Ask Paul: January 5 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and welcome to the first Ask Paul of 2024! Which, as always, is chock-full of great reader questions I will struggle to answer.

Apple envy?

helix2301 asks:

Dell announced their XPS line which is the flagship will be copying Apple and doing away with 13th inch model and making it 14 inches and doing away with 15 and 17 and just making a 16 inch. Why do these companies feel the need to line up with Apple? One of the nice parts about the PC space is the choice and the variety.

I’m not sure we can credit Apple with moving to 14- and 16-inch laptop displays, since the entire industry is/has been doing this for some time. The move from 13.3- to 14-inch displays on the best-selling models started years ago and definitely predated Apple doing this. And last year, I noted the shift from 15.6-inch panels with 16:9 aspect ratios to 16-inch panels with 16:10 aspect ratios on larger laptops, a move I am quite happy about. But whatever, I don’t think this is so much about inspiration as it is about demand: Even the world’s biggest PC makers are beholden to what display makers can get them, and squarer, slightly larger panels are in right now.

I know this because, years ago, I had a conversation with the designers at ThinkPad, and I complained about 16:9 being the wrong aspect ratio and that I was surprised they were continuing down this path. To my surprise, they agreed with me wholeheartedly and expressed their frustration with the situation at the time. They just couldn’t get 3:2 or 16:10 panels in volume at the time, and they were (and still are) the world’s biggest seller of PCs. I’m not sure exactly what motivates the display makers, but I suspect it’s a trickle-down feedback loop where customers complain to PC makers and PC makers complain to them, and if it’s a big enough volume, they take on the expense of changing what they manufacture.

Anyway, I have grown to prefer larger displays on pretty much everything—PCs, laptops, tablets, and phones—in part, I’m sure, because I’m getting older and my vision has never been stellar. For me, a 14-inch display is the minimum for a laptop these days (though I will soon be reviewing a 13.3-inch laptop, go figure), and I very much feel that 16:10 is the “right”/”best” aspect ratio for PCs (with 3:2 or 4:3 being more ideal for tablets/convertibles). But 16- or even 17-inch displays are even better … assuming those laptops don’t have numeric keypads, which is absolutely a subjective thing on my part. I just hate them. (I spoke to HP recently about using modular keyboards so that customers could choose between a centered keyboard with no numeric keypad or one with the keypad at purchase time, or later, and they actually seemed excited about this possibility.)

Anyway. Apple obviously does its own thing, but I think this is just the entire industry lining up for the same set of reasons.

AI in 2024

gstevenb asks:

Do you think that AI investment starts to slow now that content owners are pushing for compensation when models utilize copyrighted material? I am not sure the “fair use” argument is going to fly and the largest AI players will have to pay up.

Looking past the “fog of war” effects of the AI hype bubble, we might view 2023 as when several years of heightened AI investments and sudden breakthroughs triggered an explosive set of product announcements from all over the industry. But many feel that the year ended with just the tip of the iceberg in terms of actually useful products and services. And so we might correctly view 2024 as the year of AI implementation, where these companies—not just Microsoft/OpenAI, but Google, Amazon, Apple, and others—actually deliver on the respective visions they’ve laid out.

And … sure. I guess. But I’m also really impressed with what these companies, especially Microsoft, did release in 2023, and that factored into my answer to the question last week about what surprised me most last year. This company is big, top-heavy, and slow, and, yes, there will be some scaling back when it comes to the sheer number of copilot-based brands, products, and services that it releases. But it added what we now call Copilot to Bing and then Edge very quickly and never stopped improving each all year long. It announced and then released Copilot for Microsoft 365, albeit to a small audience. It added Copilot to Windows 11 and then expanded it to Windows 10. It added useful AI functionality across the Windows 11 in-box apps. And it improved maybe its most profound AI success, GitHub Copilot, with Copilot Chat. And that service isn’t just reasonable at $10 per month, it’s a no-brainer. And that’s just Microsoft: Google, for example, has been innovating in computational photography and AI-based “helpful” phone features for years, and it added the first phone-sized, on-device LLM to Pixel 8 Pro last year too.

So this coming year could be pretty exciting, assuming we level-set our expectations. Too many are focused on the extremes—AI destroying humanity or massive job losses—instead of on where AI really matters, which is in day-to-day productivity. And this speaks very much to the point of the personal computing revolution of the 1980s, where this tool would make us all more productive. In that wave, we had very specific examples of why this was true via innovations like the electronic spreadsheet and the word processor, but I feel like AI won’t have too many broad buckets of advances like that but that this age will rather be defined by the thousands of smaller advancements that are made almost everywhere across the tools we use. It’s not one asteroid hitting the earth, it’s a light show of meteors.

We’ll see. But these companies need to put up or shut up in 2024, and our job, so to speak, is to identify those advances that really matter and those that do not. There will be a metric ton of it either way.

Regarding AI “learning” by scraping content from creators of all kinds, this is a thorny issue that I, in my own simplistic way, have no trouble taking a stand on: OpenAI, Microsoft, and other AI companies are doing what Big Tech always does by stealing from others for their own financial gains. They’re powerful enough to fend off any legal attacks, and they need to be stopped. Fortunately, we have a good and modern precedent in Google, not in its book-scanning work (which was mostly about out-of-print content anyway), but rather in its content publishing partnerships: After stealing content and publishing it in its search results and elsewhere without compensating the creators, it now partners with those companies so that they are rewarded for their work.

I guess you could view this a bit like how Spotify pays for plays on its service in that it’s not as lucrative as the model the industry had previously (in the music industry’s case, this was exaggerated by payola), but is rather the reality of the more tech-driven modern world. Old-school news organizations like the NYT are no stranger to falling subscriber numbers and financial slowdowns as things change. So AI isn’t “new” in that sense, it’s just the latest threat. The goal here, I think, is a settlement in which they and other publishers are paid fairly, whatever that means in this century, for their work. And recent news suggests that Microsoft and OpenAI (and others) all know that. This is just the initial negotiation phase.

Technology advances always bring about some kind of disruption. That’s the nature of this industry. The goal, as always, is to ensure that the good of whatever shift outweighs the bad. And that’s as true of AI as it was of trains, cars, planes, desktop publishing, the Internet, or whatever else. Some things get better, some get worse. Jobs are lost, but jobs are also created. Things change. No one longs for the days of stagecoaches crossing the continent anymore, or for people selling and smoking cigarettes on airplanes, and while there were concerns for those lost jobs at the time, we now look back and wonder why they were even jobs in the first place.

Anyway. Fair use is a tough one because it’s not well-defined nor even a legal standard. To me, it’s like pornography in that you know it when you see it. Put another way, playing 10 seconds of the new Beatles song so you can discuss it on a podcast is absolutely fair use, while playing the entire song and not paying for that use is theft. When it comes to AI, we can understand what’s happening without knowing the details. In the same way that Google can (and does) objectively have the best search engine but can still be an abusive monopoly engaging in illegal business practices, AI can deliver benefits while still breaking the law. These things are not contradictory in any way because very few things in life are that clear-cut. Most everything is nuanced.

The problem for the NYT is that they’re already unnecessary and declining in a world in which we are all news gatherers and witnesses. The problem for us as individuals, and as citizens, is that we need sources of accurate, high-quality, objective news, and we live in an era of misinformation and even hostility toward experts. It’s the perfect storm of stupid, and AI could make it much worse. Hopefully, the ethical controls on AI will turn that around. We certainly can’t wait for regulation to catch up.

My guess is that the NYT and OpenAI/Microsoft settle by meeting somewhere in the middle on content valuation. And that this sets a standard, of sorts, for other AI and content publisher partnerships.

Password managers

Christian-Gaeng asks:

Hi Paul, I have a question about password managers. I think you’re using Bitwarden. However, if I know correctly, they had problems with data security. I’m currently using Nordpass. In times when every browser has a password manager, do you still need an extra service? Especially when you think about data security?

I have often observed, and have sometimes called out, how strange and wonderful it is to me when a reader seems to be reading my mind in some way. That’s not what’s really happening, obviously, but it’s interesting when I can see so explicitly that someone else (you, in this case) is literally thinking about the same things I am at the same time. Maybe it’s not so unusual. But I do enjoy it.

Anyway, this topic is consuming me right now. Some background will explain why.

I did switch to Bitwarden early in 2023. But I’ve also been frustrated by this product, which I find difficult to configure correctly/consistently across the many PCs and phones I use. More recently, it suddenly became obvious to me that certain browsers were autofilling passwords even though I had disabled that feature, and that triggered one of my ADHD-based spirals in which I literally tested how this thing worked across a variety of configurations (different browsers on different PCs, but also browsers in which I had signed in vs. those I had not, etc.). And I did not like what I found. It was a mess of inconsistency and, worse, the kind of chaos I see in Windows updates these days, where some PCs worked one way and some in others despite being otherwise identical.

Separate from this, when I started organizing what it would mean to update the Windows 11 Field Guide for 23H2, I listed out all the changes and where they would go in the book, and it was clear that some of the bigger topics would require new chapters. I don’t have the originals notes on this one because I edited it over time, but because 23H2 includes a passkey management interface, I knew I’d be writing about it, perhaps in the Windows Hello chapter. And then in its own chapter. And then I realized I’d have to cover security keys more explicitly too, since they are basically just another vehicle for passkeys now. And then I went down some rabbit hole in which I eventually realized, after more rewriting than I’d ever done, that I needed to step back and start with account security. And so I added a second new chapter about securing your Microsoft account. And so on.

I guess this is like the digital decluttering stuff: I popped open the box and then more and more came out of it. And in this case, this book update coincided with that growing frustration with Bitwarden and my inability to make it not just work, but work consistently, and everywhere. And so I did what I often do, and started a somewhat aspirational article about properly configuring Bitwarden so that maybe others could learn from my mistakes, though this assumed I was going to actually figure it out. As part of this process, I of course researched Bitwarden, and I was curious to see whether various reviews pointed out the issues I was seeing. (And who knows? This may literally just be me.) And as part of that, I came across a lengthy Wirecutter review of the two best password managers, which I had already read and re-read yet again anyway. And the obvious occurred to me. I needed to test 1Password, which is the top pick.

As I write this, I am right in the middle of this testing, and it’s perhaps a bit too early to offer a truly educated opinion. But here’s the bottom line: 1Password is dramatically easier to use and configure than Bitwarden, it’s not even close. And that’s true on desktop as well as mobile. It’s not free, as Bitwarden can be, but it’s also not expensive: An individual subscription is about $36 per year, which seems reasonable to me. And I’m just about to exit my free trial period and will almost certainly pay for it and switch to 1Password. And I will write something about this, most likely in the area of using biometrics (Windows Hello, Face ID, etc.) to simplify the security/sign-in bit, because the big drag with a password manager is that they always lock, and typing a master password is a ridiculous requirement. I have a few thoughts on that.

To your question (sorry).

I don’t have any experience with Nordpass, but I have a lot of experience with browser-based password managers, and this is actually part of what I want to communicate in that article, whatever form it takes. It’s not enough to switch to a new password manager, and it’s not enough to turn off autofill in whatever browser(s) you use, or to switch to whatever password manager for autofill on mobile. You also need to delete all of the passwords that are stored in all of the browsers/password managers you’ve ever used. (Or, as Richard Campbell did in an inspired and all-too-familiar bit of ADHD-like work, literally spend the time to manually go through every single saved password you own, eliminate at the source those that are no longer needed, kill duplicates, and then change every single password. Yikes.) So that’s one thing. And it’s a big topic.

But the big issue to me with a browser-based password manager isn’t about security or whatever. It’s that it’s not portable and locks you into a single platform. Yes, you can export and import easily enough, but I bet that almost every single person reading this has used multiple browsers and/or password managers over their lives and has passwords saved in all of them. Ideally, there is one copy of this in one place (and perhaps a secure exported backup). And you can easily wake up one day and say, you know what? I’m going to switch from the iPhone to Android, or from Chrome to Brave, or whatever, and everything is going to just work. I feel very strongly that this kind of portability is necessary because you otherwise can’t make good decisions for yourself (that’s what lock-in is all about). But password management adds that additional security/promiscuity element. And having those things out in the world, and not even thinking about it, ever, is a problem.

So. I will write that post eventually. But the general advice is here to be both portable and secure, and to choose the solution that works for you. And to make sure that your passwords aren’t out there anywhere else. This is like the routine account management stuff I mentioned in Tip: Properly Secure Your Microsoft Account. It’s something we don’t think about enough, and something we don’t check in on enough. And we need to get that in the calendar. It’s important.

So yeah. This is the stuff I’ve been obsessed with lately. Sorry.

The key to Copilot

jrzoomer asks:

Paul what do you think of Microsoft putting a dedicated Copilot key on its keyboards, and also, what do you think of Microsoft over time making it a requirement of OEMs selling PCs?

Aside from the Windows key, Microsoft has tried to get the PC industry to add special keys to their keyboards for decades, but with limited success. Its Office key went nowhere, and even Microsoft abandoned that. It was able to get the Context menu key on some keyboards for a short period of time, but most PC makers stopped using that too. (SHIFT + F10 does the same thing, by the way.) And this is just the latest example of Microsoft having a corporate aim and making a recommendation that some PC makers will adopt, while others, I bet, will not. The thing is, Copilot is borderline useless in Windows today, and so I assume PC makers have concerns there. And unless Microsoft can convince them that what’s coming down the pike is somehow spectacular, this won’t go anywhere.

I would like to see the PC keyboard modernized and standardized in certain ways, and this is an interesting area in which Google has done a better job with Chrome OS, where the keyboards on Chromebooks are, if not 100 percent identical, pretty close. That keyboard doesn’t have a CAPS LOCK key, which is unnecessary these days (and could easily be achieved for the few that need it with a shortcut or even double-tapped SHIFT). But there are other keys I’d look at removing, like INSERT, SCROLL LOCK, and PAUSE. And even BACKSPACE and DELETE could be handled by a single key (similar to SHIFT/CAPS LOCK). These changes would free up some space, and PC makers are already offering customizable keys of various kinds. And of course, there is key remapping, which could (and maybe should) become a more obvious control in Windows Settings.

Anyway. No one needs this key today. We’ll see if it becomes more necessary if/when Copilot in Windows turns into something useful.

Pixelation

dremy1011 asks:

Checking in on how your decision to go with the Pixel 8 Pro over the iPhone have been working out?

Great. I have been writing a lengthy review of that device and hope to publish that soon, but I also have separate write-ups about the Pixel Watch 2, Pixel Buds Pro, and Pixel Tablet that may/may not evolve into a single Pixel post of whatever kind too.

For now, I’ll say that the Pixel 8 Pro is a no-compromises win across the board, and that it nicely survives that test where I use the iPhone 15 Pro Max for a while but don’t feel any pull to go back (as great as it is, and as much as I like individual features, like the Dynamic Island).

But the other Pixel products each have their own limitations and frustrations, and the question there is whether I can live with them. For example, the Pixel Tablet’s 16:10 aspect ratio is not at all ideal in portrait mode, and while that’s a problem for me because I use tablets primarily to read, it’s also the kind of thing you can get used to. More problematic to me, however, is the unexpected reality that scrolling up-down in any app in portrait mode leads to a left-right gesture that, depending on the app, changes the view, and that has been very frustrating. So I’m dealing with that, and it’s not clear if this is just me or if it’s an issue with the system or maybe even the hardware. It happens enough each morning that I almost always start cursing it.

There is something to the ecosystem integration, of course, as any Apple fan will tell you. I really like that Pixel Buds Pro can switch between two devices (Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel Tablet) accurately and seamlessly, for example. And late last night, I needed to access a site on Pixel Tablet, but it sent an authentication code to my phone, which was on DND in the kitchen. So instead of getting out bed, I unlocked the Pixel Watch (also on DND), opened Messages, and got the code. Nice.

Anyway. More on Pixel soon. But it’s mostly very good.