Windows Weekly 985 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat's here. Richard Campbell's here. We'll talk about Week D. It's here too. And actually there's a lot of new stuff going in there. New Friday builds for the Windows Insider program. We'll talk about AI and Paul's love, his newfound love for Linux.

Leo Laporte [00:00:18]:
I kid you not. Windows Weekly is coming up next. You can yell at him later. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is tw. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 985, recorded Wednesday, May 27, 2026. Putting the Metal in experimental.

Leo Laporte [00:00:50]:
It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Microsoft. And here they are, the dynamic duo of Microsoft journalism. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, winners and and dozers, I give you Paul Thurat. Is that good? You like that?

Paul Thurrott [00:01:08]:
Hello, Leo.

Leo Laporte [00:01:10]:
Yes, I always wanted to be a Circus Ringmaster of TH.com and his cohort in crime, Mr. Richard Campbell from RunIsRadio.com

Richard Campbell [00:01:23]:
stretch to call me a journalist. Goodness knows.

Leo Laporte [00:01:25]:
Paul is in Makunji, Richard's in Mad park, and all's right with the world.

Richard Campbell [00:01:35]:
Yep, exactly.

Leo Laporte [00:01:39]:
There's this thing called Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:41]:
Yeah, they usually throw a wrench into everything Weekday.

Leo Laporte [00:01:46]:
I love week D. I look forward to week D. I do too.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:49]:
And then I forget. It happens and I wake up at, you know, I don't wake up, but at 4:35 o'clock in the afternoon it's like, oh, right, this happens all the time. Why do I always forget this?

Leo Laporte [00:01:57]:
So there are usually four weeks. Sometimes there's a fifth partial week in the month.

Richard Campbell [00:02:03]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:02:03]:
Is there a week E?

Paul Thurrott [00:02:05]:
Yeah. Well, yeah, but there's no, you know, regularly scheduled that's supposed to happen on Weekend Windows.

Richard Campbell [00:02:11]:
Four times a year we're getting a fifth week, right?

Leo Laporte [00:02:13]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:02:13]:
We decided to do stupid months and I.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:17]:
Maybe Richard might remember. I don't remember the. The point of, you know, Patch Tuesday is the second Tuesday of the month. And then the Week D preview update now, which is a relatively recent construct, is typically, but not always the fourth Tuesday.

Leo Laporte [00:02:34]:
So it has nothing to do with the Chicago Bulls or anything like that?

Paul Thurrott [00:02:38]:
No, I. No, no, I don't think so.

Richard Campbell [00:02:42]:
That's a different kind of week.

Leo Laporte [00:02:44]:
That's a different week.

Richard Campbell [00:02:45]:
D.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:47]:
Sorry, it took me a second there.

Leo Laporte [00:02:49]:
I know, I'm sorry. I thought a basketball reference would be right up your alley, so to speak, but maybe not. I'm sorry I threw you the ball and you dropped it.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:59]:
I mean, the whole league is weekday at this point, weak to non existent.

Leo Laporte [00:03:05]:
So week D, what does Microsoft do on week D? So week B. So week B is Patch Tuesday week.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:11]:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And oddly, you never really hear the term week B that much, do you? But yes, in Microsoft's kind of release cadence, whatever, that's what it is. You know, this stuff has changed over the years. Obviously the whole way that Microsoft develops software has changed. But with the changes we're seeing this year to Windows 11 and the improvements, the pain point addressing and so on, we're seeing a return to what I think to be a more normal or logical common sense kind of a schedule. Meaning that they won't always, but will often go through the Insider program, canary to experimental, to beta, to release preview, and then out to general or stable or whatever outside of the Insider program. The weekday Tuesday.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:03]:
It's not always Tuesday, but the weekday update is a chance to test what will be next month's Patch Tuesday two weeks prior. So last week I think it was. If it wasn't, it was the week before, but probably last week we talked about a recent set of release preview builds that were a preview of this, and this is a preview of Patch Tuesday. So the same kind of set of updates, except not exactly. Interestingly, I know Richard will remember this, but others may not remember that Windows 1124 and 25H2 are in the same code base. So they get the same update, literally, they go to slightly different build numbers. Right. One is 68, sorry, 26,100 series builds.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:48]:
The other one is 26,200 series builds. But the sub. The sub. The minor part of the build number, whatever.

Richard Campbell [00:04:55]:
I'd love to see the build pipeline on this, that they literally are taking the same code and pushing it to multiple build numbers.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:02]:
So it's amazing. You say that I'm going to reference the past a lot today because I'm old and that's what I do now. But back when Microsoft was working on what became Windows Server 2003, which was part of the wave of updates that also included the XPSP2 stuff with the security push, trustworthy computing, this was going to be in the case. Well, in both cases. But in the case of server, especially windows.net server, remember the first release, Right. And the trustworthy computing and then a common sense thing for branding kind of changed all that. But at that time when Windows development was pretty simple compared to today, remember the guy, whoever I was talking to at the time, drew this thing on the whiteboard and he was talking about branches and forking and how. I can't remember the details of this exactly.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:54]:
I drew a picture of it that I put in some blog post at the time. This is 20 plus years ago, almost 25 years ago, where there was a main kind of a trunk for Windows client and then a separate one for Server. And because of all the Longhorn silliness, the client thing had gone off on its own, server had gone off on its own, and then to do what became Vista. And this was the case of Server 2003 as well. It was based on the. Obviously the server code. Based. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:25]:
So anyway, he drew this. It was sideways. It wasn't like a tree going up like you would a normal tree, but it was a sideways tree and it had just a couple of branches. And I was like, yeah, I can't handle this. And the way it is today, you couldn't make an infographic that could fit all the branches of builds that we have today through all the versions of the inside lines would overlap constantly. Yeah, it would look like a tentacled sea monster. Like it's insanity. But just speaking just of the stable supported versions of Windows today, Windows 11 versions 24 and 25H2, again, same code base, different version numbers, different names, but the exact same thing.

Richard Campbell [00:07:03]:
Right?

Paul Thurrott [00:07:03]:
The features are always going to be the same on both. That's the way it is. Right. And that's good for a lot of reasons. In Microsoft's case, it's good because they can release a single kb, which is a cumulative update, which is a monthly patch, Tuesday update, usually that services both and does the same thing to both. Right. And so for week D, we're seeing that you get this. It's the same kb, it's the same literal update.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:25]:
It's this. You know, the build numbers are very slightly different, but that's just because they have to be whatever. Until this month, this year, 26H1, they've also been testing that and putting out monthly updates to that for some reason, even though for the first couple of months especially, no one had one of these computers, but it was always a month behind. And as recently as last week I commented on this, I think I said something to the tune of. For stable, 26H1 is like the Canary version in the Insider program, meaning it's always a little bit behind. You would think it's the most advanced one, so to speak. It should be out there in the forefront. It hasn't been.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:06]:
But this month I was surprised to Say it caught up or Microsoft caught it up. Meaning even though it's getting a different KB from 24 and 25 H2 because it is a different code base, the features it's getting, the changes, the updates, whatever, are, unless I miss something small, exactly the same with 24 and 25H2. That's a first.

Richard Campbell [00:08:29]:
Now what about the ARM line on this?

Paul Thurrott [00:08:32]:
Yeah, so that's what this is technically. So 26H1 is only for X2 based computers. Even though in the Insider program you could, with an intel or AMD or a previous gen Snapdragon X computer, enroll your PC in that and get the updates that they're never going to ship publicly.

Richard Campbell [00:08:50]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:51]:
The couple of weirdness. Well, more than a couple, but one of the weird things is 24, 25H2 will be upgradable to 26H2, which Microsoft has literally named. So the standard end of the year Update, typically around October, 26H1 will not. And they have not said when what you'll go to. So in some ways it doesn't matter because again, these things are going to be updated in lockstep going forward anyway, functionally, unless something changes. And it could.

Richard Campbell [00:09:22]:
But I would have thought they'd bring it all together 26H2 once the X2s are out in the world and they're.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:28]:
You would think that, right? But you think clearly and that's logical. Yeah, and that's just where you're failing. So I. They have never said. They, they basically, they left it very vague. We will at some time in the future explain what the path forward is. And then at some point, of course these things will all, you know, get flushed down the same toilet or whatever. But my theory, which by the way, I haven't written about this because it's too vague to bother, but I guess I'll mention it here, is that this will become Windows 12.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:02]:
Right. That 26H1 will become 1212. And then of course 26H2 will also, you know, get that upgrade path as well. The thing that has that thing I just heard is that we, we know because Microsoft, I'm not sure they said this explicitly, but Microsoft is using AI to find bugs in Windows in the code base. Like everyone is. Right. And last month they were talking about this M Dash in house frontier model they created. Well, it's more of an orchestrator, but a frontier model essentially for finding bugs in the Azure Windows code bases.

Richard Campbell [00:10:39]:
Whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:40]:
They apparently have also been using Mythos. Like a lot of other people, they were one of the first companies to get access to that, they have found an astronomical number of bugs. Right.

Richard Campbell [00:10:49]:
Which is astronomical and by all accounts, like own the keys to the castle type bugs. Like, not, oh, this is a potential weakness, but it's like, oh, if they enact this, they have everything.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:00]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:11:01]:
Over and over again.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:02]:
Right. This is both the concern, but also the promise of this stuff. Right. That especially for a proprietary software company like Microsoft, this can be embarrassing and bad and it sounds like bad PR and. But I know we keep talking about this. Like, I, I feel very strongly that any company that creates software of any kind should use AI like that, like Firefox is doing. Like others are doing.

Richard Campbell [00:11:26]:
By all accounts, it is an absolute arms race going on right now.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:29]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:11:30]:
That most people don't want to talk about at all. But it's like we only have so many weeks before black hats have access to tools that can reveal these vulnerabilities as fast as we can. And we got to get them all fixed.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:43]:
They only have one of them. So a couple, this might be a couple of years ago or at least a year ago I was talking about Rust and Mark Russinovich and Dave, Dave Weston and well, the security guy from Mexico now. And you know, they're. And they're talking about Rust and adopting Rust across the board. And I purposely made this very generalized kind of prediction statement, whatever, that knowing that people would try to pick it apart, but that Microsoft should use AI to rewrite the Windows, whatever Azure, whatever kernel in Rust, you know, which is overly simplistic. And yet when you look at the way this stuff has evolved, maybe that's not so far fetched. You know, I have not heard that they're doing that per se. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:31]:
There was that job listing where they were looking for people, more people with Rust expertise, et cetera, et cetera. There's definitely going to be more Rust work at low levels in Windows and Azure and all that stuff, of course. But this Windows 12 thing has been different things at different times. Like the AI stuff we see in Windows 11 at one point was going to be Windows 12 and then they kind of stepped back from that. And right now the vague thing that I'm hearing is that it's going to be this security refactoring from Mythos and M Dash that will form the foundation of what is Windows 12 and it will continue the message we're hearing this year about these pain point things that Microsoft is addressing.

Richard Campbell [00:13:08]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:09]:
But doing so in a far more architectural sense.

Richard Campbell [00:13:12]:
Well, I wonder if right now they're just patching what they can patch and sooner or later they're going to run into a set of problems where it's like this Requires a refink aka a new version. Right. You were just talking about SP2 like that was the issue with SP2 was. Or are you going to have to change some things right.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:29]:
And deliver some pain to customers from a user experience standpoint to protect them and we're going to have to collectively just kind of handle that. The worry for Microsoft here, of course is that we already saw how poorly people responded or customers I should say responded to the at the time felt like very artificial hardware requirements for Windows 11. This might instigate another escalation of that which we should also put Copilot plus PC in the in the middle of the way.

Richard Campbell [00:14:00]:
The kind of personality that keeps a Gen 10 computer alive is also the kind of personality that will complain bitterly that because it doesn't have a TPM2 chip in it.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:10]:
Like I have at least 15 of those in my apartment right now. So I understand that complaint. But yeah, so we'll see what happens. I But if you you know Copilot plus PC is in kind of a weird area right now because you know 16 gigs RAM, 256 gigs storage and the MPU are all expensive components now and yikes. So you know, we'll see how they

Richard Campbell [00:14:37]:
Not a good year to make hardware demands while the pipelines are as screwed up as they are.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:41]:
Yep. Oh yeah, you're not going to hear a Windows 11 announcement. Well at least certainly not a release this year. But if it. You know.

Richard Campbell [00:14:47]:
But obviously but the best I've gotten out of any sysadmin owning a large computer purchase is why am I paying for an mpu? Like just no justification for it whatsoever. And they aren't cheap so they're still specifically going to the vendors and showing show me your non MPU systems. I have no need for that. It's not that they're not using AI.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:10]:
They are.

Richard Campbell [00:15:10]:
It's in the cloud. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:11]:
It's almost like intel correctly read the market somehow. That's not true. But. But they have a bunch of NPU MPU less or lower powered NPU based CPUs. Of course. Right. Like the non core Ultra stuff.

Richard Campbell [00:15:25]:
Yeah. But you know I remember this with GPUs too you know from again very much from an enterprise perspective. Sure. Home machines was all about the gaming and they were buying they would every new machine had a GPU in it. But when you were pricing hardware and they wanted a A few hundred dollars for this GPU that Windows wouldn't utilize unless you're in DirectX mode, which most companies would never be in. Like, why in the world would I pay for this?

Paul Thurrott [00:15:52]:
Yeah. I mean, if you accept and you should, that consolidation is just the natural market for us. You can see it on all kinds of different levels. One of them would be on the component level where you have a motherboard with a dozen different chips or adding cards, whatever they are, and you can consolidate that into an soc. I mean, Intel, I don't know if they were first, but intel integrating graphics into their CPUs decades ago.

Richard Campbell [00:16:14]:
Yeah, well, I think was an early. Exactly. That reason was GPU to you guys somehow without charging you separately for it, so you can't take it out.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:24]:
Right. And. And the first ones are terrible, right?

Richard Campbell [00:16:27]:
Oh yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:27]:
You know, especially compared to dedicated graphics, they would be. But you know, 20 years later, those things are actually pretty freaking great.

Richard Campbell [00:16:34]:
New ones, certainly this is because the chips have gotten so good. But the joke the whole time with Iris and those early things was you weren't using them anyway. But at least there was a GPU on board.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:46]:
Yep. Yeah. And you know, we needed the GPU on board for things like the Glass interface and Windows Vista. You know, that kind of took, you know, took resource or took demand away from the cpu, freed it up for other things, which improves overall performance. You know, obviously dedicated.

Richard Campbell [00:17:04]:
You're now going to talk about Vista and how badly the video drivers went for that because they also tried to upgrade the quality of the video drivers and none of the vendors wanted to do that.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:13]:
Right. Which at least they're not trying to update drivers now.

Leo Laporte [00:17:17]:
Oh boy.

Richard Campbell [00:17:18]:
So yeah, I basically taken them over at this point because it's just such a disaster.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:23]:
I'm actually kind of surprised. We talked about Windhek last week and this driver initiative they have and I just take over the drivers. Just do it.

Richard Campbell [00:17:30]:
Like just. Without a doubt.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:32]:
Yeah, just do it. Not that Microsoft is the be all end all of high quality software, but.

Richard Campbell [00:17:39]:
But at least they have some incentive to do a better job. And then the trade here is you do have the Nvidias of the world that want to maximize utilization on the hardware and so they will jump through the hoops to make a decent set of drivers that rather than Microsoft. And then you have all the little like printer vendors and things like that. You don't want to bother.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:58]:
Most of those are just someone slapping a brand on some ODM part, you know, that is made in China and sold by Eight different companies and yeah, and your quality will vary. Yeah, you don't want those guys making drivers. Anywho, with all that as backdrop. Sorry for the history there, but yeah. So week D Tuesday got the preview updates. This is a preview literally of what we're going to see on Patch Tuesday in a couple of weeks in June and last month, you may recall that Patch Tuesday was the first major patch Tuesday, if you will, from a functional perspective, like new feature perspective. This one clearly will not be. So, you know, this is the.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:39]:
We've talked about basically all of this. None of it is super important until we get to the end. But you know, shared audio support over a Bluetooth LE for supported devices, multi camera. Multi app camera support, meaning you use one camera across multiple apps for camera hardware that supports that. This is where you can go when you're setting up a computer for the first time, there's a link in one of the screens where you can actually name your user account directory, which is one of those. You could do this. And if you were automating this process, obviously you could do it. But putting that back in the UI for the first time in 15 years, it's been a long time.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:17]:
You haven't been able to do that in a while. And then improvements across the board like, you know, magnifier, the secure boot stuff that's in Windows, Security Task Manager, Windows loads that are, etc.

Richard Campbell [00:19:28]:
And how much of this is just to be pointing the AI at the backlog of complaints about reliability performance.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:37]:
So we don't know. That's a good point. So I think from a. Well, just looking at the pain point thing, when Pavan Davalori talks about we want to do things like improve the latency that occurs when you click something and something opens, like the Start menu or a File Explorer, whatever, there's a. It's not a one second delay, but it's something you perceive and it makes you feel slow. So we talked, I think last week about some of the things they're doing under the COVID is to improve like app and core system experience launches. Right. Which is perfectly valid.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:09]:
You click something or hit a button, whatever it is, you expect that thing to occur. It will now occur faster. So there's actually a bunch of that in here. They didn't specify which bits, but performance improvements across those things. App and core system experience launches and then reliability improvements across the board as well. But specifically for things like the sign in and lock screens. And I hear this stuff and look, I use Windows probably more than the Average guy. I don't really, I don't perceive these things and I think part of it might just be I'm used to it.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:41]:
Right. And that sometimes you need to be jolted out of this. Right. Well, I'll talk a little bit more about this in the context of Linux in a little while, but going to Snapdragon X based Windows and ARM computers, you suddenly realize, oh, this can be better. And I feel like some of this will do that for everybody where you may not notice it, but what you will notice is you're not yelling at the computer as much or you know, however you deal with these things. I mean, I do a lot of Tourette style yelling personally, but I think, look, it's, it's valuable work, it's good to do. So nothing like from a, like I said, from a feature perspective, nothing major, but that's always good. You know, I actually, I prefer that.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:29]:
Okay, well if we could just beat every topic to death like that, will it go like 4 or 5 hours?

Leo Laporte [00:21:35]:
So tell you what, let's pause since you have reached

Paul Thurrott [00:21:43]:
an impasse, a denouement, an impasse.

Leo Laporte [00:21:46]:
I don't know, something. Be a good time to put in a word for our fine sponsor and then we'll get back to more of Windows Weekly if that's okay with everybody here. Okay, I see you hovering your finger over the skip button. Do not skip this. You're not going to want to miss this. All right, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Please. Onward and upward, Mr.

Leo Laporte [00:22:09]:
T. So the

Paul Thurrott [00:22:11]:
party line is that Microsoft is simplifying the Windows Insider program. And yeah, if you're doing a flyby, I guess it is simpler but it's not really right. Like there are, you know, the sub channels and other choices you can make inside of all the channels. If you've ever. Or if you've recently enrolled a PC in this and or have switched over to this new scheme, you'll discover that there are actually more permutations now than there used to be. In the good news department, there's a couple of things. One of the things is that you can easily move out of channel and into Stable if you want, or another channel that's good, a little bit portable. You can enable feature flags to turn on all the features you're getting so you don't have to wait for them like for a cfr that's good, you know, but it's complicated and they've changed the way that they announce builds.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:06]:
So this go, if you go to blogs,.windows.com There's a Windows Insider program header and you can see just the articles that are from that part and they just do like a single blog post for all the builds. And if I'm counting this correctly, and I'm not, there are at least four builds. But the announcement makes it seem like we just, you know, made changes to Beta and Experimental, which we put the mental. And experimental because there are multiple sub channels. Right. So there's at least four. I could be missing one. It you have to go and look at the.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:41]:
I think they're on Microsoft Learn. Let me just make sure. Yeah, Microsoft Learn, which I thought was going away by the way, but is has details about each of the. The builds that they announced. This is from Friday and this is tough reading. So let's. How do I say this? So the. The experimental channel, future platforms.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:05]:
Right. That's the one of the sub channels. This is what used to be, literally

Richard Campbell [00:24:08]:
Canary, what Canary was supposed to be but never was.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:12]:
No, it's what Canary was. Now sadly includes platform changes and there's no features and it's like, oh, yeah, no, we've been here before.

Richard Campbell [00:24:21]:
It's like the experiment is, if you notice, we change the name.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:25]:
Yep. And it's like the features and experiences might never get released. This does not map to a specific. Okay, close the tab. Okay. And then there's experimental for 26H1. And it's like. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:41]:
And you know, reliability of Explorer Exe Nice. You know. Okay. Switching between multiple desktops is going to be bit of great. This fixes across the board, this low level stuff. Literally. There's a fix for the Times New Roman font family in here. I'd like.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:56]:
Yikes. If you care about diacritical marks and the like, you will enjoy that. And it's not until we get into experimental. Just experimental. Oh, no, sorry, that's not true. Experimental Dev. What used to be Dev. I guess it's experimental.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:12]:
So there's some narrators, a bunch of accessibility stuff. I think this was tied to an accessibility holiday or whatever, our day that we marked last week or whatever. But there's a couple of things in here, nothing major, although I will say let me see if this computer has it. I bet it does. If you go into the Settings app and go to Display. And it's probably. No, it's right there under Brightness and Color, you may see an option called adaptive Color. If you're familiar with the way phones work and a lot of Apple devices, you know that the screen has sensors around it or in it that will detect the ambient lighting and adapt the color so that it looks true to the color to you no matter what the lighting condition is.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:53]:
This sounds awesome. If you've ever used this in Windows, you know that what it does is it makes your screen pink. So like, I'll just put it on. Yeah, it's terrible. So I always turn it off. I always know you see the pink and you're like, no, this is terrible. So they're adding an accessibility feature called screen tint. And what this does is basically overlay a color over the entire screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:17]:
That can do things like soften the intensity of the light, but, you know, whatever. It's kind of. It's an interesting idea. It's probably what it's like not adaptive brightness or lighting. It's like manual lighting. Like it's something you have to do yourself. But honestly, is it for a particular

Richard Campbell [00:26:33]:
kind of vision impairment that it goes pink?

Paul Thurrott [00:26:36]:
So like a lot of accessibility features, probably it's not for like color blind people or anything like that. But there probably are people with specific eye issues that may benefit from this. But I feel like a lot of people, you know, like if you've ever done like the orange light thing, like if you do night night light or whatever it's called a Windows or on a phone or whatever, you know, a lot of the first reaction to that is like, oh, the screen's all orange, you know, and then after a while you're like, actually, I kind of like this. It's nice. And I think it's that kind of.

Richard Campbell [00:27:03]:
Especially at night. Yeah, no, I definitely.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:05]:
Yeah. Like you want the, yeah, you want it to. Yeah, one of the. I think I feel like this is already there. Yeah. So night light warms you display to reduce blue light. Screen tint reduces overall screen intensity, which eases eye fatigue and light sensitivity even during the day. So, yeah, I mean, I think there are going to be.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:26]:
People are like, yeah, no, I want it to be like this all the time.

Richard Campbell [00:27:29]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:31]:
So there's that. There's also, you know, if you've ever used voice access or the, what do you call it, the, whatever the translation feature is called, where you, you know, you're having a meeting and there's a bar at the top of the screen and you can. Someone's talking in a different language, you could have it automatically translate in real time. Really cool. But also that thing is from a UI perspective is predicated on the fact that the taskbars at the bottom, bottom of the screen and now the taskbar can be moved to the top of the screen. So I'm kind of curious how it's going to impact those UIs. I'm sure they.

Richard Campbell [00:28:04]:
Or to the left side as I'm.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:06]:
Yeah. Or whatever. Yeah. I mean, just like it's. It's kind of interesting. We'll see. We'll see how Microsoft handles that stuff. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:13]:
So beta and dev. I'm sorry, that's not true. Experimental, which used to be dev and then beta, both are getting the same accessibility features. So those are changes.

Richard Campbell [00:28:23]:
So it's not part of experiment? It's. No, well, it's part of experimental.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:27]:
It is, but it also experimental was

Richard Campbell [00:28:28]:
dev and experimental wasn't Canary.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:31]:
Right? There is. Well, there's an experimental future platforms that essentially is what Canary used to be.

Richard Campbell [00:28:38]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:38]:
There's an experimental, which is kind of a new kind of Canary. That makes a little more sense than Canary ever did. There's experimental by itself, but then again, you have the three different Windows versions it could be, which is basically what Dev was.

Richard Campbell [00:28:53]:
Are you up to three kinds of experimental at this point? Are we having naming problems?

Paul Thurrott [00:28:56]:
I'm just saying, I. Like I said, you know, creeping complexity, just creep complexity. I don't know, it's not even creeping, it's just complexity. Yeah, there's a lot of it. Just. Yeah, don't. Don't look at that too hard. So the more you look at it, the scarier it gets.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:12]:
Okay, so that's happening again. Nothing major, frankly. Right. So there's no. Quite. No. No copilot buttons or anything. That's good.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:21]:
And then this isn't related to anything product or whatever, but Yusuf Mehdi, who's been at Microsoft for 35 years, announced this past week that he is going to retire later this year.

Richard Campbell [00:29:31]:
Another long timer, one of the longest

Paul Thurrott [00:29:35]:
timers of all, really. I mean, when he joined Microsoft, he worked on Windows initially, but I remember him from all kinds of different things. And this is the thing, like he kept coming up for me. So this was not my first time going out to see Microsoft, but maybe my second or third time I went out in 1998, I went to Seattle for what was the Windows NT 5.0 beta 2 reviewers workshop. I met the people I would later work with at Windows NT magazine, like Mike Ody and Mark Manasse and so forth. And Yusuf Medi was on the stage before the show start, before the event started setting up something. So I went up and I asked him, first of all, who are you? And secondly, is Dave Cutler gonna be here? And he Told me that no, Dave was off working on 64 bit stuff with Dec processors, which at the time I assume was like Alpha, you know. Yeah, whatever.

Richard Campbell [00:30:37]:
Probably Alpha.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:39]:
And okay, so that was kind of cool. So that was the first time I ever interacted with him. But I kept bumping into him again and again. So he worked on Internet Explorer. So he was the big part of that. He worked, he led, I think Bing and MSN at a time when Bing and MSN were what later became things like, you know, Windows Essentials and so forth. Like these were the things like MSN messenger and like they had like the blog, whatever the blogging product they had was like the blog editor and whatever it was, it was all these like kind of smaller apps but they were like Windows utilities and they kind of made Windows better. They weren't included in Windows so they could be updated more frequently.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:20]:
He was a big part of that. So I interviewed him at that time. He worked on, they didn't call it Xbox briefly, but it was interactive entertainment which when the Xbox One was coming out, the Xbox was going entertainment, you know, it was going to be music and videos and TV stuff and all that kind of stuff. And then he returned to Windows proper and was part of Windows and devices and that's when you know, with service. Right. And then has been promoted up the chain. And today he is the consumer chief marketing officer for Microsoft, which he's been.

Richard Campbell [00:31:54]:
Which I find interesting because he, he was always a product guy.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:59]:
So the through line here for me is yeah, I agree with you. Yep, 100%. Oh, and I should say that the last thing was he was the person on stage when they introduced what we now call Copilot. So when that thing was updates to Bing Search and Microsoft Edge, he was the guy. And the thing that will always stick in the back of my craw is he was doing demos and he said I am going to Mexico City in a few months for my sister's wedding, I think it was, and we can use AI to make an itinerary. And he had to make a five day itinerary for Mexico City, a place I know really well. Right. And so for at least two years after that, that was the first thing I did in any AI Chatbot was let's do a five day itinerary for Mexico City.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:45]:
Because one of the things I saw immediately with what became co pilot when they first announced it was that this thing had no sense of how far things were from each other and would recommend these days where first drive 90 minutes out into the desert and go to these pyramids. That's awesome. Now come back to the city, but go to the far end, on the other side of the city and have dinner in Polanco and then go down to Centro, which is kind of in the middle of this. It's like, guys, this is not a

Richard Campbell [00:33:09]:
time, this is a week.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:10]:
Like, this is not going to work. And AI, you know, has obviously gotten a lot better at that.

Richard Campbell [00:33:15]:
Not so good. You still can debate whether you should take your car to the car wash when you could walk.

Leo Laporte [00:33:21]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:24]:
Yusuf is on the senior leadership team, which is kind of incredible. This is something like Panos. Panay was not on the senior leadership team before.

Richard Campbell [00:33:33]:
No, it's really a thing to be on the slt.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:37]:
So, yeah, like you, I think of him as specific kind of product things. But when I look at this now and I think about Microsoft and the way it has evolved, literally in the 35 years he's been there, he has gone against the grain. Almost everything he's done has essentially been consumer based, which is kind of crazy. Now back in the 90s, especially the early days when, you know, from whatever year that was, 92, 93 through Windows 95 and the IE stuff, there was no real division between consumer business whatever. In fact, no, most of it was just really consumer, if you think about it. But. But at some point that, especially as NT became a thing and then Windows 2000 and the Enterprise stuff eventually happened, there was that real divide between consumer and business. And he's pretty much always been on the consumer side of this, which is incredible for anyone at Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:31]:
But for someone who's been there for 35 years, he doesn't even have one little dog leg into. I worked on SQL Server for a little while or I worked on Exchange or, or whatever, you know, like something purely enterprise based, like, speaks to him

Richard Campbell [00:34:45]:
ending up owning the marketing problem for consumer.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:47]:
Yeah, I think it's interesting.

Richard Campbell [00:34:49]:
It is interesting. It's unusual, for sure. Yeah, especially Microsoft is like, that's not where the money was.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:54]:
Yeah, I don't know this guy like personally or anything like that. He seems like a good guy to me. He seems legitimately engaged with this part of the world, however you want to say that. I mean, he seems like a good person, but. Yeah, it's just interesting. He's kind of dipped in and out of my professional life half a dozen times or more, I don't know, over many of those 35 years. Interesting.

Richard Campbell [00:35:18]:
Okay, there was a question in the chat about Windows 10 extended support.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:24]:
Okay, what Is it.

Richard Campbell [00:35:25]:
Well, you didn't get extended support for.

Leo Laporte [00:35:27]:
They did extend it. Right. For like a year.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:29]:
Well, for consumers it's for one year, and then for businesses it's three years. But you pay per year and the price doubles each year.

Richard Campbell [00:35:35]:
Right. You keep going up. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:37]:
So, yeah. So this.

Richard Campbell [00:35:38]:
Starting in October last year.

Leo Laporte [00:35:39]:
So Stacy was Higginbotham, who was the one woman who, of course, our good friend who wrote that Consumer Reports letter to Microsoft was kind of ignored. But she says she thinks they're going to extend it again.

Richard Campbell [00:35:52]:
I bet you I will. It all depends on seat count. You know, Microsoft's really good at leading the parade by figuring out which way it's going and running in front of.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:59]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:36:00]:
So, yeah. So it's always about seekout.

Leo Laporte [00:36:03]:
Yeah. Nobody.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:04]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:36:05]:
I mean, it's. I understand why you want to deprecate a version. You don't want to support it anymore. I completely understand.

Richard Campbell [00:36:10]:
Well, think about the wave of bug fixes for security they're going through right now. You really want to push this onto all the versions of Windows. That's not fun.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:18]:
So here's a fun. Well, maybe it's fun. I don't know. Bit of speculation that just popped into my brain based on the thing you just asked about extended security updates and also the earlier conversation about Windows 12 potentially happening down the pike. And that side issue, which is not a side issue, it's really the central issue of our industry right now where we have this component crisis, right, where hardware components are extremely expensive, especially things like RAM and storage and the Windows 11, which, by the way, now is what, six years, almost six years old. Right. I think it was a 2020 or 2021. It was 21.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:58]:
Could have been whatever year it was, we'll call it five years. Came under some criticism for having what felt like artificial hardware requirements, like I said, which felt like to many people, a bid by Microsoft to get people to buy new computers. And look, these criticisms write themselves. It's fine. You come up with Copilot plus PC where you specify even higher system requirements. And, you know, for someone like me, I think people watch the show, like, regardless what you think about AI or Copilot or anything like that stuff, like, you know, 16 gigs of RAM is a minimum. Nice, modern, you know, fast ssd, mpu, whatever, that didn't amount to much. But I mean, the, you know, whatever it is, what it is, those processors are great regardless of the mpu, but whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:43]:
Especially when you go to ARM and you get the. All the reliability, whatever benefits of that.

Richard Campbell [00:37:47]:
But no, the shaving off of the crafty bits of code because it just never got implemented for arm.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:54]:
Right, right. Which has its own benefit. Right. I mean this is not something Microsoft naturally does. So not being, you know, like looking at something like a new hardware architecture and having to make those decisions is actually very good for Microsoft and for its customers because it's maybe doing things it might not otherwise have even thought about. But what if they're. This is the speculation bit. So given everything I just said, what if there is a Windows 11 upgrade coming for Windows 10 users that will be supported, that will have lower hardware requirements? Because that's the reality of today.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:30]:
And that if you can build a, like we know, like Chuwi is one of the PC makers that's using, I think it's called the Intel Wildcat processors. These are the new generation low end things that are supposed to compete with like a MacBook Neo or whatever. So you've got Apple selling a MacBook Neo for 600 bucks to consumers running on a phone chip. What if we could throw a bone to our user base in Windows, which is different from that on the Mac side or Apple side, whatever, and do two things like one, better support lower end hardware, whether it's Wildcat or whatever else. And that would include older processors that maybe don't make their way into the Windows 11, you know, hardware requirements. That the way forward that might make sense for Microsoft from a support perspective is just have Windows 11 be the thing actually do get rid of Windows 10. I mean they're still going to be putting those updates up for businesses. So maybe this makes no sense.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:31]:
But be kind of interesting if there was a. It would be Windows 11, like it would have the UI, it would, you know, it wouldn't. Like it wouldn't require a TPM 2.0. Let's say maybe a 1.2 would be fine or something or maybe even no TPM if that's what you're doing, you know.

Richard Campbell [00:39:47]:
But with all these concerns around security like that, they picked the TPM chip requirement for a reason. It really is the base level of needing security going forward.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:58]:
Right. But it is. And yeah, and I would say look, a lot of the security advances that have occurred over the past year, especially about year and a half, two years, whatever, do require TPM 2.0.

Richard Campbell [00:40:08]:
Sure.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:09]:
You know the stuff we see in Copilot Plus PC around virtual async virtualization based security and the Windows low ess stuff requires TPM 2.0. So. Yes. But not everyone has those things. Those things are expensive to make and sell now. Maybe there's some version of the future where.

Leo Laporte [00:40:27]:
But wait, Microsoft said you have to have TPM 2.0, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:40:32]:
Microsoft says a lot of things, Leo. I find it's usually smart just to. Just to let it. Well, it is. So when Windows 11 was first announced, you didn't actually need any of that stuff. Right? Windows 11 was Windows 10 with a new shell, essentially, or whatever today. Yes, there are especially Copilot plus PC. There are features that are integral to Windows, that are important for security, that rely on a TPM 2.0.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:57]:
Yeah, for sure.

Richard Campbell [00:40:58]:
And TPM 2.0 has been out since 2014.

Leo Laporte [00:41:00]:
It's been a while. It's reasonable to say by now.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:04]:
Yeah. So there's no way to really. I mean, maybe I should.

Leo Laporte [00:41:06]:
Is it even that expensive? I mean, isn't it just on the system, on a chip?

Richard Campbell [00:41:10]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:11]:
No, this, what we're saying is you have a laptop, it's a 10th gen intel something. It's 10 years old. I don't know. What is it? I don't actually know. So let's pretend It's a TPM 1.2 in there. You can't upgrade that thing.

Leo Laporte [00:41:24]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:24]:
So in other words, let's have a version. Let's. Let's acknowledge that there are millions and millions of computers out in the world.

Leo Laporte [00:41:30]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:32]:
That just don't meet these specs and

Leo Laporte [00:41:36]:
they work perfectly well and you don't want to put them on the landfill.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:38]:
And is there some version of this where it makes sense? So the other version would be just let consumers do ESU for two more years or three, whatever the time frame is. Right.

Richard Campbell [00:41:47]:
That's the reason there was a requirement for TPM2 for Windows 11. And he complained if you didn't have it, but it didn't stop you from installing.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:56]:
You can still. Yeah, you can work around it. You can use Rufus or whatever to work around around it right now if you want to. Right. Just like you can work around the local account, sign in stuff or whatever. Yeah, but I mean, I'm just saying for like, but for mainstream people are never gonna. Don't care about this, don't think about it. Like, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:13]:
Would it make sense? I thought it did. When they came out with Windows 11. I didn't understand this cutoff. But look, you're already supporting two, you know, you're saying there should be a

Leo Laporte [00:42:24]:
three level version basically.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:27]:
Maybe. Yeah. I don't know what to call it. I'm not even sure if it May I just thought of this as we were talking. I'm not sure this might not be fully formed.

Leo Laporte [00:42:34]:
I agree with you. I think it's a good idea. I mean, that's how you compete against Chromebooks, that's how you compete against the neo. That's why Windows S was supposed to be.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:42]:
Yeah. The point of this is that it would work on new lower end devices which are coming to market. We know, like I said, Chewy Book is one of the companies that is

Leo Laporte [00:42:50]:
making terrible name, by the way.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:52]:
It's a problem unless you like Wookiees, you know, and there are others obviously, but whatever. That's the one that's been. They've been making kind of a splash and then. But you know what, but when you look at that level, like if we're going to go back to eight gigs of ram, you know, if we're going to go have a lower end, you know what we might have called Celeron processor, right? Yeah. It's a different operating system, whatever, you

Leo Laporte [00:43:14]:
can live with it.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:14]:
Right. Well, but is there a version of this. They're fixing Windows, right. I mean that work that's occurring in Windows to let it run better with fewer resources, we would benefit these older computers. Right. That probably do have 8 gigs of RAM and whatever generation intel processor that somebody arbitrarily decided wasn't going to make it to Windows 11, like maybe this is the time.

Leo Laporte [00:43:40]:
Especially if you like Wookies.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:42]:
Especially if you like Wookie. Who doesn't like Wookies?

Leo Laporte [00:43:45]:
Completely parenthetically. I remember that whole kerfuffle about from Linux people about TPM and all this stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:51]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:43:52]:
Ironically, my Framework desktop, which runs Windows or Linux does have a TPM2 chip. And I was just investigating whether I could retroactively put Lux encryption on it. And then I realized, oh, but I don't want to have to enter a password. So I want to come back up if the power goes out. And I'm not here because it runs my AI continuously running. So that's the problem with encryption. And my AI said, well, here's good news. You got a TPM2 something chip and it'll log in automatically from the TPM2 chip.

Leo Laporte [00:44:20]:
It'll still check to make sure the machine hasn't been modified. And if somebody pulls the hard drive and tries to get into it, it won't work because it's not connected to the.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:28]:
This is the way the system's supposed to work.

Leo Laporte [00:44:30]:
And it works in Linux, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:44:32]:
I mean, Leo, that's the secret that no One told you from Microsoft. That's why they made it so it would work in Linux.

Leo Laporte [00:44:37]:
It's great. Good job Microsoft. Well done.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:41]:
This was like very pleased. Everyone sort of remembers the history of like you know, Ms. DOS or Windows or whatever isn't done until Lotus doesn't run kind of thing.

Leo Laporte [00:44:50]:
And of course Linux is a cancer,

Paul Thurrott [00:44:52]:
which is Linux is a cancer. But I mean I feel like by the time like TPM harming the ability of a user to dual boot or switch to Linux was a happy side effect, not the point of it, you know. You know what I mean? It wasn't the strategy but it was

Leo Laporte [00:45:10]:
kind of an accident.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:11]:
Yeah, it was a haplo. Take it. Yeah, take it.

Leo Laporte [00:45:14]:
But yeah, I was really pleased. I thought oh that's fantastic. See what Linux does, which is great is they see where the hardware is and they go in and meet it. Somebody writes a driver and says okay, well if we're going to have TPM we might as well.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:27]:
This is why you get things like the ability to read write to NTFS volumes or whatever it is.

Leo Laporte [00:45:33]:
Yeah. And pretty much everybody who runs Linux is running on a Windows machine.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:37]:
I mean you know of course that

Leo Laporte [00:45:39]:
that's a PC so.

Richard Campbell [00:45:41]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:42]:
Better work. You know. Anyway, I know, I'm interested.

Richard Campbell [00:45:48]:
I mean the main thing I think you're all about the security side of this right now and oh man, are we.

Leo Laporte [00:45:53]:
Holy cow.

Richard Campbell [00:45:54]:
Because it's such a crisis and that's

Paul Thurrott [00:45:56]:
get ready and so that, that might be an argument to this thing I just made up in my brain which is we're doing this work to harden Windows 11 and other platforms that are in active view like Azure, etc. Maybe this is the line where it doesn't actually make sense to do that for Windows 10 as well. But if we can harden version of 11. That's the argument then you deliver good news to. Look, nobody actually wants to upgrade. That's part of the problem too. But the reality is if you could do this for free and it actually worked great and worked better I guess and was secure, et cetera, et cetera and was supported, I think a lot of people would be pretty happy with that.

Richard Campbell [00:46:39]:
So yeah, be a good move. And they. And arguably the easier move is just fix 10.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:46]:
One of that's what. Yeah, that's the question.

Leo Laporte [00:46:48]:
One of the problems though is that few companies want to be in the low end market.

Richard Campbell [00:46:54]:
More support. I think this is all for used older hardware. This is not for selling new machines.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:58]:
Yeah, this is almost like like fan service. Right. You have this user base that is feeling upset that you've arbitrarily to in their minds, whether it's fair or not, kind of cut them off from the latest thing, which you don't want anyway, honestly, you know, but whatever. We have to have something to complain about. I mean this is, it's an idea. Again, I'm not, I'm not actually saying, I don't literally mean like this thing I thought of 10 seconds ago makes total sense. It's. I, I don't think I've worked through all.

Richard Campbell [00:47:25]:
But you're right, there's this line, there's this intersection point of if we don't fix the win 10 machines that are still out there, they're going to be exploited and we're going to take heat for it. Like there's just no two ways about that.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:36]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:47:36]:
So do we fix win 10 or do we make some other offering and a win 11? I think somebody said se for secure edition. Okay. Or you know, simple addition.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:47]:
Nice, right? Okay.

Richard Campbell [00:47:48]:
Is the, is the other way to tackle that.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:52]:
I think people would love it too because they'd be like, look, this is the version of Windows 11 that doesn't have any of that copilot crap. You know, like, well, and then people like with modern computers were like, I want to run SE2. You know, so we'll see, we'll see. Look, I just made this up. This is not happening. I don't know. Just think this stuff is going through my brain right now, but it's an idea and I, you know, when, if you think about the Windows 10 support schedule as a, a 10 year thing and sort of a 13 year thing, but you know, it's this whatever continuum of time. We're at like the 11th hour in this thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:25]:
Like this is not what Microsoft wants from a schedule perspective, a major security initiative to harden a thing they're actively trying to get rid of right now and to spend the time and the money and the effort, whatever to do that too. I'm not sure which is worse, right? Like doing that work or letting those guys go to some, I guess, new version of Windows 11 which nobody wanted to make either.

Richard Campbell [00:48:47]:
So it's fun to do the math and go. Or ship them a nuc with the

Paul Thurrott [00:48:51]:
TPM or just like a USB stick that has like a TPM or something.

Richard Campbell [00:48:58]:
Being in a performance argument over a game where it's like this might, might be cheaper to just ship everybody. More ram.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:04]:
Ship RAM with the game.

Richard Campbell [00:49:06]:
Yeah. But comes more RAM for your computer because it Was like that, trying to keep, get the game down to fit.

Leo Laporte [00:49:11]:
Just put a RAM stick in every box.

Richard Campbell [00:49:14]:
But this, you know, it was one of the ways we drew it on the whiteboard of how we were making the ROI choices. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:19]:
Well, they sort of did this before, right? I mean, in Windows Vista because, you know, it was kind of top heavy compared to its predecessors. They came up with something called Windows Ready Drive, which is a way you could stick in any USB key at the time and use it as basically cache. Like it was a way to kind of speed up the system, you know, like, I don't know, maybe there's a. I don't know, they wouldn't be a usb. Well, maybe it would be. I don't know, maybe there's a way today for something similar. I don't know. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:52]:
I just make stuff up.

Richard Campbell [00:49:53]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:49:56]:
I've heard people say it's an idea.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:58]:
Word on the street.

Leo Laporte [00:49:59]:
Word on the street.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:02]:
And then just a couple of hardware earnings type things. Lenovo, which is the world's biggest maker of computers, had a blockbuster quarter. Actually a lot of records here. Net income is 521 million, which is not a lot, but compared to the 21.6 billion of revenues. But that speaks to a couple of things. One is the low margin nature of PCs, but also the cost of building out its AI infrastructures, which is where a lot of the growth is coming from. Right. That said, PC revenues, this is, you got to remember, this is the second calendar.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:37]:
No, it isn't. It's technically the first calendar quarter of 2026. Right? Yeah. Let me see, does it end March? I think they kind of announced this a little late. Yeah, ending March 31st. So the first calendar quarter, this is a time when the PC refresh cycle was over, essentially like people had been pre buying PCs, et cetera, et cetera because of component price increases, et cetera. But that business grew 26% year over year, revenue wise. Largest growth in five years.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:09]:
It's the biggest PC business in the world. 24.4% market share. This is the largest gap between the first and second player in this market in over 15 years. Right now, I don't know off the top of my head what HP's market share is, but it's, let's call it 20, or it could be as high as 21, even 22. But the gap between HP and Lenovo, which 15 years ago I think HP would have been actually number one. But whatever the gap between number one and number two in this market is bigger right now than it's ever been. Over 50% of Lenovo's sales of PCs in the quarter were premium PCs, which of course have higher margins for the first time. I mean, they think they have ThinkPad, that's maybe not surprising.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:53]:
But they sell IdeaPad and yoga and whatever. They disable Lenovo branded PCs as well. That business was almost 15 billion of the almost 22 billion the company made overall. But the vast majority of the rest of it was the infrastructure part of the company, which is the AI data center stuff. And that's going great. They're also, they're just doing the talking, all the words, you know, they have an AI server business pipeline of blah, blah, blah.

Richard Campbell [00:52:24]:
And more than what the question is, are these are. I presume they're still following gaps. So this is gear they shipped, not gear on order.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:34]:
So the revenue. Well, revenues are revenue, so it kind of doesn't. As long as someone paid for it, I guess it doesn't matter. But what they're talking about. Well, what are they talking about? You know, they have over 5,800 customers that are doing AI deployments and data centers and. Okay, I don't think of Lenovo that way, but whatever. And then they have a services group that's another almost 3 billion.

Richard Campbell [00:52:56]:
We always think of Lenovo as the ThinkPad guys because they got the pad business and then they did really cool things with it. Like, they're the crazy. They're the crazy laptop guys.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:04]:
Yeah, no, they've been.

Richard Campbell [00:53:05]:
This one folds over back.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:06]:
They have been the best caretaker of this brand imaginable.

Richard Campbell [00:53:10]:
They also let their, their designers go nuts. Like, they make origami computers. Like, look, this one folds into a crane. Like, it's. It's crazy.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:17]:
It's crazy mostly because they are the biggest company in the space and it doesn't make sense for them not to just be conservative. They're making rolling screen laptops that go in either direction that, you know, I, I love that they do this stuff, you know.

Richard Campbell [00:53:29]:
Yeah, it's. It's awesome, actually. It's really cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:32]:
It is, yeah. And then there's Nvidia, which, you know, they're doing okay. I don't know how they keep doing this. Well, actually, I do. In the gigantic industry circle jerk that is AI, there's only one company that's actually making money. Like, literally making money. Yeah, And I mean literally getting money from other companies. And it's Nvidia.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:54]:
Right. Because they make these GPUs that power all these data centers.

Richard Campbell [00:53:56]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:57]:
But the growth numbers, you keep thinking it's got to slow down.

Richard Campbell [00:53:59]:
Well, just from a manufacturing perspective. Right. That's why I keep pushing on this.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:04]:
They don't even sell in China. You know, they can't. They've given up on China.

Richard Campbell [00:54:08]:
Yeah. You know, there's a question of how are they accounting for this? Like when, when does the manufacturing pipeline just not keep up?

Paul Thurrott [00:54:16]:
They could put this money in a passbook savings account and would never go out of business. Like, it is astonishing. It's like, it's just, it's just a mountain.

Leo Laporte [00:54:25]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:25]:
It's stupid. So, you know, 80, 81.6 billion in revenues. Corporate record for that quarter, by the way, is a gain of 85 year over year. I didn't look at this, but you know, it was 70 something percent this quarter last year and you know, it was 70 something percent. Like how.

Richard Campbell [00:54:41]:
But yeah, and valued at 5 trillion.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:45]:
Like it's a 5 trillion.

Leo Laporte [00:54:46]:
Probably.

Richard Campbell [00:54:47]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:49]:
This business is so big, they're actually going to split. What is this? I think they just call it data center. Two words into different groups because they, they're going to try to explain like where money's coming from now. So they're going to have like a hyperscale business and a AI, cloud, industrial and enterprise business. So that'll be fun. I don't know. It doesn't matter. You can spread this, spread this money out however you want.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:11]:
It's. You're never going to run out of it. It's just astonishing. I've never seen anything like this company.

Richard Campbell [00:55:17]:
Well, yeah, 5 trillion valuations.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:19]:
No, not to this level. I just, it's crazy.

Leo Laporte [00:55:24]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:25]:
Did Laurent ever write the open end? No, he didn't. Okay. Moving into AI and dev a little bit. We didn't write this up yet, but Google announced sometime in the past 24 hours that they're adding Google Drive sync to Notebook LM, which is like, yeah, duh. And I feel like this might be workspace specific. I don't know if this is how it works for consumers. I should look into this. But this makes sense.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:50]:
In other words, you can bring your notebook. LM is a lot of things, but one of the things that is like a notebook and it's really for research. You pull in things into a project like documents or whatever it is or links to websites and stuff, and it uses that as the context and it can ignore the rest of the world and do a great job with that. And then it creates infographics and whatever you want to do with this stuff, but you could also just use it as kind of a general purpose, kind of note taking app. It's part of the complexity of this Google today because they have so much stuff, but having that single Microsoft every day. Yeah to me makes a lot of sense. One thing I've never done, but as Laurent was talking to me about today, it's like we might want to look into this is Google has this preferred sources feature in Google Search where you can go in and configure like the sites you trust and have those maybe coloring the results a bit, you know, by coming out near the top or whatever. And I don't, I've never even looked at this.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:51]:
I'm going to ask our Robert or web guy about this place. Yeah. And I, and I don't know that I would have. I mean I've seen it and I don't think too much of it. But now they're adding that AI Mode and AI Overview, which are two Google search features which arguably are the future or even the present of Google Search. So you know, having, you know, having a formal thing like we need to have a button, you know, like on the page or something. Like we don't have that. So there's a way you can just go, you can add any site you want.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:20]:
You can just go into preferences and Google Search and do that. But yeah, we, I, it's possible this

Richard Campbell [00:57:25]:
is something at some point. Do we have templates of sources? It's like.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:29]:
Yeah, right, like trusted tests, text sources maybe or whatever. Yeah, that's like playlists almost.

Richard Campbell [00:57:36]:
Yeah. But it's also. This is the bubble I want to live in. Is there a list already made for me?

Paul Thurrott [00:57:40]:
Yeah, probably actually. Right, but that's a good idea.

Richard Campbell [00:57:43]:
I want the, I want the all conspiracy theory list. How about that? Can you every response refer. Yes, conspiracy theory. What if my only trusted source is the Onion?

Paul Thurrott [00:57:56]:
Nice. I want a whimsical view of the world. Like the world I wish it was, not the world that is, you know, which I actually kind of do by the way. This one came out of the blue and I don't know that they have a formal announcement about this anywhere, but they contacted me and a bunch of others. But DuckDuckGo says that their usage across their search service, Duck AI, their mobile apps, etc. Has gone up dramatically in the wake of Google I O which of course was this AI announcement tsunami last week that I'm still trying to recover from. And this is like basically people who are like, because you know, this is the reaction. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:36]:
You either look at this as the greatest thing that ever happened, or you're

Richard Campbell [00:58:38]:
like, oh, God, this is the end of the world.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:40]:
I need to find something else. And so people are starting to look around, right?

Richard Campbell [00:58:44]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:45]:
And you know, in the U.S. average growth of their DuckDuckGo mobile app, you know, up 8 over 18%. Peak growth during the holiday weekend, long weekend, 30%.

Richard Campbell [00:58:59]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:59]:
Usage on iPad was average growth of 33% and peak growth of 69.9% on May 25, which I think was Sunday. Crazy. They have a version of. I wonder if it's a number large.

Richard Campbell [00:59:14]:
I just wonder if Google notices. Like, are you.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:17]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:59:18]:
So Google I O. Is your traffic actually down in a meaningful way or is just deckduck go small enough that those increases don't measure meaningfully?

Paul Thurrott [00:59:25]:
Yeah. So these are meaningful for DuckDuckGo. What you're asking is, is the loss meaningful to Google? I. I would guess and say probably not. But then again, you also have to be paying attention to this. Right? I mean, duckdeco literally quotes the federal judge in USV Google, who says, Google is a monopolist. It has acted to maintain its monopoly and monopolies do not worry about users leaving. There you go.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:56]:
That's interesting. So, I mean, good for them. I duck, that goes great.

Richard Campbell [01:00:00]:
Yeah. No, and again, it's like, it's interesting to see where people are at there. They. That there is a place for the non AI position.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:09]:
Yeah. I don't, I don't have that kind of non AI position. But I will say in. I know in Helium and somewhere else I've been. I've been using DuckDuckGo a lot lately. Not by any design. It's just, it must be in Helium

Richard Campbell [01:00:23]:
and for the year, just a little different search world, you know.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:27]:
But if you use Google search, like one of the things you'll see at the top of search results is this kind of AI results. It spits out whatever it spits out. It's like a little summary of whatever and it has links and whatever. But it's, It's. You're meant to just get the answer right there. And the way that DuckDuckGo does this is kind of interesting. I actually, I didn't realize it wasn't Google at first. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:46]:
So I thought, I'm like, oh, they. They scaled this back a little bit. And what they. There's like an AI overview section at the top unless you specify no AI. And you have to expand it to see that stuff so it doesn't actually spew out all the AI by default. It only does it when you ask for it, which honestly, it's not a horrible approach. And then just generally speaking, when it comes to switching from anything to anything, the big blocker generally speaking is when you notice things are bad or different in a way you don't like, you always notice that and then you just kind of go back because you're like, I can't deal with it. And that would be the experience with like Brave Search or duckduckgo Search or whatever at any time where in the past especially I should say where you're like, well, I want to use this thing, I want to try it.

Richard Campbell [01:01:32]:
And then.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:32]:
Or Bing was like this. Like you. You search for things and you're like,

Richard Campbell [01:01:37]:
no, that's right, no.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:38]:
And I still sometimes I've done this at least twice in the past five days. Ish. Where some search result comes up and you're like, no. And then you go google.com and you type it in again, you paste it in and it's like, yeah, there it is. And know that's. That's the, that's the trick.

Richard Campbell [01:01:54]:
Certainly had that experience with Kagi where I'm like, no.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:57]:
Yeah. So I mean, but if you're going

Richard Campbell [01:01:59]:
the average mortal consumer who ended up with a default of Google in the first place, right. Are they going to then now sees the AI blurb and goes, this offends me. Are they going to switch off the AI blurb? Like they didn't want to change any settings anyway. What's easier? Switching off the AI blur or switching to DuckDuckGo.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:19]:
So if you want to do it in Google, if I'm not mistaken, I think you have to do like a particular URL trick where you type in a couple of characters or something to make that not happen or something like that. It's not, it's not like a switch like in the UI maybe it is actually easier. DuckDuckGo is like we literally have a page that is never any AI. You know, like you can do it that way. Yeah. But I would say to your point though, like if you pay for Kagi, you have the situation where you know, whatever, I don't know, whatever percent, 10%, 5%, whatever it is where you're like, no. And you actually have to go to Google.

Richard Campbell [01:02:51]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:51]:
If that's not 50%, if it's like a tiny one, you know, single digit, that's okay, right?

Richard Campbell [01:02:57]:
I mean you're still has happened, but not much more than that.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:00]:
That's What? I mean, like, not enough to make you go, no, I'm not doing this anymore. So like the goal, look, you, you have to be realistic. Like, you're not going to completely remove Google from your life if that's your goal.

Richard Campbell [01:03:10]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:11]:
But you can minimize your exposure to it and that's one way to do it.

Richard Campbell [01:03:14]:
So when that was, the whole thing is let's make Kagi the default and spent the.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:18]:
Yeah. And then. Right.

Richard Campbell [01:03:19]:
Our going from machine to set up the account, pay for it, then go to the phone and to the PC and Yes. Okay, this is now my default. When I type into the search bar, go to Kagi first.

Leo Laporte [01:03:31]:
Well, and a lot of browsers don't even have Kagi as an option. So yeah, it's kind of. It's more of a pain than it really seems like. So.

Richard Campbell [01:03:37]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:03:38]:
But I did it because I care.

Richard Campbell [01:03:40]:
I battled through it.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:41]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:03:41]:
I just wanted the experience.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:42]:
Most people won't.

Richard Campbell [01:03:43]:
Most people, you know, we know that. And I committed to a year. Right. Just buy for the year when the renewal comes up. We'll see.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:50]:
Yeah. And I Look, in my case, it must. It's got to be helium because I've been installing different computers. Helium doesn't have any kind of like a setting. Yeah, yeah. So you have to kind of. You do it from scratch every time. Which in my case is a little painful because, you know, lots of computers.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:05]:
Computers for most people, who cares? But I have to say, you know, I have noticed it. I've noticed like DuckDuckGo is the default, I guess, and, and that's fine. And I think the first time I ever used the browser, I probably did switch to Google at the time, but I just, I haven't since then. It's fine. You know, and yes, sometimes. All right, google.com, whatever, whatever. The thing is, I care. I wish I could remember an exact thing because it was.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:28]:
There was some search I just did. It might have been this morning where I knew what I was looking for. I just didn't know where to go to find the thing. And it wasn't coming up in the first five or eight, whatever. And I was like, come on, I know this is going to be right at the top of Google. And it was, you know, but, but

Leo Laporte [01:04:41]:
that's, you know, here's the kind of underlying issue though, is that Both Cogi and DuckDuckGo rely heavily on Google's index. They license Google's index.

Richard Campbell [01:04:50]:
Sure.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:51]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:04:51]:
Google could at any point just say, yeah, right.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:55]:
So I.

Richard Campbell [01:04:55]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:55]:
I mean, the One. The one. Well, a couple of things that.

Leo Laporte [01:04:59]:
I mean, first, nobody's doing their own spidering.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:02]:
No, of course not. But anything that take like Apple's approach to AI so far on the iPhone has been like, you can. You can use ChatGPT. It will be anonymous. You can sign in if you want. You don't have to. And you see that with private. Not private.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:18]:
You see that with like smaller AI chatbots where it may be going off to ChatGPT or whatever it is, and. But you don't have to sign into it. You could be anonymous. Like, you know, Proton, I think does this kind of thing with Lumo or, you know, whatever it might be. So if, if smaller search engines are using the Google stuff, but you're not getting all the Google whatever it is AIO reviews and stuff you don't want. I mean, that's okay, right? I mean, it's because you can't just. No one's got. You can't spin up a new Google tomorrow.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:51]:
You know, like, this is like they.

Leo Laporte [01:05:52]:
I mean, everybody's trying to. I think both Coggy and Go are trying to. But yeah, yeah, that's it.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:58]:
Just use Deep Free. They stole it all. It's all fine. You know, you're fine. Let's just do that. Yeah, this all. It's all going to change. But.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:07]:
But as of today, it's like, look, the. The goal is to minimize it for a lot of people. I mean, and trying to be realistic about it. It's like, look, okay, maybe they're using us in the back end or whatever. I don't care. I'm not signing into my Google account. They're not, you know, they don't know who I am.

Leo Laporte [01:06:19]:
There's no AI I think is the.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:20]:
No AI Y. That's going to be a draw for people. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. That's fine. That's not perfect. I mean, nothing's perfect. What's perfect?

Leo Laporte [01:06:28]:
You know, it doesn't have any AI. This show doesn't have any.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:33]:
No, not that, you know, but I've actually been an AI construct for seven months. I'm actually asleep in a bed right now.

Leo Laporte [01:06:40]:
I figure the day will come when I won't show up for work.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:44]:
Right?

Leo Laporte [01:06:45]:
But you won't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:46]:
It will just happen and you'll.

Leo Laporte [01:06:48]:
Yeah, I think that day is not far off.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:52]:
This is a horrible show. Get seven fingers if you heard of this thing. Scarpetta.

Leo Laporte [01:06:58]:
Yeah, I watched it. I actually, I liked it. It's another Nicole Kidman who doesn't look

Paul Thurrott [01:07:04]:
anything like Nicole Kidman anymore, which I find bizarre. But we've only watched, actually, the woman

Leo Laporte [01:07:10]:
who plays her young self on Scarpetta looks more like Nicole Kidman.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:14]:
I kind of wish it was just about her, frankly.

Leo Laporte [01:07:16]:
But she was great. I loved her.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:18]:
Yeah, I thought she was very good, actually. A lot of the actors are great. It's not that the first two episodes, which is all I've seen, is.

Leo Laporte [01:07:23]:
You just don't like a bad Boston accent. I know.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:25]:
No, no, Actually, that guy's really from Boston. Although the guy who plays the younger version of him is not. But Lenny Clark is a famous Boston stand up comedian.

Leo Laporte [01:07:33]:
Oh, good. Oh, nice.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:34]:
But the. No, I. The. The two things that stand out to me are. It's. It's just people yelling at each other all the time. And the first episode, I was like, I don't know if I can take this. We get it.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:47]:
Everyone's family's terrible. Let's move on. They argue about everything all the time. But the other one is there's a character who has a wife who died and she's AI now, and she talks to her all the time.

Leo Laporte [01:08:01]:
Isn't that wild?

Paul Thurrott [01:08:02]:
And you know this is gonna happen. It's probably. It's not like it is in the show yet, but it will be in the show.

Leo Laporte [01:08:10]:
It's way much better than it could ever be now.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:12]:
Yeah, it's bizarre.

Leo Laporte [01:08:15]:
It's a real conversation.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:16]:
This is. People will. Absolutely. People are falling in love or developing deep relationships with AI chatbots who are nobody. If you can make that thing like someone, especially someone who's passed.

Leo Laporte [01:08:27]:
Can I tell you something? I'm working on it right now because Lisa's mom passed a few months ago. Her dad is really grieving and Lisa said, what if we made like a little Amazon Echo? That was her voice.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:38]:
So think about the baby steps to this, right? The. The photos from the past that turn them into little videos. Be like, oh, my God. Or the people. How many people, seriously just listening to this podcast for hundreds of thousands of them who have some voicemail recording on their iPhone or whatever that they will never get rid of because it's the last time they could hear that person.

Leo Laporte [01:08:58]:
I have 20 of my mom's voicemails because I know that it won't be long.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:01]:
And I know and someday you. It's. Someday you're going to have to. I'm going to give you going to be there anymore, you know, a tip.

Leo Laporte [01:09:08]:
You're going to be glad you were listening today. Record your Loved ones now with high quality recording equipment. Because the problem I have making Lisa's mom's AI is we just don't have any good recordings of her voice.

Richard Campbell [01:09:20]:
I did a two day sit down with my grandmother.

Leo Laporte [01:09:22]:
Perfect.

Richard Campbell [01:09:23]:
Talking about that life and what you're

Paul Thurrott [01:09:25]:
doing is here explaining all the photos. A personal. Right. So the time unfortunately has passed to do this with Sharon, who's not my mother in law or my stepmom, but the woman that we was married to. My father, who we bought this place and our previous house from, has this treasure trove of photos that I've digitized for the family, but no one knows what any half of them are. And unfortunately she has dementia and probably. I feel like I keep saying to my sisters like she's going to have one of those clarity days. You got to break up the photos right then because she has these super clear moments where she can.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:01]:
She's like, oh, that's Bob from Caribbean Maine.

Leo Laporte [01:10:04]:
I did that with my mom too.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:05]:
Yeah. Oh my God, it's incredible.

Leo Laporte [01:10:06]:
Tell me those stories. Get. I mean, first of all, it's great to have those recordings regardless.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:11]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:10:12]:
But if you ever thought you wanted to make an AI Simulcrum. So your stepmom Sharon. No. But you know who will,

Paul Thurrott [01:10:21]:
right?

Richard Campbell [01:10:22]:
I don't.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:22]:
I don't know that I want that and I don't know that that's healthy.

Leo Laporte [01:10:26]:
But there is a AI Azie coming.

Richard Campbell [01:10:29]:
Oh boy.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:29]:
Oh, for God's sake, just walk. This thing walks in the door and he just belts out the beginning. That's how he walks in the door.

Leo Laporte [01:10:39]:
Sharon says they're going to take it around the world.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:42]:
Yeah, of course they are.

Leo Laporte [01:10:43]:
Yeah. AI Azie, he kind of looked like an AI anyway.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:48]:
Yeah, they did it with abba with the. Whatever that was the.

Leo Laporte [01:10:52]:
Oh yeah, that was weird, that 3D. And they're not even dead.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:56]:
There are bands touring right now that don't have a single original member, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:11:01]:
Well, that happens because I go to the ca.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:03]:
I know, but that's. I mean that's like.

Leo Laporte [01:11:05]:
I see that all the time. It's the Drifters with George Burns.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:08]:
Yeah, exactly. Bob Smith from Alabama and. Well, I'm sorry, who is this guy?

Leo Laporte [01:11:13]:
What? Yeah, he played guitar on one tour and now he's Alabama.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:21]:
He saw them in one tour. That's the only qualification. You don't even have to have ever been in the band. You're just doing it now. It's very strange.

Leo Laporte [01:11:28]:
May I, may I introduce you? May I interest you in a commercial of course, about that time, we will continue on. You're watching Windows Weekly, Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell and the AI Azie. I realized when I got that book off my bookshelf that I have the Thurat teacup and I have the Rena's Radio coffee cup.

Richard Campbell [01:11:52]:
Nice.

Leo Laporte [01:11:53]:
And I thought, well, they belong on the set.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:56]:
Oh, that's fun.

Leo Laporte [01:11:57]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [01:11:57]:
I don't know if desk had them sitting there. As I recall, that's a.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:00]:
That was a limited run too.

Leo Laporte [01:12:02]:
Oh, well, I won't break it then.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:05]:
That's going to break on its own, Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:12:06]:
It's g. But it is on kind of a sliding.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:10]:
Sliding off the edge.

Leo Laporte [01:12:11]:
Slippery.

Richard Campbell [01:12:12]:
I ship out a run as mug once or twice a week. So yeah, it's fine.

Leo Laporte [01:12:16]:
Yeah, I had. I have a ZDTV mug that Nobody's making anymore 26 years later, and I really don't want to break that one. So I'm very careful when I wash that one. Anyway, let's go on with the show. Sorry to interrupt.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:30]:
No, no problem. OpenAI. I guess sensing all of the wonderfulness that Anthropic is doing with Office as really released a ChatGPT plugin for PowerPoint without getting into the. I know the specifics, like how specific that is. I will say this is one of my earliest examples with AI. When you think about in trying to grasp what's happening and understand it all and what could AI be good for. The two things I always come back to are my story about how every January I have to make a new fix a chart in Excel. I don't know how to use this stupid thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:07]:
Or every once in a while I have to make a PowerPoint presentation. Like, I don't speak regularly anymore. I'm not traveling a lot for this. I'm never. I've never been and never will be a PowerPoint expert. But you know, being able to go in, it literally says, like, would you like to make a, you know, like a new presentation? Like, yeah, yeah, I'd like you to do that for me. Like, you know, that's just. This is a good use of AI.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:27]:
I think so. Okay, whatever. I'm not saying this is a particularly good one or whatever, but like, of course they're doing this. So you're going to see this everywhere.

Richard Campbell [01:13:35]:
I got a new deck to make, you know, and it's the data centers in space deck too.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:43]:
Like, I'm only okay with this if. If every time you begin the presentation you say it as data centers in space, space, space.

Richard Campbell [01:13:53]:
I think the Talk title is actually above the cloud.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:56]:
Nice, Nice. This is heaven, really, right? Is that what you say? I've been complaining about net 10 just because I don't quite understand what the point of it is, but last week I talked about.

Richard Campbell [01:14:10]:
I'm pretty sure you're complaining about net 11, but. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:12]:
Oh, net 11, sorry, sorry.

Richard Campbell [01:14:15]:
Net 10 shipped in November.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:16]:
Yeah, whatever Denver's play about, if you want.

Richard Campbell [01:14:19]:
Okay, it's fast, it's fast. But you're complaining about 11 because you're not seeing anything in 11 that you care about.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:26]:
Okay, well, net Maui, which is Microsoft's, you know, C based, what do you call it? Xamarin Forms. Follow up for mobile app development, but

Richard Campbell [01:14:38]:
also trying to include everything else. It's trying to be the Unified UX solution.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:42]:
But yeah, that's not going to work that way. So yes, it's not going to be good for that. But if you like mobile apps, so their. Their support supporting material, you or as they're calling it for some reason material 3, which is the most recent modern version of the Google Android design language. This is the property flag in your project properties. Much like when you add support for net9. I guess it was to. Or I should say winui3 to WPF project.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:13]:
Same thing, it's just like a single line and they're going to improve it over time, etc. Etc. But yeah, so that's cool. I mean, that's good for them. And then last week I talked about, I think this was my tip or something, this notion that, you know, we're getting to the point where normal people are going to be able to build apps, you know, and this notion of like just making things with AI and when I was watching, I knew this was coming. But in watching the Google AI keynote, when they got to the Google AI Studio a bit and they were talking about making native Android apps, I was like, I gotta try this. And I didn't see a way to do that at the time. But I ended up making a.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:51]:
What is a really a web app version of like a markdown editor similar to Typora, which is the app I used. It was actually pretty great. And then the next day I got up and I was like, I'm going to try this again. And Android app support was there. And I was doing this on a Windows on ARM device. This is kind of weird because Android Studio on the Mac, which is ARM based, runs their emulators like their virtual machines for the devices. No problem. But on the Windows side you actually have to have an x64 device to do that.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:24]:
So I was running this against physical devices. First the phone and then the fold because it has the bigger screen, which is more like a desktop sort of. And holy crap, that was really good. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. The only issue I had, I kept refining the prompt and then what I got to was the app came up on the fold. In this case it was just an all white screen with nothing in it. So I'm writing the thing back and I'm like, yeah, this is not working. It's just a blank screen.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:52]:
And so it's like, okay, testing. It went through this whole process and at the end it was like, no, this is working exactly right. Just type into it. If you have to save it, just type control S. And I was like, oh my God, seriously, It just made this total minimalist version of the app. And I was like, okay, that's fine, I don't want that, but that's fine. But then I spent a lot of the weekend doing this stuff in various ways. I did it directly in Android Studio, which I'd say not as successful or good as maybe the GitHub copilot experience in Visual Studio, but I'm sure it's going to get there.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:24]:
I went back to cloud code, which is something I'd use before I was able to finish my winuipad or NET Pad project. But mixed results. And that was still kind of mixed results, but. But I was really. I. And then I. The last thing I did before the end of the weekend was I went back and did another version of the markdown editor. But this time I was like, all right, listen, I want this thing to be installable as a web app, like a pwa.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:51]:
Like what I want to be able to do is go to this URL and there'll be the thing in the browser address bar and I can install. Was like, okay, that's like 22 seconds. And yeah, it works great. And it had like this superfluous little UI bits, like in the corner of the app there were like these three circles that I guess were supposed to look like Mac buttons for Windows or something. Didn't do anything. So I was like, get rid of that. And then there was also a superfluous kind of install app button near the top that I said, get rid of that. That's part of the browser ui.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:20]:
And it did, no problem. And yeah, this thing, it's pretty much as good as the app I use every day. Like it just works. Every works on mobile. It works on my computers. Like, it's, it's insane. And, and I think this is. That Leo's just.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:35]:
Leo's been doing this for months, so he's not impressed by any of this. But in this notion that you can have a conversation about the thing, in this case, I do not understand the code base, like, at all. I'm not. Whether it's Web apps with JavaScript and React or whatever it might be, or native Android apps, which is Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. I don't understand these languages. I don't understand these frameworks. I don't. I mean, I'm a basic, like developer experience and other languages and frameworks, I guess.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:07]:
But I just, I, I just don't. I'm not gonna be able to edit this code, you know, and I, Yeah, there's a point where in the future maybe get the. I cannot. It's not gonna, you know, it's not gonna work and I'm not gonna be able to figure it out. Maybe. I don't know. But I haven't hit that point. And I also, you know, when, if you look at the description, especially for Google AI Studio, they're like, look, you should use this for specific apps, like simple apps.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:30]:
Like, you know, the list of whatever type of apps. I'm like, yeah, and the thing I'm making is not on that list. And it's pretty complex and.

Richard Campbell [01:19:37]:
But it's working.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:38]:
It's incredible. Like, it works great. Like, it's really good. So I just. Quick update on that. I just, I'm so blown away.

Richard Campbell [01:19:46]:
The user acceptance testing is the most important testing one way or the other. There are overarching elements, like, is it secure?

Paul Thurrott [01:19:56]:
Well, yes. I mean, in this case, it's just a. My. I'm creating a. It's a text editor essentially, but it displays in kind of. It's HTML, but it's a rich text look. Like it has styles and blah, blah, blah, whatever. I can open files in the local file system, I can save them back.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:11]:
They're like, they open them elsewhere.

Richard Campbell [01:20:12]:
They look perfect.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:13]:
Like everything's fine. Like, I think this is like a gateway drug. I think when Google Ads, like, what do they call it? Widget editing or widget creation. Like kind of conversational vibe coded widgets that if you're familiar with widgets on Android, but really widgets on any platform like iOS or whatever, it's really just another surface for an underlying app. Like you have a weather widget that it's pretty, but it's using the weather app on the phone. Right. Like the widgets you're going to create in a couple of months on Android could draw from multiple sources. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:49]:
They're like super widgets in a way. In many ways they're more powerful than the widgets that are built into your phone because you can say this is based on the demo they did. But it's like I have a trip coming up, so I want some kind of a calendar thing and I want something where I can see my itinerary and I want something where I can see my plane tickets. And you want all this stuff in one place. It's like a screen on your phone or something that's actually very powerful, you know, And I know, I just, I don't know. I'm. This, this is super impressed. Impressive to me.

Richard Campbell [01:21:21]:
Yeah. And this idea of wrapping yourself in personal software seems very reasonable, you know, given those sufficient guidelines around it to don't put it in a place where it's going to be risky for you. But if it help is automations that help you, why wouldn't you?

Paul Thurrott [01:21:37]:
Yeah. And. And this is where the historical strengths or weaknesses of like Apple and Google in particular are going to come to the forefront because Apple will be slower, but what they do will eventually be great. You know, Google will be faster and they will make mistakes, you know, but it will be nuts. And so in that sense there's going to be something for everyone. And I'm just talking mobile here because I think that where. That's where most of this is going to happen. But it's.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:07]:
I don't know, it's just a different world. Like it's crazy.

Richard Campbell [01:22:09]:
It's an interesting time that we're in.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:11]:
Yep. For sure. Yep.

Richard Campbell [01:22:12]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:15]:
Okay. And then I only have a couple of Xbox gaming type things. We talked about the.

Leo Laporte [01:22:21]:
Before you say that, do you mind if I just tell everybody they're listening to Windows Weekly, a fine program on the Twitter podcast network starring Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. And now the Xbox segment. You know, I do that. They never put a commercial in there, but if they wanted to, they could.

Richard Campbell [01:22:38]:
Nice break.

Leo Laporte [01:22:40]:
Now continue, please.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:42]:
Benito will probably never complain about this because he's such a good guy, but when I record hands on Windows, on average I would say I'm supposed to have a break in the middle so there can be an ad.

Leo Laporte [01:22:52]:
Yeah. And that usually that adds me, by the way.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:54]:
Okay. But I forget three out of four times. Yeah. And I make a point of remembering like I try to put it in the notes and you know, but even in the same recording. I'll do it one time and then miss the next three. Like, I'm really bad at that. Sorry, everybody. Sorry.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:12]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [01:23:12]:
They hate me.

Leo Laporte [01:23:13]:
It's okay, Paul. Don't worry about it.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:15]:
We all have our strengths. I just have fewer than most people. So last week we talked about more leadership changes in Xbox briefly. There's not too much to say there other than the weird AI core thing that's occurring in Xbox right now, which I don't understand.

Richard Campbell [01:23:31]:
She's also run off and grabbed a bunch of senior gaming folks now, too, from outside of Microsoft, while forcing out the inside of Microsoft gaming senior folks.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:42]:
Yeah, I mean, if you. Look, if. If the argument is like, what we've been doing isn't working and we need to make changes, it's like, okay. I mean, it's kind of hard to argue with that, no matter what anyone thinks about people or whatever.

Richard Campbell [01:23:52]:
But in the initial grab, and I think I said this on the show, when she grabbed a bunch of core AI folks was, well, don't surround yourself with people who don't know anything about gaming.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:59]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:24:00]:
But then the next thing she did was bring in new people focused on gaming. So.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:03]:
Yeah, so you're right. So the most recent.

Richard Campbell [01:24:05]:
She's definitely up to stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:06]:
Yep, yep. Yeah, like that. Like the guy from YouTube that bought Commodore, like one of the things he did that I think is so cool is he just brought in a bunch of former Commodore luminaries to advise or help. You know, like Sam Tramiel and, you know, Dave Heiney. Like, guys who were so. Or David Pleasance, you know, guys who were part of Commodore indoor Amiga for many, many years, but like 30 years ago are back, you know, helping with this company now.

Richard Campbell [01:24:32]:
It's credit for the self awareness. You know, I am an enthusiast, not an expert.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:35]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:24:36]:
Go get some experts.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:37]:
Yeah, I think it's neat.

Richard Campbell [01:24:39]:
Smart.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:40]:
I don't quite understand this one, but this happens, like late. It was like super late in the day. I think I was done the day and I just came across my feed. I'm like, okay, I guess I got to write about this. But first of all, Xbox is now all capital letters. So it's Xbox. I'm not sure I like that. I don't know why it vaguely remembers or reminds me of the original Xbox.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:01]:
There was a kind of like a kind of a brute force kind of nature to that device. You know, it was a big brick of a thing, a monolithic whatever. Looking at it, maybe. I don't know if that's from that. Maybe. Maybe it said that on the controller and the button in the middle, which I don't think back then lit up or did anything but. But I can't remember. But I saw that and I was like.

Richard Campbell [01:25:20]:
Because the old logos were all one typeface. Like they weren't. There was no upper, lowercase.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:26]:
Okay, yeah, maybe that's what it is then. But anyway, they're using it. So whatever Microsoft or.

Richard Campbell [01:25:33]:
Sorry, I mean, it definitely speaks to. If you're going back to the old culture of Xbox. Right. That we're going to focus on the console and that kind of thing. Making a reference. Like once upon a time, there was no upper and lowercase when it come to. It came to Xbox.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:50]:
Right. There was no upper and lowercase on an Apple IIe either. But, you know, I guess this is

Richard Campbell [01:25:55]:
what, you know, TRS 80, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:25:57]:
Yeah, yeah. I like at some point we just go full blown nostalgia, you know. Like I, I've made The argument like McDonald's new restaurants should look like they looked in the 60s, you know?

Leo Laporte [01:26:08]:
Yeah, that's what actually when I worked there, they had arches.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:12]:
Yeah, right, right. I think people would actually like the

Leo Laporte [01:26:14]:
tile and yeah, it was cool.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:16]:
Yep. Anyway, they're not doing that, but at least not yet. But they announced something called the Xbox Game Studio Shop, which is an online merch store. So you can buy things that are like, you know, hats, T shirts, drink wear, whatever, obviously with logos or designs related to Xbox Studio games like Halo and Forza, gears of war, etc. Kind of a limited collection as of yet. It's going to expand dramatically. I guess they're going to have big launches alongside games where some new Call of Duty, or not Call of Duty actually, but some, whatever Xbox video game will come out and then they'll have a bunch of new merchandise as well, if you want to do that. I didn't know this, but apparently they already have stores for Blizzard, Call of Duty, Bethesda and Minecraft.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:06]:
Like gear stores, like physical item stores. So this will be another one of those. But for Microsoft's, I guess they're all first party, but. First party.

Richard Campbell [01:27:15]:
Oh, they got a bunch of Halo gear, that's for sure.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:18]:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's the only way that thing's going to make any money these days, so that's good. I don't know what they're doing, but it's kind of weird. And then this happened just I think since we started the show. But the. The Valve has brought back or is now again selling the Steam Deck Oled which at one point was the most expensive. You know, the better version with a better screen.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:39]:
Right. Of their portable gaming device. But this thing now costs like 40 to 46% more, depending on which one you're getting. So, like the 512 gigabyte version now starts at $789 and the 1 terabyte version is 949, which is $300 more than it was before. But they're back in stock. So I think the. Yeah. 512 version was 549 and now it's 789.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:10]:
So if you're holding out for that Steam machine, whatever the game. Yeah, right. Yeah. It's probably going to be expensive.

Richard Campbell [01:28:20]:
Yeah. Or they'll wait till the things even out. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:25]:
I'm surprised they didn't update the components in this thing. I think this is just the same thing as before, just with higher prices.

Richard Campbell [01:28:32]:
Yeah. The freedom question is how many have they made? Because eventually those prices will come down.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:38]:
But then they can sell. But we sold everyone we made. There you go, selling like hotcakes, which I think we should all wonder if that is good.

Richard Campbell [01:28:48]:
How expensive are your pancakes?

Paul Thurrott [01:28:50]:
How many hotcakes could you sell?

Leo Laporte [01:28:52]:
Do you think that the main reason people are booing speakers at commencement when they say the word AI is it's just a bunch of gamers who can't afford to get a gaming.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:01]:
No, I think it's. You know what? I honestly, I think it's people facing one of the bleakest job prospects in history, you know, frankly. Yeah. I mean, I understand college has never been more expensive. No, no, I don't either. It, it's. It actually, the reason. The rationale of it doesn't matter.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:18]:
Right. It's.

Leo Laporte [01:29:18]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:19]:
You just spent for more years hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah, yeah. And you're going to be working a Pizza Hut, you know, like it's. It's kind of tough.

Leo Laporte [01:29:28]:
Yeah, I completely understand.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:29]:
I mean, my son graduated during the. The COVID thing and that was terrible.

Richard Campbell [01:29:33]:
He had a heart.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:34]:
He could not get a job in his field. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:29:36]:
Well, it's the same. It's the same people who graduated from high school during COVID who are now graduating from college.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:42]:
That's my daughter. Yes, exactly. She's like the. She's the luckiest kid on earth, you know?

Leo Laporte [01:29:47]:
Oh, God.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:48]:
You know what?

Leo Laporte [01:29:48]:
I completely understand why they're pissed. I'd be pissed too.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:52]:
So AI may be a straw man or whatever you want to call that, but it's. It's emblematic. Of the problem they see out in the world, you know, because it's the root cause of.

Leo Laporte [01:30:01]:
And the thing I would say to them is, I understand you're upset, but you should really figure out ways to use AI to help you get a job, because people who do, who are effective at. I just had a friend who was interviewing at Apple.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:15]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:30:15]:
And one of the first things they said is, show us an AI project you've worked on.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:19]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:30:19]:
And fortunately he had a really good one and was able to show them. And they were very impressed. Do that, you know, because there will be jobs. That's just changing the same way that, you know.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:32]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:30:32]:
Yeah. But that's not what the tech bros are saying.

Leo Laporte [01:30:34]:
No, I know. There's no more work.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:37]:
Yeah. You know, first of all, every one of these idiots dropped out of college. So what are we listening to that?

Richard Campbell [01:30:42]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:30:43]:
So Peter Thiel's paying people not to

Paul Thurrott [01:30:45]:
go to college, right? Well, I wish he'd pay me not to go to college. I could do that pretty easily.

Leo Laporte [01:30:49]:
Could have taken that money.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:51]:
Yeah. I don't know. You know, Leo's right. First of all, jobs are training. Like, I was. My sister, the teacher, we were with her over the weekend and I was asking her about AI in school and kids and all that stuff. And I would, you know, and she was saying, you know, her belief is like, you know, software development is just going to go away. And I'm like, yeah, it's not.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:09]:
That's not exactly right. But I know why you say that it's changing and it's the thing we've talked about. You're almost more of a project manager, a program manager. It's the thing I just did. I just did a bunch of. I made stuff with code, except I didn't make anything. I didn't do any of it. You know, I just directed it.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:25]:
You know, I told it what to do.

Richard Campbell [01:31:26]:
You described what to make.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:29]:
It's not hard. By the way, I have to say, it's a lot easier than actually coding. That much I can tell you was true. So, yeah, everything's changing for sure, you

Leo Laporte [01:31:41]:
know, it's not changing. The fabulous back of the book. It is an eternal truth that will be with us as long as there is Windows.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:50]:
It is an eternity. If you're waiting for it to end,

Leo Laporte [01:31:55]:
we're going to restart it. The back of the book, Paul Thurot, is tip of the week.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:01]:
Tip of the week, yeah. So a couple weeks ago, we were getting ready to come home from Mexico. I think I mentioned the Day we had that big electrical problem. And one of the things I did that day before everything went south was, you know, I'm getting ready to fly home, I have all these laptops and electronics and whatever there. And I was, I was like, I'm going to be ready for this trip ahead of time. So one of the things I did as part of that was I kind of decommissioned or like even reset or whatever, laptop, laptops that I wasn't going to need or bring home with me, et cetera. So a lot of those things were like laptops I had been testing Linux on. So I've been writing this long kind of switcher series over the past couple of months, looking at various Linux distributions and apps and whatever else and other alternatives to Windows, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:43]:
And something interesting happened which is within a day or two, I find myself kind of missing Linux. And I was trying to figure out why. What was it about Linux? Wait, wait a minute.

Leo Laporte [01:32:51]:
Did you just say missing Linux?

Paul Thurrott [01:32:53]:
Pay attention to this.

Leo Laporte [01:32:56]:
What?

Paul Thurrott [01:32:58]:
This is not for Leo. So, so I did a couple, a couple things came out of this. I installed wsl, the Windows subsystem for Linux on the laptop I use most of the time. And yeah, whatever. But I was trying to figure out like what it is, what is it about Linux, like what are the things about Linux that are appealing to me? And a couple of things came out of this. So one was the thing I talked about last week, which is you're going to set up Windows 11 as a Linux user with Linux, in other words, you're using a local account. You're not going to connect ever to a Microsoft account or to any Microsoft services. You're going to install things from a command line, et cetera, whatever it might be.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:40]:
We talked about that last week, but I wrote down a list of the things that were about Linux which factored into that article. Then I, I think it was yesterday wrote, finally wrote the article, which is like, which I called the Zen of Linux for no good reason. But like, what are the things? Like the, like the conceptual differences you have to get over. And two of them are actually coming from Windows, I guess, or maybe the Mac, but definitely from Windows. Right, but, but two are applicable to Windows. Like, and speak to that article I talked about before. The first one is this notion of like Windows users just knee jerk, go to the web, download Exe's, install them. And that's how you install apps.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:23]:
You find them on the web, you install them from the download you got from the web. But we have this Thing Linux has had forever, which is a package manager. There are third party package managers, but Microsoft has one built into Windows. Winget or the Windows Package Manager. We obviously have the Store, which is its own thing. We have new CLIs all over the place like the store. CLI is the relevant examples here. But you can, in the context of Windows, do things much like you do on Linux.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:50]:
Except that one of the big Achilles heels for Winget is it's great for finding installing apps, it's great for bulk installing apps through a script. It's no good at managing apps, meaning keeping them up to date automatically because you can go to the command line at any time and wingate, upgrade and all, whatever, and it will update everything, but you have to do it yourself. Like on Linux, like this stuff just kind of happens and like that's kind of the, that's kind of a neat thing. Like it's a, it's a different mindset, you know, it's a different way to think of it. The other one that applies is the command line, which is like, you know, we've spent the past, I guess, 50 years now getting away from command lines, right? You know, the world of ms, DOS and whatever preceded it, cpm, et cetera. But you know, I gotta say, as I'm getting. I was talking to Rich, I mentioned this, I think to Richie before the show started. Like more and more, it's like if I could boot into a command line and just use that most of the time I think I would, you know, like I, I love that Microsoft Edit, you know, command line editor.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:51]:
I mean, I love it.

Leo Laporte [01:35:54]:
I like you are really falling deep into this.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:56]:
I know it's, it's not good.

Leo Laporte [01:35:59]:
It's going to be just a matter of time before you're using emacs.

Richard Campbell [01:36:04]:
Don't go that far.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:10]:
But the command line is not just something you have to deal with. Like when people are like, well, Linux will make it. When you don't have to go. It's like you're not thinking about this correctly. There are things that are faster and better and more efficient or whatever from the command line. It's like the app updating thing. Even on Windows where you have to do it manually, it's still more efficient just to do this. I guess you could just leave it alone, not worry about it.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:34]:
But I mean the thing that's nice about Winget or any package manager is that it's everything. So no matter how you install an app, unless the thing is literally just not outside of the system and doing its own thing. This will update all your store apps, it will update web based apps, whatever. It's really nice. I just think it's not something you have to deal with. It's something you should just embrace. It's better for certain things. There are other things on Linux that are just different.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:03]:
Like the file system obviously comes out of Unix and whatever. Our file system came out of something stupid like cpm, which was inspired by some IBM stupidity from the late or early 70s that whatever. And we have drive letters and we still have them and whatever. It's normal to us, but it's just not whatever. And then the one thing that Microsoft's trying to get to, which I'm not 100% sure is actually a huge Linux advantage, is the chaos of updating and requiring reboots, right? So Microsoft wants to get Windows down to like one boot a month. Neat. If you bring up a new Linux PC or new Linux install, whatever, you're going to be rebooting that thing. I mean, there's no doubt about it.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:43]:
But I guess the goal here is that Linux is architected in such a way that updates will don't stop you from running the underlying app or service and they can just update in place and that works. And usually you don't have to reboot. And that's kind of cool, I guess, but we're trying to get there. But I guess the notion isn't so much like you should just switch to Linux, although that will be an option for some people, but more like kind of incorporate some of the thinking of Linux into the way that you approach Windows, which is what that thing last week was about.

Leo Laporte [01:38:14]:
Yeah, I agree.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:15]:
Kind of interesting.

Leo Laporte [01:38:16]:
You know, people act as if Linux is all different than Windows. It's just another.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:21]:
Well, okay, so the problem is Linux is different from Linux, right? Like you run something like Debian and there's nothing you can customize at all. Like this thing's missing. It's bizarre. You don't even get like a, like your account. You have to figure out how to make your account able to even do sudo, you know, it's insanity.

Leo Laporte [01:38:39]:
It's not built in, in Debian.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:40]:
Some of them are in this crazy, customizable, never ending. You could just spend your whole life playing around with the UI if you

Leo Laporte [01:38:48]:
wanted to do something for everybody.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:50]:
Yeah, there really is in the world of Linux. Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:38:54]:
I'm a very happy user and I'm glad to see that you have finally

Paul Thurrott [01:38:58]:
joined the dark side, or whatever we're calling it. I'm not going to admit to that. So. Okay. And then I don't have an app pick. But some of this is tied to the switcher stuff. Some of it is just timely. So Vivaldi released the 8.0 version of the browser last week with what they're called.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:16]:
I think they just call it a unified. Yeah, unified design. It's a new design. It's just like what they call the Chrome, the outside of the browser. It's actually really nice. It's beautiful. This is good enough. It's worth looking at.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:29]:
It's a Chromium browser, whatever. But their whole thing has always been customization. Their thing lately has been no AI. That's part of their little story. But this UI is fascinating because this is what Mozilla has been talking about to do for Firefox and now they're publicly testing it. If you want to, you can go get the nightly builds of Firefox. You can see this thing. But I think literally Vivaldi just shipped it.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:55]:
Like, it's basically the same thing. It's only on desktop today, but I'm sure they will come to mobile as well. But if you want to, you can look at the Mozilla version of this, if you will. And I know Kev Brewer had posted this in my forums and I think it was before we wrote about it, but Discord now has A native Windows 11 app. Windows 11 on ARM app.

Richard Campbell [01:40:20]:
Sorry.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:23]:
So you can, if you have a Snapdragon X or whatever PC, you can get a native app version, which I guess is Snappier. Sorry. And one thing I. This is kind of bizarre. Like, I. I've spent a lot of time lately, like we talked about, like with markdown editors and making them with AI and everything, and I'm. I'm. I'm a little nervous about turning my attention to a notion type app, because this can be complex.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:47]:
But I have been looking for a notion replacement. It's weird because when I think about it off the top of my head, the things that I think I need are things like, it's not a black box, meaning it's up in someone's cloud and I have to sink into it to go get it. I don't have a local version of anything. I can't sync it to myself. There's no real offline mode. I mean, there's offline support, but I can't arbitrarily easily mark things for being offline like you can with, like, most many apps. Right. And that stuff's true.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:21]:
And there are things like Obsidian and Joplin and whatever else. There's a million of these things that are. The individual notes are markdown files. You know, they use some YAML or something else to create the structure in the app itself. You can sync it to your own thing if you want to put it in OneDrive, Google Drive, Synology Drive, whatever you want, you can do that. And that's good. But then I realized in testing these things, there's actually a couple of other things that I need. One of them is like sharing.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:52]:
We do the Windows Weekly Notes in Notion and I share it with Richard and Leo and people from Twit and it works great and it's easy. Sharing is kind of a problem when it's like markdown based files that could be anywhere in a file system. It's a little. It requires a little bit of infrastructure, basically. And then the other one is like a mobile client. Right. Some of the apps I just mentioned, I think Obsidian and Joplin probably App Flowy, probably a couple of others. Any type I think is one do have mobile clients.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:24]:
But I just came across this thing I think people really need to look at. I love this app. It was written first for the Mac, it only shipped about a month ago and now it's on Windows as well. There's some things in it, like you right click on something and it says show and Finder instead of show and File Explorer where you're like. But it's beautiful, it's clean, it looks just like Notion. It is local save markdown files that you control. And it is called. What is it called, Paul? It's called Tolaria.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:55]:
T O L A R I A. This is worth looking at. It's beautiful. It's pure markdown. Excellent. It's a great markdown editor, by the way, which is really interesting. Like one app that can do the two things. You can use markdown syntax, like in Notion, you can use markdown syntax and other apps.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:14]:
But this thing has a traditional, for this kind of app, three pane view where it's like the side pane with navigation essentially and then a middle pane which is a list of notes that are in that folder you're looking at. And then a main pane with the editor itself. So if you do like Control 3 is the primary view. If you do Control 2, it turns off the side pane. If you do. I might be doing this backwards. Yeah, no. And if you do control one, it's just a markdown editor by itself.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:41]:
Like it's really clean and I'm like You know, this thing is pretty damn close to being something I would just use. It's just that it does not support. Yeah, it looks awesome and I've been using it like it is awesome. But I don't believe there's a way to share anything in here, which I is kind of critical.

Leo Laporte [01:43:57]:
Oh, so you couldn't do the show phone?

Paul Thurrott [01:43:59]:
No. So that makes it a non starter for right now. But I feel. But it's being, it's so. It's being so quickly updated and.

Leo Laporte [01:44:05]:
Well, because it's on git.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:07]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:44:08]:
So we could be sharing with fetching, but that's tricky.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:11]:
Right. So it actually. Right. So I have connected it to git. So it's. You know, there's that. That's a form of sync. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:18]:
If you think. And obviously also version control and what's the other thing? And it also integrates with AI. Right. So this guy is actually vibe coding this thing, by the way.

Leo Laporte [01:44:30]:
Well, what a surprise. You're going to see a lot of these.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:34]:
But look at the quality of the ui.

Leo Laporte [01:44:35]:
It looks good.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:36]:
It's astonishing. Yeah. So you can connect it to AI. So when I install it like on the first PC I installed it on, I had cloud and cloud code installed, which is like the CLI part of it or whatever. And it picked it up immediately. It was like, do you just want to use this? I'm like, yep. And I never use the AI sidebar. You don't have to.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:52]:
But it does have that AI sidebar thing and you can bring your own AI. It's impressive. This is.

Leo Laporte [01:45:00]:
It's kind of a stripped down Obsidian is what it really is.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:02]:
Yeah. Yeah, it's really neat. Like I. This is interesting to me.

Leo Laporte [01:45:08]:
So the sharing thing is actually the. But I think you could easily add a piece with your AI to share it.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:18]:
It's not just that though. Like, I don't. I don't want to have two things that do the same thing. Right. So I use notion for everything. So you guys see the show notes. But I use it for my business. I use it for the eternal spring thing I do with my wife.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:30]:
I use it for my meeting notes that are just whatever. I use it for personal things like weights at the gym or the names of people and dogs in Mexico City in different places or whatever it is. I use it for personal things and that means I need to be able to access it on my phone and individual markdown files sitting in a directory that yes, I can access on my phone and I can see it's fine. But I, you know, ideally there would be like an app that is this thing that is connected to the same back end that I'm using for sync, which in, you know, could be one. Like I said, anything I want it to be would be better, but that also makes it difficult because of the nature of the thing. So anyway, look, I just want people. This is. I think most.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:12]:
When you, when you say. Or Google Notion alternative, you'll get the same five to ten choices every time. Everyone's heard of them all. Obsidian, any type, especially Joplin, whatever. But this is one. I don't. I think this will start coming up. It isn't yet, but it's brand new.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:28]:
I literally, I think the initial release was like a month ago and it is super impressive. Like, it's really nice. Really nice. So it's worth, it's still worth looking at and it may meet your needs.

Leo Laporte [01:46:42]:
I'm really. And now you got me thinking. I know the source code is probably on GitHub. I presume it would be easy enough to, to say, okay, take Teleria and I want to add your own component to it.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:56]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:46:57]:
I mean, this is why Notion is in the cloud, because that makes it easy to share.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:01]:
Notion probably has a formal. I'm sure they have to. A system for third parties to make extensions or whatever. Whatever they call them. Right. Like Obsidian has this or the products that do this have that. So I don't know that this has it. I don't know that it's part of the plan.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:18]:
I think it would have to be.

Richard Campbell [01:47:19]:
It's a bit yellow right now.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:20]:
Yeah, I don't believe it's there yet, but. But I, I just look at the quality of what it is today. If you just think of this as a. Well, I guess, I guess a note like a, you know, like a standalone Notion at whatever. It's. It's like what's there is so good. I'm just kind of, I'm curious, you know, to see where this goes. And I feel like this guy, his blog is interesting.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:46]:
He's an interesting guy. Like, he is actively developing this and you can, you can tell, you can see the. How often, you know, new releases go. It's pretty incredible.

Leo Laporte [01:47:56]:
Nice.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:56]:
So, yeah, kind of incredible. I don't even know how I found it. It's just so under the radar. But it's.

Leo Laporte [01:48:07]:
Well, 11,000 stars on GitHub is one

Paul Thurrott [01:48:09]:
way that will do it.

Leo Laporte [01:48:11]:
It's a very popular GitHub.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:13]:
GitHub's like, it looks like you're making a Lot of markdown editors. Do you want to look at this thing? Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:48:18]:
I mean, and that's the other thing. There are a lot of things like this, but this looks really nice.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:21]:
Oh, there are a lot of things like this. Right? That's the. Right. And look, we all have our own little set of criteria. And if you're trying to do this kind of thing, you could be like, all right, what meets my need? Whatever. Go to alternative2.com or whatever it is and look at. Look up Notion Alternative. There's a bunch of them.

Richard Campbell [01:48:35]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:35]:
But yeah, this one. This one's really good. Really good.

Leo Laporte [01:48:39]:
Very nice. Very, very, very nice. This means because you have come to the end of your chapter in the back of the book, that it's time for. Richard Campbell. And his chapter beginning with Run as Radio

Richard Campbell [01:48:58]:
brought my friend Karin Bassett back on the show. She's done a few now. She still works for V Veeam, but very much a communicator type and digging into different texts. Of course, V means a lot of backup and stuff like that. But that was not the conversation we had this time around. This time we were talking about Loop and its role in finally productivity. I'm looking for a Loop show.

Leo Laporte [01:49:22]:
Is Loop still around?

Paul Thurrott [01:49:24]:
Before you go on, I just. Let me just ask you one quick question. Does copilot notebooks ever come up in this conversation? No, no, I'm serious. Because I feel like that is what Loop becomes.

Richard Campbell [01:49:34]:
I wonder. Yeah, co pilot notebooks. But really we. The play. She was talking about loop components primarily, which by the way, you have to be in the M365 talent attendant for any of this to work. No outsiders like they've not attended the same way. Like in teams, you can have an external. Now you can't do this with Loop at all.

Richard Campbell [01:49:55]:
But it was really her focus with the component piece was about making living documents where you always have the current data. So even as far as in a teams meeting, the agenda can be dynamically edited by anyone and everyone has the synced version of it. But and also went into while in the teams meeting, as we were talking through tasks, those became work items that appeared in people's planners that any data set that you were counting on as part of that conversation was synchronized with everyone and real time updated when you come back to review it as well. It just was a very much. Because Loop is too many things. Like we talk about Loop as the notion competitor, which it's a mediocre at that. You know, the number of times in a given week you know what I can't do with my Loop phone client? Figure out what whiskeys I previously talked about because the search is worthless. Right.

Richard Campbell [01:50:53]:
So I'm, you know, go into a liquor store, pull out the Windows Whiskey list and yeah, no, I can't find anything it says works fine on the PC, doesn't work on the phone. But when it comes to this integrating M365 documents and tying them together with component feed, it's really quite powerful. But very much you need. It's a collaboration tool for a group of people inside an M365 tenant to deal with not handing files around, not working on a date references, that kind of thing. That's really where Corinne dug in and said like look, this will save you a ton of pain and really pulls together the role of teams and planner, Loop, even Automate, you know, even putting components directly into OneNote if you prefer OneNote it could do all of them. So it was, it was a great conversation. It talked about an aspect of Loop I just did not know that much about. And it speaks to why some folks have such a great experience with Loop and don't know what you're calling about.

Richard Campbell [01:51:55]:
But it's like because you're not losing using Loop like it's notion which I'm still doing for some reason and maybe I need to stop it.

Leo Laporte [01:52:04]:
The last one.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:05]:
You and seven other people.

Richard Campbell [01:52:06]:
Yeah, well, yeah, I'm using OneNote most of the the time and I just tried a few things in Loop and

Leo Laporte [01:52:12]:
I'm a big Obsidian fan and Obsidian works really well with AI. So I'm, you know, I'm happy with that. But it is more, it's a little more heavyweight for sure and I suppose Loop is too.

Richard Campbell [01:52:24]:
But I got my loop open right now for my whiskey pick so that's where I put those notes. So we're back in Canada. I decided to pick Canadian whiskey and the particular one I grabbed this time around is from John Sleeman and Sons. And you will notice this is an unopened bottle because I'm going to tell the whole story and predict what this is going to taste like and then I'm going to unwrap it and taste it and figure out how badly wrong I went. Live on the air, living on the edge.

Leo Laporte [01:52:54]:
Man, this is better than Al Capone's vault. Ladies and gentlemen, here you go.

Richard Campbell [01:52:57]:
Funny, you make the Al Capone reference because we're going to get there. Oh, so we're back in Ontario, we're in Guelph, which is a University Town. This is near Waterloo and Kitchener, which are all university towns. It's like a cluster of universities. This is about 90 kilometers west of Toronto, 55 miles, although if you're from Ontario, you would never say that. You'd say it's 75 minutes away because for one reason, the Ontario folks always talk distances as time driven. This is a part of the world that has always grown corn. The original corn was there.

Richard Campbell [01:53:29]:
There's evidence of the Mississauga peoples, which is what this region is known 10,000 years ago, growing corn in this location. Although corn was very different at that Tinisaid, which is the sort of precursor, corn was a very different plant that long ago. What makes the location important? It's a river intersection, of course, the Speed river and the Aramosa River. Can't find a reason why they called it Speed because it's not a fast river in any way. Those two rivers ultimately feed into the grand river, which dumps into Lake Erie, not Lake Ontario. You know, Toronto is on Lake Ontario, but you got to go the next great Lake down. That's where the Grand Liver drains into. But that'll become relevant later.

Richard Campbell [01:54:11]:
This is a climate zone we call humid continental. So quite cold winters, very snowy and warm humid summers. Now, the European influences start becoming relevant in this equation around 1827, when a Scottish entrepreneur named John Galt, quite famous in in this area for building out towns and so forth. And this was a very planned town and he ceremoniously felled a tree at the intersection of those two rivers, the Speed and the Aramirus, and named it Guelph after the House of Guelph, which was the ancestral line of King George iv, who was the reigning monarch at the time. Remember, we are talking about Upper Canada in the Dominion of Canada, which was a British colony. So if you look at the map of Guelph, if you ever get a chance to go there, you will see that the river intersect. The Speed river is sort of the starting point and it does a radius, a radial road set very much like a commons model into a grid. So very European with large boulevards, lots of room.

Richard Campbell [01:55:15]:
It was supposed to be a stylish and important location and it became one. Our player here, John Sleeman, shows up around that time. Originally from Cornwall, England, he immigrates to upper Canada in 1834 and he gets brings the family business with him, which is breweries. So it's all about the beer. And he arrives in Guelph as the operator for a brewery owned by John Hodgert. Which he'll be successful enough with over just a few years that it'll get sold and he'll lose his job in 1850. And so then has enough money to open his own brewery called the Silver Creek Brewery. Taking water from the Speed River.

Richard Campbell [01:55:55]:
It's also where the grand railway line runs directly to the US as well. And so he starts cranking out beer there. Famous for small batching his beers in 100 barrel lots, more or less. Again, this is very much before bottling. By 1859, he hands the reigns over to his son George and who within a year or two rename. When his son George Jr gets involved, rename the company George Schliemann and Sons. John Sleeman, the original actually retires back to England in 1867, which is the year of confederation for Canada. That's when Canada becomes Canada and leaving George senior as the sole owner.

Richard Campbell [01:56:33]:
And he lives out his last days in England. By 1870, we have the letters between George and his father to sort of all the stories there. George Lehman gets heavily involved in Guelph from a public service point of view, becomes a city councilor, sponsors the local baseball team, who even wins a championship in 74, 1874, that is. And by 1880, George Schliemann is actually the mayor of Guelph and wisely. And there's a great paper story about him becoming mayor. One of the very first things he did was he declared July 1, which we know then you as Dominion Day, as a official day off for the whole city of Guelph. Now today it is a holiday and everybody's in theory supposed to have that day off, right? But back then it was not as an obvious thing. Some folks took it off, some folks didn't.

Richard Campbell [01:57:24]:
But it was Also in the 1870s, 1880s, a ton of serious labor strife. We're just coming into what will eventually become the union movements and things like this. So making that plated get a day off was a very popular move for the working man. It was also mentioned in the article I read that he was also in the business of selling beer. And having a day off is a good chance to sell, but sell more beer. And so by the late 1800s, Sleeman is looked on at the same level as the biggest beer makers in all of Canada. So folks like Molson and leblat Sleeman was said literally in the same voice, although not as well known for a while there, which will be explained later. 1900, the George Junior incorporates the company as Sleeman Brewing and Malting.

Richard Campbell [01:58:11]:
And that name will persist. Now, his father has invested heavily in railways and tram systems in Guelph, and to the point where he actually loses the brewery to the banks when the finances get a little tight. They've also opened up a secondary brewery they call Spring bank, and he gets and makes enough money to actually buy it back from the bank with than a year or so. Things get crazy by World War I, when there's shortages of everything. And then in 1916, the temperance movement, Prohibition, arrives in Ontario. Before U.S. prohibition. Now that was fine for Sleepmans because they were already on the rail line and were exporting lots of product to the US anyway, so they just focused on that.

Richard Campbell [01:58:52]:
Although they did start making a medicinal beer, which was only 2.5%, which fell under the thresholds for prohibition. So they were able to continue selling that, although later they'll get into trouble with making overproof beer being over 2.5% and selling it in Ontario. Things get really grim by 1920, when the US prohibition begins, and that's when the smuggling really takes off. Now, remember I mentioned the river system in Guelph goes through to Lake Erie, which means if you can get to Lake Erie, you have access to New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. And so beer selling by all accounts, continues apace. And it's not until 1926 that we there starts to be major investigations into the corruption of Customs and Excise around products traveling into the US and the brewery shuts down. Actually, George Senior, George junior passes away and his son Henry is now running the business. And prohibition comes to the end in Ontario in 1927.

Richard Campbell [02:00:02]:
And at that point, even though the brewery shut down, the commission that had been doing the investigations of corruption and so forth starts demanding to review the books of different breweries in the area. There were a number, and one of them was Sleeman's. And we have the court records where Henry is talking about the fact that they've lost their books that, you know, they hadn't been able to sell. They weren't selling beer back then, they were selling other products, but they had already shut down and they had no records at all. And of course what the commission was really up about was not paying taxes on the exports. And so ultimately they find the brewery guilty. Although immediately after Henry's trial, he sells his brewery to the competitor, a holiday brewing. But even that doesn't hold him completely.

Richard Campbell [02:00:54]:
Several. So the trials go on for some time and by the time 1933 rolls around, aka when prohibition ends in the US, the Canadian government has shut down the Holiday brewing operation, which also includes a semen operation for tax evasion and seizes assets of the new owners and the old owners for back taxes and fines, essentially bankrupting the Sleeman family as a whole. And they exit the business. Now, if you read these stories today, in the marketing that the new Sleemans is doing, they talk about a 50 year ban for brewing, which we have no real evidence of. But it makes for a good story because in 1984, John W. Sleeman, which would be the great, great grandson of the original John H. Sleeman from the 1830s, and again, the story goes this way, I don't know if it's absolutely true, acquires the recipes of his great great grandfather from his Aunt Florian, who tells the tales of the beauty brewing business of the past and how the Sleeman name was so big and all the things that happened in Prohibition. Also the fact that they kept no records because that might incriminate them and that they'd had a 50 year ban and now that 50 years had gone by, the Ant is passing on this information to John W.

Richard Campbell [02:02:17]:
Sleeman, including the story that they had apparently during Prohibition been selling beer to Al Capone. There is no evidence that any of this true, but it makes an excellent story.

Leo Laporte [02:02:27]:
Somebody had to.

Richard Campbell [02:02:28]:
Yeah, John W. Sleeman does go to the effort at this point. And by the way, the, the, the recipe book, there are pictures of it, so apparently that's real. But he does manage to get the Sleeman Brewing and Multi Company back. He gets it for a dollar, buys it back from Nabisco, who got it through a series of acquisitions after it was shut down in the 1930s and goes to work making beer in a serious way. And Sleeman's beer is very popular over the next 20 years, becomes a well known beer name in Canada once again. And I say 20 years because in 2006, John W. Sells the kitten caboodle to Sapporo for $400 million.

Richard Campbell [02:03:10]:
Now, Sapporo is a big Japanese brewer. They're not a super giant like Suntory, but they are big. They also own Anchor Brewing in the US as well. So Sleeman's and a subsidiary in Quebec are their, their Canadian production. Side of things. John Sleeman stays on as CEO for a couple years, but he will step down in 2010 and just becomes a figurehead for Schliemann's. But he also starts inquiring about distilling. He has two sons, Cooper and Quinn.

Richard Campbell [02:03:39]:
And so by 2015 they're getting serious about building a distillery. And there's a bunch of versions of the story, but I find gets really fun that they go to this ruin of a site, the former Allen's Mill. So Allen's Mill was built in 1830 as a woolen mill, and various things happen along the way. It gets rebuilt as a stone, as a limestone mill in the 1850s, but by then is operated as a flour mill. At some point, it's also a brewery and a distillery. Some of that structure on the other side of the river, a lot of that got ruined in the 1870s and another big fire. It's rebuilt and repurposed again through the 1960s when another fire shuts it down. But at that point, it's kind of a heritage site.

Richard Campbell [02:04:19]:
So they clear the whole area, a park with just the ruins of the big limestone building. And then again, there's several versions of the story. In 2015, they're looking for sites for the distillery. There's an argument that this was originally a Sleeman's building anyway. And somebody shows them that under a hidden space in the floor, in a hidden basement, there is the remains of a distillery that was run during Prohibition. Now, again, there was no evidence the Sleemans ever sold whiskey or, you know, distilled products in Prohibition. They were beer sellers. But they take this story and run with it and decide to restore the building rather than build a new distillery.

Richard Campbell [02:05:07]:
Take the old Allen's Mill limestone structure that was largely a ruin and restore it into the Spring Mill distillery.

Leo Laporte [02:05:15]:
The restoration Prohibition in Canada there was,

Richard Campbell [02:05:18]:
and it was different provinces had prohibition at different time. In the case of Ontario, it was from 1916 to 1927.

Leo Laporte [02:05:26]:
Oh, same. Roughly the same time frame.

Richard Campbell [02:05:28]:
Yeah. The U.S. was 1920, 1933. It went substantially longer there. And so all of that story, you know, that Canadians got into rum running into America because they weren't able to sell at home. They, you know, sort of forced into it. Prohibition started in Ontario before US Prohibition. And so Sleeman focused on selling only in the us and then when that went away, it was not that hard to switch to just continue to ship it, but in the dark.

Richard Campbell [02:05:56]:
And the fact they had the river system leading right to Lake Erie just made it easy. So until in the end the government comes for the back taxes and that it shuts all of this down. So this distillery, the Spring Mill Distillery, is in operation in 2019. So we're not going to get any age statements whiskey here. It's much, much too young. Their first barrelings go in 2022, and they make a rye in 2023. By all accounts, even though it's in an old restored building, it's a very technologically advanced distilleries. Lots of electronic controllers and things like that.

Richard Campbell [02:06:30]:
They're acting like it's a craft dist distillery. Their language is certainly that, but they seem a bit big. Even though most of the detailed information of the distillery is not published in any way. They talk about being all Canadian grains, mentioning both corn, rye and barley which do grow in the area. They do make a single malt, which would be straight barley, but in this case we're going to trace their rye whiskey. We know that they use wooden washbacks from Scotland, but made from Canadian Doug fir, which is what the Scottish use actually. It's sort of a famous thing there. We don't know exactly the size.

Richard Campbell [02:07:05]:
Probably between 8, 8,000 and 12,000 liters, which would be on the big side for a craft, but or a small commercial operation. Stainless steel fermenters in the 20,000 liter size and a pair of Forsyth pot stills. So these are the Scottish style pot stills, unusual for North America because typically we, you know, most Canadian distillers as well as American distillers use column stills with maybe a rectifier or a single finishing pot still. But this is all pot stills. They say they're the largest in North America. Without any published stats, the guess is somewhere between 5,000, 8,000 liters. They also have their own cooperage. This is very unusual, but one of the sons, Quinn, studied in Scotland to be a cooper, to be a barrel maker.

Richard Campbell [02:07:47]:
And so one of their claims to fame is that they have actual Canadian oak barrels. Now, this is the same species of oak that grows in the US and Missouri, but is on the other side of the border. So it's still querulous Alba, the white oak, but just on the other side of the border. And those trees do grow in southern Ontario just fine. Their storage system is the rack house style. It's in the stone milk. So milk obviously is much bigger than the distilling operation we really need. And that limestone really lends to managing the temperature variation a bit more.

Richard Campbell [02:08:22]:
So winters are awfully cold in that part of the world. But the slime stone will ease that off. And same with too much, much heat. So everything that's being distilled is put into barrels in the same building. And remember, this is still Canada, so we tend to not do mash bills the way the Americans do. We distill each grain separately because they need separate treatments and then barrel them separately and only marry the different alcohols or distillates together when you're going to bottle them. In some ways, from all the information I've gathered on this distillery, they're really straddling the line between Scottish and American technique. I mean, going all pot still is very Scottish and rather than a column, still should be more American.

Richard Campbell [02:09:00]:
In the case of this particular whiskey, their rye whiskey, this is just corn and morai, no barley, which is different from anything all the others. If you're using a mash bill, you need the barley for the amylase. But if they're just doing corn and rye and they're doing them separately, they will use other enzymes to do the sugaring, the breakdowns. And by using the structures the way they're doing, they're aging faster than Scotland would, which is much cooler and slower, but slower than Kentucky, which tends to be much hotter than that. Now, granted, it's still early days, so they don't have any age statement. Whiskeys of any kind. They do make a. They do make a single malt and they do make this rye whiskey.

Richard Campbell [02:09:38]:
Although we'll talk about how much rye is actually in this thing. The only numbers I've seen for production level so far is that they're making about 150,000 bottles a year, which is small. That would be barely over 100,000 liters. And we talked when we, when I did the stock and barrel conversation, we talked about how little benefit Ontario gives to small producers. So it's. They're kind of small, but they seem to be set up for a larger operation of this. So reading the bottle here, they talk about rye whiskey and Canadian white rope, rye whiskey in American white oak and corn whiskey in American white oak. So what is this? Most likely the best numbers I've found at one.

Richard Campbell [02:10:19]:
At least one of the websites that's selling this Whiskey said it's 75% corn, 25% rye. That's fin. There's no rules for it, have to be all rye. There is this idea of a high rye, which would be more than 50% rye. It does not say high rye anywhere on this. Anyway, that's not a requirement. Regardless, anywhere they mentioned American oak, which would be both the rye and the corn. It's almost certainly ex bourbon cask.

Richard Campbell [02:10:42]:
You would not use virgin cask for that. But the Canadian oak is probably virgin cask, which means nothing else has been in there. Not that they're going to have very much of it is relatively hard to come by. We we don't know if they fired it or not, which is normal with American oak. Right. That they actually toast the inside to a certain level. So that's an unusual quirk. And we know, because we've had other alcohols that have been put in virgin oak that gives much stronger, woodier flavors.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:12]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [02:11:12]:
That typically you go into ex bourbon barrels because certain. Those strong flavors are already gone. You might come in at a slightly higher alcohol level, like 60.53.5. And I have none of those numbers for this distillery. They've been very secretive. But I am going to open this now, and we're going to go on the ride together, so to speak. Classic bottle, little bulky, got the shoulder in the neck. Got a cork, not a stock, with a wood top.

Richard Campbell [02:11:36]:
Right. I'm just twisting it so it pops out. Actually, this might be a synthetic. That's a synthetic, man.

Leo Laporte [02:11:42]:
That's okay. You know, the cork trees of Spain are dying out.

Richard Campbell [02:11:45]:
It's Portugal, but. Yes, Portugal, wherever they are. All right, give ourselves a healthy pour, because it is the afternoon, and I don't have to be that well behaved. Okay. It's only 40%, but it's quite alcoholy. Right. And you get that sort of strong alcohol. It doesn't smell super sweet.

Richard Campbell [02:12:04]:
I think it's 75% corn. It would be sweeter than that. And normally when we talk about rye, we're talking about in the context of bourbon, where 25% rye would be a lot for any bourbon. It's normally like 10 or 15%, and it's considered the spicy grains. So am I going to get a big spicy hit with that much? Ryan here? The answer is no. This is very mild. It's not coming across very sweet. It's got a little bit of heat in it, which is fine.

Richard Campbell [02:12:34]:
It didn't burn the mouth in any way. The no nose was a little more interesting than the mouth feel. It went down. Really?

Leo Laporte [02:12:46]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:12:46]:
There's nothing wrong with this. It's. It's not spectacular. You know, I'm not. Big caramel, rich notes. This is kind of a gentler. It's very Canadian. Since it's very mild, it's got a little more floral and flavor to it, which is interesting.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:03]:
It.

Richard Campbell [02:13:04]:
You know what? If you put this in a lineup, you wouldn't pick this out as a Canadian. That's what's interesting about it. Yeah, it's like a. It's. It seems more Scottish than anything else. But a Scott would be confused because this. It seems. It's not sweet like corn, but it's lighter than a straight barley would normally be.

Richard Campbell [02:13:25]:
Yeah, I'm really. This is a surprise. I'm not going to hunt this down. It's also 45 Canadian, so it's a bargain. That would be 30 bucks American. And I don't think they're selling in the US yet, so I haven't seen anywhere. I think I picked it up from $50. So this is not.

Richard Campbell [02:13:43]:
These are guys are relatively new production. No age statement on this. Obviously corn, it's. They say it's all Canadian grains. It is called a whiskey. So it's got to be at least three years old. They're not calling it a blend, just a rye whiskey. But you know, again, those are not that restrictive in Canada.

Richard Campbell [02:14:00]:
So they've certainly spent at least you call it a whiskey. Everything had to have been in the barrel for three years. They did the barreling separately. They were only laying up barrels in 2019. So the longest anything could be with seven years. I don't think it's that old and for that price, certainly not. They do make a single malt that's $75, which that's barley and it's harder to make and probably needed to age a little longer as well. Although there's no age statements on their singles either.

Richard Campbell [02:14:27]:
On the single malts. This is nice for this. Difficult as it was to find because I'm on the west coast because it's really in Ontario and people have a good feeling about the Sleeman's name. Just be their new beer, their hunter, their Honey Brown and so forth are good beers and things. You probably want to grab one of these. And of course this is more to do the Sleeman family than the Sleeman beer does anymore. Which actually is from Sapporo now. So, you know, if you like the con, the, the folks.

Richard Campbell [02:14:52]:
And again, they're hyping up their prohibition angle now these days that they're trying to be the bad boys and that's why they're in whiskey now. But I think it's mostly just stories. I don't know how accurate that stuff is, but yeah, they've made something distinctive here and I'm good on them. You know, they're playing out the. It says on the label here 1836. And I hope by the story I've just told you this has nothing to do with 1836. They got that distillery built in in 2018. So a bit of a stretch, but okay.

Richard Campbell [02:15:24]:
But you know, if you were going to get into the whiskey, but you think about, you Think about John W. Sleeman who put 20 something years into bringing back the Sleeman name in beer and then sold it off for a huge pile of money and now decided to do whiskey with his sons. Which is really what we're talking about.

Leo Laporte [02:15:39]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:15:39]:
You need a story. Don't you need a story? So you play on the old name, you play on the prohibition story, you play on the 50 year ban which again I could not find an ounce of evidence that there was actually a legal mandate for the 50 year ban. Not a bit. But lots of people talk about it but I think it's just part of the story. They've done something fun here and they made a decent whiskey from it. So I got nothing bad to say about John Sleeman. Well done. Cool product.

Richard Campbell [02:16:06]:
Bad website. By the way, you actually.

Leo Laporte [02:16:09]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:16:09]:
When you finally dig your way, if you. If you go to the shop online.

Leo Laporte [02:16:15]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [02:16:15]:
And the whiskey section.

Leo Laporte [02:16:16]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:16:17]:
You'll see the whiskeys and there's an option, Discover. And. And when you click on Discover you will have a very slow loading Squarespace page.

Leo Laporte [02:16:27]:
Oh that's funny.

Richard Campbell [02:16:28]:
That is just the brochure ware of that wiki. It's literally the page they would put in a store.

Leo Laporte [02:16:34]:
It's not even.

Richard Campbell [02:16:35]:
There's nothing clickable, it's not linkable. It's like it might as well be a PDF.

Leo Laporte [02:16:41]:
Which one of you. I can't even get back to the.

Richard Campbell [02:16:44]:
Yeah, no, you'll have to. The one I just tasted with the rye whiskey which, which was the $45 Canadian.

Leo Laporte [02:16:51]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [02:16:51]:
Bottle the high. You're on the high. Rye, which is $65. So that presumably is more than 50% rye. If I was going to go get another one, I'd go get their single malt.

Leo Laporte [02:17:03]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [02:17:03]:
Because I want to taste the barley and it's the most expensive at 75. But yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:17:08]:
So very interesting.

Richard Campbell [02:17:10]:
Berg's talking about. Who doesn't love a bootlegger? Exactly. They're playing off the bootlegger and they're playing off finding that little space underneath the old mill that clearly had a bootleggers distillery.

Leo Laporte [02:17:21]:
That was from 1836. That's the part that was.

Richard Campbell [02:17:24]:
That's. Well, that would. That was probably from 1920.

Leo Laporte [02:17:29]:
Oh yeah, because it was the.

Richard Campbell [02:17:30]:
Right. It was while they were making stuff for the Americans, somebody built it and almost certainly wasn't the Sleeman family. One of the things they noted when they dug all that stuff out was it had dump pipes into the river. So I think they were prepared for if the police Tried to raid them that they could drop a whole load into the river. Wow. Which makes it much more of a. Of a bad guys, you know, distillery that you have these systems for avoiding law enforcement. And it was hidden in a floor and all that sort of things.

Richard Campbell [02:18:00]:
Like one of the quotes on this is, it literally, they lifted up an old carpet and there was a brass ring set in the floor that popped open a hatch to a ladder down to this hidden basement.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:10]:
Again, we all need an escape room or whatever.

Richard Campbell [02:18:13]:
Yeah. I don't know how much of that stuff is true. They've definitely restored the old building. Apparently John W. Had been planning to build a new building from scratch. And after finding this switched. But again, I found no evidence that that was true either. You know, who wants to hamper a good story? And it makes for a display of whiskey, so.

Richard Campbell [02:18:32]:
Well, you know what I'm most interested in five years from now, see if they make a 10. Like, what did they lay up originally? When we start getting some real age statement versions of their whiskey, how many

Leo Laporte [02:18:43]:
barrels did they put. Put down?

Richard Campbell [02:18:45]:
Yeah, how many they put down? That building, because it's an old mill, is massive, much bigger, so that they have several floors of rack house above the distillery. So they have the ability to lay up a lot. But, you know, limits of wood and money, you gotta spend a lot of time. They do make a gin and a vodka. So clearly they've been trying to fill the pipeline to make a little revenue as well while they've been waiting for the whiskey to get ready.

Leo Laporte [02:19:08]:
Nice.

Richard Campbell [02:19:09]:
Yeah, maybe.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:10]:
Good.

Richard Campbell [02:19:10]:
Canadiana story.

Leo Laporte [02:19:11]:
Mr. Richard Campbell is a Canadian all the way down to his New Zealand boots. Then he becomes a New Zealander.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:18]:
Nobody's perfect, Leo.

Leo Laporte [02:19:20]:
No one's perfect. He is from runasradio.com that's where you'll find runasradio and.net that rocks. His podcasts. And of course, you'll find him here every Wednesday with Paul Thurat from thurat.com and his books@leanpub.com Although if you subscribe to thurat.com, you get all those books as part of the package. So that's a good way to get Windows everywhere, Deinshidify Windows and the Field Guide to Windows 11 as part of your membership@therot.com every Wednesday, 11am Pacific Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. We sit down, we turn on the microphones, we turn on the lights, we turn on the cameras, we turn on the whiskey and we talk about Windows and Microsoft and all of that jazz. And you're invited to join us. If you want to do it live, you can now club members, of course, get behind the velvet rope access at the club Twit Discord.

Leo Laporte [02:20:15]:
That's neither here nor there. The rest of us unwashed masses can watch on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. How about that? After the fact on demand versions of the show at Twitt TV Dubdub. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. A great way to share clips. And the easiest way to make sure you get every episode is subscribe and your favorite podcast client. Of course, if you're a member, you can get the chapter markers and skip around if you wish. Many of you I know just want to go straight to the whiskey.

Leo Laporte [02:20:46]:
And if that's what you wish to do, join the club.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:48]:
And you can also seek counseling because you might have a drinking problem.

Leo Laporte [02:20:55]:
Please drink responsibly. I suppose we should say that at

Paul Thurrott [02:20:57]:
the end of every show, AI responsibly.

Leo Laporte [02:21:01]:
Also drink please, AI responsibly. I just saw that DuckDuckGo's references users went up 28% after Google and us. They're going to put it more AI the search. So there you have it. There you have it.

Paul Thurrott [02:21:15]:
There's something for everybody.

Leo Laporte [02:21:16]:
That's all coming up in about five minutes if you're watching live intelligent machines. Jeff Jarvis, Paris Martineau has the day off, so Father Robert Balasaire will join us, the digital Jesuit. He has a place at the Vatican, so I think we'll have something to say about the Pope's AI encyclical. And one of my favorite photographers, Rick Salmon, will also join us. He does a class on photography and AI for Kelby. So this will be interesting to talk about the place AI has in photography from one of the most accomplished photographers I know. Really talented fella that's coming up. Thank you everybody for watching the show.

Leo Laporte [02:21:56]:
We'll be back here next Wednesday. I hope you will too, for Windows Weekly. See you.