Welcome to episode 387 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast recorded live on October 21, 2024. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you. Today, we depart a bit from the cloud and talk about devices you may access the cloud with. Ben recently purchased the Surface Pro 11th edition, a Copilot Plus PC running an ARM Processor.
Today, he gives his take on it as well as discussing things like experiences on macOS and running Windows 11 in a VM. Listen in as Scott and Ben shared their take. Oh, Scott. It's a Monday. So should we start with we had talked about this. Should we start with a knee jerk reaction I made the other day that I am going back on, but it was an interesting experience nonetheless? Sure. Let's do it. Let's see if we can get Randy Ben going. Surface Copilot or Surface Pro Plus Copilot PC.
I have gotten angry at Teams lately, speaking of Rancy Ben, because Teams on my Mac has had some super weird audio issues. And even like today As it does. Yeah. I have joined in the browser because if I am I will say I have to just leave my team's audio settings on my desktop client set the way they are. Because if I go in and try to change cameras or change audio devices or anything of the sort, Teams freezes and crashes and just all around
blows up on me. Super odd because it happens on both my laptop and my desktop, both Mac OS. I have some theories. I have a case open with Microsoft, but I have no solutions. I also have been really irritated with Office on macOS lately, and I am not alone with this. I have talked to others where essentially like, I have Word, Excel, PowerPoint, all of those installed on my desktop. I open them up, and I don't know how it picks or chooses which tenant I'm logged into, but I am never logged into
the tenant I want to be. I'll be, like, logged into a client tenant. I'll be logged into a different client tenant. I like, I get logged into all these different tenants, and Office on Windows has the ability to go in and switch accounts. So it's super straightforward and simple. You go to, like, your info tab or your accounts tab and say, I want to go use my Intelligent account. MacOS has no such
thing. The only way I have heard of to resolve this is to go, like, log out of all my Office 365 tenants in macOS and delete stuff and delete any safe credentials and, like, it's an ordeal, and then go sign back into them, but sign into them in a very specific order and hope that it sticks. If it doesn't stick, the only way to fix it is to go do it all over again. It's the most deterministic thing in computer science. Cross your fingers and hope it sticks. Yes. But this should not be an issue.
I should especially, my macOS is set up with the macOS, the SSO for macOS for Office 365, which is SSOed with my intelligent tenant. Why do my Office applications think I should be using a client tenant instead of my own? There's Ranti Ben. All this said, I was like, you know what? I'm mad at macOS. I it's driving me absolutely nuts. You're mad at Microsoft Software on macOS. Yes. I met at Microsoft Software on macOS.
And let's be fair, 90% of my day is spent in Microsoft software, and all of my clients and work is primarily revolves around Microsoft software. I said, hey. There's this new Surface Pro running Copilot and ARM Processors, and I know I can run Windows on macOS and Parallels. But after 13 years, would I be better served just running Windows natively on a Surface Pro? And I've always thought about this. Like, this has always been at the back of my head. I like the writing experience
on Surface Pros. I like having the whole OneNote pen and not if I wanna write, having to pull up my iPad or if I'm in the meeting and I wanna handwrite, bringing it, like, mirroring my iPad over, getting my iPad input. There's ways I could do it. Like, you know what? Maybe I could do a Surface Pro, so I bought one. I bought one of the Surface Pro. I think they're 11s. They're the whole Copilot plus Surface Pro ones. And I was like, you know what? If I like it, I want to really I want it to have
the horsepower that I would need. So I bought the 64 gigs of RAM, the top of the line ARM Processor, the snap dry is it Snapdragon 11? Yeah. Whatever the highest processor I could get of the Snapdragon ARM Processors, It's not cheap. Like, it still ended up just shy of $3, and I used that for a week exclusively. I was like, I'm like, I unplugged all my external monitors. I plugged everything into the Copilot or the Surface Pro. I use the Surface Pro instead of my MacBook Pro.
I have enough horsepower here. I'm just going to use this for a week in my day to day workflow and see if I can do this, if this is something I want to switch to, or if it's going to drive me crazy. And I will 100% admit it was a little bit of emotional decision because I was so irritated with the Microsoft apps on macOS. It's not a bad idea.
So I I've been telling you for a long time that your experience, I and I I still believe this, would be better on Windows given kinda the cohort of customers you work with and your day to day work. So I get that Yep. There's cross platform apps. So in your world, writing like a PowerShell script for a customer for migration. Can you do that on your Mac? Absolutely.
But from an Office client perspective for things like Teams and Outlook, like the Monarch client, right, which isn't even available on Mac yet, but is pushed pretty heavily on Windows. Yeah. Even things like the OneDrive client, like, just availability of APIs for file system sync and things like that are different on the Windows side, so your experience can be a little bit better. So what I do is I like to have my cake and eat it too, where
my day is spent in Windows. Right? I'd I'd work in Azure, and I'm primarily there all the time. That being said, I do everything in a virtual machine. So we're on Macs. There is an official provider for or there's there there's Parallels as a company, so they make a product called Parallels dot desktop. It's like, VMware Fusion or things like that. It's a local virtualization engine, but it is the official engine for being able to run Windows 11 for ARM on Apple Silicon.
So you can get the best of both worlds where you run your Mac and then you run your Windows stuff in Windows. Of course, all predicated and gated on the available resources on your machine. So what's my CPU? What's my RAM? Things like that. So, like, I do most of my day to day on what is, like, a laptop. I just don't can't see the end of the road for I'm on an M1 MacBook Pro, and not even the fanciest processor,
and I've got 32 gigs of RAM. And I go through most of my day, like, allocating 20 gigs of RAM to a virtual machine, and I do everything in that sucker, all my Power BI reports. That's where my work email is. That's where Teams is for work, all those things. And it does camera pass through, USB pass through, all those kinds of things I need. And then I'm good, and then I don't need that separate device necessarily. But what's really funny to me is I've gone out and demoed some of the Copilot
Plus PCs. So there's the Surface ones. There's also some from I I think Dell's got some. HP's got some. Samsung has some. But the experience in power parallels as a virtual machine, at least, like, my anecdotal experience, is it almost runs better in a VM than it does on a desktop, and there's no or laptop, like, a dedicated, hey, thing that's out there. So that that tends to be what I just keep coming back to. It's just I'll keep running Windows as a virtual thing.
I'm not gonna worry about it too much. And then where I can, I'm starting to go more and more into the, like, AVD DevBox world side of things, where, hey, if I need a beefier machine than this that's going to run a pure x86 workload, well, let me just go spin that up in a virtual machine someplace in the cloud where I've got a bunch of providers and, a bunch of different CPU types and things like that, and I can
go ahead and test that. And I can even do that in the cloud today with things like Windows on ARM, so you can spin up. You've got Ampere processors, and you also have the new ish, the Cobalt series, which is Microsoft's ARM designed system on a chip, and all that stuff is up and available in Azure today. So you can spin up an Ampere. I I forget what the VM series are for those. But then you've got, like, the Cobalt 100, which just went GA in, like, the last week or 2 and are out there and
readily available. So if you do have to run even a virtualized ARM 64 workload on Windows, totally possible to do in things like Azure today. And I imagine you could do the same in other cloud providers as well. I don't know though. I'd have to go. Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity?
Intelligink is here to help. Much like you take your car to the mechanic that has specialized knowledge on how to best keep your car running, Intelligink helps you with your Microsoft cloud environment because that's their expertise. Intelligink keeps up with the latest updates in the Microsoft cloud to help keep your business
running smoothly and ahead of the curve. Whether you are a small organization with just a few users up to an organization of several 1000 employees, they want to partner with you to implement and administer your Microsoft Cloud technology. Visit them atintelliginc.com/podcast. That's intelligink.com/podcast for more information or to schedule a 30 minute call to get started with them today. Remember, intelligent focuses on the Microsoft cloud so you can focus on your business.
So, ultimately, end of the story ish, and we can talk about my experiences. I haven't returned it yet, but I did start the return process for the the return barcodes, all of those, because I think that's where I'm going to end up going. Again, I've used parallels on my Max a little bit, and I would say I was I don't want to truth be told, for me, I plugged it in. I set it
on my desk. I was driving a 43 inch 4 k monitor off of it, a 27 inch monitor running 10 80 p, a teleprompter that I think is running 10 80 p or slightly under, all my webcams, the road caster. I think we did I can't remember. I don't we didn't record a podcast on it, but I did meetings on it. I will say from a pure performance perspective, I was super impressed with the speed of the Surface Pro, especially for just having an ARM tablet that was driving all of my monitors, all of my devices.
It worked really well, and I had I actually don't think I had any complaints about the Surface Pro itself. If I was in the Windows ecosystem, there's a chance I would have kept it. What it came down to for me, one, I can't stand the Monarch client. You're gonna have to learn to love it. Hey. It is what it is. Which I'm gonna have to learn here eventually because one of the things I found with that as my daily driver, I the here's the big feature missing for me, combined in
boxes. I have 8 different Office 365 accounts in my Outlook, and I don't want to have to jump to 8 different inboxes to check them. If I wanted to do that, I'd frankly just use the browser instead of the desktop client because at that point in time, it's no different for me. MacOS, I have my combined inbox. I can look inbox and see all of my inboxes, all my email combined, and manage it all. That for me, way easier on macOS. And there was some things what else was I just thinking of? Oh,
some of it is stupid. I say stupid stuff, but it made a big deal. I love my clipboard manager on macOS. And as I switch between devices, being able to see my clipboard history, I couldn't find one that even came close on Windows. Could I get around that? Absolutely. I found a clipboard manager. It worked okay. I was able to find workarounds for everything. Where I landed on it was, like I said, it was $3,000 for the device with all the taxes and
everything. And did it improve my efficiency with work to make the $3,000 worth it? Did I feel that much more productive in gaining that much benefit out of it? Not really. Like you'd said, I can go do parallels. I've played with it, but I've never done what you did, Scott. I think this is my next test. It probably should have been my first test before I went and bought the device, but like I said, it was an emotional decision. I think it was valid
by hardware. Right? And lean in and see what's there. So hardware aside, there's lots of companies that make nice hardware, but like you said, software is individual decisions and things like that. I think some of it is you're potentially being a little too cult like about it. Like, you you're not gonna be able to get away from the client. Like, the day that they drop that on the Mac is a very sad day for you, and you're not gonna be prepared for it be because you've been
living your life a certain way. I think solutions like parallels give you a bridge to get there. Right? So, like, in your world where the majority of things that you run on Windows, but you still want maybe, like, Outlook on the Mac, well, just run the rest of your workloads in Windows and Parallels does this nifty thing. They call it, cohesion. Coherence. Coherence. Yeah. I was gonna say Yeah. Coherence.
But coherence lets you go from like a windowed desktop environment, so running my entire VM in a single window kind of thing, to breaking out the Windows into effectively more native Windows in the macOS experience. So in that world, you could have, like, Outlook in a window here running Outlook from your Mac, And then right next to it, you could have Teams, but that's Teams from your Parallels virtual desktop that's running just side by side. And you can even make it.
So, like, when you click a a link to, say, join a Teams meeting in Outlook on your Mac, that it actually opens Teams and responds to Teams in parallels. So you can do, like, redirection and all those kinds of things as needed as well because you can expose the applications that are installed from your this is one of the other nifty things Parallels does, is it lets you expose the applications that are installed in your virtual environment all the way back to your host OS.
So, like, when I go in and say I do, like, spotlight search, right, you do, like, command space on a Mac and you go to launch an application, all of my Parallels installed applications, say, like Power BI or Teams on Windows, things like that, those all show up in my native macOS launcher, like spacebar. In my case, I use Raycast. Doesn't matter whatever your launcher is. It'll just be there ready to go, and you can just double click and and be up and running super fast.
Super easy to access data across both of those as well. So I know sometimes there's, like, things that I have in Dropbox where I'm, like, oh, I need that out of Dropbox, and I need it over in Windows here. There's some stuff that, like, only plays nice in Windows, and it's just tangentially work related.
If I want to file like a medical claim through like my healthcare provider, like that stuff is just way easier in a browser on Windows, and it renders the PDFs right and everything, and like they're built in blah, blah, blah, crappy little web control. So I just do all that through Parallels and run things that way. But it's super easy. Just drag and drop, go back and forth,
all all that kind of stuff. And then the reason I've primarily done Parallels is because I want the local resource usage for things. Like, you mentioned having your RODEcaster. Right? So we both have these microphones in front of us, and I just will hop on even, like, formal Teams meetings with these microphones or with going through the RODEcaster, and and you need the USB audio interface.
So, like, we're coming from XLR mics, things like that, or fancy webcams, like, typically, those are gonna go best running into a local resource rather than through something like a remote desktop connection. And I think that's traditionally been the case up until quite, quite recently.
So I've tended to go that way. The other thing that I'm playing around with more and more is one of the folks on my team has been playing around with dev boxes quite a bit and, like, some of the new stuff in MMR, the multi multimedia redirection for remote desktop now has gotten super slick as well, where you almost can't tell the difference as long as the host on the other side has enough resources to keep up with all the local direction and things like
that. So I can almost see a day where, theoretically, as long as I'm sitting here at my desk and I'm always connected to the Internet, I can almost just turn my Mac into a thin client and just remote desktop to everything as well for my Windows workloads. I'm playing with that, and I'm curious. I know we've talked about this a little bit. Sorry. I'm jumping around. The biggest thing I run into is, like you said, you're it's the Rodecaster, and I have a speakerphone that I use here sometimes.
When I look at my audio devices on macOS, I have 20 different audio inputs, 20 different audio outputs. That's not necessarily, I would say, normal usage. Most people don't have that many different audio devices plugged into their computer where they're jumping between them regularly, and that's been one thing I've struggled with a little bit. It's easier with
parallels. For me, it's still hard with the DevBox or with the Windows 365 Cloud PCs is when it comes to a lot of that device redirection, it's just the default device. Whatever you have as your default in macOS. My default in macOS is actually very rarely the same device that I use for my Teams calls. And even with Parallels, it's not like I can have a audio device linked to both of them. You really have to have an audio
device linked to 1 or the other. So it's just a little bit and this is just me being picky, but it's a little bit of work of okay. If I'm gonna join the Teams meeting in parallels, which audio devices do I need over there? Or if I'm going to and if I'm gonna use the speakerphone versus the microphone through the RodeCaster, how which audio devices do I map over
there? So that's a little bit where some of my do I switch to running Windows natively versus Parallels came in as just like I talked about some disadvantage with the Copilot PC like the Monarch client. There are certain things with parallels like having to switch audio devices or having
to map a USB key my YubiKey. If I need that in Windows or if I need it on macOS based on what I'm doing, there is a little bit of overhead, I guess, you would say there when it comes to certain hardware devices plugged in and getting them located on the parallels VM or on macOS. But, again, that is that's where it goes back to the cost benefit for me. It wasn't worth the cost of the Copilot PC
to do that. I will say, and this is a thought I've had, is once I'm done with my MacBook Pro, like you, it's an m one. I don't know how long I've had it. Couple years, 3 years down. Coming up on 3, 4 years. Right. And I I don't see the end in sight for this thing other than the
battery dying. That's an option. Yep. And that's my thought is I don't see the end in sight, but would I potentially do that where my laptop top and my travel device would maybe be Windows and my device in the office here where I tend to do a lot of the podcast recording, video editing, all of that stay as macOS? That's something else that I've toyed with in the back of my head is would I go that route? Again, going back to I like both devices. I like my macOS ecosystem.
I like certain apps. I like the way certain things run, but I didn't have any complaints about the Surface Pro with Copilot either. It's both of them have minor annoyances. $3,000 did not solve my minor annoyances with macOS. It just created new minor annoyances. Not worth it at this point in time, but very well maybe in the future, I think. I can see. I think it's worth revisiting this stuff
as you're going through it. Like, the other thing that you might have a better experience with is there are still limitations to Windows on ARM today. Like, there especially for, like, client OS, there's definitely some incompatibilities there, and you have to discover them as they as they come up. Right? There there's a
set of kind of just, hey. I'm ready to go and optimized applications in Windows on ARM, which is, great, all good, like, native support, and you can get those through your regular stores of choice, be it, like, Winget, the Windows Store, a binary installer have at it. The other thing that's out there is emulated applications. So there's this emulation layer that's been worked on over the years in Windows on ARM called Prism.
Think like Rosetta 2 on the Mac, but for a long time, like, wasn't thought of as good, but it's actually gotten really good lately. So so Prism's doing pretty well. So that'll do x86 emulation for x86 apps that don't have ARM compatibility explicitly, but then there's this class of apps that's just wholly incompatible. So that can be things like drivers. So
I'll give you an example. Like, one driver that I miss in my workflow on Windows is NDI and NDI audio and being able to pass NDI audio out of the virtual machine and have it come back to other things. Like, I would love to have, like, my Windows virtual machine maybe run as, like, PC number 2 for streaming scenarios or things like that, and you can't do that because there's no NDI on there. So that's a kinda niche driver, but in general, like, driver support,
super hit or miss. Right? There's things that you're just not going to be able to install there. The other thing that you'll run into is you you're not gonna be able to game on those things, a virtual machine, or for the most part, like the Copilot Plus PCs as well because tons of it's emulated. You're definitely not gonna be able to do, like, triple a gaming for the most part just because of, like, anti cheat systems that require, like, kernel drivers and things like that.
That's all all out the window. It doesn't exist. And then there's some other weird stuff that just doesn't work, depending on what kind of applications you're using. If you're, like, a content creator, like, there's parts of the Adobe suite that don't work due to, like, anti not anti cheap, but, like, anti crack mechanics and and things like that are built in. So it can be, like, a little bit
of a rough experience. It's still early days for Windows on ARM, which is funny because it's been out there for a while now, but it is like a space that's still maturing, still moving through. So it's worth checking it out, but, you don't have to be beholden to any given set of hardware, be it Microsoft's hardware or Samsung or HP or whoever
it happens to be. If you wanna be in that ARM ecosystem, like virtualization is an option with Parallels, or like I said, you can run Windows 11 virtual machines in Azure as well on ARM processors if you do wanna get hands on it I mean, hands on with it and play along. But if in your case, if you're looking for the richest compatibility, it's, like, a big trade off because then you're talking about going back to x86 and buy buying, like, an Intel CPU, and then it's, well, it's 2024.
Am I really gonna keep this thing tethered to my desk all the time? And if you're gonna keep it to tethered to your desk all the time, then you probably don't want, like, a Surface Pro kind of thing anyway. That seems wasteful just to have the the tablet kinda sitting there clamshell then docked up the whole time. You might just want, like, a little mini PC or something like that, which there's tons of options out there for stuff like that
today. Like, you can get a pretty sweet little mini PC with 32 gigs of RAM and a and a terabyte of hard drive space, and it can be running like a Ryzen 7. There's some Ryzen 9 stuff out there. There's definitely Intel Arc integrated GPU things. So depending on your workload and, like, where you sit and, like, what work looks like for you day to day, I think it's a fun time because you have lots of options too. Right? Like, I I don't I didn't have it on
my bingo card. Then in 2024, I would say, hey, I would have the best experience for Windows on my Mac right now. When it comes to this certain variation of Windows that's running ARM 64, that's wild to me, and that'll probably be different next year, and then it'll probably be even different, like, the year after that. Like I said, I also didn't have it on my card, the my bingo card that I'd be thinking about actively going back to effectively,
like, thin client kind of world. But I'm this close to being able to get there. Right? And that's interesting and exciting to me as well. Yeah. That would be interesting, and I've thought about that. I actually have when I've been on the verge of purchasing just to play with a mini PC that actually has a Xeon processor in it. $260 or something. It's like a Xeon with 500 gigs of or 500 gigs of hard drive space and, I don't know, 16 gigs of memory, something like that. So I've
thought about that. I'm glad you mentioned drivers because that was I had forgotten about that. That was the other thing that I ran into with the Surface for Copilot. There weren't many. I was surprised how many worked, but my scanner did not work. I have one of the Fujitsu SnapScan. It's an older one, so I don't know if their brand new ones work, but the older one, no driver support, didn't like Windows 11 unarmed at all, and the other one was network drivers for
a wired network connection. I had a really hard time with that. CalDigit says right on their websites, their docs worked. I have both the TS 3 and the TS 4 plus, I think, are the 2. Both of them worked for everything except the network card. The Surface Dock does work with the network card. That was 1, and I did have some luck with just a USB C network adapter. But let me tell you, the amount of hubs and dongles, like, we thought Mac or MacBook Pros with the whole dongle thing Welcome
to dongle town. Surface is right up there with it with only 2 USB c ports. Man, I had dongles and docks hanging off every which way just to test everything out and see if I could get it all plugged in. It worked. Again, everything worked, but I did have some of those driver issues as well.
It is like you said, it's really interesting and while it didn't end with me keeping Windows, I felt like it was still good to go through given that I mean, realistically, I've been on macOS as a daily driver for probably the better part of 13, 14 years now. Windows has gotten better, I will say. Either that or maybe macOS is maybe not. MacOS has also had some issues, I would say, but I don't feel as strongly as I probably would say I did 13 years ago about the superiority of macOS.
I think it's, in my opinion, it's gotten a lot to there are 2 different ecosystems. There's pros and cons to both. And depending on which ecosystem you're in, maybe you get used to certain things or there's just certain annoyances. I have a lot of apps that are specifically geared to Mac OS, and that does make a difference when it comes down to the du 2 different OSes in my experience.
But it's it was really interesting, and it does have me thinking a little bit more about some of the Windows stuff and how to almost, I think, how to spend more time in Windows because of some of the benefits and, like you said, because my client base is in Windows so much. And there's a gap. I'm rambling, but this is one more thing. There is a gap that has widened. There was a conference we
were at, Scott. I can't remember. It must have been one of the first Ignites back in maybe Chicago, which I'll be back in Chicago again in a month. Just FYI, if you're gonna be at Ignite, let me know. But back at Ignite, probably the first one in Chicago, Microsoft was like, we want you to use Office on every device. We don't care if it's macOS, if it's Windows, whatever. Office on every device.
And I still remember this because I got excited about it, which is probably why it stuck in my so head so much as they talked about trying to unify the code base where you would get feature parity between Office on Windows, Office on Mac. Was it a bit of a pipe dream? Possibly. PWAs for everybody. But after they said that, I felt like there they definitely put some renewed focus on the macOS Office apps. There was a narrowing of the features between the 2, and I stayed hopeful.
However, I will say that over the last 2 or 3 years, I feel like that has actually started to diverge some. Like, we were probably way out here. I don't know. Just to give you a visual, we were 2 feet apart on feature gaps. I would say we got down to maybe 6 inches. We were down to maybe a 6 inch feature gap, but I feel like we've winded out not as bad as it used to be, but it's not a narrow feature gap
anymore. I feel like it's winded out to a foot just to give you half of what it used to be, but double what it was maybe 3 or 4 years ago. I think those things are never gonna match 100%. Right? Design language is always gonna be different, but it it is surprising to me that there's still core functionality differences. If Microsoft never intends to bring a unified inbox to the Monarch client, like, you would think they'd be better served just ripping that out
today. Right? Rip the Band Aid and get it done in macOS, Outlook on macOS and things like that, but, yeah, it's hard. I don't know where all that stuff eventually bottoms out. I I continue to think for you, my gut still says, like, your best experience and your best ecosystem for day to day is probably Windows. As as much as you don't like it and don't wanna be there, like, it's where the bread and butter is. Right? So Yep. You gotta be
there. I'd very much prefer to be in macOS all day as well, but I can't be because of my job. So this is the compromise that I've come to is, hey, here's how I'm gonna do Windows in my life, right, and how I'm gonna go and and make those things make those things work. But Yes. It's tough to lead, like, the dual hardware life too.
I think that's another thing that I really like about the virtualization solution is I'm not going to, like, a KVM and hitting a button, or I'm not, like, physically swapping cables or anything like that. I'm with you. Some of the functionality doesn't make sense. One of the ones that still bugs me is OneNote. OneNote, we still don't if the OneNote team is listening, I keep asking for this. We do not have add ins yet in OneNote on the Mac. I don't know how long add ins have been
there, but it has definitely been years. We have add ins in Word, PowerPoint, Excel. No add ins in OneNote for Mac. Like, this is a very core feature, and we also have no Copilot in OneNote. Again, will it ever come? I have this hunch that maybe it's actually tied to add ins, but there's some of that it's I feel like it's very core to the application itself. Like, OneNote on Windows has is it stickies? Or it's like sticky notes, there's no sign
of those in macOS. So some of that core functionality where if you're on one, it's just, like, completely missing. There's no compatibility between them. And like you said, there's going to be some things that exist like that, but there's other things that feel too core to the application itself in usage that it still surprises me that some of that stuff hasn't come together or been more aligned. To have insights to the roadmap would be an interesting thing. I don't know.
We'll see where it bottoms out. I think the cool thing is where we are today is hardware can be a crosscut and fairly ubiquitous if you want it to. Right? Like I said, like, you can go from running macOS and Windows side by side, or if you want, like, an ARM Windows device, those are broadly available and and exist today,
even at, like, better pricing than Mac. Like, I would still argue that, like, my MacBook is some of the best hardware that I possibly have ever had, and the support experience and all that's great. But, you know, I would totally go out and get a Surface laptop or a Surface Studio or a Surface Pro or things like that if those were, like, fitting into my ecosystem and, effectively, like, my way of work, right, which you have to have a little bit be a little bit keyed into.
What's your way of work, and where do you wanna land? And then, like I said earlier, like, this stuff moves so rapidly. Like, I didn't have it in on my bingo card in 2024 that this would be the way I'd be doing it. But I bet in 2025, like, we came back and discussed this in a year, I'd probably be doing something completely different because the landscape has just shifted again in a slightly different way. We'll have to see that. Add that to our calendar, Scott. Set a reminder for 365
days from now. Discuss how which operating systems we work on and how we work on them or devices and how we work. I would ask the dog, but she's just gonna stretch behind me. So Alright. Well, with that, Scott, I think we both have meetings to go to. We do. We do. It's an off day for recording, so back to work we go. Well, thanks. That was interesting, and you said it. We're gonna circle back to it in a year and see what we're doing. I don't want any to it, but someone will surely remind
me along the way. So 100%. And if you're gonna be in Ignite, let me know. Hopefully, I can drag Scott along for the ride TBD. TBD. We'll see. We'll see what the the media landscape looks like at Ignite this year. Alright. Well, thanks, Scott. Go enjoy the rest of your Monday, and we will talk to you again a little later. Alright. Cool. Thanks, Ben. Have a good one. Thanks, Scott. If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us
a 5 star rating in iTunes. It helps to get the word out so more IT pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure. If you have any questions you want us to address on the show, or feedback about the show, feel free to reach out via our website, Twitter, or Facebook. Thanks again for listening, and have a great day.