Ask Paul: July 20 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This week’s edition of Ask Paul features another great set of questions from readers.

Battery tests

Chris_Kez asks:

For battery testing I think you’ve said that you use video playback, similar in spirit to what Microsoft is doing, but once you’ve traveled with a device for some period of time you’ll report back on your real world impressions. I’ve often wondered… why wait until you travel? Could you just use the device at home to do your usual things but keep it unplugged? While the tasks and workload may vary a little from day to day, doing this for a few days should give a good picture of exactly how long you can go until you hit the <5% mark, and you can do it without fear of losing anything or being stuck out in the wild without power.

This is something I’ve thought about. The current laptop I’m testing, the ThinkPad X1 Yoga, is coming along on the three-week home swap trip, and I was thinking that it could be an interesting real-world test of battery life.

But as for “why,” I guess it’s just that I’m a fan of consistency. Artificial battery life tests are, well, artificial. But at least they are directly comparable.

What I Use

SeattleMike asks:

Paul, in the past I’ve really enjoyed your “What I Use” articles. With your upcoming European trip, will you be sharing what you use for travel these days? I have a trip to France coming up next year and would find that very helpful.

I will absolutely do this. Oddly, when I started yesterday’s story about the home swap and being stressed, I intended that to be the “What I Use” post for the trip. But I realized I was a little more concerned with other matters at that moment.

For whatever it’s worth, I’m hoping to write about a number of travel-related topics during this trip. No promises, but the list I have so far is international apps and services, VPN, Google Flights, Google Trips, Project Fi, language translation, Mobile Passport, and credit cards and points. But if you or anyone reads this has topics they’d like to see covered, please let me know. Here or via email.

NUC update

cheetahdriver asks:

I did a search on NUC, and noticed you haven’t said much about it/them lately. Looking at a unit to take with me for a month or two recovering from surgery in the great frozen North and was wondering what you thought about the current iterations? I don’t do PC gaming but do a ton of Office365 work on multiple screens (recovery does not mean not working…).

I use my existing NUC, which is a few years old now, for The Windows 10 Field Guide, but it’s not my daily PC. But I check out what Intel is doing there each time there’s an update, and I am considering buying a newer model this year. I’m still a big fan of these PCs. But I’ve not used the latest version, sorry.

More books

cheetahdriver also asks:

When can we expect “The Microsoft Account Field Guide”?

So I’m not sure if you’re asking this because I mentioned the need previously or because you think it’s a good idea. But this is indeed something I think about a lot. It’s necessary, too. I will likely create this eventually, and it would probably be free. (I suppose you could make a similar case for Google accounts, too, which sort of makes me wonder if the book isn’t really just about online accounts.)

Brightness control

jwpear asks:

Why doesn’t Microsoft provide a touch slider control for brightness like God intended? … I think a slider is particularly useful on the Surface Pro and Surface Book when using as a tablet.

It’s hard to answer “why” questions, but I agree this is necessary. One of the things I find myself doing on mobile devices a lot is opening the notification shade (in Android, or the Control Center in iOS) specifically to adjust the brightness. Users of Windows tablets need this too.

OK, I will take a guess on the “why”: Most Windows users have a keyboard with brightness controls built-in.

Foldable/dual screen mobile devices

karlinhigh asks:

Foldable-screen device projects, Samsung Winner and Microsoft Andromeda. (If that’s not what Andromeda is, I stand corrected.) Do you see people being more optimistic about Winner because it’s Not-Microsoft?

The existence of a Samsung foldable-screen smartphone sort of obviates the need for Andromeda, I think. This has always been the worry, just as the Samsung docking solution for its smartphones (Dex) was the final nail in the Windows phone coffin. The reason: The Samsung solutions, in both cases, are optimized for the most common usage scenario (phone) and are backed by the strongest app/content ecosystem, Android.

The Microsoft solutions both pale by comparison. Windows phone was hampered by the fact that it was a terrible phone (no apps, etc.) and a terrible PC. And Andromeda will be hampered by the fact that it’s a PC, period.

Razor choice

ggolcher asks:

A little bit off-topic, but here goes: You research the products you use quite a bit, so I trust your judgment. With that in mind, I’d love to know: what razor do you use? I still use Gillette and would love to know if anything better has been released.

I do use Gillette Fusion razors, but I find the razor blades horribly expensive and have been actively trying to fix this. There are crazy Chinese knock-off razor blades, and some less expensive options like Harry’s. But I like the Gillette razors for a few reasons, like the little trimmer blade on the back. And I have sensitive skin, at least on my face. I can’t use electric shavers.

Advanced briefings

StevenLayton asks:

In terms of learning about things via advanced briefings, how do you manage to separate what you’re allowed to talk about from what you’re not, when doing podcasts etc? Have you ever let anything slip?

So this is a very interesting topic to me, and it’s central to what we do here.

The recent Surface Go embargo is a good example. Brad and I went to New York about two weeks before the public announcement, learned about Surface Go, got to spend some time with the devices, and took some pictures and video. And then, on the eve of the announcement (days later than promised, by the way), Microsoft provided us with the blog posts and other assets they’d be publishing.

In the interim, however, there were many leaks. And that presents some issues: I can’t “confirm” a leak when I’m under embargo, of course. But Mehedi may want to write about them, and Andrew may want to talk about them on a podcast. So I have to try and be careful in each case not to screw up.

For a post that Mehedi wrote about Surface Go leaks the week before the announcement, I asked him to let me go over it to make sure there weren’t any extra bits of info that could only have come from our briefing. And I wanted to make sure that any rumors that were wrong were qualified correctly.

Here’s an example I remember: The rumors said that the lower-end Surface Go would come with a Pentium Silver processor, while the other version would ship with a Pentium Gold processor. I knew from the briefing that this wasn’t the case. So I changed the line “The device will use Intel’s Pentium Gold and Pentium Silver processors” to “According to the latest leak, the device will use Intel’s Pentium Gold and Pentium Silver processors.”

More generally, I just made sure that there was nothing in there that didn’t come from leaks, and I recall asking Mehedi on at least one point (I think the name of the device) where that had been published. We made sure to link to everything (which we’d do anyway, but it was more important in this case)so we were covered.

Likewise, right before the announcement, Microsoft’s Panos Panay inexplicably tweeted a very provocative image of the Surface lineup and you could see the shadow for a missing device. “Where will Surface go next?” he tweeted, rhetorically. Geesh. I had to cover that, of course. And note the time/date on the device screens in the photo, and what that must have meant. Which I did know was correct.

You have to play by the rules. And when you agree to an embargo, it’s a double-edged sword. Depending on the product and about the level of information one might already have about it from more secretive sources, you either do or do not agree to it. If you do agree, you’re done. It doesn’t matter if someone else leaks it. That does not mean that all bets are off.

On the night before this particular announcement, of course, someone did leak, and I believe it was by mistake. This always causes a round of terribleness, because all the usual jokers push Microsoft to let them publish too. I didn’t really care, in this case: I knew we had a ton of content and was ready to go at any time. But they did a good job of alerting us to the leak, and to the fact that they might go public early.

I was surprised by some of the vitriol directed at the leaker, though I did joke about it on Twitter. To your point, yes, I’ve made this mistake before myself. We’re all human. And it’s really easy to hit Publish on a blog post you intend to schedule because you knee-jerk hit Publish every single day of your life. Not publishing something immediately these days is the exception. I completely understand how this could happen. And probably did happen, in this case.

Windows 10 and Tablet Mode

PhilipVasta asks:

What are your thoughts on tablet mode and in general the touch capabilities of Windows these days? Does it even make sense anymore? I say this as someone who has been a huge advocate for touch and the pen input Microsoft has championed.

I liked the changes that Microsoft made when it moved to Windows 10, though I understand that many who enjoyed using Windows 8.1 on tablets felt otherwise. But I am struck by the fact that Microsoft hasn’t really changed Tablet Mode or the touch features in Windows 10 demonstrably in recent releases.

This could be because Windows is, at heart, a legacy desktop OS and that the vast majority of users simply don’t use touch (or pens) or use it very infrequently.

But I think part of the scaling back here is actually related to Andromeda and related efforts around Windows Core and Polaris. Microsoft does make at least one touch- and pen-centric Windows 10 derivative, in Surface Hub. And with Windows phone gone, I think the intention was (and maybe still is) to have a second in Andromeda.

What these Windows 10 variants all share is the same underpinnings. But where they differ is in the user interface or shell. And Andromeda was supposed to come with its own touch-centric shell. And still might.

On PCs today, many of the touch interface—like the live tiles in Start—simply don’t make a lot of sense, at least not to most people. They make more sense on tablets, of course, but that’s a tiny use case today.

Also…

Even though Apple has gotten a lot of flak over their decision to keep macOS and iOS separate, in the end they seem to be doing it the sensible way by integrating the bits that make sense from each OS. Sort of goes along with your opinion on using the right tool for the job, and I’m inclined to agree.

I think about this kind of thing a lot.

Google has publicly gone through the difficult task of taking touch-oriented mobile apps and making them work on more traditional PC devices, in this case Chromebooks. There’s a lot that goes into that: You have to evolve the app platform to handle these devices and their unique hardware. And you have to evolve the PC platform to handle the apps. You need to be able to select things with the mouse cursor, and so on.

Apple is now going through this process with the Mac and iOS apps, albeit a bit less publicly. Apple does things their own way, for sure: Where Chromebook users will find bad Android app experiences all over the place, especially at first, Apple will ensure that only those apps that work really well are available.

Do I think that Apple should just add touch to the Mac? Absolutely. Do I think they will? No. They’re moving to a model where iPads are PCs and Macs are workstations. And who knows? Maybe that is a more realistic viewpoint, after all.

Getting back to Windows, the problem for Microsoft, as always, is that the mobile app part of this hybrid equation is mostly terrible or at least uninteresting to most users. Where Google and Apple both have super-successful mobile platforms to offer to their PC device users, Microsoft does not. The work was done in Windows to allow for this. But there’s just been so little action on the app/Store front.

This all goes back to the “optimize for the every day” thing, and this topic came up above in the question about foldable/dual screen mobile devices. You and I, and most of the people who read this site, may have a hard time understanding the decline of the PC. But the real engagement these days is with mobile apps, and specifically with mobile apps on Android and iOS. Bringing them to Chromebook and Mac, respectively, makes sense. But it kind of leaves Microsoft with no place to turn. It has tons of PC users, for sure. But they’re not super-excited about app stores or mobile apps, and they largely view PCs as work. This is probably the most limiting factor for the platform, convincing people that PCs can be fun, and convincing developers that people want to have fun on PCs. We don’t even have a good Kindle app on the PC. It’s kind of nuts.