Ask Paul: Friday, December 10 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Let’s kick off the weekend a bit early with another great set of reader questions.

Wearables

crunchyfrog asks:

I know that you regularly review laptops and phones and occasionally wearables, however with things starting to heat up in the WearOS category now that Samsung has apparently breathed new life into the non-Apple side of this, will you be considering spending more time in reviewing these devices?

This is interesting timing. Short answer, yes. Long answer, requires a bit of background.

I’ve always been interested in wearables, starting (and continuing) with fitness trackers and, more recently, smartwatches. And I’ve owned probably 12-20 wearables over time, I’ve lost track and forgotten some of them. Many, many Fitbits, of course, each Microsoft Band, the Nike Fuel Band, several Samsung, Huawei, Motorola, and other Google- and Tizen-based wearables and watches and … more, I really can’t even remember. Oh, right. Apple Watch as well. And Amazon Halo last year.

If you think about devices I do review regularly, like laptops and smartphones, the big thing is that I at least have relationships with some of these companies. So I am regularly offered review devices from laptop companies like HP and Lenovo especially, and then Acer and Dell less often, and then this past year, an interesting mix of companies I don’t usually work with. (That will make some end-of-year review at some point, it was notable.) In the smartphone space, I got most Windows phones back in the day, and I get OnePlus handsets regularly. I used to get Huawei handsets, and wish I still did, and I occasionally but not always get other devices, like the random Samsung. But mostly I have to buy those myself. I routinely bought an iPhone most years either because I was using them or, more recently, because they’re too important to ignore.

With wearables, the only company I consistently heard from, briefly while they still made them, was Microsoft. I did get random wearables for review from Huawei, Samsung, and maybe a few others. But it was always sporadic. And from a personal basis, I was really using some wearable all the time for years. As such, I was less inclined to keep swapping them out, let alone switching ecosystems, because I wanted that data to be consistent over time. Things like Google Fit are interesting because they can act as a central repository for data from multiple devices/ecosystems, but not all of them. But I was really using the devices, so it was a big deal to switch.

Mostly I’ve stuck with Fitbit. And I literally interact with this thing every single day, sync in the morning to check on my resting heart rate, sleep score, and fitness readiness score. Discuss these things with my wife, who does the same. And then track walks automatically and, at the gym, cardio and weights manually. And the days turn into weeks turn into months turn into years… and you stop thinking about switching.

Except that I think about it all the time. The Fitbit I’m using right now is the Versa 3 I purchased in October 2020, and I love it for its larger, color, and easier-to-read display. But that’s about it. I’ve had many problems with this thing, and have had to replace the bands several times in the past year; I now keep several cheap Amazon knockoff bands here just in case. I would prefer a smaller device, and always wanted a color Charge, which didn’t exist until this past August. I’d like to swap for that, but it’s $180 or whatever, and what I have now works. Mostly.

The biggest aggravation I have with it, and the big difference between this device and my wife’s Versa 2, is that it doesn’t have a side button as hers does. Instead, it has a capacitive area on the side (probably for water resistance reasons) that is almost impossible to successfully click. Every single day—and I mean Every. Single. Day—when I have to stop a workout at the gym, I struggle to successfully push this button. I must look like an idiot as I contort my arm to successfully click it. And every single day I wish I had something else. It’s gotten so bad that I’m looking into other things. Garmin. Withings. And even maybe Apple Watch.

But yes, to answer your question, this new Wear OS push with the Samsung partnership is very interesting to me. I always kind of liked Android Wear back in the day, and I always felt like it had a far more logical and usable interface than Apple Watch’s weird bubble-based thing. But the devices were clunky and most terrible. Today, it’s looking like that is changing. So yes, I’m interested and motivated, and I’m looking around.

And I’ve been thinking about all that data I have in Fitbit. And what I realized, literally just this week, as I was struggling to stop a cardio workout, that … it doesn’t matter. I never, ever go back and compare what I’m doing now to anything from longer than a week ago. Very rarely I will look at some graph of whatever—sleep, maybe, or steps—over a longer period of time. Like, it’s interesting to see our big walking periods in Paris or DC in the context of the normal weeks around those trips. But that’s just noodling. It’s not important or regular.

Anyway. No promises, per se, but yeah, I’m looking around and thinking about this a lot. And one of the things I’d absolutely look at is a new Wear OS-based device. Maybe the Samsung smartwatches. Or the rumored coming Pixel Watch. If the iPhone works out, maybe even Apple Watch. But I’m also interested in those devices from companies—-Garmin, Withings—that are just focused on this one category. Increasingly, my brain is telling me that I can trust these companies more than Big Tech to do what it is I want. We’ll see.

User hostility

anoldamigauser asks;

Looking at the user hostile miscues by Microsoft this past year…the rushed release of Windows 11, the effort to force Edge on users, the bloat being added to Edge that could easily be extensions, the effort to force MSN and Bing on users, the crap content of MSN (it used to have some real content), the continued inclusion of crap like Candy Crush in the OS install, the debacle of the new Whiteboard app, the list goes on…where do you think the blame lies?

I think the blame lies in the fact that Microsoft has seen great success—revenues, growth, and stock valuation—on its cloud computing efforts and that the company’s leadership has, for better or worse, decided to run with this and require each of its major businesses to make sense in this new world. For some traditional businesses, like Windows Server, Office, and Xbox, this transition makes sense. For Windows on the PC, it does not. Windows is still this thing that sits locally on a PC and it has very little in the way of obvious and meaningful monetization from cloud services. So Microsoft has looked to the competition to see how they’re handling this. They can’t ape what Apple does with the Mac, since that product line is a luxury brand with high margins. So they look to Google. And what they see there is tracking with privacy implications and advertising. And because Windows is much more like Android and Chrome OS than it is like iOS and the Mac, they’ve chosen that route.

These are not the actions of a company following the telemetry data. They are not actions likely to make users “love Windows”.

So. Microsoft does follow telemetry data. But what I argue is that telemetry data can never map to how or whether a user “loves” Windows or the experience they get on a PC. To use one example, when Microsoft forces the Widgets UI to use Edge, and then Bing and MSN on the back-end, it can tell how much usage of these things changes by doing this. And if it goes up, as it would, they can describe that as a win. What this can’t measure is the feeling one gets when they have chosen to use Chrome or Firefox, and Edge launches unexpectedly. Some won’t care. Some will be confused. Some will be angry. And over time, some people will simply move on to other platforms because they don’t like what they’re seeing in Windows. And Microsoft’s telemetry data cannot tie that action back to when they forced Edge on people using Widgets. Telemetry can’t measure the eventual impact of confusion, unhappiness, and anger.

They do not seem to be decisions that would be driven by the engineering side of the house. It sort of begs the question, “What are they thinking?”

They’re thinking in dollars. And not in the vague dollar benefit of goodwill.

Is there a single executive whose bonus could be tied to all these things?

Well, not exactly. Today, it’s likely that Panos Panay’s compensation is in some way tied to some metrics related to this stuff, just as Terry Myerson’s was. Terry was given an impossible job, which he completed successfully by making Windows worse for users. So who do you blame? The CEO? The senior leadership team? The shareholders who demand growth and only want to hear about the cloud? Windows is old news, legacy.

Has the SLC lost its collective mind? Is it all Satya’s fault?

They’re doing the right thing for the company and its shareholders, generally. They are doing the wrong thing for Windows and its users. Windows being a smaller and smaller percentage of the company’s revenues and profits.

Are you going to ask Mr. Capossella about some of this on Windows Weekly?

Yes. We will discuss what’s happening with Windows 11 and Edge, for sure. But we’re not going to attack the guy. He’s in charge of marketing, not product development, and it’s not like he can “tell” Panay or Windows or whatever what to do. He’s just part of a team that has a much broader responsibility for the entire company. And there are very real differences between what’s best for Windows users—-what we all care most about—and what’s best for Microsoft. We need to be realistic about that.

Steve Jobs and the 1980s

erichk asks:

Paul, do you have any insight as to why Steve Jobs was so laser focused on attacking IBM and Windows as the 80’s ticked along? I mean, there *were* other players. I seem to find little online about how he felt about Commodore, Atari, Tandy, etc. Surely when the Amiga came along, he must have felt like it was a threat (or even other machines like the Atari ST), but all we got from him was DOS and Windows bashing. (Not that it wasn’t deserved at times … DOS was crude and so was Windows in its first couple iterations.)

Well, this is lost to the mists of time, but Jobs and Apple did focus on other companies and platforms in the early 1980s as well, and it did directly compete with those other companies too. You will find information about this in the many 1980’s-era books about not just Apple but these companies. But them focusing primarily on IBM did make sense: IBM was the biggest of these companies by far, had the most clout and power, and it was the one company that could out-muscle Apple or anyone else. So establishing Apple as the cool alternative was a good strategy. Not to mention that Apple couldn’t compete with Atari, Commodore, Tandy, or any other non-PC company on price anyway. Apple and IBM were in the same pricing category.

By the time the PC came out, it was clear that it would be the standard in business. And Apple wanted that market. I’m curious how this might have turned out had the PC been more closed, but by opening it up, IBM achieved two things: it beat Apple handily, and then it beat itself by letting other companies make cheaper and better PCs. By the time it tried to course-correct with the PS/2 and OS/2, it was too late.

Contributing to Thurrott.com

crunchyfrog asks:

Curious to ask this, although I think I may know the answer; can you or would you be open to accepting outside or freelance reviews of hardware for Thurrott.com? I realize that there are forums already for users but I am musing about possibly even a more formal area where say premium subscribers could submit quality (approved) content such as articles or reviews for Thurrott.com readers to view and comment, assuming that the main page would likely need to be reserved primarily for your content.

So. Let’s see.

Right now, no. But yeah, this is something we’ve discussed. The problem, from my perspective, is that this site has far too many issues that never get addressed, and I feel that we need to focus on the basics, fixing the problems, first, and then improving the site overall second, and then looking at this sort of thing as part of that last wave. I would love for Thurrott.com to be more community-focused, and that could and should include high-quality content from other contributors right in there with whatever I do. But we need to actually fix problems before we can do anything new, sorry.

Widgets changes coming in Windows 11

hrlngrv asks:

In the latest Windows 11 dev build, if one has one’s Start button and pinned icons on the left rather than centered, where does the new Widgets weather indicator in the taskbar appear?

If you left-align the taskbar, the Widgets icon will appear inline with the other built-in taskbar icons—in this order: Start, Search, Task view, Widgets, Chat—and it will be an icon only. But it won’t be the icon we see today, it will have a graphic indicating the weather (like a sun or a cloud), but with no temperature and forecast text. That’s for now, it could change.

SSDs can die

hrlngrv asks:

Ever had an SSD die? Mine did a month ago. Thanks to that, my Windows Insider VM now shows as unactivated, and it won’t reactivate. FWIW, I also have a Windows 8.1 VM, and I had to reactivate it, but that worked without issues. Have you ever had to replace an SSD, reinstall Windows, and get MSFT to provide an activation code? I’m undecided about buying a new SSD and going that route vs buying a new SFF PC.

No, but I’ve done that in the past with a hard drive and I assume the process hasn’t changed: the system may see that change as big enough that it sees it as a new PC and would thus require a manual (phone-based activation). In my case, it just activated automatically.

How many clicks

justme asks:

Apologies ahead of time for the rampant cynicism. I believe the only reason Microsoft is allowing users to come close to making a different browser default is to set a pick against investigations by legal bodies such as the UK’s CMA. The question I have is how many extra clicks in the dev build does it take to make your “default” choice actually default like Windows 7/8?

One. You install whatever browser, it asks you if you want it to be the default, and you click Yes, and you’re done.

In Windows 10, they added some steps: you click Yes, it opens Settings and navigates to Apps > Default apps, and then you have to find the Web browser entry, click it, choose your browser, and then deal with a “please consider using Edge” dialog.

In Windows 11, they added numerous more steps as detailed here. The recently announced default browser changes only cut down on those clicks somewhat. It’s still more clicks than it was with Windows 10.

Along the same lines, short of uninstalling widgets and just not using them – is there any way in Windows 11 to force links clicked in widgets to open in your preferred browser.

There is today, using tools like EdgeDeflector. But Microsoft has pledged to prevent these workarounds in a future version of Windows 11 (or a future update to Windows 11).

I would ask about de-coupling Bing integration as well, but I know Microsoft is going to Microsoft on that one.

The only thing you can do is not use Widgets, sadly. And even if you remove it from the taskbar, it’s still there. If you type WINKEY + W.

Brands and trust

helix2301 asks:

I have moved off of macbook pro and onto Dell XPS developer editions exclusively. Just is where the business I am in has been going. That being said I shopped around for the best bang for my buck and while I know you have no experience with the MSI laptops or the Razor laptops they were temping due to the more for less price. My wife ended up pushing me for the Dell because the support was much more enticing and a known company for a large purchase.

My question to you is these companies like MSI or Razor that focus exclusively on the business / content creator space while they are better priced are still a small brand do you trust small companies like that when you are making a $2000 purchases of something that will be your lively hood. Who do these companies appeal to? I know Ant Pruit uses MSI laptops but always says the support is not the greatest.

There are certainly fewer of these companies now. Huge PC businesses like Compaq, Gateway 2000, Packard Bell and others are gone (or just exist as brand licenses), and medium-sized businesses like Toshiba and Alienware have all been scooped up by bigger players. You’d really want to research these less common brands before committing. Heck, even big companies like Microsoft and Google have a hard time making reliable hardware. I’m not sure that I’d personally consider them, let alone trust smaller PC companies.

86 Celtics

sabertooth920

Do you plan on checking out the new book by Dan Shaughnessy on the 1986 Celtics?

I didn’t even know about it! But thanks, I will look this up and get it for sure.