Ask Paul: May 17 (Premium)

Happy Friday! It’s been a crazy, busy week, and we have another crazy, busy week coming up. And you know what that means. It’s time to kick off the weekend–and a brief respite for me–a bit early with another great set of reader questions.

Which Windows on Arm laptop?

jeroendegrebber asks:

Assuming the new Qualcomm Arm cpu will really deliver as promised, what daily driver laptop would you wish to get an Arm upgrade?

For whatever it’s worth, I think we’re past the speculation bit. The new Qualcomm chipsets will finally deliver a viable Arm-based alternative to x86, and my bigger question now is how quickly the industry will shift to this platform (meaning Arm, generally, not Qualcomm) entirely. Arm Holdings specifically mentioned that multiple chipmakers are working on Windows/PC-specific chips this past week, there hasn’t been a single warning sign building up to the launch Monday, and just based on leaks, we can see that the PC market is embracing these chips in ways they never did previously. The future is just about here. Finally. Monday will be a big day.

In mainstream productivity laptops, which one might define as “laptops without a discrete GPU” where the market ranges from mid-level consumer models to premium business-class models, I can’t think of a single laptop that would not benefit from this shift. In the x86 world, we have to deal with heat, fan noise, and decreasing battery life (an issue that doesn’t get enough press, frankly, though everyone who reviews laptops will tell you this). Shifting these products to Arm will be similar to the shift from SDR (standard resolution) video to HD and then 4K–where it felt like we suddenly had new eyes–except that the benefits we’ll experience will be battery life, silence, and no heat. This will be an ah-ha moment for everyone who experiences it. Just ask anyone who moved to an Apple Silicon-based MacBook.

Looking at what’s in the room with me now, I see an HP Dragonfly Pro, one of my favorite laptops of all time, and am reminded that it has an AMD processor and custom power management system, co-designed by HP and AMD, that bypasses the system in Windows to work some magic. And that this laptop could be thinner, lighter, and quieter, with better battery life, by shifting to Arm, and that the resulting product would just run stock Windows (on Arm) and not require any special engineering to achieve HP’s performance and efficiency goals.

I also have three Lenovo Yoga laptop/2-in-1s in for review, and two of them would benefit similarly to the Dragonfly Pro: These are well-made devices, but they suffer from their lackluster Intel Core Ultra innards, with the resulting heat/fan noise and battery life issues. An Arm chip would set them free. And Lenovo and its customers will both benefit from that when it happens. And it will happen.

When you move past the mainstream to the smaller but important markets for what I’ll call prosumer/creator, gaming, developer/portable workstation PCs–again, those that today ship with a discrete GPU–things are a bit murkier. As is the case with Apple Silicon, there’s no way to add a dGPU to an Arm-based PC, graphics capabilities occur on-chip, and while the GPU in the Snapdragon X series chips appears solid for what it is, it won’t meet many of the needs now served by the respective audiences. It will meet some, of course: Apple Silicon-based Macs work wonderfully for video rendering, photo editing, and other creator-type workloads, and I expect Arm-based PCs to as well. But once you move upmarket with gaming and workstation-class laptops, not so much.

And on that note, the third of those Lenovos, the Yoga Pro 9i 16 Gen 9, might be an interesting test case. This is more creator/prosumer-class hardware than a portable workstation, but it’s on the edge with a high-end Core Ultra 9 processor and discrete Nvidia GeForce graphics. Lenovo markets this laptop specifically for creators, and I suspect Arm would accommodate most of that audience just fine. We’ll see.

Winget questions

ianceicys asks:

Paul, how do you keep the software on your machines up to date these days? I’m a huge fan of WinGetUI / UniGet but it feels like every other day there’s another software update (including security fixes) for some app on my machine (ex. Steam, Windows Defender, Office 365, Zoom, FireFox, Arc Browser, Power Tools, Stardock apps–thank you start11, Notion, Nvidia drivers, Google workspace) and it’s shocking how many of these software updates require mandatory reboots. How are you automating updates of the software side you are running?

I’m not.

The Windows Package Manager (winget) is wonderful on many levels, and as I’ve written elsewhere, I use a script to bulk-install all the apps I need onto each laptop I use. And this has always worked out fantastically well, for that one purpose.

But winget falls apart in two areas: It doesn’t provide automated app updating or any kind of app configuration restore. And so I can’t and don’t automate either. But I do have my little habits/traditions, of course.

There are many reasons to choose the Microsoft Store version of an app over the web download, though this is nuanced and getting more so because the strict controls Microsoft used to impose on app makers are now optional, in part because Store adoption (by app makers/developers) was (and still is) lackluster. But one of those reasons is that the Store will (generally) keep the apps it installs up-to-date, and I (generally) don’t worry about that too much. Meaning, I just let that happen.

(Quick side-track. Among the issues with the Store opening up is that paid apps no longer need to handle licenses through the Store. So, with Affinity Photo 1, my purchase gave me an infinite number of app installs with no licensing issues at all. But with Affinity Photo 2, the licensing occurs outside the Store. So I need to sign in to the app manually, and it activates with the app maker, and while I’ve not yet run into any issues, I could. In short, it’s no better than a web download, as I have to remember to manually deactivate the app’s license when I reset that PC or whatever. This type of thing diminishes the value–and, I think, the original point–of the Store.)

Every two weeks, Microsoft issues some formal cumulative update for Windows 11, via a Patch Tuesday update on Week B and then a preview update on Week D. On those days, I lurch around the house, firing up most of the laptops and manually triggering those installs (and subsequent reboots). And I use that as an opportunity to open the Store app and look for and install app updates. It’s like flossing when you brush your teeth. Sort of.

Much less frequently, I fire up Terminal and run winget upgrade –all and let it do its thing.

But I’m compulsive. Most people would never do what I do, and I’m definitely not recommending it. Instead, most people probably just let it happen, meaning they treat app updates (and Windows Updates) as they do any notification: When your browser or whatever app tells you it has an update, you just install it then. I mean, in most cases, why do otherwise? Who cares if you have the latest code unless it’s something important?

That said, I do want this to be better. And I would love for some kind of automated app update background process that kicked off winget as needed to make it happen. But I feel like I’m the exception there. This just doesn’t matter to most, I bet.

The bigger issue for me is automating app configuration. Bulk installing apps is great, but having to go through them one-by-one and run each’s unique set up–with account sign-ins and the related 2FA authentications in many cases–can be a bit tedious. Granted, I do this more than most people because I review laptops. But this is always in the back of my mind, and I suspect both of these issues will get better over time.

Related to this, jeroendegrebber asks:

Also, as an addition to the question by ianceicys : I started using WingetUI thanks to your articles on it. I really like it, but I’m also wondering: to what extent is winget a fix/response to the failing of the MS Store or is a different tool for a different job altogether? (Most of the software I update through winget, could be a store app, but isn’t).

Winget is a different tool, targeting a different audience, though it can obviously play the same role. Related to my bulk app install process, we might wonder why the Microsoft Store doesn’t allow you to create a “playlist” of apps that you can click once to bulk install them all from the GUI. There is a related feature that’s tied to Windows Backup where you restore from a backup and your previous Store app installs are reinstalled in time. But an explicit “click here to do this now” would benefit more people, as it could be used after a clean install too.

There’s also a third tool in Windows 11 that speaks to a potential future for all this: The Dev Home app that’s installed by default for some unknown reason now includes what might be the first step towards automated app configuration in Windows via its Machine configuration interface. Among other things, it includes an app install feature that’s just a front-end to winget. And, more to the point, an app configuration capability automating certain Windows features using a YAML (XML-type) script. This functionality is aimed at developers (and, really, IT pros who oversee teams of developers), and is developer tools-specific. But there’s no reason this can’t be extended to all users/app types. This does feel like the beginnings of something more generally useful, it’s just not there yet.

Anyway. The Microsoft Store is a familiar app store experience for users. But winget is aimed at IT pros who need to automate and manage app installs. It’s sort of a superset to the Store in the sense that it also includes its own web-based app repository in addition to the Store. But it’s also not, because it’s possible as a user to download older app versions you paid for from your library in the Store, a feature that’s not available with winget. But put simply, these are just different tools for different audiences.

In an ideal world, the Store would just be a GUI front-end to winget and winget would be a true superset of Store functionality. But Microsoft is about as far from an ideal world as we can get. So that will never happen.

Phones to the future

WiseOldElf asks:

There will always be a requirement to replace phones that are broken, or where the battery no longer holds charge, for example. however, beyond that, is there really a need to buy a new phone for much other than a desire for shiny new things ? yes, there are incremental improvements in various components, but is that compelling enough to warrant the cost of a new phone ? aligned with this, and perhaps it’s a whimsical question, as none of us know the future: what else might phones do ? they’ve aggregated capabilities for so many aspects of our life, but what else is there ?

The PC had this incredible 25+ year run where it was not just the center of personal computing but was, in fact, all of personal computing, the beginning and end of everything we did digitally. During this heyday, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates used to talk up “the magic of software” and how the PC was that most versatile of devices because it rose to each challenge by proving itself adaptable enough to overcome any challengers. Until it didn’t, of course: Starting with the iPhone and modern smartphones, the PC was suddenly not the center of our digital lives, but was instead just one of those devices. And now, for many, the PC is a secondary device at best. Many people don’t even need a PC anymore.

Today, phones are far more personal than PCs. But they’re also more versatile. They don’t just come with us when we leave the house, they fit in our pockets, and so they are always with us. And many of us, most of us, see personal computing through this relatively tiny screen. It’s where we keep up with the people we love or work with, it’s how we interact with the world and read the news, it’s everything. And like the PC, it has so far risen to every challenge. That will change, someday. But for now, the phone is the be-all, end-all, for most people. Definitely the center.

In a “right tool for the job” sense, it’s reasonable to wonder what else the phone might do. Could it replace the PC entirely? Of course it could. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet. Solutions like Samsung Dex point to a possible future there, and I’m curious that Google hasn’t pushed this as an Android platform feature. But maybe it’s just unnecessary. The appeal of a Chromebook is that it’s simple and relatively inexpensive, and it offers the commensurate level of functionality most would expect of what is, to them, a secondary device anyway. Those of us who prefer more sophisticated tools, or are just old and set in our ways, still use complex PC-based solutions like Windows, macOS, and Linux. But you have to think those days are numbered.

It’s impossible to guess how, when, or why the phone era ends. But it will likely be some combination of embedded technologies, ambient computing, and truly pervasive always-there connectivity. That’s far off, so some sequence of advances in smart glasses, smart contacts, in-body sensors and compute, will wean us off our phone addictions first, perhaps. But who knows? PCs are already viewed as glorified typewriters. Future generations won’t even type. They’ll laugh when they learn that we used to stare at these tiny screens all day, just as we now look back at smoking on airplanes with confused wonder. How did this even happen?

All this is just speculative mumbo jumbo. Short term, phones are a huge market of very necessary devices, and the cost of these things is almost beside the point because that cost is negligible. I think we forget how expensive computers were 20 or 30 years ago, and how comparatively easy and cheap it is to buy a phone and use it for a long period of time. No one was offering to sell me a PC for $20 to $30 a month in 1990, that’s for sure. And while year-over-year upgrades are minor, few are upgrading that often. For the typical user, each phone is a major upgrade, because it has 3, 4, or more years of improvements in it.

Put another way, a phone is just like a PC in that it’s a tool. And while we see the PC as a tool, a tool for productivity in most cases, we’re only just getting to the same place with the phone. And I think it’s just that the phone is so versatile, used for so much, that it’s more important, more dear. But the rapid advances that got us to that point have passed. So, yeah, year-over-year, it’s mostly incremental. That’s normal. It’s a mature product now. As an enthusiast, I guess I don’t “celebrate” that fact per se. But it’s good overall. Too much churn too often is a sign of immaturity and uncertainty. And that’s not what phones are anymore.

If that makes any sense. I’m all over the place here, sorry.

Office noueveau

gregsedwards asks:

What’s your favorite “new” Office app (i.e., not one of the legacy pillar desktop apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.)? Do any offer a lot of value over the traditional tools, and are there any that you could see yourself integrating into your daily workflow? Do you feel like the “super-app” (i.e., application that does everything) is doomed in favor of lighter, simpler, single-use apps, or do you feel like those are just glorified toys? Is there a sweet spot for productivity apps?

The last “new” Office app I truly embraced was OneNote, and that was 20 years ago, and I’ve since run away screaming thanks to the rise of simpler apps. But OneNote is still interesting to me because it neatly straddles the line between what I’ll call the classic and modern Office app eras. As an app, first on Windows, it was decidedly old-school, of course. But it also was very forward leaning in that it did away with documents to save and manage, and it evolved to be this cloud-based solution in which your content syncs seamlessly between devices.

Microsoft made a few more traditional Office apps after OneNote, like InfoPath, but they’ve pretty much come and gone. Since then, there’s been some strategy shifts that mirror the broader shifts we’ve seen in the industry with web, cloud, and mobile. Maybe this is obvious, but mobile and web versions of traditional Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, are in many ways new apps, built largely from scratch, and designed to bring that functionality forward to new form factors and use cases. You might view Word for the iPad, for example, as the rough equivalent of Microsoft Write back in the day, in that it is a simpler version of a complex tool most know well, and the only question is whether it provides all the functionality you need. That will vary by person but, increasingly, the answer is probably yes.

Mobile and web versions of existing apps are only one side to this, of course. In more recent years, Microsoft has also modernized those legacy apps on the desktop, which is interesting. And it has released truly new apps. Not surprisingly, these new apps are now all web-based: First, fitfully, with things like Sway, which were literally websites. And then more confidently with real web apps like Teams (the most successful Office app of all time, arguably), Loop, the Outlook, and so on. I don’t personally use any of these apps every day, but I could. And would. And they would solve some problems if I only I had those problems.

I’ve been writing a lot on this topic recently, of course, but this isn’t new. Microsoft started encountering pushback to the “bloat” in Office almost 30 years ago, but it nonetheless moved forward with these legacy tools for far longer than made sense, driven mostly by inertia in businesses. This doesn’t get highlighted enough, and I may have to go off on a bit of rant here: Microsoft has always moved conservatively because of these change-averse business customers, and one of the many side effects of that is the insane level of backward compatibility that it has always maintained regardless of common sense. And you see the bitching and moaning that happens every single time it tries to do otherwise. Consider the new Outlook as an obvious and recent example: All I see is a bunch of whining from people, all stuck in the past, all of whom need one stupid feature or their lives will collapse. And I’m sorry. It’s this thinking that has held back our industry, and more to the point, the Microsoft ecosystem, for decades now.

And this is a problem: The rest of the industry doesn’t care, and they’re moving on. Back in the day, Microsoft and its customers would argue that the user base was so diverse that they had no choice: Every customer used different features and no one could say no. Features continued forward, regardless of need, usage, or security concern, and Windows, and Office, and everything else just became these giant hairballs. Meanwhile, companies like Apple and Google have user bases just as big and diverse, maybe more so. And yet we ridicule them for killing features and technologies too quickly. Surely there’s a happy middle ground.

My point here is that Microsoft could have simplified Office, specifically, years ago and didn’t. But more recent “ports”, if you will, to the web and mobile point the way forward, if belatedly. As do more recent new web apps. These new apps, like Loop, don’t offer the same number of features as, say, Word or Outlook. But in some ways, that’s the point. These are new apps, with new architectures, designed for this modern age. And it will take a while to move past the legacy stuff. But it’s finally happening. Finally.

I’ve been writing about bloat, complexity, and simplicitly a lot lately. But these aren’t new concepts. I have been in this headspace for over 20 years. To give a very specific example, I’m a writer. I’m a professional writer. I’ve published books, I’ve won awards, I’ve generated more content than Stephen King. But my needs, when it comes to writing, are relatively small. And I have always wanted simpler tools than those that Microsoft provides, which were, for years, the standard. Always.

What I’ve had to put up with is an increasingly complex app with a bizarre set of contradictory user interfaces, with Byzantine settings and other issues. This app (like the others, and like Windows) doesn’t sync anything important, forcing me to make multiple manual changes every time I fire it up on a new PC. And it has become enshittified in recent years along with Windows and OneDrive. And here I am, almost 30 years into my time using Word, wondering how on earth I put with this for so long.

So yes. There are far simpler, far better, solutions that meet my needs in this one area. I keep moving around because I’m trying to figure out where the right mix is for me personally. But I’m not going back to Word. And as others of my generation move on, retire, whatever, Word, like the rest of classic Office, will finally fade away. This should have happened already. And the way it should have happened is by a modernization that never took place specifically because Microsoft could never say not to an audience that, come on, wasn’t going anywhere else anyway. So we have this Titanic of apps, Word for Windows, subsets on web and mobile, and now newer apps–Loop, third-party apps–that are both simpler and more sophisticated. Saying they don’t have as many features is like saying that a modern car doesn’t have as many controls as a 747. Right. That’s a good thing.

I know there are people out there, reading this, and getting frustrated. Maybe they’re Excel wizards who need some specific feature that isn’t in Google Sheets or whatever other nonsense is out there. I hear you. But I’m moving on. And if you open the window and look around, you’ll see the rest of the planet is moving on, too. And that being skilled in using a complex tool is the past. We can belittle AI all we want, but one of the many things this technology will do is accelerate our move away from legacy solutions like desktop Office.

To each his own. But I focus on tools that are simple and distraction-free. For writing, I prefer document formats that are open and, ideally, text-based, so they are always human and machine-readable. I also look for portability. That can take a few different forms. Having the same app on multiple platforms is ideal, if it’s an app I love. But having different apps on different platforms that can use the same documents is an acceptable alternative.

There is a version of this story that could include Microsoft Word. Maybe Apple will finally figure out what an iPad Pro is and then the iPad version of Word will make sense. Maybe. But those Markdown tools I like and use all work great on iPad too. And this is a part of the issue: In not moving forward while the rest of the industry was, Microsoft has in some ways ceded the future for short-term reasons. Maybe I’m an outlier. But getting me back now, now that I’ve experienced simpler and better, will be difficult. I’m open to whatever. But I don’t see it happening.

Related to this, Markld asks:

Microsoft just seems to mess up things and make it difficult to do what I need to do. I have both MS office 365(with OneDrive storage)and Google Workspace. I am really freaking liking the later per your recommendations.

Maybe this is a cultural thing, a generational thing, or whatever. But like many, I’ve spent too many years trying to contort myself and how I work to conform myself to the complexity of these legacy tools. And today, I’m just done with it. I choose tools that work best for me, and without regret or excuse. I’m not suggesting that Google Workspace is the cure for everyone’s problems. And it’s certainly not perfect. But it is simpler. It does just work. And it does meet my needs. So yeah. I get it.

I used MS Word alot but the spellchecker and ABC ordering is a rather laughable. It is pure frustration no matter how you set it.

Yes. This is a long-standing issue for me. When I was using Word, I would post articles into WordPress and then Grammarly would routinely find a dozen or more issues Word missed. Now I use Grammarly on the desktop and a tool called LanguageTool (which I pay for) for a second spelling/grammar check when I post to the web. These tools are not perfect, but both are better than Word in this regard. (I’m not as familiar with Docs, because I can’t use it to paste cleanly into WordPress.)

I guess it comes down to I need ABC ordering as it helps me with my database I am developing. I am looking for advice. I don’t think Google Docs does ABC ordering, correct? I couldn’t find it, if it does. Does LibreOffice do at least adequate ABC ordering?

I don’t use this feature all that often, but LibreOffice Writer does support this natively (select text, Tools > Sort). It looks like you need to install an add-in called Sorted Paragraphs to get this feature in Google Docs.

What it all boils down to is MS Office 365 needs to be MS Office ‘Zero’! Thanks ahead of time. Love ‘Ask Paul’, it goes great with an easy chair and a cold or warm drink!

🙂 Thanks.

Wintabs

christianwilson asks:

What is the story with Windows tablets these days? Is the space for Windows-powered tablets dead at this point? I’m not talking about the laptops that can flip around like the Lenovo Yoga but the devices designed to be touch-first.

Pure Windows tablets are long gone.

This is tied to the conversation above about Gates (and Microsoft) believing that the PC was this infinitely malleable thing that could adapt to any need, and it’s at the center of the last quarter of Steven Sinofsky’s book Hardcore Software. Microsoft made its big push for pure tablets with the Windows 8 wave (including a brief Windows 8.1-based interlude with 8-inch mini-tablets). But it failed, in part because of bad strategies and decisions, but also because customers rejected such a complex platform on what should be a simple, consumption-focused device. The iPad serves this need perfectly. And aside from the platform itself, just catching up with the size and scope of the app market was impossible. Microsoft failed for similar reasons with Windows Phone, which at least was simpler from a platform perspective. But with Windows, we had this locked-in body of classic desktop apps that everyone is used to. Tacking a new mobile platform on top of that was always going to fail.

In the end, Microsoft and its PC makers partners switched the focus (back) to what customers demanded: Desktop (UI) PCs. Microsoft with Windows 10, and PC makers with convertible laptops like Yoga and 2-in-1s like Surface Pro.

This is reminiscent of Media Center, another example of right idea, wrong implementation. You’ve got this beautiful, full-screen UI, you’re controlling it with a remote, and you’re watching live TV or whatever, and then a Windows dialog pops up. Maybe an error. Maybe you need to reboot to install updates. It doesn’t matter: The complexity of the underlying platform got in the way. And this is why Windows tablets don’t make any sense. Because it’s full Windows.

Surface Pro is out there but it’s definitely more of a laptop replacement. Surface Go 4 is (was?) available through enterprise channels but I see those on backorder a lot. I don’t see much of anything from the Dells, HPs, and Samsungs of the world. It’s either iPad or an Android-powered device.

Well, right.

I’ve been told repeatedly by PC makers that they only make these types of PCs because they’re financially lucrative, a classic upsell based on human nature where you spend more money because of “what if” scenarios, but almost no one uses them as anything but a clamshell laptop. There is no market for pure Windows tablets.

(There is a very small audience of people who take notes with a pencil, which I see as a weird, inefficient affectation in the 21st century, and artists.)

I wouldn’t recommend a Windows tablet to people but I know there are use cases in some business settings and I’m wondering if that’s just a dead end.

It is a dead-end. And where it isn’t, specialized PCs make sense and serve those needs. For example, you might use a ruggedized 2-in-1 as a tablet of sorts on a factory floor or whatever.

In search of a simpler platform

tobyburnett41 asks:

Is ChromeOS now your go-to operating system?

No. I’m primarily a Windows user.

But I’ve always evaluated the competition, and there’s been a lot going on in that space in recent months, so I have spent more time than usual with ChromeOS, and the Mac, and Linux too. These systems have all improved a lot, but I very much prefer Windows.

I joined this because I wanted to be up to date on what Windows 10, then 11 could do for me, and the nice updates on relevant tech stuff, and especially hardware–I’ve made several purchases based on your recommendations. Thanks for the pointer to Brave!

You bet. Thanks.

Now I really appreciate the effort you make to carefully evaluate options. In that light, I’m playing with ChromeOS Flex on ThinkPad since it exposes the underlying linux, (I develop science analysis with Jupterlab) and that one can install VSCode. Thus I’m studying your posts on this avidly, anxious for more.

I don’t have a specific schedule or plan, but there will be more, for sure. And not just for ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex, but for the Mac and Linux. (And if Apple starts making some substantive changes to iPadOS at WWDC in June, maybe even for iPad as well.) There’s a combination of things happening here, but between the improvements elsewhere and the terrible things Microsoft is doing to Windows 11, it’s fair to say that my long-time goal of keeping up-to-date on rival platforms has become more important. So I’m making more of a point to actively move back and forth between the platforms. Taking the time to work through the weirdnesses on the Mac, especially its inconsistent multitasking features, really helped with that, as I had always found certain things about that platform confounding. It’s still illogical, but I at least understand it now.

But this is perhaps a bit of a dilemma: you try to carefully document Windows, often explaining that you prefer it to the Mac, and indeed it is where you got started, but what if it is no longer your favorite?

Well, I’m open to any outcome here. But my heart is still with Windows. It’s my primary focus. I would rather solve the problems in Windows than move to a new platform. But using other platforms can inform that work. It’s helpful to see what others do, etc.

I can’t predict the future. Microsoft may come to it senses. Or it may keep spiraling. Either way, I’ll be ready to make an informed decision. That’s all we can do, I think.