,
- [60:10]
C
plenty of dirty laundry on both sides. So you come away looking at both these guys going this is the leaders of AI.
- [60:17]
B
Like good lord, look, I get bad news for you guys. Well, you guys know this but I mean anyone who's like thought these people were like the Olympic gods walking around on earth, I mean all you have to know is any history to know that the people who started our industry are terrible. The people that ran companies in between now and then are terrible. I mean there are exceptions, there always are. But most of these people are pretty terrible. So AI is just terribleness at scale in this case. So I don't know.
- [60:44]
A
The other thing we know from all of these trials, Epic, Google Epic Apple is the collateral damage of the discovery and the testimony always hits both sides regardless of who wins. And you shouldn't enter into these kinds of cases unless you don't put anything in right.
- [61:00]
B
Finding this conversation just a personal technology. We knew that from Microsoft's two major
- [61:05]
A
antitrust Same thing, same thing.
- [61:08]
B
The interesting thing that came out of that was intel was sued by the European Commission similarly to Microsoft for having for similar abuses. And they settled immediately. They later by the way went back and appealed and got the money. They paid back. They actually paid a massive multi billion dollar fine. But they did the thing which I think all these companies should do, which is what I always talk about, which is settle or otherwise work with antitrust regulators to have some say in the outcome because it's, it's. Look, the bad stuff that came out about Sam Altman and Elon Musk and whoever else doesn't, I don't think registered with anyone normal in the world. I, I don't think most people are paying attention to this.
- [61:53]
A
No, that's probably true.
- [61:54]
B
Yeah, but the.
- [61:57]
A
We are.
- [61:57]
B
But the. Well, I mean, but if you want to, if you want to have an outcome for your company that you have some role in, you can't allow it to go to court. I mean, it, sometimes it works out. Of course, that's the gamble, I guess.
- [62:11]
A
But like it worked out sort of for Epic, right?
- [62:14]
B
Well, it didn't work out for Apple is my, you know, in that case, the way I would say that is Apple mostly won that case and then so belligerent and terrible because that's what they are as a company.
- [62:25]
A
Right.
- [62:25]
B
The judges threw the book at them after the fact.
- [62:27]
A
Right.
- [62:28]
B
And then that ruling withstood every level of appeal imaginable. And you know, it will still be appealed, of course, but like, or not appeal, like attempts to stop the.
- [62:37]
A
No, I think it's done. I think it's done because they went to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court said no. No.
- [62:41]
B
Well, the next step there is going to be a, A remedy.
- [62:45]
A
Judge Roger.
- [62:46]
B
Determine what they can.
- [62:48]
A
Yes, charge. Same judge, by the way, that yelled at Apple for lying.
- [62:52]
B
Well, yelled at. Reference. Or gave the attorney general a reference to an Apple executive light on the stand.
- [63:00]
A
Right.
- [63:00]
B
You know, and she's going to decide
- [63:02]
A
what the percentage is. Not 27.
- [63:05]
B
Can we let them charge a negative number? Is that a thing? Yeah.
- [63:08]
A
And I think the appeals court will uphold Judge Gonzalez Rogers.
- [63:12]
B
I mean, her, this ruling, which is extreme, there's no other way to say it. Justified, I think, but also extreme has withstood every legal right, you know, hurdle so far. I mean, it's all looking good for those guys. So we'll see. We'll see what happens.
- [63:26]
A
And I, and I think that the appeal, Elon's appeal, if he does make it, he says he's going to make it, will probably go nowhere, so.
- [63:32]
B
No, it absolutely will go nowhere.
- [63:34]
A
Our long national nightmare is over.
- [63:36]
B
Right. Well, probably the Apple one. I'll just bring this point up again because I would have said this a year ago. Whatever. It's like if, you know, Apple had this 15, 30% fee structure, it's based on nothing. If they had dropped that at any point to 10, 20. This never would have happened. And that, yeah, that fee structure is four to eight times too expensive as it is. Yeah, like they could have dropped it by a half or a third and they could have reaped billions in undeserved revenues for the rest of that company's existence. And that's not what they do. So I. Sorry, guys.
- [64:11]
C
Well, I mean, at one time they did. It's just the height of hubris now. Yeah, like, they really are so arrogant.
- [64:20]
B
Yep, Yep. This is the, the south park episode about the prius, you know, 20 years ago. Like these self righteous, you know, we know better than everybody types like, it's just disgusting anyway. At least Elon Musk is overtly evil. You know, there's no, there's no subterfuge there. He's just a jerk.
- [64:38]
C
Apple and apparently Altman lies to everybody and everybody knows it.
- [64:42]
B
We already knew this, right? I mean, like, you know, like Satya Nadella was on the stand. He didn't say anything we hadn't heard before. Before, you know, it's like. Well, it looks like you were orchestrating stuff by. Yeah, he was. They put $13 billion into open AI at a time when they had $13 billion in outside investment. Like, obviously he was involved.
- [65:02]
C
Yeah, I don't know.
- [65:04]
B
Anyway, okay, sorry, because the. Where my notes here. The open eye terribleness can never end. There's a rumor, a report that OpenAI might actually sue Apple because of the Siri integration thing they did in iOS 26. Probably.
- [65:25]
A
That's another one where I don't get it.
- [65:28]
B
Listen, I told the story. My friend Dave Kalten used to work at Microsoft. He was talking about Dell at the time was probably the biggest PC maker in the world. In Microsoft, biggest company in the world. And they hated each other and they were fighting all the time. And he was like, these two companies deserve each other. And I was like, yeah, that's the best way to say it. And like, that's how I feel about OpenAI and Apple. I'm like, you know, have fun, guys. This is like, I don't know. Apple has One thing that OpenAI would want, which is access to not just a big audience of billions of people, but a big audience that has shown itself very welcome to spending lots of money all the time. So I understand why they got in there. But what Apple does not have is that infrastructure thing, which is what they really need. Right. And so it's, it's an interesting kind of friction here, but we'll see if anything comes out.
- [66:14]
A
Of that.
- [66:15]
B
I hope they sue each other. I think this would be funny. It's like Godzilla and Mic or Microsoft. Yeah, Godzilla and King Kong going at it or whatever. It's funny. So that would be good.
- [66:25]
A
It makes, it makes life interesting for we who cover tech.
- [66:29]
B
Yeah, yeah, right. Most of the stories we cover kind of boring. So this is kind of cool fun if you follow AI at all and chatbots and all. The way things are going, you know that we've moved from like these conversational interfaces to kind of agency things where these little services go off and do work on your behalf, et cetera, et cetera. You probably know that Anthropic came up with something that they called and cloud code for coders and then they came up with Cowork, which was like, oh, we found out this code thing actually works really well for productivity as well. And so they have a separate offering for that. OpenAI, of course, came up with Codex because Anthropic came up with code, but they're using that for the productivity stuff as well. So it's coding but also productivity, et cetera. It's part of cloud. Although there's a standalone Codex app, I think it's on Mac Windows and I think there's a Chrome version too. Right. A couple weeks ago they announced this, so they brought it to mobile, but they're not doing it the way Anthropic will probably do it, meaning they're not going to have a standalone app. They they're doing it through the ChatGPT app. And the way this is supposed to work is that you can check on the progress of agents you might have fired up on the desktop from your phone and then you can conversely, you know, get notified on your phone about things that the computer is actually doing sort of on the side there or generate new tasks through the Chat GPT app. So yeah, it's like tomato, tomato, like this different way of doing the same thing.
- [67:56]
A
This is so. Well, it's funny because openclaw had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get these guys to act in a kind of persistent agentic fashion. But everybody says, oh, that's what people want because openclaw was such a success. So that's what people want. So that's all everybody's doing. In fact, that's what Google announced yesterday. I know we're going to get to.
- [68:15]
B
Yeah. So this industry is. I equate it to five year old girls playing soccer, meaning there's a ball and you just throw it in the field and they swarm around the ball and it doesn't. Someone will hit the ball, probably by mistake, and it goes down the field and they all go down the field and they run around and they're all just falling. They're just chasing each other on the field until someone trips and cries and the game's over.
- [68:34]
A
I can't think of another technology.
- [68:37]
B
No, nothing.
- [68:38]
A
There's nothing like that has changed. So, you know, if you like. Oh yeah, I use perplexity. That made sense six months ago. Well, today it's like, you're like cursor.
- [68:47]
B
Oh my God, I dropped cursor. You're still using that cursor. Somehow it was worth billions of dollars. It's like a Visual Studio code clone with. I'm sure they're calling it a harness now. Like, whatever.
- [69:00]
A
It's a harness, my friend. It's a harness.
- [69:03]
B
It's ridiculous.
- [69:04]
A
It is changing.
- [69:05]
B
You know what, this reminds me. What did you call. You said it was a. When you said agency. I swear to God, this is what you made me think of. When IBM and Motorola and I think Apple, but IBM and Motorola certainly in the 1990s were working on the PowerPC processors. You would go to like Comdex or I guess CS by this point maybe, or whatever. Yeah, I guess it would have been comdex. And you go into this room, it was all full of like smoke and everything. And there was like lasers flying through and they'd be like, powerpc, it's an enabler. And it was like, yeah, it's a chip. But that's what you just, you literally just put that in my brain. Like, I, I instantly went back, like almost 30 years. Like, anyway, that's the AI industry. It's ridiculous.
- [69:49]
C
Just as a sideline, that conference I was just in Berlin was actually an HR conference. And I was sort of the AI subject matter expert for this group of folks.
- [70:00]
B
Okay.
- [70:00]
C
Just. They wanted to field questions from someone with a more technical background. And HR people are usually responsible for training an organization as new tools come to play. Yeah. And all of them have these massive initiatives inside of their organizations to incorporate AI. One of them said, my CEO has told me we need to be AI native by the end of the year. And I'm like, okay, so what's that mean? He's like, I hope you knew. Like, no, they're, they're just making that term up. That's just a thing. But it was kind of shocking to me because, I mean, as someone who's done enterprise level deployments of software involving HR and so Forth like there's pretty clear workflow patterns and it starts with actually a stable piece of software you know how to use and that you have some training materials around and so forth and you sort of grow it out for how it's going to fit with your enterprise. And that's just not what's happening. One of the ladies talked about the fact that they just got co work for everyone.
- [71:05]
A
You know that we're native that products
- [71:07]
C
two months old and a research only product. It's EULA says quite specifically do not use unimportant information.
- [71:17]
B
Right. I mean this is. I'm not sure about cloud, but I'm sure it is there. But I think it was OpenAI. There's like a financial connector now for chat GPT so you can put in all your bank information but. And it's like, yikes. It's for entertainment purposes only.
- [71:34]
C
Yeah. Remember how entertained you were when it dropped your entire database? Watch when it drops your entire bank account.
- [71:43]
B
Think you were really going to say this, but as you were talking about the HR people, I was thinking like one of them was going to say something like, yeah, so my CEO or cfo, whoever it was, told me like I need to implement whatever AI thing so I don't have a job anymore. So can you help me with that?
- [71:59]
C
Well, a couple of me like they were planning 20% layoffs based on how this initiative went. It's like, how do you know it's going to be 20%? It's like it's going to be arbitrary.
- [72:08]
B
Yeah. These are the managers in office space who bring in the Bobs and then they're like, they get the lens of Sauron turned on them and it's like, oh, I, we, I thought we're getting rid of the losers. You know, it's like getting rid of the drift in the middle that doesn't need to be there.
- [72:20]
C
That was the other one was they had one of the big firms in saying, oh, it'll be a 40% productivity increase across the board. I was like, great. Did they bring case studies? Why? No, no they didn't. You know why? Because there aren't any.
- [72:33]
B
They can't exist. It's someone invented this two seconds ago. Yeah, like, and you're paying 20 bucks a month per person for it, you idiot.
- [72:41]
C
Yeah, if you're lucky, that's all you're doing. It's like I'm hoping that what your bosses are telling you without saying it out loud is I need you to get one of those big Windex spray bottles Fill it with water, put a label on the size that says AI and go squirt it on everybody.
- [72:57]
A
And now, now you're AI native. Congratulations.
- [73:01]
B
You almost have literally described the Beavis and Butthead episode where they learn about AI and they think it's like a trash container in the parking lot of Beavis and Butthead. Yeah, Episode. It's new. Yeah. Yeah.
- [73:16]
C
I mean, I felt for these people. I came away angry. Like, your. Your company's abusing you and it looks like they're going to abuse their employees too, but technology is just not ready.
- [73:24]
A
Well, today's the day that meta fires 8, 000 people after copy. You know, after recording every stroke, keystroke, and every mouse movement so they could duplicate them in AI this company.
- [73:36]
B
Don't get me started. Meta, please. I gotta hate that company so much. And I, you know, they make this thing that could connect people and then they do all this other stuff and
- [73:46]
A
it's like, yeah, what happened?
- [73:47]
C
Could you.
- [73:47]
B
The metaverse, just do the thing that is your thing? I don't know.
- [73:52]
A
I'm gonna pause here before anybody. I'm really curious what you think about Google. I O. We covered the keynote yesterday, Jeff, Mike and I. And you know, when you're there watching it, as with almost all of these keynotes, it goes, yeah, that sounds great. That sounds really good. That's really awesome. I went out and bought a Chromebook just so I can play with all this stuff.
- [74:12]
B
Oh, by the way, my back of the book thing is related to what you just said. Okay.
- [74:17]
A
But yes, then you start seeing the stories filter out. That is it, you know, so I'm really curious what your day.
- [74:25]
C
Later.
- [74:25]
A
But don't. Don't do it yet. I want to take a break. But what you're, you know, day after analysis is always a little bit more thoughtful. Shall we?
- [74:35]
B
Well, it could only be.
- [74:37]
A
It could only be. That's right, because you're not in the reality distortion field. We will have more Windows Weekly just a bit. But first, a word from our sponsor, Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. We're talking about AI, and I think, you know, I have some sympathy for business because the potential rewards of AI at this point, you feel they're just too great to ignore. But cautionary tales abound. The risks are also too great to ignore. The loss of sensitive data attacks against enterprise managed AI. And of course, generative AI increases opportunities for threat actors, helps them rapidly create phishing lures that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Right. Or deep fake vishing. You know the voice phishing where it sounds just like the boss on the phone. They can use it to write malicious code. They're using it to automate data extraction. Having there were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked to AI applications last year. That's why you need Zscaler, the most trusted AI security platform. And when I say most trusted I mean in 40% of the global 2000 use Zscaler they process, they secure half a trillion transactions a day. With more than 9.4 thousand global customers, Zscaler carries a net promoter score of more than 75. That's 150% higher than the average SaaS. And just talk to the customers. And there are lots of testimonials on the website. I'll pick out one from Siva. This is the director of security and infrastructure at Zuora and here's what he says about using Zscaler to prevent AI attacks. Watch. With Zscaler being in line, Security protection
- [76:26]
B
strategy helps us monitor all the trouble.
- [76:30]
A
So even if a bad actor were
- [76:31]
B
to use AI because we have tight security framework around our endpoint, helps us proactively prevent that activity from happening. AI is tremendous in terms of its opportunities, but it also brings in challenges.
- [76:43]
A
We're confident that Zscaler is going to
- [76:45]
B
help us ensure that we're not slowed down by security challenges, but continue to take advantage of all the advancements.
- [76:52]
A
With Zscaler Zero Trust AI you could safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across the business. Their Zero trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn more@zscaler.com security that zscaler.com security we thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. Zscaler.com/security I think one of the most telling things about Google I O yesterday, that's their developer conference, right? Of course last week they did the Android show and they mentioned new Chromebooks coming. Not even called Chromebooks new Google Books coming later this year. So they got. They kind of cleared the deck. This was going to be an AI thing. And the fact that Demis Hassebis was like the most prominent person on stage. The guy.
- [77:50]
B
And pretty quick too, right? Like a front almost. Yeah.
- [77:53]
A
I mean Sundar was there. He seemed very low energy and kind of depressed.
- [77:57]
B
Okay. And then he just got out of someone who was low energy and depressed. I get it.
- [78:01]
A
I mean, you know, you can't always be Happy.
- [78:03]
B
Yeah.
- [78:04]
A
So what did you think? They announced a ton.
- [78:07]
B
So here's the thing. I. You may be or may not be surprised, I have a pretty good relationship with Google. I, I get pre briefed on a bunch of stuff. I, I mostly ahead of the show. I mean I got the developer stuff so I had that going. But as they were, I was taking notes as Sundar and then the, whoever else was on stage was speaking during that initial keynote and I quickly found myself overwhelmed. Right. And some of it is like just numbers. You know, they have 13, I think it was. Yeah. Products that have over a billion users. Right. You know, Gmail search, etc. They have five Gmail search, Android, Chrome and YouTube that over 3 billion users. But they had all these numbers. They're talking about the processing of tokens. Like 1 year ago it was 3 point. No, I'm sorry, 1 point year ago it was 9.7 trillion tokens a month. Sorry, that was 2 years ago. Sorry. Went to 480 trillion 1 year ago and then to 3.2 quadrillion now a 7x improvement. I don't know if that's an improvement, but expansion over that period over two years. They have customers on Google Cloud, which by the way a distant third in this market.
- [79:27]
C
Yes.
- [79:28]
B
Over 375 of them have each processed over 1 trillion tokens over the past month alone.
- [79:34]
C
Wow.
- [79:35]
B
It's just like the numbers are staggering, you know. AI overviews and search, over 2.5 billion monthly active users. AI mode, over 1 billion monthly active users. Gemini app is over 900 million monthly active users, up from 400 million one year ago. More than double, you know, because it just goes on and on. They talked about the, they said this during the earnings call, but 180 to $190 billion on CapEx spending this year a 6x jump over the 31 billion they spent in 2022. You know, they have new TPOs.
- [80:12]
C
Well, I spend that money but.
- [80:13]
B
Okay, I know it's insane. It's insanity. Right. So.
- [80:17]
C
Well, they're all, it's also commits. Like there's really interesting studies going on saying how much of this money they actually spent. You know, when you're building a data center, you only, the money only goes out as things get built and lots of stuff's not getting built.
- [80:31]
B
Yeah, I don't have, Yeah, I don't have a lot of insight into that, honestly. But it's just, I think the thing that's interesting about Google is that you can make a very good case and I've made this case, and I still believe this, that they are in many ways in the client computing space. The next Microsoft. Right.
- [80:48]
C
Sure.
- [80:48]
B
Their operating system is something they use everywhere.
- [80:52]
C
They, their product naming strategies looking more Microsoft every day.
- [80:55]
B
The naming is terrible. They, the, the, the Gemini thing is getting a little co pilot. I think we could make that argument. But the, they work with partners to get the devices out to customers. They're not like a monolithic kind of Apple type company or whatever. Yeah. So there's that and I, I was overwhelmed by this. Right. So on the developer front, just some of the biggest ones because there was like 117 of these things. There's something. And by the way, figuring out what their products are now is getting very difficult.
- [81:31]
C
It's very Microsoft.
- [81:32]
B
It's very Microsoft. They introduced something called Google AI Studio, I think when Gemini 3 came out about a year and a half ago. Which by the way was when they also announced something called Antigravity, which was a big deal in this IO as well. The point of Google AI Studio is it's a web based IDE where you can prototype application UI if you follow the Google space. If you think about like XAML in the Microsoft space as the way that you create UI for apps, they have a declarative thing called Jetpack Compose which is Kotlin based. So it's using the same programming language as your programmatic code, but it's how you write ui essentially they've switched over to that completely now like Android is now what they call Compose first. So the old style of using xml, which is like a XAML to make views in Android apps is in maintenance mode. That's going away. Android 17 has a bunch of stuff going on, but the big one to me is the Google Book thing, which is that Android apps have to adapt to large screens. They're not going to allow you to target that API, that level of API and not have an adaptive app. So it has to work right. If you have a foldable phone, it's on a little screen, you open it up, it gets big. It's not just a phone thing stretched out. Right. It does layout and all that stuff. So if you have it on Chromebook, you have it on a tablet, you have soon on a Google book, etc. So that's all kind of happening. So there's all this stuff, you know, they have like they're, they're going to let people vibe code widgets right. On Google phones and eventually all Android phones, which is like the gateway drug to Vibe coding when you think about it, because widgets are very simple app surfaces essentially like, you know, it's kind of exciting.
- [83:21]
C
Live coded mobile apps because we did not have enough iFart.
- [83:25]
B
Yep. It just goes on and on and on. They have something called App Functions which they announced previously, which is basically MCP but for Android apps. And the idea there is that you're on a phone, AI is occurring and it can interact with the capabilities inside of apps like Microsoft's doing in Windows. Right. Using this thing that's very much like MCP. Just like they can interact with other AIs using MCP. So it's a kind of a common interface or whatever. Anyway, there's a lot of stuff just on the. But that's just like the developer stuff.
- [83:52]
C
Right.
- [83:52]
B
And I'm going to touch on that. This is for the back of the book, I don't want to step too much on that now. But then they kept talking and they started talking about things I was not pre briefed on. Right. Like the 2000 things that are happening to Chrome, which is turning into a intelligent proactive assistant that will work. And you know, like, of course it is. It's getting all hygienic. Gemini is coming to Chrome and Android Auto Browse, which is in Chrome and Desktop also is coming to Android. You're going to be able to within Chrome transfer images using Nano Banana. There are skills, AI skills that are coming to Chrome first on desktop and no doubt next year will be on mobile as well. But the idea there is that you are AI. In this case, Gemini is able to work with the content on multiple tabs and go off and do things on your behalf, et cetera, et cetera. It just goes, like I said, it goes on and on and on. It's crazy. One thing, I made this point somewhere recently, I don't remember why, but Google has these Google One subscriptions which are kind of morphed into Google AI subscriptions. And so like a Google AI plus, which is the $8 per month version, you get whatever you get for, you know, storage and access to models, etc. The mainstream one is the Google AI Pro, which is the one I got from buying a Google phone, but it's 20 bucks a month normally, but now it has like 5 gigs of storage, 5 sorry terabytes on Google Drive, across Photos, Gmail and whatever you want to use it for. And it's like yikes. But then they have the Ultra plan, which was 250 per month, is now 200 per month and that's where you get like really expanded access. And one of the things they announced at this show was that there's a $100 tier for that as well. So they have a. Oh, an AI Ultra 5x and 20x. And the 5x and 20x are references to essentially the limits compared to the plus plan. Like it's 20, it's 5 or 20 times as much, you know, access or whatever that is. Those plans, by the way, 30 terabytes
- [85:57]
C
of what, like what they really want you to use their AI tool. Let's face it, they're the original AI guys. They're the reason OpenAI exists.
- [86:08]
B
Yeah, right.
- [86:09]
C
Well, imagine if they, they. Of course the, the whole point here is they weren't turning this stuff into a product until Microsoft backed OpenAI and it lands on ChatGPT and blows the market apart. And to that point, everybody's suffering from SEO decline because Google now presents their AI mode and you're just not getting directed to web pages anymore. So their concerns were legit. It's actually happening.
- [86:42]
B
I mean, they will continue to adjust, so to speak. But like anyone, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, whatever it was, you could throw a website up, a blog as we would call it, and have one Google Ad on every page you could make a business out of. It'd be great. You know, now you have to spam your site with more ads than content and it still doesn't make any sense and you get a nickel. Yeah, this is the insertification of the ad business, which is by the way, why there's an antitrust case around that they control this. Right. So they take more and more of that for themselves. But, but you know.
- [87:14]
C
Well, and I would argue they were doing this even before ChatGPT showed up, like, oh yeah, no, they were searchers on a horrible trajectory for the past few years.
- [87:22]
B
Past many years, maybe. Yeah, Yep. But, but from the perspective of a, like an individual and you have a phone and a computer and you're out in the world, you do whatever you do. Like when you compare what they have and what you might want to, to other companies, it's actually really compelling. And that's the thing I kind of took away from this, which is that, you know, the one thing they have that Microsoft lacks is an incredible over 3 billion people just on Android. But they have great reach into the consumer market. Right. Their first party devices don't sell very well. They're sort of like the Surface of the Android world. I get that. But you know, people use Google Photos and their Phones to backup photos even if they have an iPhone in many cases.
- [88:04]
C
Right.
- [88:05]
B
I mean they, people use Google Maps, duh, they use Google search, et cetera. Like when you combine all of the perks here, this is what Microsoft 365 for consumer used to be. I used to describe this as like a no brainer, right? For 20 bucks a month with all this AI that works everywhere and I mean literally everywhere. Not just on the Google stuff because you can just go to gemini, google.com or many of the other entry points and just do whatever it is you're doing with AI and do it from there. You know, Gemini stands up very well against the best models, you know, anthropic, OpenAI etc and they have this, all this, you can't get like free YouTube Premium through OpenAI. You know what I mean? Like you're not gonna, it's, it's, this
- [88:53]
C
is back to any trust behavior, network effects, just hey, our product's not that good. But look at all the good stuff you get with.
- [89:00]
B
Yeah, I mean there's a whole tiger stripe conversation to be had here. But, but, but again just looking at it from kind of a mercenary perspective as a person who just like look, I'm gonna do something, I need cloud storage maybe or whatever it might be like it's kind of nuts. Like Microsoft 365 for consumers still stuck at 1 gigabyte or 1 terabyte, sorry per person unless you get family and then you get, you know, you have six people with up to one each but you know, they quickly went to two and then they went to five and then now this 20 or 30 depending on what tier you're. It's like what is happening? It's insane. Like it's, it's really kind of incredible. So I think my Leo asked, you know, what was my takeaway from this is mostly that I was overwhelmed. There was one thing I'm going to talk about in the back of the book which is, you know, I related obviously, but I had found out about ahead of time. I, I was in a briefing, I saw a thing about it and I was like, okay, that looks interesting. But then when they were talking about it on stage because it was a developer keynote after the main keynote, I can't remember which where it came up. If it didn't come up in the first one, it obviously did in the second. It might have come in both, I don't remember. But wherever it was first mentioned, whenever they first showed it, I was like, I got to try this, you know, and One thing I have rich experience at, which is, I think someone was alluding to earlier, which is you, back in the day, you would go to a show. More recently, you would watch a thing online, YouTube or whatever, and they announce something and you're like, oh, that's interesting. And you go over your web browser in this case, and you go to the plate, wherever it is, and you're like, I'm going to try this thing. And it never works. Like, it's never, it's never. Like you just don't have that experience. That is not what happened. I had a fricking incredible experience. And like I said, I'll talk about that at the end of the show. But so I went from like a overwhelmed and I, I had the lightest, non busiest day yesterday until about noon. And then I was frantically writing and like the guy who writes news kind of checked in on me later. He's like, is everything going okay? Like it, like there's a lot of stuff going on. I'm like, dude, I don't know what's happening. Like, they just keep announcing stuff. Like I, I was overwhelming. I've only touched kind of on the tip of this iceberg. There's so much going on. It's, it's rather astonishing.
- [91:14]
C
And it's a flood the zone kind of strategy too, right? Like, you've just got to show there's so much going on.
- [91:21]
B
Google, when Microsoft started their copilot, what became copilot, right February 2023 I think it was, you know, they stumbled out of this gate, right? This is the company that kind of invented all the stuff they could have
- [91:33]
C
done this Google had barred. Remember Bard, they've been in that name.
- [91:36]
B
That's what I mean. Like they, this, I called this the face rake thing. It was like they stepped on the rake, it hit him in the face. They took another step, another rake him in the face. Like they couldn't do anything right. They looked.
- [91:46]
C
And the funny part is that was back to back with the copilot demos.
- [91:51]
B
Yeah, that's right.
- [91:51]
C
And if you, if you went back and watched them carefully and like counted the errors and mistakes, they were the same.
- [91:58]
B
I was just gonna, I wasn't sure you're gonna say, but I'm like, actually Microsoft was just as bad, but Google got ripped to shreds. Because I think the expectation was Google's going to get this right there. Google and Microsoft has Bing and seriously, what are they going to do?
- [92:11]
C
Yes.
- [92:11]
B
And so by.
- [92:13]
C
But they were, you know, that was, that was. Microsoft was Facing open AI. So I think there's this other resentment angle of Google had this stuff for years and never showed anything until somebody else did. So, like, what have you been up to?
- [92:25]
B
So it's all, you know, like when Apple ended up buying next, like I sort of imagine like as that kind of unfolded, that at next they had given up on this thing. They weren't doing the OS anymore. They had given it up and then Apple wanted it and they were like, blow the dust off this thing and like, come out to market with like, okay, look, it still does all this crazy awesome stuff. I feel like the. What became Bard and then Gemini was like that. It's like they, they were like, oh, we weren't going to go to market with this. Like, does anyone have any, like, what, like, people were working on this, like, what do we have?
- [92:56]
C
Well, and the argument was it was undermining the principal product. It was undermining search.
- [93:02]
B
Right. Which is why they didn't do it in the first place.
- [93:04]
C
Yeah, yeah, they, they were, they were going to fully innervate dilemma this thing and just sit on it.
- [93:10]
B
Right. So I, I was, I was. I'm still kind of reeling from this. Google IO is going on today. There was some. There was more stuff. There were more keynotes today that were, you know, lesser, obviously. But I, I was exhausted by the end of the day yesterday. Like, it was exhausting. And I, I left things on the table, so to speak, for Laurent to write this morning knowing. Because, you know, there was glasses stuff, there's all this other stuff, right. Google TV stuff. There's wear OS stuff. There's all, there's all kinds of. It just goes on and on and on. It's crazy. The. The only thing else I think. Where are my notes that I pulled out? Where's this damn thing? Yeah. So last week they announced Google Book without providing some details, right. Which is kind of weird. And then more information kind of eked out over time because people started asking questions, et cetera. But one of the things that was part of that announcement was something called Gemini Intelligence. Right. So Gemini Intelligence to me is a little bit like Copilot PC in the sense that it felt like a spec and that you were going to need a certain level of something, something. And it wasn't clear which devices were going to get it. Obviously Google Books will all have it. They are kind of the Copilot plus PC of that space. But there are existing devices in the market, like flagship phones, Samsung especially. But maybe the latest Pixels, there are Chromebook plus Devices like the one Leo just bought running Flagship. In that case, ARM chips that should be able to do this as well. Like, what are the. Like, what's the line? You know. And one of the early rumors was that I saw someone had written like, it's possible this is so big as a spec that like a Pixel 9 series phone won't even be able to run it. You'll have to have like a 10 or newer, 10 being the latest gen. And, and there is a. I think it's just a support document on google.com that actually listed it out or someone found this somehow. But the device is going to have to have at least 12 gigabytes of RAM, which is a little unusual for phones. It's getting more usual, but it's literally like Samsung Galaxy S26 series phones, all Pixel 10 series phones except the A. Right. Because that has less ram. You need to flagship, soc, et cetera, et cetera. It's like the list of existing devices that this will work on is actually very small. So a lot of this is.
- [95:40]
C
It'll be all next generation gear.
- [95:42]
B
Yeah. It's going to be all new stuff. So I thought that was kind of interesting.
- [95:46]
C
It is interesting.
- [95:48]
B
And then I could go on. It's not a Google show, but there was. I look as a. You know, having gone to so many builds and covered so many shows and everything, I was just like. It was like the Memorex app with the guys in the chair and the stereo's playing. Yeah. He's like literally sliding back. That was my day. Yesterday was that guy and the chair, like, it was just, it was hard to deal with.
- [96:08]
A
I, I had to take a nap afterwards.
- [96:10]
B
Yeah.
- [96:10]
C
Right.
- [96:10]
B
I mean. No, that's right. It's over. It's. It's. It's information overload, you know.
- [96:14]
C
Yeah.
- [96:16]
B
I sent my.
- [96:17]
C
Again, what if that's by design?
- [96:21]
A
I.
- [96:21]
B
Look, Leo had mentioned, you know, they did the Android, some Android 17 in the Google Book thing a week before and it was like, it's all AI and everything. Yeah. But I, I feel, I do feel like this part of it is the Android stuff might have got lost in the mix a little bit because of all the announcements, if they waited. But also, I mean, just logistically, how much time do we have to talk about this stuff? Like, yeah, they have to space it out. There's too much stuff. So I don't, I don't think they were scrambling to find stuff to talk about. I, I'm sure they had a problem figuring out. I'm sure There were certain topics where like look, we're going to have a session. We got to, we got to cut this out. It's just too much. I do think they have too many products. I think they have too many overlapping products.
- [97:04]
C
You sure Describing Microsoft.
- [97:05]
B
I know, that's what I mean. The next Microsoft, I mean even just in the Android developer space, you have the Google AI Studio thing. You've got Android Studio obviously and all the agents and AI that goes on is an Android cli. Now you can go from Google AI Studio or Android cli, start there and then push that into Android Studio and go do the, you know, get all the debugging, whatever you get in there. There's more like the anti gravity there is like I, I can't, I can't keep it in my head and this is not my primary focus in some ways either. Right. And I'm, it's, it's difficult anyway. It was, it was a lot. It was a tsunami I think is the only way to say that I didn't have a place to stick this phrasing. But Microsoft announced yesterday, which I can't find my article about. It doesn't matter that they. Where is this thing? Oh, there it is. They've released the fourth version of their Azure Linux distribution, which is for Azure obviously. They announced something called Azure Container Linux which is an immutable version that's optimized for containers of a Linux based OS for Azure. Of course this generates stories like oh, Microsoft is making Linux distributions now? Not exactly. Yeah, version four.
- [98:25]
C
Yeah. And they've got new.
- [98:27]
B
Sorry. I mean they're not. You're not going to go to like fedora.com or ubuntu.com or azure linux.com and maybe install this on your computer. I mean I don't even know if you could. But it's not a dirty secret. They're very upfront about this, but the majority of workloads that run on Azure are running on Linux and the reason is Linux compared to the Windows or whatever Windows Server, whatever it might be is lighter weight. Right. And it has cost less support from developers. Yeah, exactly. So they have a version of Linux that's optimized for these cloud and now AI workloads that run on Azure. You know this makes sense. So literally like two thirds of the way Microsoft says this is the customer cores in Azure run Linux and a lot. They don't say the number of percentage but chat GPT. Chat GPT is scaling across over 10 million compute cores on Azure and serves billions of queries every day. Crazy. Just the scale of. It's incredible.
- [99:33]
C
It's big.
- [99:34]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's big. So. Okay. And then some quick, really quick dev things. Apple opened up the schedule for wwdc so we know it's going to happen there, you know, to some degree. Meaning schedule wise like the keynote. The platform State of the Union is their developer keynote. That's the real keynote as I think of it. They obviously have sessions and whatever they're doing there. Okay. That is June 8th. Build 2026 is June 2nd. So it's the week before. It's in San Francisco, I think. Think I know is two days. How many days? You said four.
- [100:13]
C
No, it's two days. Yeah, but it's.
- [100:14]
B
I, I was. Okay. I thought it was two days.
- [100:17]
C
Yeah.
- [100:18]
B
I think both of those new other shows are two days. So that's, that's. This is the developer season for build. This is late. Usually it's in May. I think they had trouble finding a
- [100:26]
C
place and usually longer.
- [100:28]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [100:29]
C
Well, maybe this is a very funny build. You couldn't register for it. You had to sign up for the operation opportunity to buy tickets and they literally were pre screening who could get in.
- [100:38]
B
Right. Yeah, they invited me and I, I thought about it. I. If it was in San or Seattle, I. It might. I made. It made a better case and maybe more effort. But I didn't know. We have. We have a. We're doing something with the kids and I. It's not actually that week as it turns out. I thought it might have been, but
- [100:57]
C
I'm in Stockholm and.
- [100:59]
B
Yeah. It just doesn't make sense. Yeah. I don't. I Build has always been my favorite Microsoft show. But.
- [101:05]
C
Yeah, just. This is not the same.
- [101:07]
B
It feels. Yeah. Yep. And then last week I didn't mention this because there was nothing to talk about, but Microsoft released, I think it's the fourth preview release of. NET 11 and I've kind of made this complaint. I don't know what I'm complaining about over there in the corner, but I've never seen like a point to this release. Exactly. Like every milestone they talk about. Well, this has been updated across whatever. NET platforms. None of it seems major to me. Blah, blah, blah, whatever. I didn't mention it last week on the show. But then since then they announced that Maui is switching to the core CLR runtime, which is the runtime that almost all of. Net uses. I think there's one Blazer component that is still running on the old runtime. But Maui this is a little bit of history. This is amazing to me. Maui is running on something called the mono runtime. This literally dates Back to like 2002, 2003.
- [101:59]
C
This is Miguel de Casa as net framework. But yeah, this was the open source version.
- [102:05]
B
Right. Credible. Right. So they're switching to the more modern run.
- [102:08]
C
Well, because it was the cross plat version first.
- [102:11]
B
Right, right, right. Yeah. That's interesting. So that's good.
- [102:15]
C
Well, and fundamentally Maui is where Xamarin forms. It is up.
- [102:21]
B
Yeah, that's right. Z. Right. So yeah, Xamarin forms becomes. Well, they buy Xamarin and Xamarin forms becomes Maui. Yeah. They seem to have lost a lot of momentum unfortunately with Maui.
- [102:31]
C
I. Yeah, yeah. No, you can't argue there. And I got to tell you, with all the shuffling around of leadership inside of core AI where devdiv now lives, I don't. I think people are pretty. The folks that aren't part of the battle for who's leading what.
- [102:48]
B
Yeah.
- [102:48]
C
Oh look, I adjusted my cameras around.
- [102:53]
B
That was funny.
- [102:54]
C
Yeah, because I just don't know how inspired those folks are. Like, it's just been a crazy time
- [103:04]
B
ever since mobile has been a thing meeting in the modern smartphone era like the iPhone plus whatever. You know, there is a need for. Net developers feel to write C code that ends up on mobile. There's an obvious need. There is a role for this product. I think there's some weird overlap now with Blazor that maybe confuses matters a little bit. But this is like Silverlight was this right. Silverlight was essentially C Sharp and a WPF Lite kind of a framework.
- [103:42]
C
You know, running was originally WPF everywhere but.
- [103:46]
B
Right. Wpe. Yeah, that's right.
- [103:47]
C
Yeah. Because if you have a dumb code name, you get a good product name, but if you have a product name, you can't have both.
- [103:56]
B
That's right.
- [103:57]
C
Yeah. But those were far more inspired times with the dev did that knew what they were trying to do.
- [104:05]
B
I just feel like they. They should have just by nature have had some percentage of the market. But things like React Native happened as flutter. Obviously there are other things. I don't really care about the space too too much. But looking at it from the perspective of what I think of as a Microsoft oriented developer, because C is not just net necessarily, but net. We'll call it net. C. Net is all C sharp. Of course the Windows app, SDA, UWP, etc. Also uses the C language.
- [104:39]
C
And then you know what your problem with Maui is? It's trying to unify mobile development and Windows client development. And then you stop and say, why am I building a Windows client?
- [104:50]
B
I know, especially like a really constrained mobile app, silly Windows thing. Like, look, there are, there are certain apps where that does make sense, of course, but yeah, it would be few and far between.
- [105:03]
C
And if that is that important, then you're making a WPF app. Yeah. You don't want constraints.
- [105:09]
B
Right, right. Which is I think going to be the problem for Flutter because they've expanded to desktop and web.
- [105:15]
C
Flutter has done a great job on Android and iOS.
- [105:19]
B
Yep. And less so on desktop.
- [105:20]
C
Now they're struggling to get to that and it seems to be the way, like we, you realize the only people who want this are the developers because we want to write one code base runs every, everywhere. The customer couldn't care less. They just wanted to run on their thing.
- [105:35]
B
Right, right.
- [105:36]
C
And so the fact that we're jumping through hoops trying to make something designed for mobile to run on a desktop, it just may be a mistake.
- [105:44]
B
I think this is the make a
- [105:46]
C
web form, make a web version of your client or make a standalone Windows client. So trying to combine them is just
- [105:55]
B
fully formed in my brain. But I feel like one of Microsoft's big strengths with developers historically has been kind of no developer left behind mentality where we're going to bring these guys forward. You know, we're going to bring you, we're going to, you know, things will change.
- [106:08]
C
Like guys about that.
- [106:10]
B
Well, but they did in a way. I mean, you know, I mean, I. Right.
- [106:15]
C
I understand from a code basis.
- [106:18]
B
No, I know. In other words, like you, you know, C sharp, you know how those libraries are going to work. So maybe it's a new, you know, you move from, you know, whatever it is, like it doesn't matter from WPF to Windows app, SDK and it's like it's not the same. No, I mean there's similarity. Like you, you. The. The way forward is there. I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm just saying there is a way. It's, it's. And I feel like Maui is in some ways the last dying gasp of that. It's like, it's too bad. I, I really feel like this should and could be today a first class mobile development environment. And I, I just, you don't really. It just doesn't get a lot of momentum or interest. I don't know. Okay. In other depressing news, you'd have to be really well into the Microsoft world to even know who this is. But A guy Samar Somas. Soma Sagar. Right.
- [107:14]
C
Yeah.
- [107:15]
B
So much
- [107:17]
C
I'm pouring whiskey now because I have to toast a man. He was a remarkable.
- [107:21]
B
He was one of the good guys and he same age as me. He was born like three, four months before I was born. Started work at Microsoft. Working on OS 2. Quickly moved over to.
- [107:32]
C
He was one of the test geniuses for Windows.
- [107:35]
B
Right. And he was on the NT team. He shipped I don't remember the number 8 or 9 versions of Windows over time led the developer effort for many, many years. That's how many years that to me
- [107:46]
C
is one would argue was instrumental in getting open source into Microsoft.
- [107:51]
B
Yep. And is very indirect way. There aren't many people like this at his level. But is a curious combination of technically smart and a good guy which I know sounds stupid.
- [108:06]
C
And he was never a great stage guy. Like that was not his style. But if you were one on one with him and I had that chance a number of times, you couldn't say no to him. It was impossible. He was just so appealing. We did NET rocks interview with him many years ago and his PR team handled him carefully because he wasn't a natural glib kind of guy. He's very thoughtful, he takes his time and he's not a performer. And so they wanted to script the conversation which is super normal PR always pitches that I never go for for it. And ultimately we. We came to an impasse on that as Soma called the bosses. I'm doing it without a script. And the first 20 minutes of that interview was very for him.
- [108:53]
B
Right.
- [108:53]
C
Until he forgot he was an interview. He was an interview because you guys
- [108:57]
B
are all talking about things. You all understand you're all in this world.
- [109:00]
C
Right.
- [109:01]
B
It becomes normal, you know.
- [109:02]
C
And so we actually managed to construct a new intro in the course. We did a big recap at one point point and made that into the intro because you saw the best side of the guy. The guy was so brilliant and so into what he was doing and how he helped people be successful. Like I was really glad to capture that part of the story and he had all the time in the world for me. I was super generous. So yeah. No, I'm devastated to see you. Soma. He's a good man. Yeah.
- [109:29]
B
So he's. He passed away this week. We don't know how or you know, what happened yet.
- [109:34]
C
I'm not going to speculate.
- [109:37]
B
No, I. I wasn't going down that path. I'm just. But it's. It's sad and you know He. What was he. He left Microsoft and went to.
- [109:44]
C
He went to Madrona.
- [109:45]
B
Madrona.
- [109:45]
C
Yeah. And I used to have a. I used to meet with him almost quarterly at that time. Every time I was down there, we'd have lunch or something. And then I. Then he went to Medrona, and I pinged him right away, and I'm like, madrona? He goes, yeah, I got to take it a little easier now. I'm just a limited partner. I get down there at lunch and. And I look around at what he's doing, and I'm like, dude, you don't know how to partner. Because I. His name is. I know what to do at lp.
- [110:10]
B
He comes from the. Whatever the version of Makunji is in India. It's like the smallest town imaginable. And his first name is unpronounceable, I believe, even to Indians. And thus the Soma thing. And I don't want to explain. I was. It was him, and I can't say who was there, but I jokingly said to the other person, I said. I said, do you have a hard time every time you see this guy not going so much. So much. Soma. Soma. Soma chameleon. He goes, dude, this is what he said.
- [110:41]
C
I'll never forget.
- [110:41]
B
He goes, every time. Like, that is amazing.
- [110:47]
C
But one quarter later, I go down to visit him again. He's the managing director. He's running all of Madrona.
- [110:54]
B
Wow.
- [110:54]
C
And it has ever since.
- [110:55]
B
Because you see what you had, like, in other words, he must. He got in there and they were like, you know, and he knows everybody,
- [111:01]
C
and everybody loves him, and. And he's moved the whole place forward. Like, no two ways about you. You running an investment fund, and you've got a soma saegar. You should put that guy in charge, like. And that's what happened. Right. So, you know, and I feel for Madrona, like, that he's been their leader for a decade.
- [111:16]
B
Yeah.
- [111:16]
C
It's going to be a challenge.
- [111:18]
B
Yeah. He's. That's.
- [111:20]
C
Yeah. His family's lovely. He was a great man. I'm really. I'm really sad, and I know a lot of people are in the same boat.
- [111:26]
B
Yep.
- [111:27]
C
Yeah.
- [111:28]
B
It's too bad.
- [111:30]
A
59 years old. Very young.
- [111:32]
C
Very young. Lots to do.
- [111:35]
A
You know, it's very impressive when somebody can be in that position and. And nobody has a bad word to say.
- [111:42]
B
No, that's the thing. I mean, look, you could be infamous, and we're gonna remember you.
- [111:47]
C
Yeah.
- [111:47]
B
Right. Or. Or you can just be awesome. And he Was awesome. Yeah.
- [111:54]
A
You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. And we tip one out to Soma. We're glad you're here. More Windows Weekly. Now time for the Xbox segment. Paul Thurat.
- [112:12]
B
Yep. And once again, there's a lot going on. So this just happened as I was preparing for the show. So Laurent wrote this up. I didn't have a chance to really look at this in too much detail, but Asha Sharma, the CEO of Xbox, has announced more leadership changes inside of her team. And sit down, Richard, if you didn't see this. She has brought over four more executives from Core AI. Oh, no, sorry, that was from before. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Brought over two more. Two more. Sorry, two more. That was four before. So Christopher Dring. Nope, that's the person announced it. Sorry. Matthew Bell Ball.
- [112:54]
C
Yeah.
- [112:54]
B
Will be the chief strategy officer of Xbox. And Scott Van Vliet. Vliet, okay. Is the chief technology officer.
- [113:05]
C
And then both these guys at least have backgrounds in gaming because the four she brought from Corey, I did not. And that freaked me out. The fact that she's brought in people really serious about gaming is a relief.
- [113:18]
B
Well, yeah. So the second guy, he previously was an Azure cvp. He worked at Amazon. General manager of apps, games and Alexa. But yeah, I mean, at least he's in there. And then I guess this is the third one. I'm sorry. So, Chris, why don't we try to say people's names? Schneckenberg, Vice President, Partnerships and Business development. Xbox is being promoted to corporate Vice President partnerships and Business development. That guy worked at Activision Blizzard for 12 years.
- [113:45]
C
Yeah. So gaming guys.
- [113:48]
B
Yep. According to Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games world class team being assembled foreshadow serious dedication to the future of gaming for Windows, Xbox, Minecraft, Call of Duty and the many world class studios. Jesus. Who wrote this? In the Microsoft family, but he was you. No, that's very nice. I mean, that's like. That's not his usual kind of plain spoken style, but that's nice. I mean, so it's nice. Okay, I got a balance. I don't know a lot about this yet. I just kind of saw this. This is really weird, but we've had two controller leaks in the past week. The first one is The Elite Series 3 controller, long awaited. The last one I think was 2019. 2018. Something like 2019. I owned the first one and loved it. But they're super expensive. If you drop one of these on the ground, it explodes into a million pieces because all the pieces Come off, right? That's by design. But I eventually broke one of the sticks and I just couldn't bring myself to spend whatever, almost 200 bucks on the second one. But it looks like they're doing a third gen. Well, they are doing it. They're working on it. And the big thing here, other than small visual redesign, you know, slight changes there. But the big one is in keeping what we're seeing across a lot of consumer electronics these days. The battery will be replaceable. So it's going to be like smaller built in capacity, built in battery than previous gen. Little bit. But you can replace it, right? And that's, you know, so that's good. It's at least more sustainable. The other one's an oddball. So this one is called. It's like a cloud connected Xbox controller. It looks like a bar of soap with Xbox buttons and sticks stuck into it. It's very strange. It's. It's kind of, it's. It's like. And someone in the comments on my site was like, why, why can't it just look like a controller? Which is a fair question. I don't know. I mean, I have big hands, right? And so if you think back to the original Xbox, Xbox, the first one, one of the. The DO controller, the original controller, like one of the big complaints about that was too big. I loved it, like, it was awesome for me. But when they went to Japan, they actually had to make, I think they just called it an S controller. Just a smaller, you know, S for small. And that became the controller. So by the time we got to the 360 that became the standard controller and basically you could trace the lineage of the normal Xbox wireless controller back to that. I mean, it's basically been the same size, but this thing is smaller. It's weird looking. It looks like a. It looks like a Sega Master System or something, or Nintendo nes, you know, but rounded like it. It's very. I don't. It's weird looking anyway. I don't know if this is coming to the market or not, but one of the things we know Microsoft to be working on and one of the things I called on Microsoft to make when Stadia had come out was that this might be that controller that connects directly to the cloud. So if you're doing cloud streaming, this will offer you a better latency kind of experience because it's like one fewer. Like it's connected directly to the game. It's not connected through your device which is connected to the game. Like that's One of the reasons Stadia actually had pretty good experience until Google killed it. And I think if you buy an Amazon Luna controller, it works the same way. So I can't explain why it looks like a bar of soap, but it does. And it is the second half of May, so we're starting to get a new wave of games across Game Pass. The big one being Forza Horizon 6, which just became available generally, I guess, this week. Right. For everybody. Right. So you could buy it now, it's out. But if they're actually doing this day one on Game Pass, which is, you know, they're not always going to do so well, it depends on the tier. Right. So if you have Game Pass ultimate or PC Game Pass, you do get fours of Horizon 6. And then there's a bunch of other stuff. I think the key one, we can all agree is Pigeon Simulator.
- [117:54]
A
Who doesn't want to be a pigeon?
- [117:56]
B
I mean, I like to crap on people as much as the next guy,
- [117:59]
A
but is that part of the game is like, I don't know.
- [118:03]
B
Okay.
- [118:04]
C
I don't know.
- [118:04]
B
Jurassic World.
- [118:05]
C
The last one I played was Ghost Simulator, and that was pretty.
- [118:08]
A
I enjoyed that. Yeah, that was fun. And there was Untitled Goose game.
- [118:12]
C
Yep.
- [118:13]
B
I think Train Simulator is more my speed, personally, but
- [118:18]
C
all right.
- [118:19]
B
And then. Yeah. Oh, and then if you haven't. Laurent, he writes news normally, but he asked, he said, hey, you know, we don't review a lot of games. Do you think it'd be okay if I reviewed Forza? I was like, dude, of course, you know, so he got it early and he wrote an awesome review on myself. Check that out. Yeah, it's really good. And now I'm like, no, he can do this. He's going to be doing more of this.
- [118:40]
C
He just ruined his job.
- [118:42]
B
Yeah, I'm sorry, did you just ask me to do more, you idiot? Yeah, no, that's fine. No, it's really good.
- [118:48]
C
I found for says all the Force is really fun to play for like an afternoon. Right. Enough to get through a few matches and stuff. But the last time I.
- [118:57]
B
So it must have been hor. It was Forza Horizon 5. Right. So the last one I remember, I played this game for about a week and better part of a week, probably not a full week. But my wife came downstairs and she goes, what the hell are you doing? And I'm like, it's Forza. It's a racing game. She goes, all I can hear upstairs is. And I'm like, yep, that's pretty much what it is. I'm sorry.
- [119:25]
C
Still screaming, tired the whole thing.
- [119:27]
B
She's like all here's this droning sound that never ends. And I'm like I'm sorry. I think that was the one was in Mexico. Right. The last one and then this one. I don't remember where this one is but somewhere else. Okay. So the Xbox team being more transparent, yada yada yada, they've launched the player voice feedback hub. Probably a mistake by the way. And I think, I don't know if this is like literally the. I think it is the number one item of feedback was you need more exclusives. Love it guys.
- [120:00]
C
Love it. Tell the judge. Tell the judge.
- [120:05]
B
God damn.
- [120:06]
C
So but the customers told us. I know.
- [120:09]
B
Well so ironically or coincidentally probably is maybe more accurate. There is a rumor that Sony might be moving their single player games which lately have been also being brought to the PC and in some cases even Xbox. Right. Making the single player experience games like the, the games are just like a interactive story basically keeping those as PS5 or PS whatever exclusives and because the
- [120:40]
C
argument for being on all the platforms was to maximize the player base in multiplayer and you don't need that.
- [120:45]
B
Yeah. Like I would say for a user. That's right. I, I, I would say maximizing the amount of money you could make in some ways. Right. But I guess by selling more to people maybe on PC or whatever. I don't remember the numbers but you know, PC as a gaming platforms about as big as console together. So it makes sense that Microsoft, Sony, whatever would want to put games on PC. But just. Yeah, I mean we talked about how poorly Sony and Nintendo are doing right now. We know Xbox has been doing terrible as a console business for a long
- [121:15]
C
time but it's not like they were making money on the consoles in the first flip in place. Just sell more games. That's where the money is.
- [121:22]
B
Right. So I will, that's not official but we'll, you know, we'll see what they do. And then because Sony always copies Microsoft. Just kidding. Actually they're doing the opposite. They now they did announce they will raise the price of their PlayStation plus subscriptions in certain regions by one to three dollars depending on this, you know, one or three month span, whatever. Decided ongoing market conditions. I struggle to understand how a component shortage would factor into a subscription service or whatever but whatever. I mean so like in the US for example like a one month PS+ essential subscription is 10 bucks. Now it's going to be 11. You know, so the three month version is going from 25 to 28. You know, it's not like a. Not a big, big deal, but, you know, prices are going up, so. And I will never stop celebrating. Epic kicking Apple to the curb. But as of. I think it was today or yesterday, Fortnite has made its triumphant comeback to the Apple App Store. Five years after they were booted up by Apple. The one exception is Australia. I don't actually know why Australia.
- [122:40]
C
Well, they're the ones leading the charge for keeping kids off social media, so maybe
- [122:47]
B
Apple. Oh, Apple apparently is breaking the law in Australia. I don't know. Well, it's hard to say. But anyway, so that's good. You know, Fortnite is actually a very good game, by the way. I. I was. I. This has been several months now, but I was. I played it quite a bit after not looking at it for years, and it's fun. Yeah. I was surprised, like, how good that game still is or is. You know, it's actually better than it was.
- [123:12]
A
Yeah. Done a lot of stuff. It makes them so much money that they.
- [123:16]
B
Yeah.
- [123:16]
A
Are keeping it up.
- [123:17]
B
Yeah, it's. It's.
- [123:19]
C
It also doesn't seem to be as toxic as Roblox.
- [123:24]
B
Well, it's the others. You don't take the teabagging as personal, personally when it's a cartoon. You know, like, if it's. If it's a guy dressed up like a US Marine and he's teabagging, he's kind of. It's hard not to take that personally. But it's like a cartoon sprite or something, you know, whatever these things are.
- [123:41]
C
When it's a polychromatic turkey carrying a rocket launcher. Okay, Right.
- [123:48]
B
This goes back to. That was the Red, Blue, Red Team, Blue team stuff from Halo early days. They used to have this awesome videos
- [123:55]
A
like, oh, those are so good.
- [123:56]
B
One of which was, like, the guy, like, the, Like a new player, like, killed someone and then was teabagging the guy, but then he fired his rocket launcher into the ground and killed all his teammates and they all yelled at him. It was just like. It's just. It captures the multiplayer experience so perfectly. Yeah, dude, you do. Yeah.
- [124:17]
A
That's your finger on the trigger, man.
- [124:20]
C
Hey.
- [124:20]
A
Let's pause briefly for station identifier notification. Then we'll get to the back of the book. Tips, picks, whiskey, all coming up.
- [124:32]
B
The usual.
- [124:32]
A
The usual. But first, I would like to invite all of you, just briefly, to join the club. The best club in the whole darn world. Club Twit. We love Club Twit. We love our Club Twit. Members, we, thanks to you, we're able to do what we do. You cover at least a third now of our operating expenses and that's how I like it. Honestly, if we thought we could do everything we do without advertising, I would do it. But the good news is if you join Club Twit, 10 bucks a month, we're not going to show you any ads. You're not even going to see these plugs for Club Twit because you're supporting us. We really appreciate that. If you believe in the value of independent podcasts not owned or run by any big company, with no obligations to any big company, our only obligation is to support and represent you, the user because we're all users support the club. Twitter, TV Club Twit ad, free versions of all the shows, access to the fabulous Club Twit discord. You get special programming, all sorts of special programming. We the the Google IE keynote, for instance, yesterday was club only because we don't want to get taken down by putting it on YouTube. So. And that's going to be the case for WWDC. June 8th, they got Micah's Crafting Corner, Stacy's Book Club, Chris Marquardt's photo segment, which is coming back next month. By the way, Friday I'm going to do a redo of the interview we did with Jeff Atwood, the guy who writes the amazing coding horror blog. He created Stack Exchange, founded Stack Exchange and is also responsible for our forum software, the discourse software that we use at Twitter Community. And he's just a wild, wild man. We will talk to Jeff Atwood 2pm on Friday about coding. He's also very big. He's promised to donate half of his personal, his family's personal fortune to a charity including. He's very big on guaranteed minimum income. He came from very poor area of West Virginia and he wants to support that, so he's working on that as well. Very interesting guy. That'll be Friday in the club, 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern. Just one of the many things we do in the club. Please support the club by going to Twitter, TV Club Twit. We really appreciate it. Now to the back of the book and Mr. Paulie Little Paulie Thurat and his tip of the week.
- [127:13]
B
Yeah, so I've been doing these kind of focus month things. I was focusing on like switcher articles in April, but then as we got into May, I was like, this is too big of a topic. I'm going to keep going with this and kind of expanded it out into Applications and services. So I'd written this thing about markdown editors last week or whatever. And of course in the back of my brain I spent all that time writing these various versions of Notepad as Net Pad or when you iPad, et cetera, in different frameworks and languages and so forth, and struggled a lot with the multitab, multi document stuff, whatever. But people have asked me multiple times like, are you going to turn this into like a markdown editor? Like, why don't you make your own markdown? And I'm like, yeah, that's been in the back of my brain for, for a while. But I mentioned, you know, skill IO thing and as I'm watching the keynote, they're talking about AI Studio and how AI Studio, which was designed to be like a web based IDE for prototyping apps, the UI for apps can now create native Android apps. And I was like, really interesting. So throwing caution to the wind like an idiot, I, I wrote the simplest prompt imaginable in AI Studio. I would like to create an Android desktop app version of a full featured markdown editor similar to Typora. It should run perfectly on a large screen device like a Google Book. And it's okay if it works on a phone too. And it took 158 seconds and it created the most full featured markdown editor I've ever seen in my life. Not a native Android app, by the way. It's a typescript web app. But I don't know if that Android thing is not there yet or I missed it or something. But the point is I didn't, I didn't spend time on this. I wrote the quickest thing imaginable. I went back to watching the keynote, I checked in on it, it popped this thing out and I was like,
- [129:14]
A
oh, you did this last night or today?
- [129:17]
B
Yeah, yeah, last night during the show. It took about two and a half minutes. So I was like, okay, this is interesting. And then I was like, well, okay, let me get it closer to what I want. So there were four panes. There's like a lot of apps. A little like a. No, like a Notion or Obsidian will have like a navigation pane on the side and then it will have like a text editor, like a text view and then like a preview pane, like side by side, like a lot of markdown editors do that. This thing had this like full featured Gemini co writing pane, like full of things to generate text or fix text or whatever. And I'm like, all right, this is too complicated. I just want an Editor. So I got it just to spit it like a two pane, side by side view. And I was like, okay, that's pretty good. But what I really want is like a. What you see is what you get, like single view, just like an editor. So it looks like the preview, but you can edit it. And then it did that, and it did it in the context of the thing it already created. So you had to go into the preview mode only, and then you could turn it into what you see is what you get and you, you could edit it. And I was like, okay, this is insane. So I tried a few times to do the native app version and I could never. I never got it to do like a Kotlin jetpack, compose, whatever. But I was like, all right, well, you know what, don't worry about that. Who cares? Like, a web app is fine. Web app will run everywhere. So this morning I got up and I was like, all right. And I actually wrote a more detailed description of what I was looking for. And it's just a couple of paragraphs of text, really, it's not that long. But. And God damn it, it created this thing. And I gotta tell you, this is pretty good. It's not pretty good. It's frigging really good. It's actually still more than I need. You can see it for yourself in the article I wrote. You can link, you can go use it yourself. You can open documents, you can export and save documents. You can use keyboard shortcuts to do formatting of any kind. There's a little floating toolbar for formatting. There's a full menu system with all kinds of stuff going on. And like, I'm sorry, but this is insanity. I. I just spent the better part of a year, probably more than a year, trying to do like multi document, multi tab, whatever in the. When you. Well, originally in WPF and then in the Windows app SDK just for a text editor. Didn't quite get it there. I got, I got closer than I actually understood at the time. But I used AI to get it over the top. So it took a month or maybe two months to kind of put that together and finally put it to bed. And this took 15 minutes. 15. I mean, look, I could spend another 15 and make it perfect. I just, I was blown away by how good this thing is.
- [131:52]
A
Yeah, it's pretty amazing, isn't it?
- [131:53]
B
It's astonishing. So, you know, like I said, the typical experience keynote at some industry event, they're like, blah, blah, blah. You could try it out yourself and I'm like, all right. And it's always like, yeah, no, this is garbage. I was like, no, this is unbelievable. Like, this is what. So I would, I'd like to make a native Android version, frankly. I'd like to be able to push it into Android Studio and work on it further, etcetera, etcetera. But the way this thing is right now, I mean, again, I would, I'd still play with it more and you know, whatever, but it's like, this is, like, this is really good.
- [132:25]
A
Now this is a web app, right?
- [132:27]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's a react app. It's incredible. It's incredible.
- [132:32]
A
Did you, does it post. When you do it this way on GitHub, does it post the code or
- [132:37]
B
you can, you can connect?
- [132:38]
C
I did.
- [132:39]
B
So it is on GitHub. I didn't make it public yet. I'm gonna, I wanna play with a little bit, but you can actually, I include the link to the app. Like you could just go run the app. I mean, you can see it.
- [132:48]
A
Probably the, the reason I always do that is not because I want to distribute it to the public, right. But, but because I want people who, who say, oh, that's interesting to be able to start with the code because that's the other thing you could do. You could point your AI to Paul's GitHub and say, okay, this is a starting point, but I want to do it this way.
- [133:07]
B
So, okay, so it is in GitHub. It's private right now to work, but.
- [133:13]
A
Right, but you don't have to, I'm just saying.
- [133:15]
B
No, I know, but I was going to jokingly to say you're looking at this from the perspective of a developer. Like the thing that's amazing about this to me is like AI progresses so fast that you say like soon you will be able to dot and by the time you finish saying that sentence starting. So like I've said to my wife, like this has come up a bunch recently because I like to bore to death with this kind of stuff but you know, it's like you as a non program and non technical person will be able to create like little apps all by yourself, you know, personal. She could do this. Like, she could do this right now. Now she wouldn't know how to edit the code. I mean, I don't either. It's typescript. I don't, you know, I, but I mean, I, I've obviously spent time doing this kind of thing. But like, you just keep talking to it till it's exactly what you want, then you're done. It's.
- [134:01]
A
I love it that it's a web app. This is it.
- [134:03]
B
Yeah. It's crazy.
- [134:04]
A
So, you know, you can.
- [134:07]
B
Yep.
- [134:08]
A
I love it.
- [134:09]
B
It's crazy. I think of all the time that I spent, you know, on Net Pad, when you iPad, whatever, and then on. All the time it did not spend creating this thing, which is approximately 100 times better. And I want. I mean, I'm not going to hurt myself, but it's like, this is like. Yikes. I mean, that's amazing. I'm sorry, but this is amazing.
- [134:33]
A
Yeah, it is pretty cool. So I can view it.
- [134:36]
B
Yep. Well, you're already, I mean, you're technically already viewing the. What you see is, you know, I mean, this is already like rich. Yeah, yeah.
- [134:47]
A
Crazy nice.
- [134:50]
B
Yeah. It supports different themes.
- [134:53]
A
I love it.
- [134:54]
B
I know, I know there's stuff in here, there's a focus mode. Never asked for that. And by the way, actually that's an important point. Not to drag this out, but the. This just came up recently too. One of the things any, anyone, even if you were non technical, you grew up in the 80s, 90s, whatever. One of the things you always hear is like computers will do exactly what you tell them and only what you tell them, you know, Meaning that you as a programmer, if you don't tell it exactly what you want, you're just going to get what you told it to do, not what you meant. That kind of thing. AI is actually kind of the opposite of that.
- [135:29]
A
Knows what you meant.
- [135:30]
B
It's inferring from what you wrote. It's assuming. So in this case, what it did was it implemented features I did not ask for because they're common in markdown editors or whatever. Right. So the first version of Zap had that sidebar thing, which I do not want, or the focus mode, which I will never use and did not ask for, or there's a couple other things that I remember off the top of my head. But there are like features in this that are there because other apps have these and it's like, that is. Yikes. I mean, it's crazy. I just, you know, again, not a professional programmer, but as someone who has spent time doing this, I. Yeah, I mean, I don't think any one person said this, but many people have said this. You know, the role of the developer, it doesn't go away. But I feel like developers almost become program or project managers where most all. I don't know, the code is going to be generated by AI. And you, you should know it. You should know the code, you should understand how it works, etc. But you're really kind of guiding the thing from whatever beginning, wherever that means, if it's a new app or to where you want it to be, meaning whatever features you're going to add over time, etc. And that's what I see right here. It's insane. So I'm blown away by this.
- [136:47]
C
You know, the job as a developer was never to write code, it was to solve problems.
- [136:52]
B
There you go. Right. Okay. Actually, you know, that's. You're a smart guy, Richard. I don't think you enough credit for that. You. That's a good point. No, I mean, it really is a good point because I think in some ways. No, not in some ways. We do this just as human beings. We do this all the time. This is the change diversity thing. We get so used to doing things a certain way, we stop thinking about it and then we get affronted when there's an improvement or just a change. Right. Like a lot of traditional old school people my age would look at this kind of thing and be like, that's not, you know, whatever. But, you know, you, you, I, I. Someone in the Discord referenced this Heil Zandersberg interview on YouTube. I watched twice already. And one of the amazing things that his career kind of doesn't parallel, he did it. I mean, you used to in Ms. Dos, write in an editor of some kind, exit out of it, go to DOS command line, type your little commands to compile, link, run the thing, find out what the problem is, exit the app, go back into the editor. And so we go from that to an integrated development environment. We could do all those things in one place. And then of course we go to GUI is where that comes better with, you know, more complicated or capable environments, etc. Etc. And you know, we were happy to make those changes. I mean, but some of us weren't. Right? I bet there were people like, oh, well, I would never not do this with Edlin. Why would I? Why would I want this all in one place? Like, that's silly. And it's like, well, no, that's progress.
- [138:19]
C
You know, why did you take your hand off the keyboard and put it on the mouse? That's crazy talk.
- [138:24]
A
Exactly.
- [138:25]
B
Right, right, right. Yeah.
- [138:28]
C
Okay. Yeah. The only problem with this particular change is the name and the excess amount of money that's been stuck into it. The combination of those two things has made everybody extra stupid.
- [138:41]
B
Yes. So I mentioned this earlier just in passing, but you're going to see stuff like this everywhere. But one of the first ones is going to be that kind of ability to create your own custom widget, which they announced a week ago. Could go at that Android show thing, whatever that was. This is going to be something that works across devices. So you could create a widget that is on your phone, obviously, but you could have one on your Android auto screen, on your car, et cetera, et cetera, and it will be created conversationally. Right. This is not a, this is not you constructing a script. It's not using a, an automation tool. And if, then whatever, then, you know, whatever it is, tool. It's not like that. I mean, it is doing that kind of thing probably in some ways, but you don't need to know that. And that's, it's powerful and simple and it's gonna, it's gonna be everywhere. Like, this is gonna be very common.
- [139:32]
C
Yeah.
- [139:33]
B
Anyway, very exciting. I, I, I, what I expected was I would go into this, fail and then say, okay, screw it, who cares? And I, it worked so well. It was like. And then, you know, it wasn't exactly what I wanted, but then I, you know, I added, I did.
- [139:51]
C
But that's part of the reality, right? It's like you get to that point where it's like, now make it the thing you actually wanted.
- [139:57]
B
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. It's. I joke about this sometimes just with people. I'll say something like, would you do what? I mean, not what I said, you know, but that's like, that's good at
- [140:08]
A
what this is doing.
- [140:09]
B
It's crazy. Anyway, so that's. Look, just go look at it. It's amazing. I'm kind of blown away by this. And I think this, you know, like I said, I think we're gonna see a lot more of this. And then just for apps, real quick, startup today released something called Descapes 2026. I enjoyed that. They've suddenly switched to your face naming for this one product. This is a way to use local AI. And this will run off of cpu, gpu, whatever. You have to either create new images for your background, but also to edit images and do all that restyle stuff. Right. That's getting very common these days. And local. I don't know what models are using. I can talk to Brad tomorrow and find out, but I would imagine it's probably FI or something that runs on your Windows machine. Right. But you know, you have an image you like. I like this, but I want something close. That kind of thing. It's only 10 bucks if you want to buy it. And it's available on sale right now during the launch period for seven bucks. So it's not particularly expensive. So kind of a cool thing if you like to customize your desktop. And then Firefox 151 came out this week on mobile and desktop and they've added a bunch of stuff on across both. So they added the free VPN with 50 gigs of data. Now it does location selection like a normal vpn. You can say, I want it to be here. They're going to make that more granular in time. It's available in Canada, it wasn't before and I think it's coming to more markets soon. The AI kill switch, which unfortunately is not called that is in desktop, that's been there for a couple of months. It's now available on mobile as well. Shake to Summarize was a big. I don't know why I just made that. Shake to Summarize was a feature they brought to Firefox on iOS, I think end of last year. They actually won some awards for that by the way. It's available now on Android. There's a one click reset of private browsing. So instead of closing the private browsing window and restarting another one to clear out your cookies and history and whatever else, you can just click a button to do that and some other stuff. So there's. Yeah, a bunch of stuff across the board. And that's it. There you go.
- [142:16]
A
Very nice. Let me see.
- [142:20]
B
You can make your own apps. You don't need apps.
- [142:21]
A
Just make your own, make your own, write them.
- [142:24]
B
All everyone's doing.
- [142:25]
A
They wrote a operating system yesterday. Just, you know, that was the other.
- [142:29]
B
I know they wrote and then they were like, it's not an OS unless it runs doom, so let's make it run doom.
- [142:34]
A
That was kind of cool. They wrote a video driver. I'm like, stop it on the fly.
- [142:39]
B
Yeah, Seriously. We live in an insane interesting world.
- [142:42]
C
It's crazy interesting times. It is.
- [142:45]
A
That's why run his radio is always so important. Important.
- [142:50]
C
Well, at least for the administrators. So show 1037. The one we did, I did with Richard Hicks a little while ago actually. But we knew this was coming. It was very much a timed release because we're talking about secure boots. So for those of you who haven't been following along, Secure Boot is a an update to UFI to allow to resist root based malware. So it's a whole mechanism for certifying where updates come from patches to ue your bios configuration, that kind of thing. And when it was set up they, in 2016, when it first came to pass, they put a 10 year certificate on it. And look, it's 2026. And this certificate expires next month, June 2026. It's the very first original one. And so there's been a big push for a while now inside of Microsoft to just update machines to point to newer certificates. And now that we're getting close to the end of the road, there's been a bunch of tools put out there to allow you to check that your machines have gotten the update. And if your computer's current in any way, you know, a gen 10 or above, and if it uses Windows Update, you've already got it. You can try in the links there, there is a client for, for checking to see that your registry updates been done. For secure boot, you can just say yes or no. Easy to check. But if you haven't, it's not like the world's going to burst into flames if you haven't done this. Because the reality of course is that the certificate will be invalid and that means you won't trust any place for updates. And so if there is a vulnerability to your UEFI that shows up, you won't be able to get patches for it. And that could turn into something very dramatic.
- [144:36]
B
A question about this.
- [144:38]
C
Yeah, buddy.
- [144:39]
B
So I had two people ask me questions about this last week and my understanding of the plan here is that Microsoft is going to roll out this, these updates through Windows Update. You'll just get it. It happens.
- [144:49]
C
It's already done.
- [144:50]
B
Yeah, yeah, you can go into Windows security and you can see, you know, green dot, you're doing good.
- [144:54]
C
Y.
- [144:55]
B
What if you don't get it? Like, I don't, I don't mean like you've explained like it's a year from now, something happens, whatever. But I mean, do you, do you or did you. Was there any discussion about whether this could ever come from like your PC maker, your motherboard maker? Like if you for some reason it's not there, is it going to be made available somewhere else? Do you know? No.
- [145:14]
C
I mean, and it's coming through the Windows pipeline, so you can go download it, you can do it yourself. It's not.
- [145:20]
B
Oh, you can.
- [145:20]
C
Science. Yeah, okay, but. And the reality is a vendor can make it impossible too. Most vendors, if you bought machines in recent years, have already moved to new certificates. So new, new computers will never have this problem in the first place.
- [145:35]
B
I've been trying to find one that does not have this new certificate.
- [145:39]
C
And I, yeah, you know, I think anything that's gotten 24H2 is already fixed pretty much.
- [145:46]
B
Okay.
- [145:47]
C
So it's just, yeah, I, I, I'm not, I'm looking for and have not heard from like an administrator is like, oh no, I have 150 unpatched machines. And now.
- [145:57]
B
Yeah, that's what, that's what I was like, right. As this thing kind of winds down to the end date, it's like what happens when that date is passed? You know, Microsoft will know through telemetry X percentage or something. I'm thinking it's going to be so small it's negligible.
- [146:11]
C
But you know, and that's always the goal. Right. The goal coming in like this is that it becomes a non event. And we've, they've pulled it off a few times lately.
- [146:20]
B
Okay.
- [146:20]
C
And I've made shows about this, you know, the same with the certificate, the strong certificate requirements for Active Directory.
- [146:26]
B
Right.
- [146:27]
C
Which was a little literal showstopper. And last year they deliberately triggered it to try and get sysadmin's attention and you could fix it with a registry change. Right. So they thought they'd got enough people fixed, there's only a few left. It's like, let's even get their attention by. They put this update in and it would break something. If you haven't dealt with it then you could switch it back and it's like, okay, we're going to make it permanent. September. And when September, October finally rolled around, nothing happened. And it's like, and it was Steve Cyphus I was doing that one with and he's like, perfect, that's what I wanted. Nothing happens. Everybody's fixed. It seems like those challenges just can get the guy's attention. The thing that's evil about this one is when the date goes by and you're unpatched, nothing happens.
- [147:10]
B
That's what I mean. That's the thing. Like, there may come a time in the future where this is more of a problem. But in the short term for certainly you're not going to notice anything. It's not like, it's not like, oh, your firewall doesn't work anymore. Sorry. No.
- [147:23]
C
You know what's going to happen is there's going to be a vulnerability and you're going to go try to up these machines and you're not going to be able to, you're going to have to go fix assert first and then do it.
- [147:35]
B
Hey, you can't even run Call of Duty right now, unless you have an updated tpm, so an enabled tpn, I should say.
- [147:43]
C
Yeah, yeah. Anyway, you know, Rich. Rich Hicks is one of the best. He's the guy Microsoft calls for a bunch of, like, remote access and stuff like that. And he's just been all in on this particular problem. And, you know, actually we've had a lot of certificate discussions on Run as lately. Because the biggest problem with modern certificates, even in the browsers, is the revocation strategies just don't work. And so if you have a bad cert, a cert's been exploited in some way, there's no good way to fix it. And. And so right now, the current plan is to shorten the lifespans of search down to 47 days.
- [148:19]
B
Wow.
- [148:20]
C
So that you'll have to automate replacing certificates, which means even if the revocation doesn't work after 47 days, it's not being used anyway. At most, it's all part of the game.
- [148:31]
B
Okay.
- [148:34]
A
Many a tear has to fall, but
- [148:38]
B
it's all right in there.
- [148:41]
A
You know what I'd like to do right now?
- [148:43]
C
What would you like to do, friends?
- [148:45]
A
I like to have a little drink.
- [148:47]
C
Well, is that one of my very favorite places?
- [148:51]
B
Right.
- [148:51]
C
Because I'm. I'm back in Alkmaar. My buddy Remy, and Remy, if you recall, because I've been here a number of times before, he has a favorite whiskey shop here in Alkmaar, and the gentleman that used to run it wanted to retire, and so Remy bought it from him.
- [149:07]
A
Nice.
- [149:08]
C
And. And has done very well. More than doubled sales over the years. He's never been in retail before, but it's been a thing he's been doing with his son. And they've been having a lot of fun with it. Built a great website, have been really collecting on the whole point he's had with. With the whiskey shop here in Alvar is if you can buy it at a regular whiskey store or regular liquor store, we don't have that. Only things you could find nowhere else. And this thing, Draft Daft Mill. Yeah. You definitely can't find anywhere else.
- [149:33]
A
This is very special bottle Daft.
- [149:35]
C
What a great name, huh? And it's truly one of the rarest things you can imagine because it is a single estate whiskey maker. All right, let's start at the beginning. We're going to the Lowlands. Do you remember the low. You know, all the different regions of Scotland? This is the lowlands. It's the southern eastern part of South Scotland. So this is sort of the flat terrain, more temperate compared to The Highlands, where the weather's more extreme and more certainly more mountainous. The general area, if you draw it out, there's this area called the Highland Boundary Fault, which stretches across the mainland of the UK from Helensburg on the Firth of Clyde in the southwest across to Stonehaven in the northeast. And I was just in Stonehaven in January. That's where we saw the amazing tides and stuff like that. But, yeah, really lowlands for a reason. No higher at any point than 200 meters or maybe 600ft. It's just mostly the Central Lowlands, which is just river valleys and rolling hills, and also the rivers of Clyde, Forth and Tay. And then the. On the southern end of most of that is they call the Southern Uplands, although, remember, no higher than 200 meters, which has got more lands and stuff like that. This is all the big cities. This is Edinburgh, this is Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Stirling, not that they're Bell that big. And Daft Mill is in the how of Fife, a how in Gael, of course, meaning a hollow or tract of flat land. So this is the how carved by the River Eden and near the village of Calisi, it's called Daft Mill, after the Daft Burn. Again, Gaelic. A burn is a stream, and there's parts of the Daf Burn that, because of the shape of the land, that appear to run uphill. So that stream is clearly daft. And so the fact that uses the stream means it must be. If you use the Daft Burn, you must be a daft mill.
- [151:27]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [151:28]
C
So that's where it comes from. And up above that area there is the Lamont Hills, which is where all the royalties are forth. And this has been productive land for literally millennia. Archaeologists have pulled out Neolithic sites, Bronze Age sites, all the way through. Khaleesi, the nearest village, is also famous for Khaleesi man, which is a sandstone pillar about 9ft high, 2.7 meters or so, with a carving of a naked male warrior carrying a shield and a spear. And this is likely 1500 years old. This is the Picts, and this is at the time that the Romans were trying to control Scotland and failing against the Picts. And so this was a kind of an artifact that was built at that time to terrorize the Romans. Now, the particular chunk of land we're talking about in the how of Fife has got lots of land records. The earliest one show the Kinloch family had control in the charter to the mill and the lands that were already there from the reign of Alexander III. So that's 1245-1285. Then there's records of it handing, passing to the Sandilins and then to the walkers. So in 1701, the Walker family, so fast forward here 500 years or so, established the Daft Mill and Pitlairn. And also on the property is this stone water tower. It was built somewhere in the 1800s. Nobody's exactly sure when. It has a Dutch look, so they presume it was built by the Dutch engineer that was working the area during the development of the railway, which the Walkers were investors in. And famously, further to north here is the Tay River Tail rail bridge, which had a collapse in the 1800s. Is one a great story, but a little off the beat for this particular one. The current family that controls it is the Cuthbert. So grandfather Cuthbert actually was a sharecropper for the walkers, but in 1984, the sons Ian and Francis were able to buy the property. And so they are the fourth owner in 700 years or so. And it is about a thousand acre working farm. So they rotate crops of barley, potatoes, carrots and broccoli, but they also work beef cattle as well. So synergistic farming, very normal. And it's important to remember that these guys are primarily farmers. And so they do have barley as one of the rotational crops. And they sell most of that barley to whiskey makers, mainly Edrington. So that's Macallan and Highland Park. And as is noted in one of the pieces I was reading at the time, back in 2005, they were selling barley at about 70 pounds per ton. And so there was this idea that, you know, we could make that barley more valuable by making it into whiskey. And so to make more money on barley, they started, they upgraded, applied for a license to be able to build their own spirit production facility, a distillery out of some old vintage buildings in the area. It took them a couple years to get that license, but they got their first spirit make in 2005. So of all the barley they produce, they only keep a hundred tons for themselves, which they send to Chris Maltings and Elloa to do the malting, which means they get back about 80 tons of malt, and they use that over the course of the year because they don't make whiskey all year round. They're very farmers. But there is a couple of periods after the barley harvest. So after they do two harvests of parley a year, a winter harvest and a spring harvest or a summer harvest. And so from November to February they make some whiskey, and from June and July they make some whiskey. Otherwise they're just farming all the time. Which is much more the like the way the farming that barley based Whiskeys were made 200 years ago, you know, in the 1800s. Two harvests a year in between. You make whiskey to do that. Francis Cuthbert is the, is the whiskey maker of the brothers. Ian is quite a bit shyer and he's very quotable. And I will quote him here when he says when it comes to distilling there are three of us doing it. Me, myself and I who taught me. I think it's just genetic. All Scotsmen have it in them to make whiskey. So his approach, this is a very small facility is remember he's got 80 tons of grist. He loads a ton at a time into the mash ton with a copper top on top. They take water off the well that comes through that water tower to make a very clear wort. It's part of their design. They use a pair of 7500 liter stainless steel washbacks. That's tiny. They do a 72 to 100 hour ferment using dried yeast, no cream yeast here for those who are squeamish. And then off to a 3000 liter wash still and a 2700 liter spirit still. Those are stills from Forsyth. Virtually everything else in this whole facility was made locally. But the stills do come from Forsyth.
- [156:18]
A
Nice.
- [156:19]
C
Yeah. The spent grain is then given to the cattle as high calorie feed. Even the spillings and so forth are not bad fertilizer. They also use that on the ground as well. So nothing is wasted. Everything was made from the farm. Everything goes back into the place.
- [156:36]
A
Must smell like whiskey though.
- [156:38]
C
Well, for a few times a year, every year. But tell me the downside. New make comes in at about 75%. Of course they fill it 63.5 because they're filling bourbon casts and they get their bourbon casts from Heaven Hill. They also have some sherry casts and they have all their Dunn storage on site. So as I mentioned, they started in 2004. 5. They did not make their first bottle until 2018 because they're not in the business of trying to make money off the whiskey per se. When. When Cuthbert was asked about that, he said why'd that wait so long? Because I didn't think it was ready. And so yeah, he. They kept laying up barrels every twice a year and it was only when they got to over 12 that he finally decided to do a bottling. His first bottling in 2018 was only 250 bottles at cast strength. And you had to enter A lottery for the opportunity to buy one at £200 a piece. And it disappeared very quickly. So this, they do all their bottling through an external bottler, Berry Brothers, Barry Brothers and Rudd. And so that's what this is. This is bottled by Barry Brothers, and this is their 2012 edition. So this was distilled in 2012, bottled in 2026, and I think it's already gone. Although in this case there is 3,475 bottles, so the production is a little bit bigger. So then this actually comes from five first filled Sherry's hogsheads. These are Oloroso and Pedro Jimenez. Seven first fill Heaven Hills barrels. So that combination of 12 barrels produces the 3,400, say five bottles. They actually did the distillation on December 25, 2012. Like Christmas time. What's that?
- [158:26]
A
What you do for Christmas Day?
- [158:28]
C
Christmas Day, I distilled whiskey and then, you know, 13 years later, I put it into a bottle at 46% and sold it for a hundred euros. Very reasonable. It's about 115us and I've already had a couple of tastings of this as a toast to Soma. The color on it is spectacular, but that's of course a sherry casking, so you'd expect nothing less. I defy you to think this is a lowland. It could be a spay. It's big and rich and sweet and clear. It's just perfect. And it's not exported in any way. You have to come to Scotland to get this. Barry Brothers is a. Is a great producer. They do a lot of custom bottles and so forth. But in the case here, you're talking about a single farm estate whiskey bottled through a bunch of pros, only certain. Even here in the Netherlands, there are 10 stores that carry this. And one of them is the whiskey shop in Alkmaar. It is both a combination of the craft distilling wave that we've seen and the oldest school whiskey possibly imagined. Barley grown on a farm, sold from the farm, essentially. And it's a delight. I love that this exists. It's hilarious that it's called Daft Mill, but it's just, it's the real deal. You make a trip to Scotland, you pick up, you got a friend who loves whiskey, you gotta get him one of these. Yeah, it's gonna be a pain in the butt to find, but if you find it, it's gonna be so special because it's in a time of these ultra industrialized whiskey whiskey producers at massive scale. These guys just not that Guy, they're farmers. And for a hundred tons of the grain they make a year, they put into barrels and once in a while make a batch maybe once a year. That's all they do.
- [160:16]
A
Yeah. I mean, this is. You don't get rich doing this if you make 341 bottles a year, even at 100.
- [160:22]
C
3,500 bottles a year.
- [160:24]
A
500, okay.
- [160:25]
C
Yeah. So. And at 100, and then the retail is $100. So 100 pounds. So that's. That's 35,000 of which they're getting maybe 20% of that. So, no, it's not a huge amount of money.
- [160:37]
B
No.
- [160:37]
C
You do this, but it's a thing.
- [160:39]
B
Yeah.
- [160:40]
C
And. And it's just another. It's worth more than what it would be just sold as grain. So they are making some money. But it's really. It's lovely. It's the lovely that it exists. It's just. Once again, I'm educated. I have a moment where it's like more than one way to make whiskey out there. And some of these ways are the old ways. They're making Whiskey like it's 1826.
- [161:03]
A
How cool. Daft mill. You can't get it, so don't try.
- [161:06]
C
Yeah. But if you ever get a chance, if you're ever in the right place, get somebody who's. Karen. Barry Brothers. Look for it. This single farm estate. It's very special. They make a cast strength that. That will be only like 100 bottles. Those are much harder to find. But this is their main release each year, the winter release. And it's perfect.
- [161:24]
A
Nice.
- [161:24]
C
Perfect in every way.
- [161:27]
A
Thank you.
- [161:27]
B
Richard.
- [161:27]
A
Richard Campbell. Runasradio.com where do you go from the Netherlands?
- [161:33]
C
I'm going home tomorrow for a week. Then I'm back to Stockton.
- [161:38]
B
You slacker. Crazy.
- [161:40]
C
But. But the week I'm home, I get to go talk to two different high schools. So I'm really looking forward to this.
- [161:44]
B
I have fun. See, I would be looking forward to crawling under the bed and falling asleep
- [161:48]
C
for a week, but, you know, for a few minutes. But compared to Richard talking to kids about, AI, you only get to do this a few times a year. It's really, really important.
- [161:58]
A
I hope they don't boo you. Like, the college crowd has been booing people like Eric.
- [162:02]
B
I don't think he's going to be like, rah, rah. AI. Am I right? Anybody? Cricket?
- [162:07]
C
Not that. Not that guy.
- [162:08]
A
And if, you know, if I were those kids, I'd be very, very interested in what you have to say. Because there's a lot of uncertainty as they.
- [162:14]
C
Yeah. And I want to hear what they want to say. You know, that's one of the reasons I'm up there is to see where they're at. What do they see now?
- [162:21]
B
Right.
- [162:22]
C
Yeah.
- [162:22]
A
Thank you, sir. Thank you. Paul thurat, he's@therot.com Become a Premium Member for all the goodness. T H U R r o t t.com and his books are@leanpub.com of course, if you're a premium member, you can get all the books as part of your membership, which makes it even more desirable. And together they form the dynamic duo of windows journalism every.
- [162:48]
C
Well, I know I'm dynamic.
- [162:49]
A
Dynamic one of us. Every Wednesday at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us do it live if you want. If you're in the club, of course. In the club, Twitter, discord, but also YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kick after the fact on demand versions of the show@TWIT TV www.there is a YouTube channel dedicated to the video or you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client to the audio or video or both and get it automatically as soon as we're done of a Wednesday. Thanks, John. Ashley, filling in for Kevin King, who's on vacation this week. Producer extraordinaire. Stay tuned if you're watching live. Intelligent Machines is coming up. Our guest will be the CTO of Dashlane, one of the big password managers talking about AI. He is doing a lot of vibe coding himself, but he also his team of 100 is using AI and what AI and what the future passwords are. It's all very interesting.
- [163:54]
B
There is no future passwords, Leo get the memo.
- [163:57]
A
Well, I think he knows that. So how do you run a password company where.
- [164:01]
B
Well, it's passkeys and.
- [164:05]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah, help me manage my past keys.
- [164:08]
A
He's very much, you know, an advocate of that. So we'll talk Frederic Raven coming up in televisions. Thank you, gentlemen. I will see you all next week on Windows Weekly.
- [164:19]
B
Bye.
- [164:20]
A
Bye.