Ask Paul: September 29 (Premium)

Whew! Happy Friday, and welcome to another epic Ask Paul that’s chock-full of excellent reader questions.

Certified refurbished is the way to go

jmeiii75 asks:

Hi Paul. Here’s a quick one for you. I’m primarily a Windows user, but also owned a Mac in the past (and liked it). As someone who likes to see how the other half lives, I’ve been looking into getting another Mac but obviously would like to save a bit of money wherever possible. This has pointed me to the Certified Refurbished area of the Apple store. Perhaps I am misremembering, but I think I heard you mention that you have gone this route yourself. If so, how was that experience for you?

It’s possible I have purchased more Apple hardware from the refurbished part of its store than otherwise. But if that’s not true, it’s close. And I have never once had a bad experience doing so. I highly recommend it, and if you somehow get a device that got past them with a scratch or some software issue or whatever, you can return it very easily. You get the full warranty, etc. There is no downside to doing this.

Sometimes the truth hurts

vernonlvincent asks:

At the Google antitrust trial, Apple testified that there really was no other option for search engines other than Google. That, to me, seemed like a slap in the face toward Microsoft and Bing. This seems to echo the general sentiment I see frequently that Bing is a joke of a search engine. However, I also hear that Google has gotten really bad – especially of late.

So, I try to acknowledge that everyone has their own experiences, and that even some objective truth to me isn’t always the case with others. I often look at what people do, and the decisions they make, and they fall into three categories: Things they do that I would also do, things they do that I would not do but I at least understand why they’re doing it, and then things they do and there, nope, is literally excuse or rationale for doing that and I am just not OK with that.

To me, Bing falls into that latter category. Friends don’t let friends use Bing.

And … I know.

I write that knowing there are people out there who disagree with that. That their experience is that Bing is, in fact, better than Google. That maybe in some part of Europe or whatever, it does a better job doing … whatever. Look, there are exceptions to everything, but my take on this is simple. Bing is a sad joke of a service that Microsoft should never have kept on life support for all these years (and that’s so true that they tried to offload it on Apple, we just found out). It’s a failed brand, the butt of jokes, just like Zune, and that made starting this year’s AI push with Bing so confounding. And that even if the AI stuff somehow elevates the service or improves its usage (which it hasn’t), that it won’t matter because AI is just table stakes now, and everyone will have it, and in a world in which everything is AI, we’re back to the same old problem that Bing is still Bing, the brand is still broken, and it will fail. There is no reason to believe otherwise.

And I’m sorry. I know this seems harsh. But it’s also reality. Not quite an objective fact, but generally true. That most of us try Bing sometimes and go, oh right, this is why I use Google. But that’s us. When most people out in the world hear the term “Bing,” almost everyone who actually has heard of it before will respond with, “Oh, is that still a thing?” There’s a reason.

Anyway. With regard to those points you made that I did not address…

Yes, Apple has never had another viable option for search, whether it was back in the day in Safari for the Mac or today on the iPhone. But there is a corresponding point to be made here, which is what Eddie Cue testified to in court: That is because Google Search is so good and so much better than any alternative. If it wasn’t, it would select the best thing. Or it might have built its own search engine. Which it did not do because Google is so good.

A slap in the face to Microsoft and Bing? It’s just a competitive reality. A Microsoft executive also testified in this trial and he admitted that Apple never seriously considered Bing and that Microsoft was stuck in what I’ll call a “non-virtuous cycle” in which it is “uneconomical to invest” in Bing because the cost of doing so doesn’t justify the tiny traffic gains they would get, while Bing “doesn’t have [the] traffic” [this was on mobile specifically] to justify any further investment. It has, in other words, been idling for about a decade, with no momentum or growth.

(We might wonder why Microsoft has even kept Bing in the market. My theory is that it has to do with the cloud and AI. That is, Microsoft has the Graph for commercial customers, but it needs vast amounts of public data from the Internet for consumers (and, in commercial, for non-internal purposes) to feed its models. Without this data, it would have to pay a third party, and that would be prohibitively expensive and/or untenable because, wait for it, the only excellent source of this data is Google.)

As for the quality of Google Search, that is not my experience at all. Which is nothing but anecdotal information. But the one area in which anecdotal wins at this version of rock, paper, scissors is vs. “I have heard.” We all have our own experiences, and that’s valuable to some degree. But there is that wider consensus bit that I was discussing at the start of this, and I do pay attention to the personal technology space, obviously. I have not heard that. And in this world of enshittification, where some tech products and services are indeed doing south fast, I can’t put Google Search in that category at all. Yes, there are ads in there, but compared to other experiences, this still works great. And it is core to Google’s entire existence. Sundar Pichai has been very clear that the company will protect this in this new AI era and not just survive but win.

Is Bing really as bad as people say it is? My personal, though anecdotal, experience with Big is that it provides me what I’m looking for as well as (but not better or worse than) Google.

Yes, it really is that bad. 🙂 I think so, at least.

Of course, Apple’s testimony was also likely self-serving. If Google goes down as a monopoly – they have to know they are in the crosshairs too. So they could be putting forth arguments to bolster Google in the hope of a favorable outcome so that the FTC might then reconsider its stance against other companies. But’s just speculation on my part.

Apple’s testimony exposed something very interesting that may warrant an entire article: We’re all familiar with Steve Jobs’ declaration that Google releasing Android would trigger a “thermonuclear war,” and that in the wake of his death, Apple has only been passive-aggressive against Google through privacy marketing and its legal battles with Samsung. And that during this entire time, its partnership with Google on Search has only grown and that, today, this may be the most lucrative partnership in personal technology (or at least up there). In Eddie Cue’s words, “We’ve [Apple] always thought [Google Search] was the best.” And that’s it. For all the posturing, for all the marketing, Apple sticks with Google for all kinds of reasons. Money, of course. But also quality.

And the fact that Bing was never seriously entertained by Apple is all you need to know on that count. You and others may not agree with me on Bing, and may think I’m a bit over the top here, and fair enough. But Bing has never once met Apple’s bar. And whatever you think about Apple, come on. This company knows quality.

I really don’t mean to just cut off any debate on this topic. I just don’t get it.

The new Outlook

wright_is asks:

With the talk of New Outlook arriving on Windows 11 shortly, what is the story with Outlook on the Mac? I have been running it for 2 years, well, I have been using a Mac for 2 years now and not using Outlook for Mac, because it doesn’t support Microsoft’s own mail server, Exchange! Outlook being Microsoft’s primary business tool for mail and calendaring and Exchange being Microsoft’s tool for business email, it seems strange that Outlook supports AOL, Yahoo!, GMail, Outlook.com and M365, but it doesn’t support Microsoft Exchange. Exchange has been “coming soon” for about 2 years now. So, what does coming soon actually mean? We are in the middle of a migration at the moment, so we still use our on-site Exchange.

I don’t really follow that space very much, but I did have a very strong memory of Microsoft shipping a modern Outlook for the Mac a few years back and finding that kind of odd. Tied to this is my ongoing problem with Microsoft 365, where Microsoft will add some new feature to some component of the service (say, Word) but only on one platform (the Web, and not Windows, Mac, or mobile), and then … years go by sometimes. Sometimes that feature is added to other versions. And sometimes it just isn’t. Keeping track of this, from my perspective as an outside viewer, is hard or impossible.

With all that in mind, I looked it up to remind myself. And as long ago as 2019, we reported on Microsoft continuing to modernize Outlook everywhere but Windows. This app was, of course, a native app, and by the time we heard that a modern Outlook was going to Windows, it became obvious over time that that app would be the web app we are just now getting. (The Outlook preview is in the default Start menu now when you clean install 23H2, replacing Mail/Calendar.) And Microsoft said earlier this year that there would be no web app version of Outlook on Mac.

Looking through the comments on this Microsoft Tech Community post about Outlook on Mac being free, there is some belief that the “new” Outlook for Mac is more of a consumer offering, but I don’t understand why it can’t be like Outlook on Windows and do both. And at that time, a Microsoft employee did chime in with “Support for Exchange On-Premises, Tasks, Local Data, and Contact Lists are being worked on. It’s just a matter of time!” But there was no ETA, just as there isn’t now.

I have a lot of half-started articles in my “To-do” folder, and among them is something I call “Slow Boil” that contrasts the heady, rapid adding of new features to Microsoft Teams over two or three years with the slow, silent, and sometimes worrying development of things like Loop and, wait for it, the new Outlook for Windows, which lacks such basic features as offline support. And it’s possible/likely that Outlook for Mac has fallen into this same pit of undernourishment. We can only speculate why, but I would have pointed to Teams as the real emphasis of this organization over the past whatever of years. And perhaps Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft’s big AI push now. That there are priorities, and that these things are not among them. Not an excuse. But a possible reason.

Not a great answer, I know.

Captive to Raptive

wright_is asks:

A second question, what is RAPTIVE? At the bottom of the Thurrott.com pages, there is a message that this site is a RAPTIVE partner site.

This is tied to yet another half-started article, though I will definitely complete this one, which is called “Behind Thurrott.com: Money.” And it’s a discussion about this business from a financial perspective, meaning where/how money comes in and where/how it goes out.

And on that note, Raptive plays two roles for us, one of which is tied to money coming in. It’s the service we use to sell ads on the site, and it takes some percentage of that revenue. (The other half of the money in bit is Premium.)

We also use Raptive for analytics. It uses Google Analytics for this, and while we could go there for this data, we find Raptive’s interfaces to be simpler and more concise. And, go figure, I will be writing about that aspect of the site too because there is an interesting discussion around how you can view the success of individual articles. For example, you might look through a list of articles on the site and see that some have lots of comments and assume that those are “successful,” perhaps because of ad sales or whatever. But this isn’t a great metric because there is a category of articles, those about Elon Musk, as an obvious example, that often have an outsized number of comments but comparatively few actual views and little in revenue. And then there are literally articles with no comments that do quite well.

I’ll have more on both of those topics soon.

Arm futures

will asks:

Last week you mentioned that one of the nuggets of information in the data dump of Xbox and Microsoft information was the potential of moving to ARM in a future console.  I am curious just how big of a jump could be coming down the road with ARM processors that we don’t know about or is this more wishful thinking?

No, this is real. And while there was a lot of information in that leak, and lots more to write about still, to me, this was bit in some ways the biggest news of all. Because when it comes to any personal technology product or service, there is marketing and then there is reality. (Look at the Bing vs. Google stuff above as another example.) And while Microsoft has long marketed Arm as the future of the PC, in particular, the reality of this platform has always fallen short. And so we look to some next generation of Qualcomm processors to fix the big remaining issue, and should have clarity soon. And then another year goes by.

But that’s what we know out in the world. Internally, these companies partner, have roadmaps, and they understand what is coming over x number of years. And at the time of the memos I quoted regarding Arm, in 2020, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and AMD (at least) all understood or at least believed that the Arm (and related GPU) silicon whose development would start in 2023 and ship in a product in 2028 would likely be powerful enough for an Xbox console that would remain in the market for several years. And that its power management, cost, and sustainability advantages would solve a lot of problems it would have with the then-upcoming and now current generation consoles.

At this point, Microsoft has or has not gone with Arm. We don’t know. But even if the next Xbox is x64-based due in part to inertia and, perhaps, to ongoing performance shortcomings in Arm, the fact that they seriously considered this three years ago says more to me about the reality of Arm than anything Microsoft says publicly.

The Xbox in the room

jrzoomer asks:

Paul I heard on a recent Windows Weekly that you haven’t powered up your Xbox since earlier this year. I was thinking is this due to you doing PC gaming now since you can run Xbox games on PC? Or just prioritizing other things in life that are more important than gaming?

I wrote about this back in June, after it had been three months without turning on my Xbox. But I’m now closing in on 7 months without using the Xbox (!), which is unprecedented for me.

The primary motivator was the unhealthy relationship that I felt I had with Call of Duty. And while I don’t feel that my game playing ever negatively impacted my writing—in some ways, it’s helped, as I’ve discussed in the past—there was something especially pernicious about COD and my behavior playing it. And as part of a broader push to better myself—the health-related changes I’ve made this year can be viewed as part of the same effort—I just wanted to see if I could wean myself off it. And as with the weight loss stuff and my decluttering activities, it’s been more successful than I had any right to expect.

That said, I don’t intend to not play video games. I have shifted to PC-based gaming temporarily, and have stuck largely to replaying older games and some newer titles, like Halo Infinity, that I never finished. And … I play a lot less often, frankly. A lot less.

Will I go back?

Yeah, I will. The next COD is problematic because the multiplayer games, which is all I do, will all be remakes of the original Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer levels, which are among the best in the franchise’s history. So that will be a gut-check moment. And there are other coming games that I should play on the console too. We’ll see.

Microsoft and Bing

ianceicys asks:

Hi Paul, what do you think about Bloomberg: Apple held talks with Microsoft about acquiring Bing in 2020. As the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google presses on, we continue to learn more about Apple’s search agreement with the company and its talks with other companies. Now, citing “people with knowledge of the matter,” that Microsoft held talks with Apple in 2020 about selling Bing, which would’ve then replaced Google as the default search engine on Apple platforms. Apple and Microsoft had a deal in place from 2013 through 2017, which saw Apple use Microsoft’s Bing search engine to power Siri and Spotlight search results. Towards the end of this agreement in 2016, Microsoft put a plan in motion to expand upon its deal with Apple to make Bing the default search engine in Safari on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

By the time you read this, Laurent should have a post on this topic. (Here it is.) And I of course tackled a lot of Bing topics earlier in this post, and then retackled it repeatedly, and then kicked it into the sand. (Sorry.) But I have also been collecting links to all of the Apple/Google relationship information that has come out of this trial and as noted above, I may be writing about this separately. With all that in mind, I will summarize.

The Apple/Google relationship hasn’t just evolved over the years, it’s turned into one of the most lucrative partnerships in personal technology. There is an interesting symbiosis there that I’m sure Google is happy to promote that Apple is not because it rightfully makes them look hypocritical. Money talks.

(Fun tip, if you use an iPhone: Use Google Search but don’t sign in with your Google account. In this scenario, Google cannot track you when you use an iPhone, so you get all the benefits of Google with none of the tracking and privacy violations. This came out during the trial.)

And Bing is a sad joke of a service and a brand. Even those who defend or even prefer it should take note of Microsoft’s eagerness to sell it to Apple, Apple’s disinterest in that, and Apple’s ongoing reliance on Google because of its superiority. Plus, the Microsoft testimony in this trial, too, which verifies these opinions.

Other TWiT podcasts

simont asks:

If you had a choice, which of the other TWIT non-windows podcasts would you like to appear on and defend/complain about Windows/Microsoft.

What makes you think I’d defend Windows or Microsoft?  🙂

Actually, I’m kind of not joking. I would just be honest about both, and about whatever else. I do recall appearing on whatever the Android podcast is years ago, when it was different hosts, and being somewhat blown away by their lack of knowledge about what Microsoft was doing in the productivity space compared to what Google is doing. We can’t all know everything, but I think a big responsibility of anyone doing what I do, especially if you focus on one company, ecosystem, or product, is to understand the competition. You can’t claim something is the best or better if you don’t know anything about the other options.

That said, I tend to play in the personal technology space, so the Mac and Google/Android podcasts would be of the most interest. And I do know many of those people and like and respect them. I would be surprised if there was anything more than a healthy debate on whatever topic.

NextDNS and privacy

ThemainJP asks:

Hi Paul, are you still using NextDNS, and if so, how’s it going?  I gave up on it recently for two reasons… I almost always had to disable it to join public WiFi and I have some privacy concerns about giving a single company knowledge of literally everything I do online (particularly since the USA seems to be so far behind other countries with privacy law).

Yes, I am still using it. And in the same way, meaning only on mobile (and on all my mobile devices). I do not use it on my PCs because I don’t see the need: We can easily protect our privacy in web browsers with extensions (I prefer Privacy Badger) and I don’t care what happens in Windows or in apps. Which is related to…

That leads me to a more general question about online privacy.  Even if you use a privacy-first DNS (such as Quad9) and a privacy-first browser (like Brave), are you really accomplishing anything once you sign-in to your various online accounts like Google or Amazon?  Is it even worth trying anymore?

Yeah, it really is. We may not be 100 percent successful. But we are more successful than those who do nothing.

The other day, someone asked a question about Windows IoT in the forums. I did a bit of searching on this site to find what I had written about this topic, but couldn’t find the exact article I wanted. (I had actually used Windows 10 IoT Core on a Raspberry Pi at some point.) And in giving up on that, I ended up searching Google to find a definitive answer. Which I did, of course, in Brave. The private browser.

Later that night or the next morning while reading, I noticed that type of thing we all notice, in this case when reading my Google Discovery feed, which is almost exclusively tech topics. There were multiple stories in there about Windows 10 IoT, a product that is both out-of-date and generally uninteresting to me now. And it’s obvious why, right? I had searched Google for this thing, and this thing showed up in this feed.

This Google feed, I had to remind myself. Because obviously, you do that sort of soul-searching thing where you’re like, what the hell, I’m doing everything right here. But I’m not, not really. I chose to use Google as my search engine in Brave because I, like Apple (see all the references above) know that this is the best choice. And that in doing that, I am making some compromise to my ideals about privacy and personal data in the name of … I don’t, productivity, I guess, or efficiency. That yes, I could stick with the Brave Search default, or maybe use DuckDuckGo, but I’ve tried them all and find them lacking. And so I Sophie’s Choiced it.

But that decision doesn’t mean I just give up and stop blocking tracking and give into the warm, captive embrace of Google’s The Matrix-like world. (Sorry for all the movie references.) It means I still do what I can everywhere, and make these decisions on a case-by-case basis. I am fascinated by the whole “remove Google from your life” thing. But I also use and rely on so many Google services—Maps, Photos, Workspace/Drive/Gmail, YouTube, YouTube Music, and more—that such a thing is a nonstarter for me.

And who knows? Maybe, hopefully, we will one day have regulation that prevents Google and other firms from doing this. And we will look back at this the same way we do with allowing people to smoke on airplanes, and we laugh at how dumb that was and wonder why anyone ever allowed it to happen.

We can dream. But in the meantime, don’t give up the fight. Just do what you can do.

The new iPhone is hot!

BrandonK asks:

How’s your iPhone 15 Pro Max holding up?  I’m reading/watching reports of overheating and durability issues with the 15 Pro Max; can’t tell if it’s legit or just new model FUD.  I have one on order and need to decide if I’m going to cancel or not.

I have so much to write here, and it’s been delayed because of my case-buying fiasco—I have lost days of usage this week because I bought a FineWoven case, returned it, ordered a silicone case, discovered I got the wrong (non-Max version and returned it, and then got the right case. And I only made the eSIM switch last night. And even that forward progress was offset by two big mistakes which I will be writing about over the weekend.

So. 🙂 In the theme of not undermining that future article, some of which I have already written, I do have a few comments for you now.

First, it’s clear that the overheating issue is real, but it’s equally clear that it does not impact everyone. So it is possible that buying an iPhone 15 Pro right now might be a crapshoot. You may or may not have any issues.

Second, I can’t say that I’ve experienced this, though it did get warm during the initial setup. Which, by the way, is normal. And my Pixel has much worse heat issues. Ongoing, not just during setup.

Now that I have made the switch, I left the apartment with the iPhone for the very first time this morning. So I need more time with real-world usage to be sure. And I hope to have a better answer by the end of the weekend. But I will have a formal write-up by then too, which will at least touch on this topic.

My advice? This is tricky. I would just let it happen. Watch the news about this topic. Assess your phone when it arrives. And then decide when you have more information. It’s not hard to return these things, and I don’t know what your schedule is, but whenever you get it, we will know more than we do know. (Not the least of which includes Apple’s coming response.)

Slip slidin’ away

Ruvger asks:

Hi Paul, do you know how many Windows apps included “in the box” are still UWP? (the weather app for example?) And do you know what Microsoft is planning to do with these apps (since UWP is deprecated)?

Microsoft will never come out and make clear statements related to the death of UWP specifically or its plans to modernize apps in Windows 11. What it will do instead is announce app updates as they occur and rarely explain what technologies they’re using to build those apps. (One interesting exception is that the File Explorer team has explicitly said what they’re doing, which is taking a legacy Win32 app that was later updated with heavily modified WinUI 2/Xaml Islands technologies and is now updating that mess with heavily modified Windows App SDK technologies, Windows App SDK being the successor to UWP.) So. Given this, how do we find out?

I don’t know.

But I am very curious about this topic for all the obvious reasons. And so I asked Rafael, our generation’s resident Windows internals guru. Someone who also interacts regularly with the parts of Microsoft that are actually working on these apps. And his answer was both enlightening and not what I expected.

To understand all this, we need to understand what we’re looking at. UWP used/uses a UI technology called WinUI 2 that is now deprecated and not being updated. (See here, for example.) More modern apps (like those that use the Windows App SDK) use a newer UI technology called WinUI 3. UWP will never be updated to use WinUI 3.

As important, many modern apps are not using just one technology. Many, like File Explorer how, are hybrid apps using a variety of technologies of varying ages. And when Microsoft or any developer moves to upgrade an app—modernize it, I guess—they have choices. And different parts of Microsoft make different choices. The “new” Notepad and Paint apps, for example, are not “new” apps, they have not been rewritten from scratch. But they have been heavily modified, sometimes just at the UI/UX level, and sometimes internally too. (The new Notepad, for example, has lots of new code now.) It’s a matter of priority, value, cost analysis, etc.

In some cases, it’s clear-cut. Mail and Calendar are UWP apps, for example, and their replacement, the new Outlook, is built on web technology. This one, at least, is obvious. But others are more nuanced. Probably most others.

To help figure this out, Rafael provided the following PowerShell command.

> get-appxpackage | ? { $_.dependencies -like “Microsoft.UI.Xaml.2*” } | select Name

This provides a list of apps that rely on WinUI 2 (which UWP uses, though it’s not exclusive to UWP) and what he called system XAML. So I guess I would say that this list represents both “true” UWP apps plus hybrid apps that for any number of reasons rely on WinUI 2 and not WinUI 3 today in Windows 11 today. And that list is longer than I expected:

• SecHealthUI
• WindowsTerminal
• BingNews
• BingWeather
• WindowsCamera
• GamingApp
• WindowsSoundRecorder
• WindowsFeedbackHub
• WindowsCalculator
• Todos
• MicrosoftSolitaireCollection
• ZuneVideo
• ZuneMusic
• WindowsAlarms
• Paint
• StorePurchaseApp
• windowscommunicationsapps
• WindowsSubsy…
• Getstarted
• WindowsNotepad
• WindowsStore
• WindowsMaps
• XboxGamingOverlay
• GetHelp
• ScreenSketch
• DesktopAppInstaller

To be clear, this is not a list of “UWP apps.” But these are apps that use UWP-era technologies, for sure. And while pure UWP apps will definitely disappear in time, likely within the next year, the reality of Windows and its many generations of developer technologies ensures that some of this stuff will persist well into the future. When it comes to legacy apps, it’s easiest to do nothing, easy-ish to modernize existing code, and not at all easy to just rip and replace with new code.

Either way, I find this very useful. I hope you do too.