WW 957: Selectively Transparent - Windows 26H1 Aims For Snapdragon X2 PCs

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell are here. Actually, Richard's in New Zealand. He's joining us a little earlier in the morning than he's used to. We will talk about, of course, Microsoft's results. And some of the less transparent things that happened there. 26H1, can it be? And Spotify's earnings. How do they make money? Oh, they don't. Okay. All of that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit.

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therod and Richard Campbell. Episode 957, recorded Wednesday, November 5th, 2025. Selectively transparent. It's time. Hello dozers and hello winners. Maybe it's clear if I say hello winners and hello dozers what I'm talking about. It's time for Windows Weekly. Get it out! And our international crew of Windows Microsoft observers are here from beautiful Mexico City. Mr. Paul Thorat, Thorat.com. Hello.

And as usual, his painting is in perfect focus. There's something about that painting. The camera loves it. That's all I'm saying. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. I'm not super worried about it, but I'm using a... Like a smartphone. Oh, it should be better. Well, yeah, you know what? Come to think of it, it is better. I think so. It is better. And look where Richard is in Taranga, New Zealand.

We live in amazing times. Richard Campbell. A week later. I kind of like Old Zealand, but this is pretty good. Well, the Old Zealand is in the Netherlands. I love it. Oh, that's right. But that's Z-E-E.

So I like it because not only did you travel 15 hours in a jet airplane, but you've traveled from winter to summer. Yes. Yeah. Smart man. Yesterday we were down in Mount Manganui at the beach. We did the hike around the volcano and then we went down to the sandy beach and my little granddaughter, which is the reason we're down here, brought her parents along. She got her dip in the South Pacific.

baby's first south pacific dip yeah and also her first flight which was 15 hours on a 787 like start high my friends start high so That's actually, you could do it when they're really young. It's when they get to two or three. She's seven months old. So she's probably slept most of the way. For the most part. And I hung out with mom. I did that.

i did two like 40 minute mom needs to eat grandpa gets to walk around the plane with the baby shifts so she she did just fine she's really a happy little kid and her two cousins who are three and five here are just... blown away by her and they're being so careful right they're they're proper chaos proper chaos monkeys are delightful boys but uh they've been coached on having a little baby girl in the house so they're trying to be quiet and they're trying to be gentle but one of the old

The older one, Tiaki, gave her the remote control to the dump truck this morning. And what did she do with it? She drove it directly into her father. Impressive. Having no idea what she was doing with it. She just doesn't understand buttons or anything. But now...

Tiaki thinks she's the best baby in the world. She drives a dump truck. That's impressive for seven months old. We're just down the hill from Hobbiton, so I think we're going to do the Hobbiton tour at some point. Hobbiton's in Taranga. It's outside, yeah.

Not Amata, but it's not that far away. And maybe I run to Rotorua, take in the hot springs and things. So we've got a few days. And this is vacation. Other than hanging out with you guys once a week, I'm pretty much taking the month off. The whole month. Yeah. So we call this month November. What do they call it in New Zealand? November.

oh okay it's just a little confusing that november is is their spring oh yeah no christmas is on the beach here because it's flipping hot in december right like that's That's just a different dynamic. I want to go there. Well, and I've been pitching to She Who Must Be Obeyed about this idea of we could just live summer to summer, right? I am a citizen. We could have a place down here. It would be summer all year round. Summer all the time. Endless summer.

She's, you know, I haven't persuaded her yet, but she's not suffering. Let's be sure. Well, you two snowbirds, let's talk about Microsoft in particular. I just got 25 H2 and already.

We're talking 26 H1. Yeah, but you're not going to get that. Oh, good. So I guess hearing rumors about this for a little while now tied to. Snapdragon X2 and the first half of next year and I don't know what this is going to entail but if you think about what they did with 24H2 there was really a

24H1 as well, right? They called it 24H2, but then they didn't deliver it to everyone else until the end of the year, so they're doing it again, but for the X2, so. Yeah, and I see this as... you are this is the the teams are different even though they're trying to build the same goal and so it made as soon as you say this out loud i'm like yeah of course they are so they all do like like they alternate like okay team a team b team a team b or

No, I think it's more. There's an ARM team that's specializing in the ARM issues and taking advantage of the new chipset. So this is an ARM-only release. Right. Specifically X2-only release, yeah. Oh, interesting. That's the new Snapdragon you saw in Hawaii, right? Yeah. That's cool.

Yeah, we don't know what that entails, but the name has since popped up in the release notes for one of the Windows updates that Microsoft screwed up last week. And then the dev channel or the insider program announced that. They are moving, they didn't say 26h1, right? But they're moving the dev channel to a new build stream or whatever, build tree, build branch, I don't know, whatever it is.

Beta will soon be moving over to 25H2 testing. Right now it's on 24H2. So it's clearly going to be 26H1. I mean, it's just... What else would it be? Yeah. I mean, that's it. Right. So it could be slow on it. It'll be 26 H2, but you don't know when this machine's going to ship.

You know, last time it was June, like this is barely in the window anyway. Yeah. But the fact that look, the name could change, but the fact that they've been calling at 26 H one gives us a little bit of a hint. It's probably the first half of the year, which June is the first half of the year.

Yeah, I would hope for January. I wanted it for November. I don't know what's taking. Dude, I'm ready to replace this machine in a second, but only for an X2. What do we think? Will it be better battery life, faster processing? What's going to be the... What's the pitch? Or is this one better? It's one better. It is one better. I mean, no, the benchmarks much better across the board. Graphics are better. CPU is better. MPU is double, I think. Oh, nice. So they're really focusing on the AI.

Well, they're focusing just across the board. I mean, I don't know what made them focus on this for V1, honestly, but... This was the first time they were trying to build a CPU straight up, right? Like at that scale for PCs. For PCs, yeah. Well, I mean, the X1 was not.

No, the X1 was their first attempt. So now they're making up for everything they had to cut to get it there. I think they nailed the basic experience across the board pretty well. But yeah, I mean, there's always... The X seemed to be a leap forward for... or Qualcomm. It's a leap forward for the industry. It's dramatically more reliable than any x86 chip. The performance is incredible, even on the lowest end version, which, by the way, I'm running on this thing here right now.

You know, three monitors, external webcam, Thunderbolt 4 dock. No problem. So that's because it's a system on a chip. So it's not just a CPU. So those extra capabilities, like the three monitors, that's really a discrete display adapter that's built into the SoC. That's true. Yeah. Well, what they're doing is finally catching up to what Apple figured out.

years ago with the m3 ironically apple uh three three monitors were not available on many apple devices well right but i mean they got there in time and no the um one of the other big things with this uh chipset is that there's an extreme version that it might be called ultra extreme, that you can actually have...

the ram like right now the bus width is wider it's 192 bit but you can even have it on the die like so that will actually dramatically improve the performance as well so this will be more expensive obviously but then you get into that situation where this will never be upgradable obviously because it's on to die but it's apples in the same boat it's unified memory yeah yeah that means it's faster

Well, also because the vast majority of machines never do get their memory upgraded and every machine will be faster. Like it kind of makes sense to do what the majority case will be. Should I, if I'm thinking of buying a PC, wait for the X2? It's definitely what I'm doing.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, how long am I going to be waiting? It's going to be six months, I think. Okay. And that will be the next year. Yeah. Sometime, hopefully first half of next year. It will probably mirror what they did last year, but. It's a year apart. That makes sense. It's two years apart. That's the issue. Yeah, they missed all of this year. But if they're going to do what they did last year, it means they announced a build, which will probably be sometime in April or May.

Ship for June. I would like it to be earlier than that, but maybe we'll see. Earlier the better, but... okay i mean there's some subtle changes like the two different kinds of cores in x2 like they're definitely doing some thinking about the way to improve performance in a single die like it is interesting what they're doing here

And if I get 26H1 on a Snapdragon X, it'll run, right? I mean, it's not... Well, we don't know how that's going to work. But last year, through the Insider program, you could get 24H2 starting in, I think it was May. on any pc including x86 pc so you could do that if you wanted and okay we can only speculate right now about features and whatever i i there's a pretty good chance this will just be the same exact features we see across 24 and 25 h2 as well

There may be some X2 Copilot plus PC specific. Does Microsoft still use HAL to the hardware? No, that died in 2000. Well, but, uh, well, I mean, the, the NT how old old fashioned I am. Yeah. Well, the idea was you abstract the hardware away from the operating system so that it can, but that's still ready. I mean, that's.

still that's how all systems work right i mean it's yeah yeah well yes and no i mean apple's abandoning intel now the next version of the apple os will no longer yeah but they were only able to do that because they had their version of a hal and they were running arm

Yeah. They had Rosetta too. So like, you know, I look, all we know, Apple's working on risk five right now. So on the day that Snapdragon finally catches up, we're going to be like, Hey, we're switching architectures again. You know, we'll see. But well, next year I'm going to probably buy an M six.

It'll be next sometime. It'll be the fall of next year. Late next year, they're saying. Have people actually got their M5s in their hands yet? I haven't actually seen real. Yeah, the M5s shipped, but just the M5. It's like every Apple processor upgrade. It's like massive benchmark advantages and exactly the same in real world. I always wait for the actual benchmarks because it doesn't matter what the paper says.

Right. Right. Yeah, no, it looks good. I mean, these machines are kind of overbuilt. Actually, the big story about Apple this week is that they're going to start selling that cheap. version based on the iPhone 16 processor. Yeah. Well, how many people are pairing a new machine because they want a faster processor? Right.

You can buy an M1 MacBook Air now at Walmart. Apple sells them for $599. You shouldn't. No, you shouldn't. The MacBreak Weekly guy said, yeah, you absolutely could. Yeah, but those people are idiots, and I'm going to say they're wrong.

It is only eight gigs of RAM. That's why. Do not ever buy any computer today with only eight gigs of RAM. That's ridiculous. It's for very low-end users. Yeah, this will replace that, obviously, and it will be more broadly available. It's probably going to be great, honestly. Those chips are fantastic.

I mean, that's the, I think that's Apple's point is we got a lot of overhead, a lot of headroom rather. And we can, it's interesting. They typically keep one of the, or one or more older versions of things in the market as a. You know, the lower end alternative or whatever. And so having something that's made specifically, you know, for that, it's probably the mainstream majority of the market's casual users, right? I mean, I think it's fine.

Most people in general on Windows or Mac are using it as a browser. Yeah. Maybe getting some email, but even then they're still using the browser to get the email. So I... That's why Mark Andreessen got it right in 1995 or six, whatever year that was. It's a poorly written pile of device drivers running a browser or whatever he said, something like that.

Yeah, that sounds like Windows. Also Clipchamp and Copilot now. But yeah, pretty much. Actually, both of those were web apps. Hilarious. Anyway. Yeah, look what they're trying to do with AI is make it agentic browsers. It's all going to be browser based. That's the, you know. yeah if you care about the cloud like the same time we have this huge push towards doing as much as on-premise possible right we also have the dgx devices like by the way people are still disappointed with the dgx

Yeah, well, you're jumping back to GPT-3 and you've forgotten three years ago how basic that was in terms of what's going on right now. Yeah, the DGX is not all that. And it's $4,000. Yeah. So I'm glad I didn't buy one. I wasn't going to, but I'm glad I didn't. Yeah. All right. So that's very exciting. We're already in 2026. And that's not, you know, that's, yeah, I mean, that's what happens. We're doing the model car thing. It's fine. Yeah. But I would expect that we.

outside of the arm space. We'll be getting all of the same features, but they'll call it a 25H2 or something like that. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. But this is... To me, this is totally the team dynamics. There's an ARM team focused on dealing with Snapdragon issues to build out features. Some new things are going to appear from them, and the other teams will see that and adopt them if they think it makes sense. But both teams are contributing to a split.

code base for a time and then there will eventually be a synchronization it'll be a common version because they don't want more than one but with these early days of arm on windows being so important

to the company actually of course they would put together a team specialized on making sure the arm implementation goes extremely well well let's talk about windows 11. how about that Oh, wait a minute. That's what we were talking about. Well, just kind of coming back to the present. Microsoft. So Microsoft last week, just the gift that keeps on giving, you know, in the transcript, it'll say.

Deep sigh. Yeah. Well, uh, whatever I, well, whatever that was the two, the, the week D Tuesday, when I wrote up the. I guess it would have been that day. Maybe it was before that. I'm sorry. Maybe it was the, whatever it was, whatever the, the first time I noticed this, I was like, oh, they, they're changing the, they changed the way they described this thing. It was just called preview update. And I was like, oh, that's.

curious you know and then the next day they announced like we're changing how we name these things and so they honestly they did what they did with windows 11 they oversimplified it I appreciate the direction they were going in, but as soon as they did this, IT admins and people who have to support this were like, excuse me, guys, you need to have the date and the name.

That's how we know what it is. We're not going to memorize KB numbers. So they then came back less than a week later and said, yeah, you're right. So they're going to retain the new names, but they're going to also add. the date, which is, or I should say, add back the date, so. This is the schism between consumer updates and sysadmin updates. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, people like consumers don't care about this stuff. No, they don't at all. But they don't even know. Well, yeah. I mean, if anyone ever went to Windows Update and looked at what was there. it might be confusing or, you know, until now, I mean, the language is so weird, you know, even this, this was a windows 10 thing originally, but you know, we used to have version upgrades and then we're all going to be on windows 10, you know,

And we're all going to be in the same version if possible. There were like 11 different versions in the market, all support at the same time, whatever that was. We went to the feature update language. There were quality updates, you know, security updates, pretty straightforward driver updates, obviously. Then they started doing the preview updates and it was like, well, this is a non-security preview update. It's like, wait, what?

Like they just, the language was just so screwy. And so now it's like, yeah, it's a driver update. It's an AI component update. It is a Windows, you know. OS, whatever it is, like a preview update, an actual quality update, meaning a non-security update, a security update. Good. Like, it's fine. Like, it's, you know, it's good. But they lopped off too much. Like, they got rid of the date.

And it's like, no, we need to know this was October 2025 or whatever the, you know. And in a remarkable set of coincidences, my guest on Run As Radio, also Aria Hansen. the one who tweeted out the one who tweeted that we're going to fix it she's you know she's the grown-up in the room my goodness like she's just uh every everything about update seems to fall in her review and i'm lucky to get her once a year just go how we doing

Because there's been a lot of motion there. It's like, well, we shipped 192 updates this year so far. We got like 188 of them. Pretty good. The other ones we don't really want to talk about too much. She's about the update infrastructure. Cause I don't know if you've looked at how many different ways there is to update windows when you're, it's terrifying. I think I spend 50% of my life on that topic. Yeah. So anyway, I,

Yeah, whatever. It's fine. They screwed it up. It'll be okay. Speaking of screwing it up, last week, was it last week? I'm losing track of when things are. No, I guess it was last week. Sorry. There was that preview update last Tuesday, the weekday update. And if you installed that, you might find that you have duplicate or triplicate, even whatever it is, multiple copies of the same processes listed in Task Manager.

It doesn't mean they're actually there. It just means it's displaying it wrong. Yeah, which I appreciate. I'm working on like that notepad app and I am Very good at displaying the name of the previous document, but not the current document. So like I get like the kind of mistake that might be. But yeah, they're, you know, whatever. It's a preview update. That's fine. This is an okay place to make that kind of mistake, frankly.

Except that it's going out to the public, right? So there are probably people installing these things and not realizing what they're doing. But it's not a big one. So not a big deal. It's okay. It's okay.

I didn't mention this when we did the 26H1 thing, but with Microsoft's transition to every PC is an AI PC, a little bit of fun marketing there. I wonder if Copilot Plus PC goes away as a brand, you know? So one of the things to look for as we kind of go through the dev channel stuff and as it switches over to what will be 26H1 or whatever it is.

You know, see if they keep using that language, right? Yeah. Um, I got an idea for your next book. Yeah. It's my history of Microsoft through their marketing code names. Oh my goodness. It's like the big book of Microsoft code names. That'd be good. I like that. Just dust that thing off. Yeah. God.

I was just making fun of Apple. Apple doesn't do fun code names. And I know someone referenced that thing from the eighties, right? Well, those are names. I mean, code names. We just don't know. Cause they're so secretive. They might have, well, when they,

come out it's always something like like that macbook we were talking about is j100 that's yeah right like but they have real they have real they have code names yeah i hope so they're creative people yeah and code names are pretty rare in the microsoft space these days too really lots of products just don't A lot of people just don't like them. The best use for codenames is to give different codenames to different members of the team to see who leaks to Mark Gurman. And then...

You got something. Is it that important? Is it that important? It was to Steve Jobs. He would do that, actually. Famously. You're the only one to do that, Codename. Bye. Pack your bags. You're out of here. Well, I mentioned the dev and beta changes. And if you are in the beta program on a PC right now, the beta channel, you can temporarily just not.

install updates you'll stay on 25 h2 but at some point you will be pushed into i'm sorry 24 h2 you'll be pushed into 25. if you're in the dev channel you can for a little while the kind of magic window thing I talk about sometimes although usually it's with the lease version but there's a window where you can

not downgrade, but to shift over to beta, like just in the UI, just click the box, you know, you probably have to reboot or whatever, but it's not going to change anything. I mean, like right now you're just this, the same features who cares, but, um, And then the dev, like I said, is going to move forward to whatever 26HM. So we'll see. Dev today is still 25H2. And this new build, which you can get optionally now in beta as well.

has that ask copilot feature in the taskbar. This is the thing where the search box is going to do like what browsers do now in some ways, right? Where it's going to route you accordingly. based on what you query like what you type in there so if you ask it a question it might bring up like a you know a bing sorry a copilot um box instead of the browser or instead of the uh and i just said copilot and here we go again it's another week

It's fine. I'm going to want to install this thing while we're doing it in the next ad break. I should have just kept it to Bing. Anyway.

so there's that um there's a full screen experience for xbox gaming handhelds that are not named xbox ally uh or rag xbox ally um starting with a i actually forget the name i forget which one it was it was like msi maybe or some

It's a claw something. I've never heard of this one, but I'm hoping to get this on the Legion go that I'm reviewing. And I know it will happen eventually, probably before the end of the year. Are you playing any games? I mean, I know you're doing it, but is it fun to play on?

You know, I can't explain how this transitioned, but one thing I've noted over the past week, because I take notes, you know, when I'm using it. And for the first month or more, this thing was like a jet engine. It was just like the whole time. And I was reading something someone else wrote about it. And Lenovo does recommend different power management settings, whatever. So I've been kind of messing around with that. And the thing I've noticed is like, you can just put it on balanced.

i don't it doesn't make any sound anymore it's actually pretty quiet like i was like okay great it's super unreliable like um i blew screen on this thing a lot and that i can't explain um but the quality is very good so like On balance, if I play the now latest Call of Duty, soon to be supplanted, it's between 60 and 90 frames a second, depending on the level and where you are and what's going on in the screen. That's great.

Yeah. And it's, you know, it's, it's only like, it's 1920 by 1200 or whatever. It's not like it's, you know, 4k, but it's, it looks great. And I can't, the other thing I can't quite explain is, you know, like I'm older. Right. And so like, I don't have them here, but I have these little cheater glasses I need when I'm like.

That must be his site. Yeah, so it's like an old guy trying to play on this. We've got Pops the Rot playing a handheld gaming device. Yeah, with his gaming glasses on. I need gaming glasses. Mother, I want them to be like yellow. I want them to be like yellow. They're on your head, Paul. They're literally. like a CVS $2 special plus one or whatever. But I need them to play this thing. The screen is 8.8 inches, which is the biggest of those screens, but it's still not 14 or 16. It's small.

And I really struggled with this thing for a long time. And again, nothing has changed. This I cannot explain, but lately it's been fine. I've been... I had for a while forced myself to use it because I have these bigger screens that I prefer. Right. That's why that was my complaint. It's like, why wouldn't I just use my PC? Well, I mean, you could.

take it on the subway. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Look, the battery life is not fantastic, but it's, um, I don't know. It, it, it's a neat example of how good windows can be as a kind of a gaming handheld.

but also the serious problems that still exist with windows as a gaming handle right now it's kind of both of those yeah last last time i looked my switch 2 hadn't blue screened even once yeah yeah yes yes like if you wanted on the plane was that a fun thing to have on the plane you play a little animal crossing for the switch to that kind of thing yeah that's what it's for right the whole idea is for

Yeah, you're on the plane. I mean, I just appreciate that they're trying to make Windows into a gaming device, but we know what dedicated gaming devices look like. And they're pretty robust. So this is, I think this is to like a console, what like NT three point, whatever it was to a PC. Like it was like, you can see it. It's not.

It's not quite there yet. Like there's certain things about it that are really good. Like the reliability in that case was fantastic, but the performance was really bad. It's not that serious, honestly, but I would say, you know, I'm not to beat this. comparison or metaphor, whatever it is to death, but like, you know, the Xbox ally stuff maybe is like NT four. So it's like, okay, we're starting to get there, you know? Yeah. Um, but,

Yeah, I think we're going to need a rev or two more of the software to get it where it needs to be. We really want one of those X variants of Windows for this type of device. Because you're not going to be running that one problematic piece of software on this. So, like, lock the snot out of it. So the processor that it uses is an AMD chip that's part of the Zen 5 family, but it's not the mainstream stuff we get in laptops. So it's designed for these handheld gaming devices, PCs, and it's...

But, you know, from a gameplay perspective, compared to a laptop, I don't mean like a honking gaming PC with dedicated graphics and awesome stuff, but like compared to a typical laptop, it's… It's sort of like the X2, or I'm sorry, the Snapdragon X, base Snapdragon X is to the high-end version. Like it's actually, it's...

there's never been a time when I've been like, Oh, this doesn't work as well. You know, it doesn't run as fast or whatever it is. Like it's, it's great. Like it's actually really good. Yeah. Um, Anyway, so yeah, so Deb Beta has that. If, you know, they're going to start expanding that to more of the gaming PCs. Every one of my screens just went dark there for some reason. That's funny. Nice. It's time for bed. I guess I didn't touch the mouse in a while. It's like on a two second timer.

There's also a preview version of shared audio over Bluetooth LE, which is very common now in the mobile world space. You'll see that everywhere. You can have one Bluetooth headset or whatever connected to two devices at the same time or whatever, that kind of thing. So that's obviously that will happen to Windows. And then interestingly, or maybe most interestingly, they are, or they did, or they're, well, I guess in our process, because it's only in the dev and beta channels, but.

they are improving the Prism emulator in Windows 11 on ARM. And this is the thing that allows it to run x86 apps, what appears to be full speed. If you ever use one, it's fantastic. They didn't really go into a lot of detail, but... They're adding support for certain x64 slash x32, interestingly, instructions that are not currently supported. And this opens up the range of apps that can run better, you know.

As a result, and again, like they didn't say this, but this is pretty much for gaming. Like this is very clearly for gaming. And I think pointing to where they want to land when the X2 comes out and have that be a more acceptable. platform for gaming than the current gen so we'll see but it's cool yeah um and then there's two kind of two other like you know windows related i guess

Microsoft Edge, like all web browsers, has its own password manager. I strongly recommend never using anything built into a browser, but whatever a lot of people probably do. And now in the latest stable version of Microsoft Edge, you can save and sync pass keys through this thing. So you really want to lock your password management to a browser? Right. So... Right. In the sense that you most often need that with a web site.

I guess it's okay if you're using edge on your mobile device as well. Maybe I'm assuming it is there or will ever be there. I'm sorry. I just don't feel comfortable tying my password management to any given. Yeah. No, I strongly recommend never doing this, but, but it's the thing. And, you know, look, there is a complexity to pass keys. We should all acknowledge, but also a complexity to.

The system, the OS itself supports passkeys. Windows 11 now supports third-party passkey managers like 1Password, etc. Yeah, and so I'm thinking we're kind of at a point now where passkeys can be reasonably used. My only battle with them right now is what passkey manager jumped in. That's exactly where I was going to go.

i had this experience just the other day where i use proton pass um there's an app i don't really need it on windows but use that on mobile and that's how you get it into the apps and uh and webs you know websites on you know in browser apps but

i i don't know it was like do you want to use it was like i had to sign into whatever and it was like do you want to use a password do you want to use a pass cam like use a passkey and then this other thing came up and i don't remember i'm trying to remember maybe it was

Chrome or maybe I don't remember, but it wasn't proton pass. And I was like, who are you? Why do you want my pass key? Get out of my way. It's like this middleman slid in from the side and was like, I'll get it. There's a bunch of them. right like that's the problem if any argument i'm going to push back to bit warden it's like you need to make it very clear this is bit warden saying would you like me to handle this i think they do i mean the pop-up says

Yeah, but you know, people don't pay attention. And often it says, who do you want? Whose pass key do you want to use? That I would like to see. In fact, I'd like to see it one time so I could then turn off the other one so I never see it again. Because if there's anything worse than saving a passkey in your browser's password manager, it's using any device, whether it's a PC or mobile device where you have...

three password matches. So you're on like an iPhone and it's like, do you want to put this in proton? Do you want to put this in one password? Do you want to put this in Apple password? It's like, yeah, you're an idiot. Um, you know, like whatever, like I know I want, I just want the one thing.

you know and and you made this point in your article but uh and kev just mentioned here too this this edge password manager is for msa accounts only it's not intra yeah not yet that's really evil like that's that's

That's a main reason not to touch it. If you're one of the few lucky people who doesn't have to live with M365 in any way, fine. But if you aren't, and you probably aren't, you have M365 in your life, and you've already had the battle of, am I in my MSA account? Am I in my intro account? I don't know. Yeah. I mean, Microsoft three, well, we'll call it entra to MSA is, um, as is workspace to Google slash Gmail account. It's like,

these features go to the consumer version first. Yeah. Oftentimes because there's less control necessary. I mean, you know, it doesn't have to control it. Like it's centrally controlled, but it's really by Microsoft. Right. So it's probably just easier. to do i'm getting i gotta write this you know sysadmin in the next year and i'm really debating is this the time to start getting serious about pass keys or should we wait another year because

Because it's important. The attacks are more aggressive than before. Password problems can persist. And to be clear, this is only valid if you actually then remove the password too. That's the, this is any transition that's anywhere in the sphere is like that. You know, when you talk about password managers, the same thing, uh, pass keys, absolutely. Same thing. Pass keys. Now the pass keys are portable. You know, I, I'm not sure that the spec has actually been ratified yet.

and there are security concerns like we're still in the battle but I like that move along is riskier yeah but Yeah. If you are going to go to the new thing because you feel like it's more secure, superior, whatever the reason. Great. Good for you. But you got to get rid of the old one. And that's the, that's the one.

People either just don't think about it or when they do think about it, they're like, oh, I don't know. That's the one that makes you jump. But my point also then is, but you know there's two other strategies on that account for getting back into your account. You also had the I'll send you an email token option. There's a bunch of ways to do this.

Related to this, and every time I reference this, I feel obligated to point out I was with Richard briefly when this happened and then fled the table because I didn't figure out what was going on with my YouTube account. But it was a great day. We had a lovely breakfast without you. I don't have the same memory of it as you do, but it was...

One of the many things I did after that was start investigating whether, you know, we've all used that kind of single sign-on capability, like a Google account especially, but if you're in the Apple space, maybe Apple, you see that sometimes. Obviously, Microsoft, you see it sometimes.

sometimes and it's you know it's convenient right and you get the benefit of whatever 2FA you're using on that account if you're doing it right it should be pretty seamless but if you get locked out of that account In my case, I own the domain. So it's like paul.thorot.com. Okay, great. I can move it to Proton or wherever else. If Google's like, yeah, we're done with you. Sorry. You lose all your data. You lose.

So what happens to all of those accounts that I've only signed in with a single sign on Google account sign in, right? Like, can I still access those? Because that, if you got locked out of that stuff, that exponentially. Yeah. Expands the pain of, you know, getting locked out of an account. Yeah. And my understanding based on the testing I did was, no, you can actually get in. You can, if you don't have a password.

They can, they'll send you one via email. They'll send you a link via email. Right. I mean, there's always that way. Yeah. And then it's almost a disaster response or disaster recovery plan is okay. Before I go. remove this password let's go not use the pass key and get into the account like what are my exactly and listen this that's a diligence that most people just don't have and i'm myself included i

Like many people, you kind of react when something goes wrong. It's the TSA theory of life. We're just going to keep reacting to the last bad thing that happened, not thinking ahead to what might happen next. Yeah, it doesn't always work out. But anyway, I can't stay it for every account type, but I would imagine they're all the same. If you're using a single sign-on, whatever it is, Microsoft, Google, Apple, whatever, you should be able to recover that account if you lose access to your...

the actual account like now if you're at a place where you need to talk to someone to get this fixed you are in a world of hurt because getting to talk to any of those tech giants to actually get real support is i never got any real i published the responses that

The responses I got from YouTube, which I know is Google, but YouTube, were so unhinged and so unrelated to what we were talking about. It would have been funny if it wasn't the most serious thing that's ever happened to me electronically in a long time. And I was while trying to relax in Mexico and it went on for another week or 10 days or whatever. Like it was, it was a nightmare. So.

Yeah, you don't want to. And imagine, you know, and you just had a dumb account problem. If you'd actually had a bad actor acting on you. I know. Like, it's that much worse. Yep. Although I would argue, and there's very famous memes around this. The system actually works better when you're under attack. Yeah, because well, because that is the thing they plan for. Right. That's right. I don't think anyone was planning for let's not.

ever warn Paul that something is wrong with his account, and then when some arbitrary date passes, we'll just shut him out. Yeah, it'll be fine. I don't think that's the policy, but that's what happened. Anyway. All right. So yeah, don't use the edge password manager. It is better now, but don't use it. And then I'm grateful for the improvement, but it's still not there.

Exactly. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how they improve it. There's no way you should ever use that thing. If you want to use your pass keys on a phone or somewhere else. Well, I mean, you can get to them through edge could register as a password manager on a phone, I believe. And I'm sure now for pass keys too, but I,

What are you doing? It's not the hoop you should jump through. How many years removed from Windows Phone have you got to be before you wake up? Please don't do this. Use your password manager. That's how it works, right? And Proton Pass, your favorite, now uses those passkeys, right? Oh, my God. Yeah, they were one of the early... I think they were the...

I don't want to say what I'm not really sure. It's not about doing pass keys. It's about doing portable pass keys, right? Like you, well, they are, they're in your password. Right. That's the point. Because to the passkey, that's the device. To me, it's on every one of my devices, so it's wonderful. That's becoming, like I said earlier, that is becoming part of the spec. I don't believe that's been ratified yet, but everyone's doing it.

it's yeah they this is something fido left out at first because they were worried about security well yeah you don't i But they understand you need to. Yeah. Because look, a normal human being is not going to go and recreate the same password on every device they ever use. Like that's ridiculous. Right.

That's where you cross the line between secure and inconvenient. It's the area where people are like, yeah, I don't care anymore. I'm just not doing it. So you make it portable now. It's like, okay, now it'll work. It's good.

The Microsoft store has a web front end, which is actually pretty, it's fine. You know, there are even links for not all apps, but for many apps where you can download an EXE. And then it runs a little miniature store instance in a little dialog and uses the store to download, whatever. If you're familiar with the Windows Package Manager or Winget, which is like a lot of things like AppGet.

get apt get right yeah and yeah apt get or homebrew on the mac and linux or um i use pacman on arch that guy okay um it's a package manager um the Windows package manager, WinGet, supports two repositories. One is the Microsoft Store and the other one's the web repository, which doesn't mean the whole web, but the apps that have kind of brought into that system. It's a big, big list.

I always sort of wondered, there's been little indications here and there that these things would essentially be part of the same infrastructure and that the Windows Store would essentially be like a graphical front end to Winget, right? Which would be... I still think it's a great idea, but they just implemented something that's kind of like a half step in this direction, which I think is really interesting. It's only on the web version right now, but they let you do.

uh like app like uh app bundles like in other words you go to the store like you would in a package manager right if like or a graphical front end to one and you're like i want that one that one that one that one and then you could save that as a thing

And then you run it and it just installs all those apps. So that's nice. Winget is better because it has the web. I do that in Winget. I run a script, like a PowerShell script. But it's the same theory. Like you, I have a list of apps I want to install. Always install the store version when there is one. If there isn't, I'll take it from the web. So the store is just the store. So this won't be a complete thing, but it's a handy feature. And it's not in the store app that's in Windows 11 today.

I mean, it will be, right? Of course it will be. So you could, if you bring up a brand new computer, run the store, go into your account, wherever this thing is saved, and be like, all right, install all my apps. Useful. Yeah, nice feature. Yeah. The store keeps them up to date in the background, et cetera. So it's good. We will now pause and enjoy the silence. No, we won't because I'm going to do a commercial.

You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat, Richard Campbell. Paul's in the Northern Hemisphere. I'm in the Northern Hemisphere. Richard is in the Southern Hemisphere. Third time this year. I'm barely in the Northern Hemisphere, but yeah. Yeah, you're close to the equator. it's we up here we get the seasonal changes we're about to enter a cold season uh and for that reason i'm very glad i have my helix mattress our sponsor for this segment is helix sleep if you're

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windows microsoft was busy this past week they uh they had a little uh earnings call a little actually you had the early numbers when at the end of the show last week. But have you taken a look at them in more detail now? No, not at all. I spent 27 hours on this actually. But yeah, so in keeping with this insuredification stuff that... You wrote a great review, by the way, of it on your website. I swear to God, the thing I wrote originally was easily 6,000 words. I was like, this is a book.

So I cut it down. And I'm just going to write more about this as we kind of go. But this is an aspect of big tech that he's not actively working on as far as I can tell. He talks about the certifications of platforms, like software services, whatever, as big tech kind of sucks all the value out of these things over time.

I'm starting to realize, I brought this up a few times, but that this kind of financial manipulation stuff is a big part of it too, right? That you get to, you know, like people, it's a very easy criticism of Google to say, They're like an advertising company. That's all they are, you know? If you use Gmail and Google Photos and Google Maps and...

have a Chromebook or whatever, an Android phone. You don't really think about Google that way, but some people who are critics of the company do. And that's a little reductive, but I would say once you are earning... well 50 billion but now 100 billion a quarter um as some of these companies are uh you're not in the business of making software and services you're in the business of money and what how to best

Take the money that we have, whether it's actual holdings, like real money, or just value through the stock market, market cap, et cetera. And that's what you see with OpenAI. Speculative earnings. Yeah. Remember the infamous Microsoft diagram of the little, the orgs all putting the guns at each other? It's like that.

but 100 times bigger with more lines going back and forth. And it's like all the companies in AI, all the money going back and forth between all of them. And at some point, there will be, and we're probably there right now, there's going to be a line joining every company to every company, right?

No money has come into the circle, but there's a trillion dollars in the circle somehow. And it's all just money we've promised each other. So Microsoft is doing a lot of that. And we've been talking about that. I'm sort of focusing it on it or focusing more on it in a sense that, you know, and I would say Microsoft.

doing some of it. The one that's really doing this is NVIDIA. NVIDIA is playing with trillions and multiplying those trillions. OpenAI is maybe the most egregious in the sense that they have the most number of deals or whatever. And have the least amount of income. to compare. Have the least amount of anything. I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, I think I said this last week. I was just a senator or someone.

kind of said, these things are not companies, they're ideas. And it's like, yeah, I mean, there's something to it, right? I also read some, someone said something like, open AI today is like Microsoft was in the 90s, just making a mad land grab. and being super more aggressive than the rest of the world at the time. So this is not the whole Microsoft story, but it is part of the story, right? And it is an overwhelming part of the story.

Last year consuming the company to the point where there's some serious people who are saying this is too much. Yeah, there are. I mean, look, there have been so many stories over the past year, especially where.

you get hold of an internal memo or something and it's basically like, look, I get that you're not on board with the AI stuff. Leave. Because we're doing it. And if you don't want to do it, we're going to find someone who does. And we're going to do it. So it doesn't matter what you think. We're doing it. And it's super aggressive. There is a ridiculous interview with Satya Nadella and Sam Altman briefly. He leaves pretty early in the call with some guy on X of all places.

This is two people who are not human beings trying to pretend they are and trying to pretend they're friends. And it was, the first five to seven minutes of this might be the stupidest thing I've ever watched in my life. Like it's painfully bad. I refuse to believe that those people care about each other in the slightest or our friends. It's unbelievable, like in the literal sense of that word. But in the post-earnings conference call,

In that interview and elsewhere, you know, Microsoft, whatever, they're selling this. They're selling like, this is what we're doing. This is why we're doing it. Sorry, why are you doing it? You know, because I don't quite, I still don't quite see it. And, you know, look, I know to my mother, to my brother, to sort of mainstream normal non-technical people, when I start talking about technology, they're like, man.

You're talking, it's like you're speaking Latin. I don't understand anything you're saying. And that's what this stuff is like to me. It's like a fungible planet scale fleet. And it's like, dude. learning the language. What are you talking about? And there's this complicity with Wall Street. So much of it is hidden too, right? They're using shell companies. We don't actually know how much they own. I know. I know.

So there's little things that happen. Like this quarter was interesting because OpenAI restructured. And in doing that, they're not a publicly held company. They're a profit company. But they will, I mean, I'm sure they will eventually have an IPO of some kind, whatever. I'm sure it will, like, remember when Google went public, it was this really weird kind of, it was so, you know, googly is what we call it. But like, just very unusual.

And I think whatever open AI does will make Google look like the most traditional, like good housekeeping company from the night. But Google was forced by the sec to go public because they had too many shareholders. They fought it tooth and nail. And then they did some weird auction. Yeah. The Dutch auction thing.

That is not what's going to happen to open AI is my guess. I think they're going to do it as quickly as they can. As part of the restructuring, though, Microsoft, well, Microsoft, you know, there's always been this line item. This guy.

Last week, I talked about this guy for the Wall Street Journal called out the fact that in their previous earnings, there was this thing. I don't think it was in an earnings statement. I think it was in the 10Q, which is the SEC filing. But it just said net, other. And it was some whatever billion, whatever it was. This quarter, that was 4.1 billion. And that's just a loss on their investment in OpenAI. They had to report it.

which is the only reason they did. The other thing they reported was that their capex spending, which is AI infrastructure build-out, is just about $35 billion. A year ago, it was $20 billion, so it's like an 80%-ish year-over-year gain, which is humongous. But I think the previous quarter, off the top of my head, well, I can just look at it. I think it was $24 billion, something like that.

20, yeah, 24.2. So this is going up, you know, and the whole time, every once in a while, I write this kind of analysis of the earnings. Well, I write that every quarter, but every once in a while, it just takes on a life of its own.

You know, a year and a half ago, I wrote something that was just all AI. I'm like, I'm just trying to understand where the money's coming from, where it goes, like how this makes any sense. I didn't make any sense of it. And this time I'm like, I'm going to focus on this Wall Street analyst thing, this call. And this was a bunch of just gross back slapping. Great.

Congratulations on the awesome quarter. You guys are the best. You know, it's like, would you say that Copilot is a great AI or the greatest AI? You know, it's just ridiculous, right? But there was one guy. Right in the middle of it, I think he referenced this $4.1 billion loss, which at the time I didn't understand what it was. I didn't see that anywhere in their financial results. And man, they shut him down hard.

They shut him down really quick. What'd they say? I'm trying to find the exact thing. It is because it's the response to this was so ludicrous. Let me see if I can just find this. There were two questions where they literally said to the CFO of Microsoft, hey, I don't want you to go into the weeds on the accounting stuff. Don't worry about the numbers. What? She's the CFO of Microsoft. That's the job. Yeah.

So this guy asked about this OpenAI thing, the $4.1 billion. And he says, you know, he's like, this feels like it's way larger than, you know, what you were saying before in prior quarters. It's like, it can't just be your share of the OpenAI loss. Could you describe that and what we can expect in subsequent quarters? Oh, and whether this signals an accounting change of any kind. This is an excellent question. She did not answer any of those questions.

She started off by saying that number was not impacted by the new agreement that they put in place with OpenAI last week. Of course it wasn't. That was the previous quarter. The guy on the call knows that. He didn't ask that. He says that increased loss, she says, the increased loss was due to our percentage of losses and open AI equity method. That's an exact quote. Just to be very clear, also an exact quote, because that is not clear. No.

She says, there's nothing or there's not anything there that is not the increased losses from open AI. Right. That's what he asked. Yeah. So he wanted to know if that was the case. And she said it was, but. How's that going to impact future quarters? And are you changing the way you account for this in your numbers? And she never answered those questions. Yeah, which obviously they are because the company's restructuring.

And arguably, this is a one-time write-down, which you would never say out loud, to adjust for the fact that the equity is measured differently now. But she never said any of those things. Right. So the correct response to that little bit of nonsense would be like, right. But the questions I asked were, and then kind of reiterate them. He doesn't do that. He says, understood. Thank you. Yeah. Like, like he was a school child being admonished by a teacher for screwing up in class.

Did you not see like the envelope passed to him outside of the camera? I don't know if you were following the glad hand, but okay. I just, it, Why wouldn't you stick to this? Yeah, couldn't you just stick to like, we had a great quarter? What's wrong with you, you idiot? We're not here to answer hard questions. Oh, I thought that's why you were here.

What are you talking about? This game has been going on because the market values keep going up. And the investors that are on that call are very happy because they're getting their bonuses and they're getting their promotions. And you don't say mean things when you're getting what you want. When this bubble bursts and these reports are not going to be so much fun anymore.

Are we going to get the shareholder revolt? Now you aren't getting your bonus and you aren't getting promoted. Aren't you going to be interested? Why? I, as a. current or potential shareholder in this company? Yeah, I think I'd want to know that. Also, I could be off on this number, but since 40% of our... retirement savings are all tied up for this these companies like i don't know maybe there should be a little bit of oversight here like i mean

I look at gold prices and I think I know where a whole lot of retirement money is going right now. Yeah, it keeps going up, doesn't it? Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know. Anyway, look, whatever. Microsoft's making a ton of money.

So we talked about this a little bit last week, but $77.7 billion in revenues. Although, by the way, well under Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple, but whatever. Third, fourth biggest company in the world still. Productivity and business processes, revenues off the charts, both have exceeded $30 billion in a quarter. More personal computing is kind of struggling along, although they're almost at 14 and they indicated that this current quarter will be over 14. So they're moving up as well.

They did say that we, yep, we're going to spend more money on this AI stuff. Don't worry about that. That's going to keep coming. Like, okay. And then as far as like actual... product related information because i spent so much space just kind of covering in the article i wrote each of these kind of things i just sort of looked at If there was anything, is there any like hard data in here? That's kind of, no, there's not much like they threw things out. Like we have 80,000.

customers including 80 percent of the fortune 500 in the context of using microsoft ai products whatever that means you know in any you know in other words you ran paint and did like a background removal you're one of those people i guess i don't know They said things like, we took share, like Azure took share. Okay, how much share? They said that about Edge, which I looked up, and they said it about Bing.

which I also looked up because that's ludicrous, right? So the quote on Edge was, Microsoft Edge has taken share for 18 consecutive quarters. Well, you can look that up. So... If you look at the last, I think it's the last year. Maybe I looked at that exact time frame. Edge did go from 8% to 10.37%. So yes, they've taken share. However.

Chrome, the market leader, which shouldn't be really growing at this point, they're roughly 70%, they grew more in the same time period. They grew from 67.5% to 73.8%. So okay, I guess you took share from what Safari Firefox. I don't know same thing with Bing

It says, you know, we took share again in search. We're bang, nailing it. You know, I'm like, don't make me look. I'm going to look. Okay, I'm going to look. How much was it? So Google has 90% share in search. Exactly the same as one year ago. yeah um bing has 4.1 share up from 3.96 so all right 0.5 um half a percent um yeah and so i guess they're killing duck duck go or something i don't know i don't know i don't so

I don't know what to tell you, man. This stuff really kind of freaks me out. 155 million monthly active users of Minecraft. Wow. Must be that movie. Right. uh i mean i'm kind of not joking i bet it was but i don't think for call of duty it's probably in the same yeah we don't know because they're not saying that right now but it's um well yeah i don't know i mean that's a good question i mean it sounds high but it doesn't sound that high

Yeah, that's a good number though, right? It's a steady number. That's a 20-year-old game practice. Yeah, you don't want people to question it, but you want them to be like, oh, that's cool. Good. That thing's going strong. It's nice. You know, I talk about this sometimes where they're sort of selectively transparent. Like they talked about how the commercial seats for Microsoft 365 grew by whatever percent.

They talked about how the same thing happened in consumer, but in consumer this month, this quarter, they talked about what the actual number of subscriptions and they didn't talk about the actual number of licenses on the commercial side. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't like that's just kind of whatever. You know, this whole thing freaks me out. I don't know what to tell you. It's just, I don't know. So, yeah, there's a lot of...

A lot of stuff going on. Surface disappeared. You don't hear about that anymore. Device revenues are always down. They're going to be down again this current quarter. By the way, Windows revenues from PC makers and also from their own devices business. will decline in the current quarter. It's going down. And then they said that in the next sentence, I swear to God, was we expect continued momentum from Windows 10 end of support. Continued momentum down?

What are you talking about? Shouldn't that be going up? If you're getting momentum, that means to me that people are getting off their Windows 10 PCs and upgrading. Or are they buying extended support? Are you now concerned about that revenue? Yeah. And where does that revenue get realized? I mean, it's kind of hard to say. I also, you know, I think it was, yeah, it was last quarter Microsoft for the very first time ever.

said what the azure revenue number was ever yeah and i made the point at the time i did for one quarter and maybe two but you could now go back to backfill you could backfill and find out when it gets down close to zero um I'd like to see this for Xbox hardware revenues because I don't understand how revenues can keep declining from hardware every single quarter for years. Like at some point, I mean, I know...

Literally, you can't go below zero in that because you're always going to have something. But can't you? I mean, at some point, we sold three and we took four back on return. I mean... How does this thing keep losing money? Red ring of death years, right? Yeah, I mean, it's bizarre. So, anyway. A lot of information there, but I mean, I really...

feel just at a very high level that what Microsoft is doing is essentially saying, look, our business is great. Our stock price is through the roof. Our market cap is amazing. That's all you need to know. You don't need to worry about where it's coming from or where it's going because we're doing great.

And I'll just point out, you know, this is not the full cost. I'm not a financial guy. I should point that out too. But, you know, for a long time there, for several quarters in a row, you could make the case. And we did.

That whatever Microsoft's CapEx expense was that quarter was not as high as the profits. And this is not how the accounting works, I guess. But you could say, well, this company made... more profits than they spent on capex are essentially paying for it with cash yeah right and they have big cash reserves like that yes but i mean but as far as you know you've got whatever money in and out in a quarter you're still

trending this way because you're not spending as much as you made after all the cost of business is factored in. Now, that's not true because there's a big cost of business factored into all these data centers. I don't think it's actually part of this, but ignoring that. Their profits this past quarter were almost $31 billion. And their spending on AA was almost $35 billion. So they are not doing that anymore. So, I mean, again, you could...

You couldn't really do the math, but you could kind of speculate a little bit since everyone's doing it. Is there some point in the future where the spending continues and the profits continue in the same vein that we just run out of cash? You know? I mean, it's a long way away. They have so much money. But I don't know. I just don't understand this company anymore. I really...

I wasn't super interested in Microsoft's shift to focus on businesses over consumers, even though they intended to do both, but they just didn't do consumer well. The shift to cloud computing was particularly bad for me. Because you could just feel the emphasis switching away from Windows forever. Like they just didn't care. Right. It wasn't the motivator anymore. And listen, you could find this clip, I'm sure.

A year ago, six months ago, whatever, at some point I was like, well, at least Windows is in the mix now. They're talking about it and it's part of the AI stuff. But I'm thinking now, I kind of wish they were ignoring it.

You know, I'd rather not have anything to do with any of this stuff. Like I, the funny part is that we still haven't seen the new guy really take charge of windows yet. Like yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm, which I'm kind of excited about. Like, I just want to hear a new voice in this space. I like him, and I don't know if that means anything for him doing a good job, but I like he's like enough of an engineer. He's well-spoken. He's smart, you know. Maybe. I don't know. He's not.

ever going to be part of these quarterly reports really they're going to take whatever reports up to leadership and they're going to you know they're going to hoodify it so to speak turn it into this exactly song and dance story yeah i think i made this case last week you know even the ceo people don't think this way but like everyone answers to someone right there's always a higher power and in davilar's case like um yeah the higher power is a much bigger power and and you know

There's this going to be corporate initiative that comes down on him. Like, yeah, no, we're, this is what we're doing. But there's this schism in all of this between what you're actually reporting internal of the company and how the company is going to respond to it and what they say to their shareholders. Right, right. And, you know, it's like the lying through a mission thing, you know? Yeah. I think I made the case about this last week again, but the...

Look, I get that in some way, every quarterly earnings event is going to be basically marketing, right? You're selling the company. You're focusing on the good stuff. We'll talk about Amazon very briefly in a few minutes. uh amazon's earning uh reports are ridiculous they talk about money for like two seconds they mention aws and passing and then there's like a

3,000 word list of like all the products they announced that quarter. I don't know if you follow Amazon, but that thing is like a disaster of like millions of products. So it's like, hey, we have a new TV show. We have a new Echo device. Sell Pampers in Vietnam now or whatever it is like it's guys whatever like it's just like all milestones, you know

And there's nothing to write. Like, it's nothing interesting. And I think that's the point. They're like, look, we're doing great. Like, don't worry about the numbers. We're doing great. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. We're fine. Yeah. Everything's fine. We like fire. It's warm.

All right, let's take a break. We'll do more. We have some more earnings. By the way, if you were bored to tears by what just happened, and I think a lot of people might have been.

Get ready because there's more. No, no, I'm going to blow through the rest of it. I'm going to mention it just to mention it, but I'm going to blow through it. It's not going to be like that. And to be fair, all of these companies are playing this game because this is what their shareholders are. I'm going to give you another example of a company playing this game.

Apple, we talked about this yesterday on MacBreak Weekly. Tim Cook actually, at one point, somebody asked him, oh, what was it? I can't remember. I know. I actually listened to this conference. Tim said, I'm not good. I'm not going to divulge that. It's like, I'm not even going to tell you. Yep. You're like, huh.

I thought you were a publicly held company. Am I missing something here? I mean, the SEC, I guess, would enforce this. Yeah, if the SEC's doors weren't shut to the world and weren't paying attention to anything, because they're not.

I don't know how you tell the difference between SEC closed and SEC not closed, right? Yeah. The theory of all this is. I didn't mean because of the shutdown. I mean, this organization has been like this for decades. Like, I don't know what's going on. If you're an investor. Before you put your money into a stock for a company, you have the right to know what's going on inside the company. And that's kind of why there are rules about...

public companies. Public companies have to reveal more than private companies. That's why companies don't want to go public office. That's why this scaling back of transparency has occurred over the past decade. It's unconscionable. I believe it's illegal. So it's just that, you know, does it matter if you speed the limit by 20 miles an hour if no cop is ever going to pull you over? No, I guess not. If nobody enforces it.

Yeah. It has to be enforced. The problem is it doesn't stay at 20 miles an hour. It gets faster and faster. That's the thing. Now we're like 120 miles an hour and it's like, well, you know, it's a big successful company. What's your problem? Like, what are you asking questions for? Your pizza got there sooner. By the way, sorry. So I've referenced this ex-interview with Sam Altman and Satya Nadella. One of the first things that Sam Altman says, it's disgusting.

He says, people are starting to question where all the money is coming from. What's wrong with these people? We're doing great. What's wrong with these people is you don't report any of your finances. And you have like a trillion dollars of deals. It might be 1.8 trillion, whatever the number is. Of money you do not have. And then he says, what I want is for those guys to short our stock so that I can see them fail. Yeah, financially.

Yeah. And then he cackled like a Bond villain. And I'm like, I'm sorry. Are you kidding me? That man is evil. So I have the actual quote here. So an analyst asked Tim Cook about Apple's revenue. services revenue uh about it you know basically he was trying to find out how much google pays apple yeah uh and sorry you have to wait for the next trial yeah it was wamsi mohan of bank of america right and uh he said

Basically, Cook's response to his question was, we don't divulge. I'm dodging the question intentionally because we don't split at that level. Boom. I mean, I'm sorry. Really? You don't? You don't have a spreadsheet in your brain? Yeah. I know exactly the number, but I ain't telling you, buddy. That is ludicrous. And by the way, next quarter, when they said they're going to set all these records or whatever, see if that guy's on the call.

see if he's see if he gets a question in next time i bet we don't hear from him ever again you know yeah i mean uh jason snell commentary on this is these calls are almost entirely Apple execs dodging the questions of fiscal analysts. At least Tim Cook admitted it this time.

Yes. So I got to tell you, I listened to the Apple call live. I have since now listened to the Microsoft call. I wrote what I wrote based on the transcript. Apple is way more transparent than Microsoft right now. No, I mean way more. Those executives on that call were much clearer about what was going on.

Well, at least when they don't tell you, they tell you they're not telling you. Well, listen, you've got to appreciate the honesty. I don't think it's right. I'm not going to tell you that. Sorry. We don't divulge that. information. All right, let's take a break. We're going to come back, talk about other companies. We've got AI, we've got a whiskey pick. We've got lots of good stuff still to come. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Therott.

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All right. Earnings all come at the same time because the quarters end. Whether it's a fiscal first, second, third quarter, they all end at the same time. Unless you're like Dell, HP, and Lenovo, and they're like... Our fiscal year runs from April 13th until – Do they really? So not everybody ends at the end of the month. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, it's crazy. Well, some of them are at the end of the month. Dell is the outlier. Dell –

Anyway. Dell's confusing because they went public and they went private and they went private. I know. It's crazy. Crazy company. Yeah. So I just wanted to highlight... a company that I've actually kind of praised for being transparent as an example of you can see what's happening like this stuff is happening there as well and that's Spotify so Leo I think just mentioned Club Twit and how

You have, you know, some body of viewers and a small percentage roughly is paying, but they're generating for us.

yeah making them a quarter of the it's a quarter of our operating expenses yeah and that's my experience at throughout.com as well like the vast majority of people don't pay obviously and then they see ads and those ads make like zero dollars and so you know whatever but like it's just the system we have so they've always done this and so they separate out their monthly average users into two groups there's the

people who pay, the premium subscribers, and the people who are ad-supported. There are more ad-supported than paying, of course. It used to be a big gap, by the way. It's closing a little bit. But the vast majority of their revenues come from the people who pay, right? And so...

You know, you would imagine that as a business, you would want to focus on those people, right? Like that's how it works. And so, you know, I watch this every quarter and I'm like, okay, you know, I'm not particularly interested in Spotify's business. vaguely realize they're killing the music industry but also sort of saving it i don't know what's going on there but spotify is whatever so they're they're they're they're in this space where i mean are they big tech you know

Less than 5 billion euros in revenues. Not even close, right? So I don't know. But are they little tech? I don't know. They dominate, right, this part of the market. I mean, I don't know. I've noticed this before, and now I saw it again, which is They mix and match different financial reporting types to make their numbers look better. So, for example, if you're familiar with gap versus non-gap accounting principles.

You're not allowed to use constant currency and gap accounting, which is the standard. Most big tech companies, probably most companies only follow big tech, but our tech report both numbers, right? And so in Spotify's case, they just mix and match. So the reason for constant currency is you're an international company. Their exchange rates change every day. Sometimes they go up a lot. You know, and it just kind of averages out over the reporting period, whatever. It's not really designed to...

you know, help you lie about your numbers. It's designed to give investors a more accurate look at what the business is like, because it's really hard otherwise to understand. Like, you don't want to live and die on an exchange rate that because whatever some.

something happened and whatever a couple weeks is bad whatever okay but but they like they they reported all the numbers and what i would call a gap numbers and then for revenues they were like it was up 12 in constant currency and i'm like That doesn't look like 12% to me. And I don't like when I have to do the math. So some companies, they'll report net income revenues.

They'll show you the figure from the year earlier and then they'll tell you the percent change. And I have to say, I don't ever check that math for the most part. But a couple of times lately I've had to because I've looked at the numbers and I was like, I don't think that's correct. And it's not correct.

If you use the actual same numbers they use for the other things, they went up 2%, not 12%, less than 2%. It was like 1.85%. I was like, wait, what? And I don't know. So like, I don't like that kind of stuff, but. Is this the place where we are, where we just fictionalize numbers just to make the reports look good? Yeah. And look, I'm not the smartest guy in the world, and I'm definitely not good at math. But even I looked at the number, and I was like, hmm, that doesn't look like more than 10%.

The other one that they do is like the word profit, right? And I don't mean profit like Mohammed. I mean profit like financial profit, typically. I mean, and by typically, I mean literally.

is net income uh not every company uses that term by the way which is vaguely irritating but there are different terms that all basically mean profit but net income is literally cost of business comes out of it whatever that is it's everything everything that impacts your business uh negatively the cost is is um is included in that

And this is not the first time I've noticed there's Spotify. They use a, what's the, I don't think I wrote it down, but they're not using, they have a net income, but that's not, by the way, net income, they lost money. They lost 70. 72 million euros in the quarter. But if you just pretend we didn't have a cost of doing business. Yeah.

They made a lot of money. If we didn't have to pay any money to the record labels or our staff or rent or property taxes or tax, whatever it is, then they made a profit. Right. So did I. Isn't that just revenue? I mean, isn't that just revenue? No. I'm sorry. I don't have the thing in front of me. I'm forgetting the term they use. There's all these different accounting terms that... Their problem is that record companies determine...

how much it costs them to do business. And they're not in control of this. And the record companies hate them. So they can change this all the time, right? Because that's who they publish the music. Okay, but that's your business. You chose this. Oh, that's what they chose. This is your business. It's why they try to get into podcasting and then why they're doing audio books and all these other things. Yeah, of course. Diversify.

They hate this. A lot of hand-waving, right? So Spotify had a really busy quarter. They launched by their count. I didn't check on this, but 30 new products. Lossless Audio Support, Apple TV app, new Apple TV app. OpenAI, ChatGP integration, a deal with Netflix to bring some video podcasts to that service, yada, yada, yada, whatever. But the quote from Daniel Locke, who is still the CEO, he's going to step down on January 1st.

and become, I don't know, chairman or whatever he is. This guy, I swear to God, this kills me. He said, not only is Spotify profitable, we have... We experienced a profit expansion in the quarter. I don't even, what? You lost 72 million euros. What are you talking about? Oh, he's talking about operating income. So in other words, if you look at just the business.

Not the actual all the things like, you know, for example, like you could look at like if I generate ads or I have money coming in from like premium subscribers, you're like, all right, my operating income is negligent is that stuff. Right. But it's like, OK, but.

I have to pay for website hosting. I have to pay for Laurent who writes my news. I have to pay whatever my costs are. I have cost, right? And at the end, when you factor in all the costs, that thing is profit, but it's also called net income. Technically, the thing he's talking about, which again, I keep losing operating income, is a form of profit. If you forget the rest of it, excludes a lot of costs. I guess. I don't know. Anyway, my point is everyone's doing it. Big, small, whatever.

I saw this and I thought, okay, these guys are going great. AMD 1.2 billion net income profit, right? On revenues of 9.2 billion. I'm like, this looks good. The biggest business unit they have right now is data center. I'm like, huh? And it's weird because I read about this every quarter. I was like, is this the first time this has ever happened? No. This is the fourth or fifth time. But three of the past four quarters, Data Center was, in fact, their biggest business.

A year and a half ago, Dr. Lisa Su, their CEO and chairperson, said, you know, we're refocusing on AMD. They're going after NVIDIA. And they are not making a lot of inroads there, frankly. You know, we'll see. I mean, still plenty of time, obviously. But to me, I look at these numbers, I'm like, this thing's going gangbusters. And Wall Street was like, no, you're doing terrible. The stock price fell because...

They expect bigger numbers because, you know, they've been trained by big tech, you know, to expect like stupid big numbers, you know, like Google, Alphabet Google, which. $102 billion in revenues, $35 billion in net income profit. Double-digit growth of both, by the way, 33%, 16% year-over-year. 72.5% of those revenues did come from advertising. I mean, that, you know, whatever.

Google Cloud revenues are up 33.5%. This is a business I think a lot of people wrote off. And this is sort of their like Azure slash AWS competitor, I guess. So like that's starting to come together. as I guess you would think. Amazon, like I said, stupidity, but their profits go up and down dramatically because a lot of their stuff is physical goods and also...

you know, things like drivers and logistics and whatever, but $21.2 billion in net income and $180 billion in revenues. It's like, what? Amazon's AWS was 30 billion in revenues. That's up 20% year over year. So I don't have it in front of me or do I? Yes, I do. Microsoft, the intelligent cloud business, which is Azure essentially. was also 30 well 30.9 billion in revenue so you could argue those are comparable although

As we're going to say, as we'll discuss in a little bit, OpenAI has signed one of their 118 deals with AWS. And it's going to be interesting to see what their reaction is to hosting their stuff on. something that is not Azure, whether there's any difference, you know, in either direction, I guess we'll see. And then Apple, we just talked about a little bit, but 27.5 billion of net income on 102.5 billion. A lot of interesting stuff on that call.

Tim Cook talked about Apple intelligence so much, man, you'd think they were an AI powerhouse, but obviously most of their money is coming from the iPhone and then services. Well, and in fact, we now know that they're going to use Google for Siri, that they're not. Yeah. And they're going to pay for that, by the way, which is interesting. So Apple this year, I bet 25 billion plus from Google for Google search placement.

That's the thing that Tim would not divulge. Well, it came out in court, buddy, so we kind of know what it was. We kind of have an idea, yeah. And then the report for Mark Ehrman is that they're going to pay Google a billion dollars a year. It's a net gain. it's just like the open ai microsoft relationship um a lot of money going in one direction um so you know they're great i the most interesting thing that

They said in some ways was that the current quarter, which of course is a holiday quarter, is going to be their biggest quarter in history. Like it's going to be out of the park. It could be like 140 or something. And it's going to be some stupid number. It's going to be really, really big. So.

I guess the new iPhone's doing okay. I don't know. It's interesting that all these companies are pro AI centric except for Apple. I know. And honestly, I, if you, you know, Apple's got a real product. That's the difference. That's the thing. So what's weird about like, I always feel like this is obvious, but you know, Apple makes physical products. These are things that do typically do not have high margins. Apple's margins are through the roof.

They also do a really great job of selling these things. So Apple and Amazon had roughly the same profit, essentially. But Apple's revenues were like 80% smaller. So Apple's margins are much higher, you know. And look, Apple's. product line has become a little complex, frankly. You know, the old Steve Jobs chart with the four things, you know, we're kind of past that. But compared to Amazon, they're like a mom and pop shop. Like, the fact that they're

doing this kind of business. Just a reminder that Amazon is a warehousing company, right? Yeah, logistics. Yeah, exactly. They're like a property manager and a logistics company. In reality, of course, Microsoft is now becoming a property company. Oh, 100%. It's all about data centers. Apple is still the company that just makes technology. I know.

Their land is part of operating costs, not cost of goods. Oh, there's so much I can't stand about Apple, but I have to say, I do, I respect that a little bit, like, you know. But we've always looked at the things that they've done as failings. They never got into cloud even though they needed cloud for their own products. Right.

And was that really a failing? They did this weird thing where they said they were going to get into AI and did a full smoke and mirrors, you know, FUD demo and then just didn't talk about it anymore. And now it looks like it was clever. Like it's literally a hindsight.

correction yep and it may be even more clever and this is like this might just be a timing issue or whatever you want to call it but because of the data sovereignty has become like this big thing now dude I just spent a month in Europe what do you think you're talking about Well, they're talking about two things. The stupid cookie pop-ups you see all the time. But then also data sovereignty, right? Yeah.

Well, it depends on US companies, full stop, right? Right. So if you press, and this has happened, if you press Satya Nadella or anybody at Microsoft on this, it's like, well, we can't actually guarantee. We'll meet the requirements of all your regulations. We'll do what we can. But at the end of the day, if the U.S. government comes down and says, nope, we've got to get in there, I don't think they're going to say no. And arguably, this was broken after 9-11.

Like the erosion of this idea of national sovereignty in exception cases just wasn't, it was probably never true, but it's really, really very not true. like we now say it out loud because data is everything now and you know the data is not a thing on a piece of paper it's like in a bit it's in it yeah it's in a giant concrete building with barbed wire around it and almost no humans at all Last year, when Apple announced Apple Intelligence mid-year,

One of the things they talked about was this private cloud compute. And of course, it's Apple. So you think of Apple as primarily a consumer company, which I guess they are. But it was kind of in the context of that. It's the, you know, what stays in your iPhone or what happens in your iPhone stays in your iPhone or whatever.

And it was, look, whether it makes sense or not, it was kind of a unique solution to the, well, I don't want my data going to open AI or wherever else. And they're like, we got it. We're going to solve this problem. You're like, cool. But I think that might position them pretty well in the EU, especially where it's really stringent regulations. Except for that part where they're using third party data centers, which is to say one of the big three.

or all of the big three. And if that is going to be penetrated, the same rules apply. See, I don't know what the infrastructure is for the private cloud computer. I don't know if that's all Apple data center stuff. I don't know if they... what their footprint is in different uh regions etc etc but well in any and you know now it's a broader conversation about like the germans insisted that microsoft set up a german entity to operate data centers in germany so that they had more control

Yeah, well, that's a very Chinese thing to do. Well, I would argue, we saw these waves happen in the 70s as well, where governments did assert authority over resources operated by extranational companies. That might happen again. Yep. Yeah. I mean, no, it's like, this is a real issue. I mean, I, I don't know. You know, I don't know that by a, by a location count perspective, I suspect Microsoft has the biggest.

Yeah. You know, international network of data centers or whatever. Yeah. You know, AWS has got to be up there. Google probably is up there as well. But Apple, I have no idea. I don't know what they're doing. you don't see a lot of it but i mean i have data centers obviously but i i don't i just don't know do they or are they just renting time on other data centers no they have they have they probably do both but they do have they have data centers as well yeah yeah

Okay. I had to try really hard to keep the AI stuff to being pertinent. So there isn't that much, but a lot of AI stuff this week. But bigger than that even is this came out of the blue. I woke up this morning and I was like, I cannot believe.

This actually happened, but Epic Games and Google announced they've agreed to settle their antitrust case. What? So this is Epic v. Google, right? This is the one Google got slapped around at every level. I can't believe we're still talking about this, Mike. I know. Well, it's been five years.

years and they lost big time they they they appealed every time they could they went to the Supreme Court the Supreme Court gave them the middle finger that was it do we know what the settlement is yeah it's it's actually really good and I have to say this Look, as you might imagine, Google and Apple come to me for advice all the time. And the thing I tell them is, the thing I would tell them if they listened to me was. Sundar, baby, come in. Yeah, yeah, okay.

What are you thinking? It would be a shame if anything happened to you. So, like, we went through the whole Microsoft thing twice, right? United States and then again in the EU. And, like, the one thing I think that came out of that was, like, Don't be found guilty and then have to scrape back from that, right? You should work proactively with regulators to meet the needs and then...

move on from there and rescue what you can of what I consider to be sort of ill-gotten gains on things like 30% fees and apps and whatever, blah, blah, blah. They don't do that, right? And Apple in particular is very... belligerent right so even when they're found guilty of breaking the law and even when they're held you know they they're fined and you know they they

They refuse. They meet the letter, sort of, and then months go by and it's like, oh, they're not meeting the requirements and blah, blah, blah, whatever. Time goes by. And the whole time, they're generating all that income. They're trying not to lose it. In Apple's case,

Phil Schiller, their app stores are, was like, this is unsustainable. We should be lowering new seats. Tim Cook said, yep, we're not doing that. Thanks for the advice. Not happening. 30% completely arbitrary fee structure. It's not based on anything. It's not based on the cost. We know that this business is

is astronomically profitable. We now know that MasterCard and Visa charge between 1% and 3.5% on similar things. And they're charging 15% or 30% on the same exact thing. And it's like, this is not in any way fair. So what Google did in their settlement with Epic, which Epic is all for, is say, A, we're going to make these changes worldwide, not just the United States. We're going to do this everywhere.

We're going to not do it for three years. We're going to do it for six and a half years. We're going to allow everything that was forced on us by the courts, by Judge Donato there, meaning third-party upstairs, no problem. We're not going to have scare screens. We're just going to let it happen.

You can use third-party payment systems, et cetera, et cetera. Don't worry about it, no problem. And if you do use us, we're gonna lower our fees to 20 or 9%, depending on the type of purchase it is. There you go. And this is the thing. If you go back five years, whatever number of years, the advice I had for these companies was just lower the fee structure. Just do it. Take the air out of it. You're still going to take billions of dollars for doing nothing. Yeah.

And no one's going to sue you, ever. And all these companies have said this. They've always been like, yeah, if they just have the fees. Imagine if they went down to 10%, which is still exorbitant for what they're doing. Yeah, you're still making billions of dollars every quarter. Just do it like this and then you can live up to this thing you market

about how awesome you are. But at the same time, the amount of money you made over the years, the five years of this case, pay for this case dozens of times over. Yeah. All you got to say is, look, look, we were the scrappy little upstart. We were trying to do something different. Yeah. It's the first, you know, major digital computer platform where.

We didn't build it and hope that developers showed up. We thought this was so good. We're going to charge them for it. You know, like it's a crazy reversal of the way things normally happen. I mean, I know there are small. platforms like video game consoles, et cetera, that still do this kind of thing or whatever, but that's a different model. Like Apple's making 40 something percent margins on the iPhone. They're not losing money and making it up in app store fees. Right.

They're just another way to earn money. Not struggling to survive. No. So look, they could have just had that adult moment and said, you know. It's been 10 years, 15 years, whatever the time frame. And this app structure made sense when we were building the business out and whatever. Right now it's running itself. We don't actually do any oversight anyway. It doesn't matter. We're not spending money on this.

It will lower the fee. If they went down to, I'm going to call it 10% or 12%, whatever. Pick a number. This industry would have just been like nice. And that would have been the end of it. But no. They're all in court. And the good news now is to. There's case law and precedence set. Apple really is screwed. Yeah, that's the thing. So every plaintiff in any case against Apple now will always point to this and say, well...

The other thing that's really notable about this settlement is that when Google started the Play Store, which was the Android marketplace at the time, they were like, look, this thing is to bet it's it's what i said it's a platform it's it's going to benefit our platform we want developers to be here we're not trying to make revenues or profits on this thing we're going to put enough money into it where we'll pay our bills but

We just want people to make apps for Android. And then one day it was like, man. Apple's making a lot of money on the App Store. We should just do the same thing. And literally, there's a history of this. You can follow it. They just do exactly what Apple does every single time. And I would argue their shareholders demanded it.

You know, like that. Yeah. Which is, I mean, I would say is an excuse, you know, and a weak one, but it is one that you're going to make. And Apple's, by the way, this was totally arbitrary. Remember, they didn't set out to make an App Store. They were dealing with the reality their phone had been jailed.

broken, they were about to lose control of it. They released the internal dev tools, which is why they were terrible. And they had to have some place to manage that. And that became this thing. And the 30% was. utterly arbitrary but that was also when jobs had signed the deal for the 99 cent song where he had he had locked AT&T into a multi-year exclusivity agreement with complete control of the network and destroyed them over it like right it was horrifying

Yeah. Now you're going to defend it? I know. I literally wrote that they're defending the indefensible. It's ridiculous. So hopefully, I don't think they will, but... Hopefully Apple will look at this and be like, the writing's on the wall. They've got us in Korea, Europe, United States, wherever else. Let's just do the right thing, you know?

Yeah, 30% is the gaming console market because they lose money on the hardware. That's why that makes sense. This is the agreement in that industry. We're going to subsidize the hardware. One thing you can say in these companies is they are not losing money on this. I just made this point out.

Apple makes more money, bigger margins on hardware than any company ever has, ever. I don't know how they do it. It's incredible. So good for them. But I mean, that thing, that more than pays for any app store fees that they have. There's no excuse for this. It's crazy. Anyway, so they're settling. I mean, we'll see. The judge has to accept it, right? So this has to happen. But the fact...

You've got to remember, this was a year and a half ago probably. They were in court. The judge begged them to settle. He forced them to talk to an arbitrator. He's like, you do not want me to rule. Go to a mediator, arbitrator, whatever, and settle. And they didn't. They couldn't reach it. And so now Google has been found guilty again and again and again and again. Well, and I suspect at some point somebody said, you know, the judge can get punitive at some point here.

Well, which is what happened with Apple because Apple got off with a relative slap on the wrist against Epic, but then did their belligerent non-compliance thing. And she was like, you know what? Screw you. Here it goes. We're giving everything away. So, you know, like that's and that's what I mean.

Work with regulators proactively, right? So when you see like the DMA in Europe and different companies respond differently, like Microsoft for all their problems has been pretty good about this stuff for the most part, right? They've worked with the regulators like, all right, what are we going to do?

We do it. Apple's like, nope, nope, nope. All right, here's this stupid thing you asked for. And it's like, this is not what we asked for. It's like when they did the video in the Microsoft trial in 1999 or whatever you were there. They pulled Internet Explorer out of Windows as the judge told them they had to do. And it's like, oh, it doesn't even boot anymore. Oh, I told you so. And he's like, you thought that's what I wanted. You thought that meant my requirement.

You know, it's like this is the spirit of the law versus the letter of the law. So anyway, that's fascinating. I never saw this coming. I think that's fantastic.

And then we have OpenAI, the world's most successful company. Well, I mean, someone in the financial industry actually did some math. And it was basically that given Microsoft's... 27 point whatever percent ownership in the company which was 32.5 in the previous quarter uh microsoft lost 4.1 billion dollars that means that's the write down for that correction yep so that means uh that

Well, but I lost at least $12 billion in that quarter. And it's like $12 billion. I'm sure they lost $120 billion. So, yeah, I mean, and this is the thing that. Sam Altman was lashing out at, you know, he's like, you don't understand. We have all these Enron deals, you know, up in the air. He's like, everything's like, look at all the big numbers. You really say Enron.

No, I did. I'm sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I'm paraphrasing. That was not an exact quote. Please. I was thinking WorldCom. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like I. I keep repeating myself, but I think I made the case that you can't call it a pyramid scheme because a pyramid is a simple shape. This is like an octopus of numbers. Let me see if I can find this thing. I think there's a...

No, it's not in here, I guess. Somewhere I had written the... Maybe it is. No. I think they have now floating out in the world, I believe, I apologize if this is incorrect, but I believe that it's like 1.8 trillion, I think, in promises. You know, like money's going to go in different directions. Is that in the gap? Is that part of generally accepted accounting practices? I don't think it's generally accepted. Promises. Yeah, promise.

I like that. That's what GAPS stands for. That's what GAPS stands for. Generally accepted accounting promises. Promises. I mean, I'm not an accountant. I don't think that's what it stands for. Pretty sure. Pretty sure.

Anyways, I thought that was kind of interesting. And then this isn't related to anything, but I didn't know where else to put it. Microsoft announced yesterday that .NET Conf, which is a virtual three-day conference for .NET, is next week. So this is the 11th to the 13th. This is where they're going to launch .NET 10.

It's also the place where they launched .NET 9 the same time last year and .NET 8 the same time you were there. It's been several years in a row now. There's a sneak up on us. I'm not allowed to talk about it on .NET Rocks. One would speculate sometime in November.

Yes. And this year, at least, it's not at the same time as Ignite. That's nice. Yeah. I think it's 24-7 over those three days. Yeah, they run three days straight. Bunch of live stuff. Yeah, they do a day of... the team and interviews and things like that in a day of community stuff it's really

done it at comp is lovely and i've i've had the opportunity to do like a four-hour shift yeah you did a part of the live feed was it last year and i gotta tell you like the crew works really seriously yeah uh But we really do have a ton of fun with it because we have so much time, right? Right. There's also, like, look, they're going to hit all the core. Like, what's new in C Sharp? All this is going to happen. Right. Like, nobody knows. Nobody's surprised. You know what's coming.

Yeah, but there's also some fun stuff. Like, I'm sure Scott Hanselman is behind this, but there's going to be like a Commodore 64 session, right? Oh, without doubt. That's absolutely... Hanselman all the way. Yeah, 100%. You know it is. I can't wait to see whatever that is. Dude, he brought the Altair on the stage for the keynote at my show in Orlando. And it was hysterical.

And it was a real one, right? This is not an emulator in a box. Not the one I have behind me. Not like some loser might have. It was a mini. Some wannabe of some kind. But it has an FD card in it, so you know there's been some hardware improvement. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the new Commodore 64 is an HDMIO, too. Yeah, you know, as it should.

By the way, someone just posted in the show notes that the Louvre's video security password was reportedly Louvre. Louvre. Yeah. Make sure you do the capital L, though. Not even Louvre, like one, two, three. Three, yeah. It's Louvre. hey who could remember a password so good it's just a video camera oh my goodness anyway everyone's making a friend of france but my jeff friend jeff fritz runs.net comp he works incredibly hard and those yeah those guys are all

But it's a great party every year. And, uh, I always have a battle on, should I be home to be able to be part of that? If they, you know, stay on site with those guys or am I out in the world doing a thing? And my granddaughter won this year. So not upset. I'm also missing ignite. For the same reason. Yeah. That's okay. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, boy. That's funny. All right. Do you want to take a break and then talk about the Xbox? Of course. Okay.

Of course, of course, of course. In that case, you're watching Windows Weekly, Paul Thorat, little Pauly Thorat, and Mr. Richard Campbell from Toranga. Toranga, Toranga.

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Xbox time, little Paulie. Yeah, it's going to be a big month for Xbox. Not for hardware sales. Just kidding. But.

lots going on new call of duty game coming out in i think next is next week soon but that game black ops 7 and then five other games are going to be day one on game pass in november with an asterisk because you have to have ultimate or the pc game pass subscription to get that um and you will pay a pretty penny for ultimate unfortunately but um so black ops you know we'll see that's obviously a big one but you know sniper elite

Resistance is in there. Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris. And then Call of Duty. So Call of Duty is November... I mean, we know how expensive Ultra is, but... This is a bunch of day one games. Like if you had to buy them, does this pay for a year? It pays for, well, yeah. Oh, well, if you wanted all six of them, yeah. I mean, yes. I don't know who might want all six of those, but yes.

Yeah, so I might, let's say I wanted three of them. Me who takes on a game a year, maybe. Yeah, no. So if these games are $60, $70, depending on the title, and maybe you wanted three of them, so let's call it $60 is easy, $180. And then... that's half a year of ultra right there yeah yeah yeah so this all this math almost works except you know there's still the top tier games aren't shown there i think there's a

a mental block over a certain number. It's just, it's too big a number. It's too, it's more than any version of Netflix. It's more than any version. I wonder about the right, how many right gamers are there out there? Yeah.

I still believe they priced this so no one would do it. I think that's the point. It's like our costs are too great. Let's just not do this. We can't step it back, but we can make it so expensive. Just no one will do it. And if they do, then we get to collect a bunch of money. Yeah. I mean, so one thing I like, so I'm not, I don't pay for this. Right. So I threw some, I don't know how to explain this. I guess I technically do pay for it, but I have so many.

months prepaid like on my account like I've gone out as far as you can go like I think it's like three years or something like right I'm never gonna see this cost increase but if November 1st or December 1st whatever came and I had to pay 30 bucks for this thing

I would definitely go down some level. And the math for me would be like, look, okay, I'm going to buy Call of Duty. Okay, so that's 60, 70 bucks. And then it's like, well, what am I getting out of the rest of this? And like, I would probably go down pretty far. I don't have to face that question right now, but I wouldn't pay for it. It's always the relationship you have with gaming. How important are new titles to you? What are you doing?

Different people, different things. Fundamentally, unless... someone figures out game streaming in a way that actually makes sense for every type of game. Like you can actually play Call of Duty and the latency is fine. You may have to defy the laws of physics to make this happen, but yes. Yes. So assuming that happens. And by the way, I think that's what Sam Altman is promising.

it's possible. Wow. A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon you could just alter the physics. Exactly. Right. We're actually going around the sun in the opposite direction now. It's fine. I mean... then you could make the case like, okay, this is a little bit like Netflix or Spotify where you have access to giant collection. If you could have instantaneous or near instantaneous access to games, okay, you can make a case for it. But these are big games. Yeah.

These are so big. Well, at least the Call of Duty games where sometimes the just randomly I'll turn the computer on. It's like you have a 60, 80, 100, whatever gigabyte download. You're like, what? And it's not even the game. It's like, it's just an update to the game. Yeah. Well, and now we get the space on your device. Like, can you absorb this? Exactly. I do not want that. Like, so if this was like an instant on thing and it just worked.

yeah we could talk but that's one thing yeah but no so in this case my answer would be well i'm scaling this way down and i'm just gonna buy the game i want you know yeah that would be how i would do it yeah yeah all right so we also got the october update for the xbox for Xbox on October 30th. So it came a little late in the month, but big update for Xbox ally owners. So

They've made, I can't say I actually understand this, but I know ray tracing and then they have like graphics shaders or image, I guess it's image shaders. There's a new advanced shader delivery feature, which will preload the game shaders. during the download process so games now launch 10 times faster so this is actually i believe this is the issue i see in call of duty where some updates actually it has to sit there and regenerate the i think they're shaders

And it takes, sometimes it takes like 20, 30 minutes. Like, it takes a long time. Interesting. So this, and Black Ops 6 will be one of those games. Gears of War is reloaded. Forza Horizon 5. You know, yada, yada. So a bunch of Microsoft games. So...

um outer worlds 2 which just came out last week is going to be one of those games as well and then of course third-party developers can use this as well um it does and then outside of that's minor stuff like if you are on a console this uh this concept of game hubs that It's just like a full screen experience for an individual game with different things you can do in there. They've added a few new modules for developers in there. And then they've added more games to that.

game streaming collection, you get through Xbox Cloud Gaming, which, by the way, now spans all of the subscriptions, right? And now there are over a thousand cloud-enabled games in Game Pass. So that's pretty good. Yeah.

And then just two quick things from outside of Xbox. Nintendo announced their earnings. Nintendo is one of the companies I struggle with for earnings because of the yen thing. Again, not a money guy, but I feel like yen is like 20,000 to one or something. It's like this crazy math, you know? It's stupid. And I really struggle with it. But the thing I don't struggle with is these guys have now sold over 10 million Switch 2s. Yeah.

You've got to remember, this thing's $450, right? So it's more expensive than the previous. The most expensive Nintendo device ever made. You have a Switch, too, right, Richard? I don't. You don't have the new one. You have the old one. No, no. The girls have them.

I have the old one, but I'm trying to decide. It's hard for me not to buy the Switch 2. So, you know, they did some things well with this, right? Like obviously it plays most backward, you know, it's mostly backward compatible. It's smart. it's more expensive like that turned out being pretty smart um they haven't hit like unlike xbox they haven't hit that ceiling where people like oh i don't know like what's going on here um

This is going so well, they've raised their estimates now for both revenues and units for their fiscal year, which ends at the end of March. So previously they expected to sell 15 million switch twos. Now they expect to sell 19 million. And they still playing the old model of we make exclusive games for our platforms. Oh, my God. It reads like an alternative universe. Yeah. This is not my area, right? Like, I don't.

these are not my kind of games but you read like it's like mario kart world king kong bonanza like bananas and you know and you're like yeah okay whatever but you know like that mario kart world that thing sold almost 10 million copies all by itself I mean, these things are going gangbusters. Yeah. So they're doing great. I guess I think the rest of the console market, like all these guys have to look over there and go, what are we doing so wrong? I know.

Well, look, this is something other companies can't replicate. They're sort of the apple of the space in the sense that they use the exact words. Yeah, they have a Disney like. persona of characters that are kind of cartoony and long, you know, 40 plus years. There is no call of duty on the switch. No, I mean, it should be, and there probably will be first person shooters. So, I mean, but they're always cartoony. Oh, really? Okay.

Well, Xbox has talked about bringing Call of Duty to the Switch, although you'll notice it has not happened. No, you've got to get past Nintendo's requirements on that one. Good luck. And I would be disappointed if they did it. I could see it at the end. It's been part of their distinction.

Call of Duty has been insuredified this year. And I want to be super clear about what that means. Because this isn't like, I just don't like where it's going. Like, I don't like that I play the same game every year. No, it's not that. I don't mean that. Like, that's a fact too. But like, that's not insuredification. It's just, you know, they stuck to a...

something that works. No, the insertification bit is they let you buy these skins so you can run around like Beavis and Butthead or Chucky from those stupid horror movies in the 1980s and they say things in those characters' voices.

Well, you're playing the game. So you're playing this military shooter and there's this giant cartoon head going behind the hedgerow or whatever. And you're like, I guess they're going to shoot that thing in the head. Look at that. It's like a balloon. But the thing is, like, I don't want to see that junk. But these are in-app purchases, essentially, right? So Seth Rogen, who's like this fat comedian actor guy, is one of the characters you can be.

He's running around going, that wasn't in my contract. Like, what? So the thing is, it's funny, just as you were saying, like other companies can't replicate, et cetera, et cetera. The thing that occurred to me was some of the weirdness of these, I don't know what you call them, skins or whatever you're buying, is that people would get these guns where when you shoot them, sometimes it will turn into a fire hydrant or like a...

It's stupid. It's like this, it's nothing to do with military shooter. Like it's just dumb stuff. Like flowers will cascade out of the explosion. And I was like, Actually, maybe that helps them get on Nintendo, right? We'll turn this into a fun game. Like when I was younger and I would play Doom, like the original Doom on my friend's computer, and this little kid would sit in his diapers on my lap.

And he would be like, bad guy, fall down, bad guy, fall down. He had no idea what was going on, right? And I was like, yeah, that's the Nintendo version of this game. It's like, I'm not killing him, demon. We're just knocking him over. It's fun, you know? And I don't know, maybe, I don't know.

That sounds like a terrible idea, but maybe. And then I don't follow the PlayStation market too, too well, other than the fact that I know they're killing Xbox, the bastards. But... They have their own, you know, online services and subscription services and game streaming, right? Cloud streaming.

And I believe to date, the only way that you could stream a PlayStation 5 game would be from your console to one of those little, it's like a handheld, but it's really just, you know, like a remote connection to the PlayStation. Yeah, so they just enabled actual streaming from the cloud. Mm-hmm.

You have to be a PlayStation Plus premium subscriber, which its name suggests is not the $5 a month one. You have to have that handheld thing, which is ridiculous. It's the PlayStation Portal remote player.

And you have to have bought the game, right? Actually, am I right about that? Actually, I'm sorry, that might not be true. That part I'm not sure of, because again, I don't really care. But the point is, they're enabling actual cloud streaming. So you're not streaming it from an install on your PlayStation. You're not streaming it from the cloud. But you're required to have the PlayStation. And it is in the processing lube. Probably, yeah.

Yeah, so it's like a $200 device that's essentially a screen jammed inside of a hand controller. And then, yeah, you need a high-speed connection, of course. But, okay. I mean, it's interesting. yeah you would have 50 to 50 megabit connection in your own over wi-fi good luck with that yeah all right yeah yeah yeah yeah anyway Is this the first week I haven't had any overtly horrible news about Xbox? I think it is.

It's been a while. It's been a tough year. Sometimes when you're circling the drain, you get out on the outer lip for a while. It's like you're failing. You just get stuck on the side and everything flushes down and you're clinging on there like, I'm going to be okay. Don't wait for the flusher.

Somebody might put the plug back in. I don't know. There's ways back. The Navy hood comes in. She's like 30% margins. Yeah. We're on the high, we're on the high edge of the circle there. Let me show you. Let's take a break. We're going to get to the back of the book in just a little bit. I did want to show you.

Oh, is this that thing? Is this that E meter or what do you call it? It's the new Aura frame. Yeah, our sponsor. I love this. I love the way I wanted to see one. They just got a rave review, by the way. So this is, yes, this is the Aura. yeah e-ink frame i'd i really like it so let me tell you yeah this is going to be the where this market needs to be so it would here's the idea is basically this looks like uh

a framed photo, a print on your wall, right? It's kind of hard to tell here because the lights are very bright and stuff. But it's not. The photo changes. I have it set, and I think this is what I would recommend to change overnight.

So that every morning I get up and there's a new photo. This is the Aura Inc. You know Aura. I mean, Aura is consistently named as the best digital photo frames out there. But this is a new thing that's... kind of not digital in a way it's they're all new cordless notice like the magicians there's no wires color e-paper frame yeah no it looks awesome like it

yeah i mean it's not um it doesn't look like an lcd but i think that's kind of the point that's literally the point yeah yeah it's but it's yeah they're super smart what they did there's also a built-in very subtle uh light on it so uh i mean it's it's hard to describe you got to see it in person or maybe i'll show it to you like this it's their first ever i can by the way they have buttons on the top that you can change the image i'll change the image just to put some

Different. It looks great, by the way, with, I take a lot of monochrome images, so it looks great with black and white. Meet Ink, Mora's first ever cordless color. e-paper frame featuring a sleek 0.6 inch profile and a softly lit 13.3 inch display ink feels like a print it functions like a digital frame and perhaps most importantly, lives completely untethered by cords. With a rechargeable battery that lasts up to three months on a single charge, unlimited storage,

and the ability to invite others to add photos via the Aura Frames app. It's the cordless wall-hanging frame you've been waiting for. So I've changed it now, and there's Lisa and her son, Michael. you can change it every every other hour if you want but i the whole point of this is it's calm it and you know it's also what people have been asking for no cords so a lot if you have a digital frame the lcd ones have to be plugged in right which means you've got a wire when you hang it on the wall

You got a wire. This has a rechargeable battery. I have not charged it since I got it weeks ago. They say it lasts up to three months on a single charge. That will depend on how you change the image. It's another reason I just change it overnight. It does have unlimited storage.

The ability to invite others to add photos via the Aura Frames app. This is the cordless wall hanging frame you've been waiting for. And I love the Aura app. That's one of the reasons Aura is so popular. The app is very... clean very easy to use and it makes it really easy for instance sending one to my mom she's in you know the nursing home and because she's got alzheimer's the modern what's going on today is hard for her to kind of grasp but when i

put the old pictures so we have all the old family slides there's more than a thousand of them and we used to have slideshows you know once a year you'd get out the we had the the kodak carousel and you go You have to put the screen up. And it was such a pain. You hardly ever did it. I digitized all the slides. My sister did, actually. And it's in her frame. So now, and because it's the old days, she knows.

More than I do. Every single person, when it's taken, what's the details. So it's really good for her. She loves it. And she doesn't even know it's a digital frame. She just thinks, well, the picture somehow, the elves come in and change the picture. This is a breakthrough in e-paper technology. The ink, when I say ink, I'm talking about the Aura ink frame, transforms millions of tiny ink capsules into your favorite photos. It's kind of vintage.

tones, you know. It's not an LCD. It's not like burning your retinas. It looks like a print. And by the way, they've really put some thought into the design. It's got a graphite-inspired bezel. The mat is paper-textured. The glossy glass front, it makes it look like a piece of decor, not like a digital device. And look how thin it is. It hangs flat on the wall. It's just like this is a picture hanging on your wall.

Plus, the app allows unlimited free photos. You just download the Aura app, you connect it to Wi-Fi. It is a great gift for anyone who appreciates innovative design, cutting-edge technology, or who doesn't and doesn't want technology on their wall. Just once. A photo frame. Here's a picture. This is, I think, the Quebec...

or Montreal. I was going to say Montreal, Notre Dame. Yeah, it's the Notre Dame. I literally saw that. I think that's Notre Dame in Montreal. Yeah. It's so beautiful. And what, so you can, like I said, you can change it manually. It's got the buttons on the top. The app lets you change it up to every other hour, I think, 12 times a day. But my recommendation is I would just do it overnight. So you don't even see the change. It just happens.

This is also, there's so many little design things. This is, so you can hang it on the wall, you can hang it portrait or landscape, but they also, it comes with this stand and it's just little thoughtful things like this. It's magnetic. so it just it goes in and it stays in it's just a little thing and it can go on this side or it can go on this side so you get you know you could choose what you want um

I just, everything about this, they've really thought about it, put some energy into it. Look at that. I mean, it's just great. I was literally just looking at this. Highly recommended for the holidays. I think it'd be a great gift for yourself.

Lisa, I think we're going to put them in the bedroom. We're going to buy a lot of them. Sleek, subtle, and stunning ink blends the warmth of a printed photo with the versatility of an e-paper frame. No cords, no fuss, just your memories. Beautifully displayed. wherever you want them. Head to auraframes.com slash ink to see for yourself. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. That's auraframes.com slash ink. Imagine if you had like a piece of paper that you could change daily.

and hang on it's like that it's a new print every day auraframes.com we thank aura so much for their support i think i want to tie that into my home assistant and have pictures follow me around the house Bill Gates did that, remember? I was literally going to say that was the Bill Gates thing, yeah. But see, this is the thing. That was a TV screen.

right yeah and so it's not it looks it's it's lit from within it's emitive yeah it's emitive as opposed to reflective this is reflective it's just it's a aesthetically different thing. There's a place for that too. I look at screens all day. That's the thing. I don't want more screens on my wall. Because you can't see it. If you're at an angle, it doesn't look... You can't see it. I'll put it back on the... On the Nixie clock. Hmm. I like this. It's very pretty. Very happy.

All right, let's start our back of the book segment with your tip of the week, Mr. Yeah, I finally reined it in and got my book review of Insertification by Curry Doctorow out. I don't know what to say. You've been writing this. You said 6,000 words. I have so much more. Yeah, this is going to go down. This is going to be a deep dive for me. I don't know if I wrote this in a reviewer. No, it's something I haven't written yet.

uh or published yet but um i did not enter this year intending to be radicalized against big tech but you know between the event i just referenced at the beginning of the year with youtube and all this stuff that's been going on this year it's like i I just can't, I can't take it anymore. Like I, I don't know. So anyway, he's got the right idea. If there's a criticism of the book, there's not a lot you can do as an individual.

If I could speak to this guy, if I could ever interview him, I wouldn't really talk about it in certification. I would like to talk to him about like, what do you use? What's the software you use? What do you, you know? I'm kind of curious. I'm sure it's Paul. I can tell you a little bit. He has a framework laptop running Linux. Of course he does. He's always run Linux. He used to use Lenovo. He now likes the frameworks.

I'm sure he uses Libra office. I haven't asked him that, but I'm sure he uses Libra office. Yeah. I'm just, you know, I think this is something like, I think as individuals, look, the one, one of the, one of the many cases he makes is that, you know, we're all we all know these phrases like if you don't pay for the product you are the product but she correctly says it's complete nonsense you're the product regardless um it's true yeah it's you know apple being the great example there but the

He also talks about this notion of like, I'm going to vote with my wallet. He's like, yeah, no, you're going to unpack the $180 trillion company. But from my perspective, it's like, okay, but I'm not, look. I'm not going to hurt Microsoft or Apple or Google or whatever. I'm not going to hurt them by leaving. But, you know, I think we all need to kind of selfishly do the right thing for ourselves.

I think the more you learn about these companies, and he deep dives on like, you know, Meta, Apple, Amazon, I think Google, I think the Google ads, it's gross. You know, it's just, it's terrible. And it's way worse than maybe you think it is. So anyway, I have a lot more. There'll be a lot more coming from this kind of thing. But the book is fantastic, of course. He's a great writer and he's smart. He's on the right side of history and all that stuff.

well and arguably other with the exception of the recent ai insanity the american consumer collectively is the largest economic force that exists right yeah I would bet that Corey would say, you know, and we get him on all the time. He's on Twitter and we love having him on. I would bet that he'd say to your question, it's impossible not to be.

I mean, I've tried, everybody's tried to unmire themselves from Amazon and Google. Right. So in one of the many interviews I've watched with him, he made the case like, he said, look, I still use Twitter. I, he says, there's no service. I hate more than Twitter, but I still use it. Right. And that's true for me as well. And it's like, why? Because that's where everyone is. And that's, you know, I, you're stuck. I mean, what are you going to do?

I'm not going to bite my nose off to spite my face. It's honorable to be a vegan, but it's not necessarily doable. As my daughter, who was once vegetarian, said... I just missed the taste of meat. You know, like I feel bad for the baby animals. That hasn't changed. They're delicious. But they're so good. Well. In this case, it's You Missed the Taste of Inshitification. Oh, boy. Let's work on that. We're going to workshop that idea. Yeah. Anyway, it's a great book.

Yeah. And it's arguably the years are over. It's probably the best business, like a tech industry book of the year. Huge attention. And there's some great books out there. There's a book about the Epic Google thing and other. related things, but mostly up at Google and then of course the Facebook book, the careless people, which I think is, uh, I feel the only reason I haven't read it yet is I feel like I've.

been with cory as he has been over 20 years yeah you know as he's been producing this thesis i mean i've heard it because so he's been on our show since the very beginning you know so before he came up with this term he was already talking about

of stuff but he didn't have a good quippy way to describe it right so he would say something like what was the term he had for book capitalism um uh choke point capitalism yeah and it's like what does that mean you know like but once he landed on this term it was like bam yeah because as soon as you hear it you're like oh yeah i see that all the time yeah um

And right up front, he's like, look, because everyone gets this wrong. They're like, I don't like this thing, so I'm going to say it's insuredified. And he's like, yeah, that's not what it is. But he's like, I also realize this is a tidal wave.

These people using it incorrectly are actually going to help me get the message out. Yeah. You may have started the way, but you don't own it once it rides. No, that's really true. Yeah. He completely understands that. And same thing happened with vibe coding, right? Like now I'm crazy. You've been backing away. I love. So by the way, so vibe,

Vibecoding, which started as not what everyone said it was. That guy who was a developer was basically like, look, you're a professional developer. This is a cool way to battle through stuff. And it was like, Vibecoding. So then... Three months goes, this is not what he said. Everyone got it wrong. Three, four months later, it's like, I swear to God, I saw this headline. Our industry, oh, I hate it so much. It said, oh, it makes me crazy.

It said, even the inventor of Vibe Coding thinks it's dead. And it's like, he never said it was what you... Anyway. Yep, we're terrible and we're all part of the problem. Yeah, you may have made a way, but it's roshing over you too. Yes, exactly. None of us are clean.

in the sense that I just referenced this January event from YouTube and, you know, I got a couple of NASAs and I'm using, you know, changing the things I use, et cetera, et cetera. One of the, one of the things I came onto was this notion of little tech, which is not a, like a term i invented obviously i although i i feel like i kind of came up with it independently but it's it's been out there it's not i did not invent it

And so some months ago, I wrote an article just called Little Tech. And I was like, all right, so these are the companies or maybe the products or services that I feel don't just fall into this category, but are worth... considering right and one of them was affinity because at the time infinity had three separate apps photos designer and publisher

I had gotten I only need photos. I use it instead of Photoshop. So when you think about like a certification and Photoshop, everyone is probably familiar with the fact that the CC apps, including Photoshop CC. are things you can no longer buy. You have to rent them at great cost. And, you know, okay, I disagree with that, but I feel like maybe you have both or whatever, but okay, this is their business model. It seems to be working out for them. I'm fine.

But they also always had or have long had for probably 20 years Photoshop and Premiere elements. And those were perpetual. Microsoft would call them perpetual license products where you would buy it for 100 bucks a piece or maybe get both for 140 or whatever. And you could just use it forever, essentially. If you read that EULA, man, it's still just a license to use. Ownership is a hard concept. It's still software with a EULA, of course. And they had restrictions built in, like you...

had to deauthorize it on a PC before you could put it on another one. Like maybe you could install it on up to two or three PCs and then you had a whatever. But the last two years, they have switched explicitly to a three-year license. That's it. So I'm sorry, but you're licensing this. You just paid for a subscription for three years. So if you paid $100 for Photoshop Elements, that means you're paying $33 a year.

And then you get to go buy it again in three years. That's a subscription. I'm sorry. Sign up to create a plot at that point. Yeah, you can call it whatever you want to call it, but you're paying for a subscription. Oh, Adobe. Right. So Affinity, I like them because you paid for it and you could use it forever, whatever. So when the V2 apps came out, they had a huge sale a couple of years ago, whatever it was. I got all three. They work on Mac, Windows and iPad, actually, which is unbelievable.

And then about a month, month and a half ago, Affinity went dark. I should add, sorry, Canva acquired Affinity earlier this year, I believe. And one of the big promises was like, guys, we're not going to subscription. Don't worry. We're going to keep it the way it is. No problems. But early, I don't know, late September maybe, early October, I don't remember. But you couldn't go download these apps easily anymore. Like if you were a new customer, you couldn't get them.

they've just disappeared. And I noticed, when WinGet came up earlier, I did these WinGet-based bulk installs. The latest laptop that I put together, Affinity was never installed. It's out of the Microsoft store. It was gone. And I'm like, oh, what's going on here? I'm like, what is this? And they had a message on their website like, big thing happening. Wait, you know, whatever day. Stand by. You'll be so excited.

Yep. And then last we came and it was the day. And what they announced was they now have one app called Affinity. It's all three of the apps in one thing. It's Windows, Mac, and we'll be on iPad soon. And it's just free. We're just giving it away for free. There's no catch. Now, I'm sorry. This is a good news story. I'm confused. Yeah, it is a good news story. It's like this is like you're kidding me. It just went free like.

sometime in the past year they did a thing where like uh you could get all three of the apps v2 versions and for free and use them for i don't know six six months nine months i don't remember now it's just free And I'm like, okay, come on. There's a catch, right? Like, it's a catch. And there is a catch in a sense. Like, they have AI features that you would need a Canvas subscription to access. But all of the core features, the features I use, anyway, are all there. And it's like...

Huh. Like, huh. So this was one of those little tech companies that I kind of held up as like notions in there. And I don't remember the full list, but like, you know, you. this is like a thing. Like if you want like an alternative to dot, dot, dot, you could pick dot, dot, dot, you know, and infinity is like, if you want an alternative to Photoshop, there it is. But now, you know, affinity, the full suite, and now it's just one app is like, um, I don't even remember what's the,

What's the Adobe page publisher app called? I don't even remember. Page maker. No. No. Publisher. Publisher. I don't remember, but... Anyway, it's got all this. I wish they would do a video editing app. They would solve all my problems. Well, you got DaVinci Resolve, which is free, right? Yeah, but it's like a battleship. I don't want to learn how to fly a plane. I just want to put a...

you know, transition in there. Um, anyway, there are like clip champ is free too. But anyway, this is just worth looking at. I would, uh, yeah, I would take a look. It's free. It's free. Did we say it's free? Apparently it's free. It's free. It was confusing. For a while, it was very confusing. It's not free as in beer. It's like free as in it doesn't cost anything. Right. It's just, you know, plain English it. So, yeah, definitely check it out. Hey, kids.

Know what time it is? What time is it? It's time for Run As Radio. Yay. Episode 1009. Coincidentally, Aria Hansen. I recorded a few weeks ago, but she was... in the storyline up this week already talking about managing updates because that's aria's job she works very hard in the update space i do not envy the lady for some of the things she has to contend with and we've talked year over year about the evolution of things like Windows Update Services and Windows.

business updates like sysadmins need to manage the updates of their machines differently for consumer and that's a challenge and there's been generally a move to how do we get rid of managing updates on the local network with more folks working in cloud maybe you're using Intune maybe you're not because Intune is really more of a mobile device management product too so that consolidation is finally coming together around a product called

auto patch which even aria said immediately listen we have a tough time with names but tape down what is auto patch actually but the modernization of the windows updating tools for administrators who want to manage how updates roll out into their organization, ways to cache updates so you're not burying all your bandwidth, picking and choosing what you're going to apply.

And then we get into a conversation about separating security updates from feature updates, that kind of thing. Again, I was very much into the conversation we had earlier today.

And, you know, they're on a path. And Ari is the first to tell you like, okay, we've got this out there. Now we're taking feedback. You know, just remember WSUS, which a lot of people depend on is... being shut down over time like never going to take it away per se but they are going to stop working on it and it's a bit by bit we do need to think through what our modernization strategy looks like and there's not one answer and the update landscape's also changing like part of this

is we're now acknowledging that unpatched servers represent a larger risk security-wise than the possibility of a patch causing problems to systems. So how do you streamline this? This actually has got us into a conversation about this whole... Windows roadmap idea that Microsoft's separately from the Insider program working on road mapping out when features are going to appear in Windows so that you can decide through Auto Patch.

ahead of them being deployed, whether you're going to have them on your machines or not. So yeah, just watch the, stay tuned. This is a moving target. I'll be checking in with ARIA again, because. it is a challenging time to be managing updates and they're trying to modernize the tooling on all of this and this is the next wave yeah all right all right now let's talk uh whiskey So this is another one of the, a couple of weeks ago, I was with my friends in Norway drinking very rare whiskeys.

i go back and forth on how much i should talk about these things in some respects because often and this is certainly the case i'm about to tell you about a whiskey you cannot buy because there was only 238 bottles of it made in the first looking place One of the reasons I brought it up at all is it was a distillery I had not ever interacted with before, which is Glen Katem.

And yet Glencatum is a very old distillery. The Gaelic interpretation of Glencatum is the Glen of the Wild Goose. And this is in the eastern highlands. So normally we talk about the highlands as the area outside of Spey.

in the higher mountain ranges in the northern part of scotland but the highlands is kind of a catch-all for everything in the north with the exception of Speyside and remember Speyside was actually a declared region late like they came up with that term to separate from the rest of the highlands because there was such a concentration of distilleries on the Spey River. in the area around Dufton and so forth. And the highlands even stretch up north of Inverness with distilleries like Dalmore.

you know this is kind of the broadest name region so what we're talking east side here the eastern highland so if you drive out of edinburgh on the a90 going north you're going to get up to the Burg of Brecon, which is on the river Esk. And Brecon's been a town for 900 years. This is a medieval town. It's been a long time. It had a cathedral while the UK was still Catholic. That's how old we're talking about.

And like many stories of whiskey in this part of the world, its story begins in 1823 because that's when the excise tax laws come into place. And it's illegal to have a distillery unless you comply with the excise tax law. So oddly enough, this is...

distillery starts in 1823, although you'll also find some places where it starts in 1825. But anyway, the beginning of, one would argue, the modern whiskey movement when it's it's going through regulation rules and the tax ban is going to come for you and so forth george cooper founded it lost control within a couple of years it was taken over by an operator called david scott who was trying to tune it up to get it sold but after a decade of trying in 1837

He is unsuccessful shuts the place down and it takes another 15 years before alexander milne thompson takes it over and uh operates it properly successful distillery forms a corporation called the glen kadham distillery corporation and it runs very well

until it is acquired in 1891 by Gilmer Thompson. This is part of the blending group out of Glasgow that makes an addition called Royal Blend. And Kadem had... a single single malt through all that but mostly we're selling their production to blenders it's a two still operation it's not a big place they were making you know a reasonable amount of whiskey but mostly a local single malt and largely being sold to blends, including things like Bally's or Valentines.

In 1954, so fast forward through World War I, the shutdowns around Prohibition, World War II, Hiram Walker, the Canadian company, while on there, we have lots of money, let's go buy things, Brent. bought both Glencadum and Strassila. and also modernized facility, although they don't expand it. They replace their old stills, which are now running over 100 years old, with equivalent design stills in the 1950s.

And they formalized a licensing deal with Valentin and Sons to do almost entirely blending. Hiram Walker also being a big blender, not big on the single malts. Now Hiram Walker will get acquired in the 1980s to Allied Alliance, which will then become. allied Damiq through this array of mergers we've talked about over and over again in the 80s.

That doesn't save them. Once again, by 2000, they are mothballed. Although mothball being they don't dismantle the place at all. They literally clean it, shut it down, cool it off, clean it out.

and leave it off for a few years until a local organization, Angus Dundee, who also owns Tom & Tool, turns it back on again within a couple of years it's in 2003 and they start making blended and vatted malts again all no no single malts not for a couple of years and they bring back the 15 which was the original single malt that had been made for years there and in 2000 2008 they rebranded trying to do a larger edition but now they make a full range of single malts from a 10 up to a 21.

their actual process they are not growing their own grain because that's essentially impossible where they are but they do do their own grinding so they hill still have a proteus mill from the early 1800s when i told the story about uh milling and how what happens when you make too good

of a product that you put yourself out of business with only so many customers. Proteus was one of the two, along with the Bobby mill. These mills are a hundred plus years old. This one happens to be painted purple. They are completely indestructible with proper maintenance and yeah. That thing's original equipment still running fine.

Why is he throwing whiskey on it is my question. I don't know. It's a ritual. They don't need it anymore. He's going to drink a little bit and then throw it in there. It's an offering to the gods. The whiskey gods. This is Is this the oldest continuously running whiskey still? Yeah, I don't think any of that's true because they've had several shutdowns over the years. Oh, okay. So they haven't always, but you know what they didn't have? They've never been burned to the ground.

Yeah. Like most distilleries, especially through the early era. Yeah. Yeah. When you were using direct fire. And you were literally heating up those stills with fire while also making alcoholic fumes. Pretty risky business, which is why you notice if you take a tour of the still facilities, they tend to be pretty open air.

they've got vents along the roofs and so forth that was all to allow those alcoholic papers to dissipate and if there was an explosion for it to not actually blow the building apart In the 1970s, of course, we switch all that over to steam. So we take the fire out of the building, build boilers and pump the steam into the stills. And one can argue that changes the flavor a little bit, but it definitely reduces the risk of explosion and fire.

feature so you know these buildings look really smoky like they've been charged well because they for you know these are old this 200 years old yeah when you're also talking about um this is where coal began right yeah yeah yeah so it's coal country yeah yeah so they so the earliest coal burning happens here also i would also say that alcoholic fumes tend to grow

a black mold and so a lot of buildings that have had alcohol fumes in them for a long time have a lot of texture black on it and it's a byproduct of that uh it can get really extreme in certain parts of the world i've toured distilleries where even the trees are covered in that black It's the byproducts of alcohol exposure. But I never forget when I'm walking through buildings that are 300 years old. Yeah, look at this.

this is a place that used to burn wood because that's all there was then burned coal the savior of the forest at the time and you know then was electrified got indoor plumbing at some point like all of those things these buildings were there before any of that They all look like they're slightly tilted as well. Nothing is straight. And even if you built it straight in the first place, the land does move in a century model.

So production wise, this is a million liter operation. So traditional wooden mash tons, six stainless steel washbacks at 28,000 liters. That would be average size. 48-hour fermentation, which is remarkably short. You know, 72s and 140s, not that strange. This is a quick one.

They run on exactly two stills. They have always run two stills, although they have been replaced. 14,000 liters each would be very ordinary size. Both the wash and spirit still, same size. They haven't done that optimization. What is distinct about these stills? They are classic onions. is they have an upward line arm.

So where if you look up your still goes through the gooseneck and then there's an arm that reaches over to the condenser. And that angle of that arm is the subject of a lot of debate. And many stills, that line arm is a downward turn. So the alcohol. makes it to the top, cools on to the copper, and then falls down the line arm into the condenser.

in this case it's an upward 15 degree angle which means if you can't stay warm enough to actually carry right to the condenser you reflux you go back down into the pot and the argument there is this makes a lighter smoother

whiskey again very subjective but these designs of stills are signature elements for every distillery you ever go to especially scottish ones and so we point out the lyon as a distinctive feature of what means glencatum glencatum warehousing is very typical wood floor dunnage with racked

Three High, you've seen pictures of it in the rotation there. It's exactly what you think. Why have you never heard of this distillery? Yeah, this looks pretty cool. Because for a couple of hundred years, this place has sold blends. That's what they do. The vast majority of this product goes into Valentines and Stewart cream. Oh, interesting. And that's which, by the way, also now.

uh brands that are owned by angus dundee so they've sort of pulled those things together angus and he makes a bunch of other whiskeys as well mostly peated this is their non-peated line and glen katum uses no peat whatsoever no pete it's the eastern highlands you know this is not where you would use pete but they do sherry casks so they yeah mostly bourbon but they do some sherry finishes uh no chill filtration no coloring they have never had a visitor center until now

In just the past couple of years, as they've decided to switch to being more of a branded whiskey slowly, they are finally building a visitor center. And it's part about the terrain there. This is not the busy part of Scotland. This is, you know, we have.

reached aberdeen yet and generally that northeast corner aberdeen going up that's oil country like that's where all the oil rigs and stuff stayed from it's not where tourists go so i mean i wish them well and i will come to this visitor center if i have an opportunity to i want to take a look at it because it's an interesting place i've only been to a couple of distilleries over there in the past they're rare eastern highlands is not the place where a lot of people go now

I've told you this great story about this whiskey while not drinking any of the traditional additions. I encountered this at a party with some serious whiskey drinkers, and one of them brought... This custom bottling, this is from the distillery brand, which makes a line called rather unique. And so, and broadly on the label is the 1999, which is the year that it was distilled and barreled into bourbon casks, single barrel. And it was bottled in 2022. So it's a 22 year old.

whiskey there are exactly 238 bottles of it of which well that's why it's so unique holy cow When it was available for retail, which was a number of years ago, it was about $150 for this bottle. But you have to get it at the time. They sell out rather rapidly. And if you were to try to buy, I went looking for an auction edition of this model and there are none. And that's, I would argue.

because it's not that famous in addition that anyone would put it to auction. You either knew what you were buying and you're keeping it or you didn't and you just drank it. And that being said. it's a 22 year old bourbon age non-peated whiskey it's lovely i bet beautiful just a gorgeous there's a reason they picked this barrel like

The guys who did the bottling went to the barrel house and they sampled a bunch of barrels. And what's in this bottle is exactly what was in this barrel. They did nothing to it. They put it out, cash strength at 53%. It's the, I would argue in many ways, one of the most honest representations of whiskey you possibly imagine. A very educated whiskey person walked through this barrel room probably many hours and picked the one cask he liked the most that he could buy.

at a reasonable price from Glen Cato and made a bottling from it. That's what this is. Very nice. you don't have any right now though i do not i want to go to this party not my bodies that would be a fun party to go does everybody who goes to these parties bring another unique bottle of typically and it's also What a party. You've also had to have been drinking whiskey long enough for you to even know what you're tasting. Yeah.

Right. Same with that red breast, those special editions. That is not going to be the title, Paul. Don't get your hopes up. Can we talk about this one? I don't usually care too much. I was trying to do it.

you were drinking okay yeah never mind no that's so you so how often do you go to these whiskey parties because that sounds like fun there it's one of those things where there's a gathering of folks that are all pretty serious about whiskey yeah and you've been waiting as what happened at that party is friends had been sitting on bottles they wanted me to try with yeah it's like phone to own they're holding on to this that zero day bottle yeah special occasion yeah and in that sense like i

i always debate whether to do this on the show because it's not a product you're going to get you can't get it like it isn't no no but i think it's great it's a great story no do do those yeah and maybe it's a contrast right it's just a contrast of Because I also like, you know, I got back to New Zealand. I'm back here again. You know one of the bottles I finished last night? The Jura 10 that I picked up to talk about Jura when I was here last time in April.

And I got the end of that bottle. You left it there last time. I did. You haven't been schlepping it around all year. I do not fly with open bottles of whiskey. Ask me why. That's not a thing you should ever, ever, ever do. if i open it we're gonna finish it or i'm gonna leave it in place one or the other and so yeah we we knocked that out but i you know i'm trying my best like believe me i have a list of every single open distillery in scotland we're

20% through. We're not going to run out of anything. nice anytime soon much less get into different editions like i mentioned red breast 12 when we were talking about irish whiskey sort of obliquely without really getting into the distillery and now i've talked about one of the dream casks like that's unfair there's many other editions

just in red breast alone. Yeah. I, I, you know, people tell me, well, how long can you do this thing for? And I'm like, look, it's not going to run out of things to drink. Like that's not an issue. Yeah. And if there is, we'll just have another whiskey party and people will bring some good stuff. Yeah.

And I think it's become part of the fun because of this show. Good. They're trying to show me something we've never had before. Yeah. There's lots. You've established yourself. Yeah. Half a dozen different whiskeys that night. I don't think I'm going to talk about them all.

That I'd never tried before. Nice. Nice. Richard Campbell, RunIsRadio.com, where you'll find not only RunIsRadio, but .net rocks. That fabulous show he does with Carl Franklin. So you're going to be there for a month. I'm so jealous. Yeah. So probably be somewhere in New Zealand next week. I think we're thinking about going up further north into the more tropical area. And then the week after that, we'll be in Australia. We're going to do a few days. Oh, fun.

all right i hope it looks as beautiful as this ocean view it's gorgeous out here in snow we went down to the mountain we're on the beach yesterday with the baby the baby got her feet dipped in the south pacific so actually i think that's mendocino yeah Yeah, California's got an epic coastline. It's all Pacific Ocean. Yep. That's right. We share an ocean. We do. You're on the other side, but we share an ocean. Paul Thorat.

He is nowhere near an ocean. He's in the middle of the highlands of Mexico, Mexico City. And you'll find him easily enough on the internet at thurot.com, T-H-U-R-R-O double good.com. Become a premium member. for all the great extra stuff, but it's a site you must visit every day anyway for all the latest Windows and Microsoft news. His books are at leanpub.com, including Windows Everywhere, The History of...

Windows through its frameworks. Of course, the field guide to Windows 11. And soon to come, we're going to do a history of Windows through its code names. Maybe. I don't know. Huh. Maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe not. Every Wednesday, Paul and Richard and I get together to do Windows Weekly. You can join us. 11 a.m pacific 2 p.m eastern 1900 utc watch us live on youtube twitch x.com facebook linkedin or kick if you're in the club of course you can watch us in the discord

After the fact, on-demand versions of the show available at the website, twit.tv slash www. We have audio and video. Get the video because it includes the audio at no extra cost. It's a better value. But then you have to look at us. It's also a greater download. So, you know, it's your decision. Can I buy the video without the audio? Because maybe I just want to see it. Oh, wouldn't that be good? I don't know. I don't think we make that available. We'll have to work on that.

Probably not. There's also a YouTube channel. You could just turn off your screen and then you'd get the audio without the video. The YouTube channel is good for sharing clips. We also have made a series of clips of the whiskey segments. You know, we don't have them all up to date, but Kevin is, you know, always adding more. You could just go to, what is it? Something weird from my closet.com. Yeah. Although I don't think that link's currently working. YouTube got jumpy about the.

HTTP to HTTPS conversions. They didn't like that, huh? Okay. Well, just go to twit.tv slash Windows Weekly, I think, and you'll find it. Or twit. I'm sorry, youtube.com. Well, actually, twit.tv slash... Windows Weekly, for sure, because there's a link to the YouTube. I think it's WW, I think. WW, you're right. On Twitter, and then at Windows Weekly at YouTube. At Windows Weekly, okay. YouTube.com slash at Windows Weekly. I think you're right.

I don't know if there's a dash or not. You'll figure it out because you're smart because you listen to a great show all about Windows. We will see you right here next week. Don't forget to subscribe. That's the best way to get it, by the way, in your favorite podcast player. And if you do subscribe to the audio or the video, leave us a great review. Tell the world what a wonderful show you're missing. They're missing. You're not missing it.

Thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. Enjoy your trip to New Zealand. Paul, enjoy your tacos. We're going to Oaxaca this weekend. Oh, lovely. They already did their Day of the Dead, but Oaxaca is great. Well, that's why we waited. It was too expensive and busy. We had a great time. A few years ago for the Day of the Dead. And the cheese and the coffee and the chocolate. They grow their own chocolate in the highlands up there. It's amazing.

You have really good chocolate drinks. It's kind of different. Yeah, and the pulque. We had fun dancing. Slightly inebriated with pulque. You'd have to be to pulque and dancing. Oh, it's so much fun. It was the middle of the day, but we had a great time. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. Thank you, you winners. We will see you next time, you dozers too. on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.