Ask Paul: February 10 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This week’s Ask Paul comes to you from my temporary and sad lair in the basement, so let’s kick off the weekend a bit early with some great reader questions. So I can go back upstairs like a human being.

Windows 11 on low-end hardware

SherlockHolmes asks:

Over the weekend I did setup a low-end laptop  ( around 500 € ) for my girlfriends son. It was a Lenovo Ideapad 3 with an Intel Celeron N6305 with 4 GB Ram. Interestingly it did came with Windows 11 Home preinstalled. It works surprisingly well. So my question is: It is obvious that Microsoft did the restrictions mainly because of the needs of the PC makers. Do you see Microsoft to change this nonsense policy in the future?

No, I don’t see that changing. And I’m mixed on that.

Aside from the fact that, yes, Microsoft arbitrarily set a limit on which generations of PCs can upgrade to Windows 11, and that this was done largely to help the PC industry and not users, there are good reasons to not be overly concerned by these limitations.

The first is implicit in your question: technical people can easily workaround the hardware restrictions and install and use Windows 11 on PCs that don’t meet the requirements. (Whether that PC will work well with a web browser and just a few open tabs is another story, of course.)

Second, the fallback isn’t horrible because Windows 10 is still a modern OS and will be supported at least through October 2025 by which time many of the older PCs people might want to upgrade will be even that much more out of date. I did the math on this once, but off the top of my head, Intel released its 8th Gen Core CPUs in 2017, so mobile versions and PCs based on those chips first appeared in 2018 and were still being sold during the 2018 holiday season. So the most recent unsupported chipset, the 7th Gen Core series, will be 8 years old by October 2025. And that’s a reasonable upgrade cycle, honestly. (I know some may disagree. And whatever, we still see some Windows 7 PCs out in the world today. We’ll see some Windows 10 PCs out in the world in 2027/8 or whatever.)

Third, I sort of see the Windows 11 hardware requirements as an exaggerated response to the mistake Microsoft made with Windows 10, which was to keep it in the market some indeterminable amount of time and then claim, vaguely, that it would be supported for “the lifetime of the device” without explaining what that meant. There were corrections here and there midstream, as when Microsoft stopped supporting certain Intel chipset versions, but for the most part, there was no clarity on when things expired. We at least have that clarity now.

Finally, Windows 11 is free. Other than the end of support for Windows 10, which is still over two years away, I’m not sure Microsoft has any responsibility to do more than it is doing right now. Again, technical people can easily work around the limits. (And there’s a whole other story about Microsoft wanting to better monetize what we now know is a user base of 1.4 billion Windows 10 and 11 users. They certainly have that right, but we will always debate the paths they choose.)

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft extend support for Windows 10 for businesses as they did for Windows 7 and for the same reasons. I don’t expect this to happen with consumers, but I do always sort of wonder about things like just delivering security updates for x number of years. This is how Android support works, for example, and it’s how Windows support used to work (five years of updates then fix years of security and bug fixes). Yes, when October 2025 arrives, that will be 10 years. But PCs last longer and so on, and maybe that part of the support lifecycle should be adjusted accordingly. That would be an acceptable compromise, I think. Over time, of course, some Store apps would no longer work on Windows 10 as that platform evolves. But does that platform evolve much? Not really.

On the other hand, there was one idea behind Windows as a Service (WaaS) that I thought had value: keeping as much of the user base on the same Windows version as possible. (The stated goal was to get the entire user base on one version, but that was never going to happen.) This would make it easier for Microsoft to react to zero days and other security threats, since it wouldn’t need multiple versions of patches and the testing that that requires. Windows 10 and 11 are so close internally, yes, but that gap only grows over time. In a few years, this may be problematic.

If we flash forward to October 2025 and try to imagine what the user base split is between Windows 10 and 11, I suppose there is some line where Microsoft’s hand might be forced. Windows 11 adoption, to date, has been slow, and whatever anyone thinks about my ideas for Windows 12, that release will only confuse matters further. Or… clarify them. Maybe it’s important to always have two supported Windows versions in the market.

And there are signs that Windows 11 is finally picking up, ahem, steam: according to the latest Steam hardware and software survey, Windows 11 is now on 30 percent of PCs using the service, compared to 64 percent for Windows 10 (including both 64-bit and 32-bit, and there are no other OSes with more than very low single-digit usage share.) That seems pretty healthy to me: Windows 11 is less than 18 months old and Windows 10 has been in the market for 7.5 years.

Anyway, I don’t expect any major changes to the hardware requirements.

Microsoft acquisition financial results

helix2301 asks:

Just a question on Microsoft earnings we know Microsoft purchased a lot of companies GitHub / LinkedIn or mojang. Do we ever find out the earnings of these companies? Has any of these been a profitable buy for them or were these technology buys they wanted their tech? I am just curious we have seen Github grow not sure about linked in and others.

Interestingly, I was just thinking about this because of the GitHub layoffs news: one might have assumed that Microsoft’s broader layoffs would include these companies. But they don’t because both GitHub and LinkedIn are still run as separate companies even though they are both mentioned in Microsoft’s quarterly reports (and never with hard financial numbers). I’m not sure what the corporate structure is in those cases—they’re subsidiaries, I guess?—but they are run independently from Microsoft.

But a prime example is Smash.gg while it is still around and operating there has been no news on it and there prob never will be again but Microsft still owns them. ClipChamp great product built into windows but is it profitable?

I guess we’d have to take a look at them on a case-by-case basis, not that doing so will reveal anything. ClipChamp, for example, reports that it is now “part of Microsoft,” and it was acquired full-stop. Is it run independently? Is it part of Windows or the More Personal Computing business? I believe it’s the latter, but I honestly have no idea. Nor will we ever see any hard numbers of profitability or revenues. It’s all part of the bucket that is whatever business unit they’re in. In the case of Clipchamp, it may not matter per se: the product makes Windows better, for sure, and the subscription money will be added to Microsoft’s services/subscription revenues.

Pixel vs. iPhone

dremy1011 asks:

Any update on your iPhone vs Pixel choice?  Last I saw you were back to the iPhone to see if there was anything from the Pixel you missed.

Ah man. 🙂 This is something I think about literally every single day. I’ve been carrying the Pixel and the iPhone around the house as I move around, kind of comparing the two over and over. I only use the iPhone out in the world right now because of the eSIM connectivity. And with Google having yet another sale, I’ve stupidly been running the numbers on a non-Pro Pixel 7, which is the form factor I really want.

It’s kind of a tough thing. I really do prefer the Pixel overall, I guess, though it’s a fine line a there are things I do very much like about the iPhone. From a form factor perspective, the iPhone I have is a bit smaller than I’d like but the Pixel 7 Pro is a bit bigger and has those curved screen edges I hate. Obviously, I should just sit on what I have.

But the Apple Watch is the wild card. I’m just about at my six-month anniversary and I’ll be writing up something soon about my overall experience since September. The short version is that it’s mostly positive, and I’ve adapted to charging the damn thing every single day. But it’s bigger than I’d like and I’m wondering about whether all this data and the admittedly nice way that Apple presents it is making a meaningful difference. I could go back to Fitbit, of course. I could just stop worrying about it. I don’t know.

I will say this. If T-Mobile wasn’t making it so tedious to switch phones over eSIM—you have to call them and read out an IMEI number and then wait a bit each time—I probably would have switched back to Pixel by now, if only for further testing. But this is all kind of a distraction. Both of them work fine. Neither of them is exactly what I want.

Best Bond films

andrew b. asks:

Which decade do you think is the best for the Bond films?

I almost feel like we need to separate them into eras instead of decades, if that makes sense (and is OK). That is, we have the Sean Connery (6 films), Roger Moore (7 films), Pierce Brosnan (4 films), and Daniel Craig (5 films) eras, and then what I think of as two sub-eras, with George Lazenby making a single movie and Timothy Dalton making two. The Lazenby movie is really part of the Connery era, of course (and is inarguably one of the best movies of the series). The Dalton films can sort-of be tacked onto the Brosnan era as Brosnan was the original choice anyway.

The Daniel Craig movies are definitely the best of the lot, and while I may be somewhat biased because of their recency, I do watch these movies all the time, and I was thrilled by the harder direction they took with Casino Royale (something Brosnan had begged for). Skyfall and Spectre are mostly very, very good as well.

Connery is the most iconic Bond, of course, and those movies only suffer from being dated (and in some cases small) now, but I would put them in second place. Followed by Moore (which, granted, is sort of a nostalgic thing since I grew up on those movies and saw them in theatres) and then Brosnan (which wasn’t his fault, but most of them are so lightweight they can get silly). Roger Moore had a neat debonaire thing going on, and while those movies got silly for sure, and he was a bit out of place as he aged, they’re fun. I loved Pierce Brosnan in Remington Steele and, more to the point, in The Fourth Protocol, which is a terrific spy movie and no doubt a response to him not being able to play Bond at that point. So I was excited when he finally got the role, but the movies are mostly mixed. Too many one-liners, etc. I am happy to see he’s made many, many other great movies.

But Daniel Craig? Come on. He took the rough animal qualities Connery had and ramped them up to a new level. Really impressive.

All that said, and a few cringe-worthy moments aside, I pretty much love the entire series. (And the books. I’ve read all of the books, many of them multiple times, and many of the non-Fleming books as well. The Fleming books are even more dated (and are smaller) than the movies but are interesting on many levels.)

Following up

Anlong08 asks:

Forum question, several times I’ve thought up follow-up responses to an Ask Paul or an Editors Desk several days later but not posted assuming that after several days you had moved on. Do you get some sort of notification to forum posts to be able to respond (should you want to)?

I do, though I don’t find myself paying much attention to site notifications. I do check the comments every day, but I can certainly miss things. And I agree that this format isn’t ideal for an ongoing discussion. I guess I could work harder at that.

Moving?

Anlong08 also asks:

Also. Did you decide on a place to move to once you start splitting time with Mexico?

Not exactly, but I think we will stay in the Lehigh Valley for this year at the very least. There are a lot of things happening with the house suddenly, and unless anything changes, it will be for sale in about a week. My father unexpectedly expressed interest in buying it back for reasons I don’t quite understand, but I explained all the things he’d have to fix in the coming years and that hopefully ended that. But I will connect with him over the weekend to find out. Otherwise, it’s all going down the following week.

Anyway. One of the many things my wife and I have discussed is where we end up, of course. And it’s complicated. We have two kids who live out of state but nearby. We have lots of friends and family in the Boston area and get a nice guilt trip about that every time we visit. We want to spend more time in Mexico, but we also have two cats and need to figure that out. Etc. For now, we have the house entering the market soon, a three-week trip to Mexico City in early March … and then we’ll see.

But my guess is that, assuming we sell the house, we rent an apartment in this area for the next year. And then take it from there.

When’s the hat fitting?

SilentHero117 asks:

I watched TWiT last night and was thinking about what you said about Microsoft’s uncharacteristically moving so fast to get AI out in the open. I think you’re right to be worried and I started to wonder that perhaps that executives at Microsoft are too. Think about why they stuck to Bing with its baggage and tainted reputation. There’s nowhere to go but up for Bing so it seems to me that they know this is a risky move.

There are so many questions and so many potential problems here, it’s hard to even know where to start. Thinking about just Bing, it’s a bad brand, and the butt of jokes, and it competes with a product that is utterly dominant. So getting users off Google will be hard, and as Brad pointed out this morning on First Ring Daily, the success level for ChatCPT was 100 million users in the first month, while Bing has only gotten 1 million waiting list signups in its first day. We’ll see where things stand in a month, but it’s clear that Google will offer something very much like this in its own search product. And at that point, why would anyone leave the thing that still works great for the thing they are unsure about? I just don’t see a major shift.

That said, even low single-digit usage share gains in search are worth billions of dollars. And this is clearly an advertising play: any gain is huge for Microsoft.

I also wondered if Microsoft and OpenAI strategically opened up ChatGPT to gauge the public reaction because Satya Nadella in one of his interview stated that he was impressed by what he saw back in June.  It’s certainly plausible that this was some sort of a litmus test for Microsoft to proceed with the Bing + ChatGPT experiment.

This is reasonable. It’s interesting to see OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nadella describe how ChatGPT and Bing AI are not the same thing and that they in some ways don’t compete with each other. But if Bing is successful, I’m not sure how ChatGPT makes sense as a standalone service. OpenAI may not care, of course: Microsoft’s billions will pay the bills very nicely.

I played with ChatGPT myself and can certainly see the appeal in how easy and natural it is to interact with AI despite how accurate it is.  My only fear here is the public will grow to be less concerned about disinformation and trust that this is the best way to get information without going through the maze of search results.

Oh, come on, people have never fallen for obvious misinformation that easily!

Oh. Right.

Don’t get me wrong, this is certainly next level and potentially a disruptor much like Google for search and Apple for mobile, but I can’t help shake the feeling that there’s so much at risk here.  Am I crazy to wear a tinfoil hat here?

Not at all. We need to collectively approach this AI stuff with great speculation and trepidation. And I will just remind people that for all the talk about “AI principles” and whatever other nonsense that Microsoft and Google are spouting right now, that both of these corporations are after only one thing: revenue growth. They don’t care where it comes from or how and the reason we know that to be true is that we know how they do business today. Just looking at Microsoft, this is the company that force-feeds Edge on users who have explicitly chosen another browser specifically so that they will be exposed to MSN, Bing, and Microsoft’s advertising services. But it’s worse than that: Microsoft explicitly said that Bing will steal content from creators, present it to users in some comingled form on Bing.com, and sell ads against it. Oh sure, there will be links to the original content. Why would anyone click those links? They will get everything they need from Bing.

In the 1990s, Microsoft tried to become an online content creator and failed. In the 2020s, Microsoft will simply steal others’ content, just as Google has been doing, but will now mix it together into independent content pieces that need no further research, and will sell ads against it. This is a problem, and it’s a problem before we even get to the misinformation and lack of quality.

This may be the moment when Big Tech got too big. We’ll see how regulators and lawmakers respond.