Ask Paul: April 12 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Let’s kick off the weekend a bit early with a great set of reader questions. Not surprisingly, many of you are wondering about the same topics I am.

Don’t worry, be happy

madthinus asks:

I want to take you to task, oh dear, an Angry Dear Paul letter!

Gulp.

Twice now you have mentioned that Google has shipped an official Chrome for Windows on Arm because of the coming chipsets from Qualcomm and Twice now I have rolled my eyes.

What is more likely: Google porting Chrome to native ARM because Windows on Arm is going to take off, or Microsoft did most of the optimization work for Edge on Windows and Google are piggyback off that?

That sounds plausible, and I certainly don’t have any insider information about how or why Google uncharacteristically chose to support this platform. But more on that in a moment. I do have one pertinent piece of data that may be relevant to this discussion. Or not.

In the briefing last week, Qualcomm discussed the performance advantages of native Arm apps over their x64 equivalents on Intel. For web browsers, the measure was the Speedometer 2.1 benchmark, which is no longer the most current version, but still interesting. On Arm, Edge performs fully 57 percent faster than it does on Intel, which is a big different. But Chrome and Brave saw smaller (but still meaningful) improvements of 20 and 15 percent, respectively. And perhaps because I’m a Brave fan, I asked about that. Why were Chrome and Brave so similar to each other, but so different from Edge?

I was told that the Edge team was obviously invested in this shift, and that Brave, in this person’s view, was just a “skin over Chrome” (or similar, I forget the exact phrase). He never mentioned Chrome explicitly, perhaps because Qualcomm and Google had partnered on the announcement. But the inference was that Chrome and Brave saw similar gains because they are architecturally similar to each other, whereas Brave (and thus Chrome) is not as similar to Edge.

Does this suggest or prove that Google thus did not just piggyback on Microsoft’s work? Not necessarily: If you think back to the news about Microsoft bringing ClearType text rendering to Chromium, and thus to Chrome, you can see that Chrome uses a different text renderer than Edge. And it’s equally possible that differences like that explain the performance gain differences between Edge and Chrome/Brave on Arm. (I assume Brave uses the Skia text renderer like Google.)

Also, you don’t think Qualcomm showed their PC chip to Google for Chromebook support? And Google saw the value in making optimizations in Chrome and ChromeOS for a view on a next generation Chromebook?

This is also plausible. And, as noted above, these two companies did partner on the announcement: The original PR outreach was very clear about that, and the date changed a few times because of changes in Google’s schedule. Chrome was “fully optimized” for Snapdragon-powered PCs, including (but not limited to) that will utilize the X Elite. And the two companies stressed their partnership on mobile, as Snapdragon is the most popular processor choice on Android.

Both these feel more likely to me than OMG, Windows on ARM is going to be big, lets race out to support it…

I think you’re misunderstanding my excitement about this development. And also the deep institutional hatred and fear that Google harbors for Microsoft. This kind of support isn’t just rare, it’s unprecedented. And for it to occur for a platform that, to date, has amounted to absolutely nothing, is astonishing. Google, after all, thwarted third-party YouTube apps on Windows Phones, another platform that didn’t matter. Why on earth would they support this so openly?

Its partnership with Qualcomm, for one. Its need to shift Chromebooks to X Elite, as you note, for another. Absolutely. But Google’s desire to undercut Microsoft at every opportunity is a strong counter to that. Which again, is why this is so astonishing. This platform is strong enough that Google got over its anti-Microsoft bias long enough to just do it. (And weren’t there Arm-based Chromebooks already?)

That doesn’t mean that Google believes that Windows on Arm is great, or that Windows on Arm running on an X Elite will somehow become the mainstream desktop computing platform. It just means that X Elite is great. And strategic to Chrome and Google. And that we, as Windows users, can benefit from that. Which is just … great. It’s great all around.

So, sure. Roll your eyes. But I didn’t mean to suggest that Google was embracing Windows and thus implicitly Microsoft as well. That rift remains. The good news here is really just about the hardware platform, and the real takeaway here is that this announcement was one of the best indications we got before our hands-on time with the product, that the X Elite is the real deal. That’s why I was excited: We had been disappointed by Qualcomm and Windows on Arm so many times in the past.

And not to push this too hard, but … this is me. I don’t get excited over nothing. If anything, I’m overly critical. It’s easy to be cynical about this, given the history. But we should view this event for the good news it is, regardless of why Google did it (or if Microsoft somehow did all the hard work).

This is a win. Let’s celebrate it.

Target market

a93nckd2nakrhjw3 (and will) ask:

There has been a lot of optimism around the Snapdragon Elite X processor of late. The focus seems to be on thin and light notebooks but I’m quite interested in its potential to appear on the desktop in small form factor PCs (I prefer NUC-like desktops) and Framework laptops. I recently purchased a Framework 13 (AMD 7840 edition) and installed my own RAM and SSD. It flies and is a beautiful machine. I’d love to be able to install an ARM mainboard in a few years when I’m ready to upgrade.

I suspect this will happen: Qualcomm partners at scale and would surely welcome any PC maker, big or small, that wanted to use this chipset in whatever form factor. In the same way that Apple’s M-series chips are designed for mobile first—not just for performance but also for efficiency—but are still used in small desktop systems like Mac mini, Mac Studio, and iMac, the X Elite would make a good choice for a NUC or SFF-type desktop PC too. To be clear, I have no knowledge about this happening or which PC makers are planning which devices.

Tied to this, my initial take on the Snapdragon X Elite last October was that it would hopefully present a reasonable alternative to what I think of as the mainstream part of the PC market today, that $1000-ish Ultrabook form factor, like the MacBook Air. But having now seen it in action, and knowing that there are at least 2 or 3 versions of the chipset, I’m thinking a bit more broadly. Not necessarily up to gaming-class PCs. But I don’t see these chips being limited to just a single class of laptops. So that plays into your question too: Everything we know so far suggests that its impact will be both broad and deep.

will adds:

It then brings the question of would someone be able to build their own ARM based system? Maybe something with higher performance since it could have a small cooling system and bigger power supply? Do you think Microsoft could release a Surface device just for this very purpose (outside of the dev unit they have now)?

Here we can only guess, but if X Elite helps Windows on Arm become a mainstream option, there’s no reason why all of this can’t happen. I have been assuming that the first-generation X Elite-based laptops will be thin, light, and fanless like the MacBook Air, but it’s just as reasonable to expect beefier configurations with active cooling. And desktop systems with no portability needs could of course push the processor harder too. It may not all happen immediately, but even in the beginning I think we’ll see a range of systems. If they take off, the future is wide open.

You got your Microsoft Word in my Google Drive

Markld asks:

I’m currently exploring more efficient ways to manage and share documents, hoping you can offer some guidance.

As a fellow traveler on this same path, I will do my best.

Google Workspace Functionality & OneDrive Sharing Issues: I find Google Workspace’s offering at $9.99 USD per month to be quite valuable. Specifically, I appreciate that it doesn’t require recipients to log in to view shared documents via a link. When sharing documents like PDFs from OneDrive, recipients often report that they’re prompted to log in or enter a password even when I send it from my ‘Public’ folder, even though I use shareable links intended for editing. Is there a setting I might be missing to streamline this process and avoid such prompts? I am just frustrated at the moment and its basically a lot of Microsoft’ doing{some background, I am in the process of selling my home and moving, oh the stress, so I hope this was not a word salad}.

I’m not well-versed in file sharing from Google Drive or OneDrive, though I’m frustrated that Windows 11 doesn’t offer a single Share interface that works consistently between OneDrive and non-OneDrive folders. If you don’t know what I mean, you can test it by trying to share a file from each type of location. The experience couldn’t be more different and that makes no sense to me.

That said, the share interfaces for Google Drive and OneDrive in Windows are similar to each other. Both let you copy a link to the clipboard, and both let you configure access for specific people via email address and some permission level (view/edit etc.) The only real issue, to me now that I’m using Google, is that the Google Drive options don’t appear in the top-level Windows 11 context menu when you right-click the file(s) you want to share: You have to select “Show more options” to get the full context menu and then “Share with Google Drive.” So it’s an extra step.

Anyway. I don’t share files from OneDrive or Google all that often. But looking at this in Windows 11, you can of course set permissions, and OneDrive gives you the option to set a password, which is interesting. But I shared a file with my Gmail account to see what that looked like. And then I opened the link in an incognito (or whatever) browser to make sure I didn’t get authenticated automatically. And I didn’t have to sign in to access it.

If you do this with Google Drive, it works similarly. You configure the permission level (Viewer, Commenter, Editor) when you share it. (This is where my lack of experience comes into play, but I don’t think the location of the file matters.) And when I share files outside of Google (say, to my Hotmail account), it tells me that anyone with the invitation will be able to see the file without signing in. But I just don’t do this kind of thing enough to be certain about how it works, sorry.

Auto-Save in MS Word: I frequently use Microsoft Word, but I’ve noticed that documents aren’t automatically saved when I work directly in a Google Drive folder. Is this an issue unique to my setup, or is it a common challenge when using MS Word with Google Drive? Any solutions or workarounds would be greatly appreciated.

Microsoft Word saves to OneDrive by default, of course, but it also requires an active Microsoft 365 subscription. And when you leave it in that configuration, it will also auto-save the documents you’re working on. But if you save documents outside of OneDrive, as I do, Word auto-save no longer works. And that’s as true of the Desktop (assuming you don’t use OneDrive folder backup) as it is of Google Drive-based folders. It’s OneDrive or nothing. (This is true on the Mac, too.) So you do lose that feature if you leave OneDrive.

For whatever it’s with, LibreOffice Writer, which is free, can be configured to auto-save regardless of the file location. But it’s not automatic on the fly, you have to configure it for a specific time (every 2 minutes or whatever).

A galaxy of questions

dremy1011 asks:

Was wondering how things were going with the S24 Ultra and when you think your review will be up? Also with you recently using the MacBook Air and the AirPods Pro, are you thinking of going back to the iPhone?

My original plan was to finish my review of the S24 Ultra before I came home from Mexico in early March, but I ran out of time. And then I got the MacBook Air, and I realized that maybe testing the broader ecosystem there, as I had previously for Pixel, probably made sense. Which led to me temporarily returning to the iPhone. Delaying the S24 Ultra review further. Sorry.

Once I review the MacBook Air, I will move back to the S24 Ultra and finish up that review, which is partially written (and longer than I’d like). After that, we’ll see. I move between phones each year as it is, and I do miss the Pixel 8 Pro especially. But I use all three devices in some capacity, even now. The one thing I am sure of is that I won’t be using the Galaxy S24 Ultra once I review it: I see the appeal, and I certainly like some aspects of it quite a bit, like the camera system. But this isn’t my kind of device, and at a very high level I prefer the more minimalist experiences on Pixel and iPhone.

We’ll see.

Store woes

MichaelMDiv asks:

When did the Microsoft Store get so bad? I never really used it before, because it seemed terrible, but I went there during the recent Spring Sale, and I found 3 obvious scam apps in 10-15 minutes (to be fair, other users reported it and I was just reading the reviews). They were mimicking legitimate apps, or simply pointing to the legit app for a fee, or unlocking functionality in their app only if the user provided a five star review for said app. You mentioned recently that the Windows 11 Store has declined (for clarity, I was on a Windows 10 machine); is this more of the enshittification? Should we add it to the list?

The Microsoft Store has never been great. It was even worse when it was still called the Windows Store, as was the version in Windows Phone. But that said, it’s arguably “better” now than it’s ever been, if you can believe that, because the selection of app types has improved so dramatically, allowing us to find high-quality desktop apps there now, like Adobe Photoshop Elements, Affinity Photo, and so on. So yeah, the crap remains. And Microsoft for some reason continues renting and selling videos, which I’ll never understand.

But I will always choose the Microsoft Store version of any app I use over the web download. So I look there first. And I minimize my interaction with the Store itself by automating my app installs through winget. So I just visit the Store to update the in-box apps after an initial install, and then only occasionally after that. This is the same strategy I use with relatives I can’t stand: Minimize my contact is key.

(And in this case, being on Windows 10 won’t help anymore: The Store app is the same on both now.)

Customizing the desktop

jimchamplin asks:

Your favorite built-in color scheme, Visual Style, highlight color, whatever it’s called, from the major versions of Windows. For me, it was the default gray in 95/98, and the more platinum look of Me/2000/XP Classic theme. XP’s default blue. By the time you got to Vista, you didn’t really have a lot of variation. Just the tint in Aero. Now there’s even less customization.

I really like the Windows 2000 look/feel/color scheme, and also the Windows 95 version, though I darkened the green/gray background. I found Aero to be “dirty” looking, in the sense that the bleed-through transparency was a bit much, and would often disable or de-tune the transparency to make it cleaner. (I think I could set the transparency color to white, and that helped.) I used to try to mimic the Amiga’s Workbench 2.0 look and feel a lot as well.

When PCs were the center of personal computing, customization and personalization was a big deal. Now that they’re not, it’s not, because few users even bother with that anymore. This came up during my interview with Stardocks’s Brad Wardell. I make only very minor look/feel changes to Windows these days.

Apple, Siri, and AI

helix2301 asks:

Siri is probably the worst assistant on the market at the time Apple has plans to improve it with AI do you think they will use OpenAI like everyone else or do you think Apple will do Apple and get into its own thing going? I read your article yesterday on M4 chip that’s why I am asking.

We can only guess at this point, but I feel like Apple will offer what I think of as a “bespoke” Apple-style take on AI that will utilize multiple back-ends, including those made by third parties like Google and/or OpenAI, in addition to the local AI capabilities that it’s sort of pioneered. And that they will market this as offering the best of what’s available, but with the safety and privacy its customers expect.

Many people discount Apple because they appear late to this game, but Apple is too, big, powerful, and influential not to get this right. And it has a history of coming in seemingly late to the game and cleaning up because it waited until it offered real value and differentiation. Nothing is ever certain, but I can see that playing out here.

As for Siri, I’m vaguely curious whether Apple will try to do what Amazon is trying with Alexa and transform it with AI. For now, it’s the first thing I disable on every Apple device I use.

Between Build, Google I/O, and WWDC, the next few months are going to be very interesting.

One laptop

My other question is since you like the MacBook Air so much would you ever do what we do at work and run Windows in Parallels as a daily driver?

I haven’t even installed Parallels Desktop on the MacBook Air yet. I originally expected to do that immediately, but then it occurred to me that it was better to have a purer Mac experience, not just for the review but so I could get over my macOS usability issues. Full immersion, I guess.

I know you review laptops and you need to use them but if you were going on a trip and only wanted to bring one laptop would that be an option you would consider?

There are trips, and then there are trips. I took the MacBook Air on a day trip to New York City last week, and that was fine. And based on my previous experiences with Parallels and other Macs, I’m sure that combination would work well for trips of less than a week. But longer term, this isn’t a viable solution for me. I would never go to Mexico (or whatever) for three to five weeks and just use the MacBook Air.

That said, I have multiple PCs there, and even more PCs here at home, and while I mostly use Windows, and I do move back and forth between Windows, Mac, Linux, and ChromeOS, just as I move between different phones. And the Mac’s combination of performance, battery life, light weight, and large screen is pretty special. So maybe I would go back and forth to Mexico with just the MacBook Air (though I usually travel there with two laptops).

Things change. I will check out Parallels on the MacBook Air after the review is done. And as I’ve written recently, I will be getting a Snapdragon X Elite-based Windows laptop as soon as I can, preferably a 15-inch Surface Laptop. If this is in any way truly comparable to the MacBook Air—meaning, similarly thin and light, with similar performance and battery life, but with Windows 11—I can’t imagine sticking with the Mac. We’ll see. Any number of things could undermine that PC.

Also, I realize that, in some quarters, when I’m complimentary to something like the MacBook Air or a Chromebook Plus or whatever, there’s an underlying tension. And that in other quarters, there’s an “I told you so”-type reaction, like I’m late to a party or something. But whether it’s phone or PCs or anything else, I have long moved back and forth between platforms, and there have always been advantages and disadvantages to each. This isn’t something new, in other words. It’s also just a slice in time.

It’s important to keep an open mind and have enough experience to form an educated opinion. And on the PC side, what I see is that the Mac, ChromeOS, and Linux have all improved nicely in recently years, making each more viable to larger audiences of people who might otherwise have chosen Windows PCs. Conversely, Windows 11 has gotten worse over time, and this obviously troubles me given how much I discuss that. But that emphasis speaks to where my heart is, too. I still prefer Windows. That could change. But it hasn’t yet.

A spiral of the downward variety

iantrem asks:

Your recent discussions about the enshittification of Windows remind me a little of the talk around Windows Phone when it was first released, knowing what Microsoft needed to do to make things better but with a realization that they feel they are doing things right despite what everyone else is telling them, and it’s only going to get worse.

I’ll publish my review of Steven Sinofsky’s Hardcore Software soon, but this book challenges some of the assumptions that many of us have made about why certain things happened. And while I don’t always agree with his reasons, I do appreciate the perspective. And the one thing we should all agree on is that life is rarely simple. There are usually multiple causes, both internal and external, that factor into any outcome.

More specifically, Windows Phone was a reaction to a situation that Microsoft found itself in when Apple upended the smartphone market. This wasn’t unique to Microsoft: Companies more dominant than it was in mobile tried and failed to meet this challenge too, and all of them disappeared. Late to market as it was, Microsoft’s eventual reaction to the iPhone, Windows Phone, was unique, bursting with creativity and original ideas. But it was also hobbled by the self-inflicted need to come together quickly (among other things). Windows Phone, like Windows 8, was created with the understanding that the first version would be incomplete and that those teams would improve matters over subsequent updates. This had worked well for Microsoft in the past. (Everyone “knows” that it takes Microsoft three tries to get anything right, but as Sinofsky points out in the book, that isn’t unique to Microsoft either.) It didn’t work out in those cases.

Like Windows Phone, Windows 8 is nothing but what-ifs and an endless source of debate. But in the end, many bad decisions and a nexus of events and competitors beyond its control overwhelmed a few good decisions, including the central premise of it all, that Microsoft should be the one to try and disrupt Windows. It really was a bold bet. Wrong in all the details. But a bold bet.

The failure of Windows 8 led us to what we’re left with today, and the irony was that the resulting shift was the path that Sinofsky had refused to take. But one wonders: Would we really have been better off with a second Windows 7, a release that wouldn’t have addressed the competitive threats of the day in any way?

It’s impossible to know. But I kind of obsess over it.

While Windows isn’t going to go away, (you used the perfect term, inertia, in your “Soul of a Different Machine” article), are we approaching a point where Windows is just “there” because it needs to be there but people move to different platforms (it’s probably already happened in the home, is it on the way for business?) and do you feel Microsoft feels the same way?

Everyone has heard the phrase, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Less discussed but equally true, Rome didn’t fall in a day, either. Similarly, huge computing platforms like Windows don’t just disappear overnight.

And inertia isn’t always bad, it helped us get by Windows 8, in part by a huge portion of the user base sticking with Windows 7. That’s happening now with Windows 11, too, though less dramatically. Over time, Windows will inevitably succumb to the usage shifts. All the bad behaviors that Microsoft is forcing on customers just accelerates that.

After a few years of Teams dominated Build Conferences, we’re now on our 2nd AI Build Conference where even the web is taking a seat in the back of the room with Windows development. Those that want Windows to do well have moved to other things so we’re just left with a development team that don’t care.

This is tough to understand from the outside, but I have to remind myself sometimes that Microsoft isn’t really a single entity working in concert, it’s a humongous group of what would otherwise be hundreds of smaller companies, often working independently of each other and sometimes, rarely, partnering internally. There are relationships and dependencies, and there are isolated groups. Each has its own goals and strategies. Sometimes these things conflict, and sometimes there’s synergy.

Everyone knows that Windows is no longer the center of Microsoft as a business, and that it’s not even one of the core pillars anymore. But it’s still important, and big and profitable. And there’s still some form of virtuous cycle in which Microsoft’s best customers are using, and paying for, some combination of Windows and Microsoft 365/Office, and perhaps even deploying Surface PCs at scale. This reality forces these business to align when possible.

Likewise, I assume most understand that Windows, as a part of Microsoft, is sometimes forced to meet some broader strategic requirements that may or may not make sense to that team or the product’s users. The more drastic side effects of this need are a form of enshittification, of course. But I have to believe that almost all the individuals working on Windows today, by and large, want this product to be as good as it can be, and for it to meet customer needs. And that they are distressed to varying degrees by some of the more onerous behaviors that they’re forced to employ from on high.

Here, I have to remind myself not to over-personalize my reactions to this behavior. When something like forced OneDrive folder backup upsets me, it’s important to remember that these behaviors almost certainly were not dreamed up by any person on the OneDrive team. Or, if they were, it was only because they were forced to come up with some way to increase OneDrive storage usage, and this was the least painful strategy they could think up.

Regarding Build, I’ve long described it as my favorite Microsoft show, and it’s always been an excellent way to gauge the true strategic focus of the company, dating back to when it was called PDC. This is where we first saw Microsoft demote Windows most clearly, as its other platforms were given equal billing, then more billing, and then Windows blinked out almost entirely. The good news for Windows today is that it at least plays some role in this newly AI-focused Microsoft. The role it played in the previous cloud-focused Microsoft was negligible to non-existent.

But make no mistake. When it comes to Windows and apps, nothing has changed or will ever change: All meaningful new apps are web apps. And legacy apps of whatever variety—Win32, WPF, UWP, whatever–can be modernized in different ways. But no one is building meaningful new native apps for Windows, not even Microsoft.