Ask Paul: October 22 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and an early Happy Halloween, since I’ll be traveling next Friday, and this will be the final Ask Paul for October. Here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.

Stadia as a back-end service

christianwilson asks:

AT&T is now offering customers access to a streaming version of Batman: Arkham Knight and the infrastructure is powered by Google Stadia. There are a few articles about it on 9to5Google if you haven’t seen it.

Yes, thanks. I did see this last night and was considering writing about it. But for now, let me point you to the article I wrote back in February, So, We Should Probably Have a Little Chat About Stadia, where I discussed, among other things, the notion that Stadia would perhaps make sense as a back-end service.

“Amazon, Google, and Microsoft would see even more success if they simply created the back-end services needed for other gaming studios and then sold them those services instead of making them available directly to consumers … [Google does] offers back-end services for game publishers. But now that it has over a year of Stadia experience behind it, Google is also looking at those capabilities to third parties as well. It hinted as such in its announcement yesterday about killing off the Stadia Games & Entertainment Team (SG&E) … Google sees the success of Stadia, and thus the future of the service, as being contingent on its being able to sell this technology to third parties that will use that functionality in their own services, outside of Stadia.”

Obviously, I didn’t predict/expect this exact outcome, but it’s reasonable to assume we’ll see other partnerships like this. Google, after all, does have an incredible cloud infrastructure and, now, lots of experience with streaming video games online.

Arkham Knight is an interesting game to offer because, as of now, that game isn’t available on Stadia. It’s AT&T exclusive. This is the first example of Google’s “white-labeling” of Stadia technology and I think this is a great step for the sustainability of Google’s game streaming business. It does, however, suggest a fragmented future where game publishers, ISPs, television networks, movie studios, and your local pizza shop could offer their own streaming services, each with their own game libraries, account systems, and subscriptions.

Totally agree.

I was curious of your thoughts on this as I know you continue to test cloud gaming as it evolves.

I don’t think I’ll test this exact offering, but I do still have more to catch up on with that series, most notably with Xbox Cloud Gaming. Which, frankly, has been wonky enough for me so far that I’ve deliberately delayed writing about it. I should get on that.

Surface Pro X upgrade path

crunchyfrog asks:

Hi Paul. I hope you can advise me on an upgrade path to the release version of Windows 11. I have a Surface Pro X with a preview of Windows 11 stuck in Dev mode. I would like to exit Dev mode and install the retail version of 11. If I formally exit the Dev mode, Windows 11 preview says it will require me to install Windows 10 again and I believe I have to use a thumb drive to Load Windows 10 and wipe the drive. This is the wrong direction.

Well, I’d phrase it as, this is the fallback. If all else fails, you can at least do that.

If I attempt to load the retail version of Windows 11 from a thumb drive instead and wipe the drive, this will overwrite the Insider Preview I have installed but will doing this exit me from the Insider Program on this device or do you expect that I will encounter some errors here?

Speaking generally—because I don’t have a Surface Pro X but assume that it will simply work like any other Windows PC in this regard—if you install Windows 11 RTM using a USB thumb drive as a clean install, the so-called “nuke it from orbit” approach, yes, that PC will be unenrolled from the Insider Program and you will be on the stable path. Furthermore, because that PC came with Windows 10, it will auto-activate and you will have no issues.

And if this is wrong for some reason, you can always go back to that fallback plan. But I would bet money you will have no issues at all.

Article tweets

jheredia asks:

Maybe not the kind of question you’re looking for here so no need to put it in the article, but just wondering what happened to the tweets of your articles each time you posted? I used to use the notifications to keep track of what ones I’d read/wanted to read (and to just generally keep up with what’s happening that might be important), but for the last few weeks there’s no tweets for articles. I don’t mind visiting the homepage, I just sometimes forget to check each day and there’s a backlog to catch up on.

Thank you for this. I was wondering the same thing. And so, when I scanned the list of questions this morning before we walked the dog, I copied and pasted it into Teams so we can figure out what’s going on. This was immediately pegged as a serious problem, and it will be fixed.

Behind the scenes, we switched to an AWS-based infrastructure two or three weekends ago and have been scrambling to fix a variety of weird little issues across the site, and I think this is one of them. Sorry about that.

Pixel Pass

kdjones74 asks:

Hi Paul – What do you think about the Pixel Pass? I have a Pixel 4a5g on Google Fi, Device Protection, YouTube Premium, and Google One (100GB). Those add up to within a few dollars of the Pixel 6 w/Pixel Pass price.

I love this idea. And because I already pay for YouTube Music (which also gives me YouTube Premium) I might have chosen this path for my Pixel 6 Pro upgrade, but for two things.

One, my primary account (which is [email protected]) is a paid Google Workspace account, and as such it does not gain access to certain Google services, which is infuriating, and one of them is Google One. So I can’t even buy a Pixel Pass with that account.

Second, I prefer to pay for my phones upfront, or perhaps use a no-interest financing plan so I can pay them off in 2-4 months or whatever. So, what I’d really like to see is a Pixel-less Pixel Pass, if you will, something that bundles the services without the phone. My guess is that this will happen in time.

Looking past my own peculiar situation/needs, I feel that Pixel Pass is a good deal, assuming you need/want any of those services. And it just takes simple math to see that: The Pixel 6 Pro I purchased was $899 before taxes and fees, and if you space that out over two years, you’ll pay $37.46 per month. By comparison, if you purchase that same phone with Pixel Pass, you will pay $55 per month, or $17.54 more per month. Google notes that this is a $294 savings over two years, or $12.25 per month. (And if you’re a Google Fi subscriber, it’s an even better deal, because you get a $5 credit to your Fi bill each month, which is worth another $120 over those two years.)

Here’s the breakdown. 200 GB of Google One cloud storage normally costs $2.99 per month. YouTube Music Premium is $9.99 per month, and that comes with YouTube Premium. Google’s Preferred Care service costs $9 per month. And Google Play Pass costs $4.99 per month.

This seems like a great offer to me. Again, assuming you want/need at least some of it.

Windows on a tablet

hrlngrv asks:

Will tablets running Windows ever be anything more than tablet PCs? That is, will there ever be much of a market for Windows application software intended for tablets with little usage on non-tablet PCs? Well, other than Android apps running under Windows.

No, I don’t believe so. But I think that Windows has found a nice niche on full-sized tablets like Surface Pro that offer that hybrid usage where they can be like a laptop or used as a true tablet. And the appearance of Android apps can only help in that regard.

Related: would you use any removable type cover for any tablet for a full month? I realize the answer could be an immediate and unconditional NO because all of them are too small for those of us with ham fists who need big, spacious keyboards.

Well, I could use Surface Pro as my normal laptop, and I could see using it as a tablet sometimes for reading, especially. (This is the PC I’m traveling with next week.) A smaller tablet, though? No. I would rather use a real tablet, especially an iPad, though a smaller Chromebook tablet, like the HP Chromebook x2 I’m currently reviewing, is interesting because it’s basically an Android tablet with a full-featured desktop web browser.

Related to that last point: I miss the Palm phones which came with styluses for interacting with too-small phone displays. Did you ever use smartphones which relied on styluses?

Oh, for sure. I owned and used almost every Palm-branded and Palm-compatible PDA ever made, including most of what Handspring and Sony produced back in the day, plus many of the Windows CE/Palm-sized PC/Windows Mobile/whatever PDAs from Dell, Compaq, and others. And then a sequence of Palm and Windows Mobile-based early smartphones as well.

I never found writing with a small stylus to be comfortable or efficient, but I do have large hands. And, unfortunately, Microsoft wasn’t well placed to take on the iPhone because most of its UIs were optimized with tiny touch targets for those styluses. So by the time that revolution started, I moved on to iPhone until Windows phone arrived. And by then, the stylus was dead on smartphones. (Which is for the best, frankly.)

Stardock coverage

anoldamigauser asks:

Is the increased coverage of Stardock applications the result of Brad joining the firm, Windows 11 increasing the need for them, or a bit of both?

I discussed this with Brad on today’s First Ring Daily if you’re interested. But the answer goes like this.

First, I don’t believe that I have increased my coverage of Stardock products. I’ve been writing out their most important Windows utilities for years, have known the company’s founder and CEO for about 20 years, and am on their normal PR email list.

Second, Brad has never discussed anything Stardock-related to me, per se, or asked me to write about any Stardock product. He doesn’t need to, but that hasn’t happened.

But I do think there is something to the notion that Windows 11 dropping enough functionality that things like Start11 are necessary for a lot of people. Not just utilities from Stardock, but from other companies and individuals as well. I don’t think I’ve seen this big a need since Windows 8, frankly. This is interesting because Windows 11 isn’t horrible, as Windows 8 was, but it’s been simplified enough that it’s impacting our muscle memory, which impacts efficiency.

Anyway. I’ve always liked Stardock and what they do. Brad being there is great, but it hasn’t changed my position on, or view of, the company of its utilities.

In-place upgrade vs. clean install

jchampeau asks:

Back in the day, in-place Windows upgrades always seemed to result in a PC that just didn’t behave quite right. So I generally format the disk and do a clean install. But these days, I spend less time tinkering and it would take quite some time to get everything back the way I have it on my primary Windows 10 PC, so I’m considering the in-place upgrade. Is there any reason to avoid it?

I guess it depends on what you’re upgrading to. I could make a case for clean-installing Windows 11, for example, because there is an interesting list of junk from Windows 10 that comes forward during that upgrade that won’t be there if you do a clean install. But Microsoft also kind of markets this upgrade as being as seamless as going from one version of Windows 10 to another, and I think that’s fair. It’s a bigger change, UI-wise and so on, but the underpinnings are similar enough that it should be fine.

Going from one version of Windows 10 to another, however. I don’t think that warrants a clean install, especially given how minor the past 3 or 4 releases have been. We’ll see what that looks like for Windows 11.

And in the interests of full disclosure, I will just say that I ignore most of my own advice and routinely do clean installs. Or do an upgrade and then a full reset to get to the same place. I feel like I’m always installing or resetting Windows somewhere. And I don’t find the process of configuring Windows, installing and configuring apps, and syncing whatever I need to OneDrive to be all that time-consuming.

Intel and Apple

martinusv2 asks:

Hello Paul, saw an article on Tomshardware stating that Intel CEO want to win back Apple. After seeing the new M1 Pro and Max, do you think that Intel is delusional in thinking they would be able to get Apple back.

Well, the notion that Intel believes it could ever do enough to get Apple to drop its own in-house chipsets and adopt some Intel platform is absolutely delusional. Apple is all about control, and it can achieve greater things by controlling the entire stack, hardware and software, than it can be relying on a third party for part of it. So that will never happen.

But I don’t think Pat Gelsinger is delusional. I think he was merely sending a signal to the media, its customers, Wall Street, and Intel’s employees that this is how serious he is about modernizing and improving the company’s chipsets. In other words, we (Intel) have to be so good that Apple will want us back. Knowing full well that as he says that, it will never happen. Never.

And about the AMD Ryzens problems with Windows 11, I read somewhere that some insiders reported the issues. Did you heard something like this? If it’s the case, is it another reason that the Insider program is useless? And by the way, both patches are out for AMD Ryzen users.

I didn’t see that, but it wouldn’t surprise me: For all of its reliance on telemetry data, Microsoft has a rich history of not seeing the forest for the trees, so to speak. And it seems like every time there is an issue with a newly released version of Windows, we discover that Insiders had reported that issue and Microsoft either ignored it, never even saw it, or gave it such a low priority that it just wasn’t fixed. And this kind of problem is exacerbated by Windows 11’s ridiculously short three-month testing period, right? Microsoft didn’t even have time to act on the feedback for the RTM release, any feedback it is working on will appear post-RTM. It’s just unfortunate.

If Microsoft knew about the AMD problem, is that a sign that Microsoft will dump AMD in favor of Intel?

No, I don’t think so. Intel is obviously Microsoft’s biggest partner, and I’m sure it’s working to optimize Windows 11 for the Alder Lake-style “big/little” architecture. But it’s also done so for AMD’s unique multi-core architectures, and for Qualcomm’s ARM-based chipsets too. And that will continue. (And AMD and Microsoft are big partners on Xbox, too.) If AMD has issues going forward, it will be because of Intel or internal mistakes, not because of Microsoft.

Freedom Phone

anderb asks:

Hi Paul, will you be reviewing ‘The Freedom Phone’ currently being championed by Candace Owens and other right-wing nut jobs?

LOL. No. But I hope it finds as many customers as possible. China is waiting for their data.

Windows 11 + Android

madthinus asks:

Am I missing something. My expectation from Android Apps on Windows 11 is that they will simply install from the store, make a short cut and work. Listening to you describe the process, this is not what it is like at all. did they outright miss communicated this or is this just early days and this process will get better?

If you’re missing something, then I’m missing it too.

Jim, let’s roll the tape.

“Android apps [are] coming to Windows,” Microsoft’s Panos Pay said during the Windows 11 reveal back in June. “And I mean, coming to Windows. They can be integrated into Start. They’ll be integrated in your Taskbar. You can window [using Snap] … And they’re discoverable through the Microsoft Store using the Amazon Appstore [for Android].”

As he says these words, the canned demo shows the Amazon Appstore for Android inside of the Microsoft Store and, you’re right, that is not the experience we see today.

“We use Intel bridge technology to bring it to life so it’s just seamless and smooth. And these integrated apps … [stumbles] what it does is it brings you into Windows from the most professional editing apps all the way through to the most casual apps you can think of when you lean back on the couch.”

This, too, is not the current experience. It’s not seamless or smooth, and you have to deal with an Android VM starting up the first time you do anything.

So. Is this a problem?

I don’t know. For now, we can simply chalk up the experience to it being the very first preview release. And assume that Microsoft will make it more seamless over time. If nothing changes, if the Amazon Appstore for Android is simply an app you download from the Microsoft Store and then you must use this other app to find and install Android apps, it’s not the end of the world. But it’s not the seamless “store in a store” experience we were expecting.

It is worth noting, perhaps, that when Microsoft later announced other store experiences coming to Windows, like Epic Games, back in September, those stores were clearly just apps downloaded from the Microsoft Store and not integrated experiences. So maybe this Amazon Appstore thing is working as expected. (And an Amazon app that is a front-end to its retail operations will likewise just be a downloadable app.)

Put simply, Microsoft will either fix this in time, or this will simply be yet another example of it not communicating something clearly or correctly and causing confusion. I’m getting a bit numb to that, frankly. It’s just so common now.