Ask Paul: May 24 (Premium)

Happy Friday, and Happy Memorial Day if you’re celebrating. It was a BIG week, of course, and like you, I have many questions. So let’s kick it off. I have a lot more to write about the events of this past week, but this is a good way to get it started.

Data sync and resiliency

j5 asks:

Hey, Paul so we just went through that really bad storm here in the Houston area. We were fortunate in all that happened to us such as having our power flicker a few times and lots of tree debris in the front and back yard. We’ve been through some bad weather in the past, Hurricane Rita and Harvey, tropical storms, and the Texas Freeze. Through all of these, I’ve come up with a strategy to keep my tech and personal files from getting damaged.

We had a terrible storm here in the Lehigh Valley this week while we were in Seattle, and when we got home, the desktop PC in my home office wouldn’t boot up. The power light came on for a moment, then just went out, and it wouldn’t start correctly. I had to record First Ring Daily, so I figured I’d just use a laptop, but when I got back from putting in my contacts and cleaning up a bit, I noticed that the PC’s power light was blinking, so I watched it for a minute. And it booted up. I thought I must have lost it from a power outage or whatever. But when this kind of thing happens, my mind always goes back to that time our yard got struck my lightning, and we lost several PCs and other devices to the power surge.

I’ve switched to laptops so I can just grab them and go. I now scan all my photos, files and take pictures of physical items, and back everything up into the cloud. I use iCloud and OneDrive.

Same, though I use Google Drive and OneDrive.

I do think cloud services combined with modern day smartphones are such an amazing technological situation to have during a disaster. I had a friend whose entire first floor was flooded during Harvey. All their paper files, family computer with all their photos and financial information were on it. But he had an iPhone and was putting some files into iCloud. Although they permanently lost some old photos and documentation. All their recent photos and documentation were in iCloud. All the places they called to have housework done in the past were in both of their Contacts apps. So it was a lifesaver having their iPhones combined with iCloud.

Right. This is the proper setup, and why I discuss using sync instead of traditional backup tools: Everything you need is synced to the cloud and ideally to several devices (PCs, in my case). So you can just pick up any of them and get to work.

I was curious, do you have a strategy to deal with these kinds of situations being that you need to be able to connect to the internet and write is critical to what you do? I just have to think about one location my home. But you have your place in Mexico and Pennsylvania. And I consider you a tech insider and someone with lots of experience with technology and the cloud. Maybe you might have some good tips to share on this subject.

The basic strategy is outlined in that article linked above. Everything important to me—work files current and archived, personal documents, photos, home movies, etc.—is synced to at least two cloud services. I sync what I need on an ongoing basis to multiple PCs—in my case, literally over a dozen of them because of what I do for a living—so I can work from any device. (I sync the same subset of folders to each device, my working To-do folder and my book folder, which has all the books).

I also have an out-of-date NAS that I will replace this year and, most likely, replicate between Mexico and here. But that’s just me being OCD, it’s not necessary for most. File sync with at least one cloud provider does the trick. You have to have enough storage, of course, and that means you have to pay for it (Microsoft 365 Family is an obvious choice, and I pay for Google One as well). Then you just make sure everything important is in a folder that’s syncing.

For non-technical people, just enabling that OneDrive folder backup feature that I personally loathe is a good strategy. That way, even things on your desktop will sync. But I don’t need that, as I have a particular folder structure I use, and it’s designed for this purpose: Lightweight sync of what’s important day-to-day and everything else is accessible in the cloud from any device.

These are kind of the core articles about this stuff:

• Don’t Be a Statistic (Premium)
• Roll Your Own Windows Time Machine (Premium)

Which laptop

jrzoomer asks:

Paul I heard on Windows Weekly that you ordered the Snapdragon X Elite Surface 15. I really value your opinions and am curious to hear your thoughts on these things:

Do you specifically prefer a laptop form factor over the 2 in 1 Surface Pro for your use?

Yes. Very much so. As I get older, I also prefer larger screens: The 15-inch-ish display on the MacBook Air M3 is pretty much ideal from a size and aspect ratio perspective, but 16-inch laptops work well for me too (though I very much don’t want a numeric keypad).

That said, I really do like the Surface Pro for reasons that are difficult to express given that I will literally never use the thing as a tablet or to handwrite notes. But I love the keyboard covers, especially the newer versions that come in that oversized font, and I’ve never found them to be too jumpy or whatever. If there was a 15-inch Surface Pro, I’d seriously consider it.

But yes. I prefer the traditional clamshell form factor, ideally without multitouch, over any 2-in-1 form factor.

Is 15 inch your preferred screen size for a laptop as opposed to 13 or 14?

14 inches is sort of my new minimum screen size, but I find 14-inch displays with 16:9 displays difficult to use now, they’re just so short and constrained. But yes, I prefer 15-16 inch displays now, ideally 16:10. But a 3:2 display is great too, and those can be a bit smaller because of the aspect ratio (that is, a 13.5-inch 3:2 display would work OK).

Is LTE/5G not important to you on these portable devices?

It’s not necessary, so it’s not something I’d pay extra for: I have my phone with me at all times and can share that connection if needed.

Lenovo is also coming out with the Snapdragon X Elite Thinkpad. You were always a huge Thinkpad fan…are you still? Or have others like the Surface supplanted that?

There’s a lot to unpack here.

My favorite PCs, overall, have been HP premium PCs like EliteBook 1040, ZBook Firefly, and various Dragonfly laptops. It’s a combination of things, but they have perfect keyboards and whatever minimalist style/quality that resonates with me for whatever reason.

Lenovo ThinkPad is a close second. The keyboards aren’t quite as good, but they’re excellent. The X1 Carbon in particular is one of my all-time favorites, but if I was spending my own money and couldn’t get on at the right price, I’d go down the list a bit as needed (and possibly land on a ThinkPad Txxx S). IdeaPad/Yoga PCs are also very, very good—generally speaking—and I would cross-shop there for sure. (A minor issue is the crapware/upsell stuff on the non-ThinkPads.)

Surface is … different. On the one hand, I don’t think this product line should even exist, and that Microsoft should not be competing with its partners. But on the other, there’s just something about Surface I’ve always really liked. Well, liked since Surface Pro 3, when Microsoft finally got it right. Surface keyboard quality (Laptop and Book, at least) is right up there with HP premium PCs, though I’ve not reviewed a recent entry. Anyway, I have a soft spot for Surface I can’t explain.

The reasons I chose a Surface Laptop are manyfold, but the top two reasons are that I wanted something as close to the MacBook Air M3 as possible, and nothing else comes close, and Microsoft no longer offers me these devices to review. I’m going to get HP and Lenovo (and possibly other PC maker) laptops to review in the next 30 days. So it always seemed obvious that I’d go with Surface, and not just Surface, but Surface Laptop, for a Snapdragon Elite X PC.

(Most of the new Snapdragon X-based laptops, including Microsoft’s, are using the same or nearly identical chassis as existing products. HP is the one big exception there. I liked the Yoga more than the ThinkPad from a look/feel perspective, if that matters.)

That said, I may cancel my pre-order and re-order a version with 32 GB of RAM. It seems that the 16 GB minimum for Copilot+ PCs really is the minimum, and I think I may need more RAM than that. And that’s not ideal with Surface Laptop: To get more than 16 GB of RAM (which requires 1 TB+ of storage), you have to go with the black color, as the others top out at 16 GB for some reason. And that’s not the color I want. It’s not a big deal, but it’s a thing. And I wish that was different.

Complicating matters, we’re going to be in Mexico City for most of June, so we’ll be out of the country when these PCs ship. Lenovo has sent me three PCs in Mexico without any issues, and HP told me they would as well. The Surface Laptop I ordered is set to arrive here in PA on June 18, and we have someone staying in our place to feed the cats and so on, so they can sign for it and make sure it’s sitting here waiting for me when I get back. But if I cancel the preorder and go with a 32 GB model, that won’t arrive until July 1 (or maybe later now). Which is OK, too, assuming I at least get one review unit while I’m away.

So, we’ll see. But I will most likely stick with the Surface Laptop, but cancel my initial pre-order today and get a model with 32 GB of RAM instead.

UPDATE: Or, not. I just canceled the original order and will get a 32 GB/1 TB model instead. I have to wait up to 24 hours to see whether I qualify for the monthly payment plan, but either way, I’ll order it today/tomorrow, and it will just arrive when it arrives.

UPDATE 2: Well, that was fast. I was approved for that payment plan thing, so I ordered the 32 GB/1 TB Surface Laptop. Will write that up separately, soon.

Why no 5G?

jgraebner asks:

Any insight into the delay of the 5G versions of the Surface Pro? I haven’t looked closely at every device announced, but it generally looks like 5G connectivity is not common and it isn’t clear if any have it at launch. I remember that one of the original selling points of Windows on ARM was that they would be always connected, but it appears that Microsoft/Qualcomm have moved away from that now.

No, but this has happened before. It may just be tied to Microsoft’s status as a smaller PC maker, and they want to have enough components for the versions that will sell in higher volume at launch.

24H2: Hot or not?

gg1 asks:

For all the flack that we give the Windows team, after testing out the 24H2 release, I’m finding it to be the most impactful to my needs in a long time. Several features like: the unified Teams app; the dedicated, Store-updated Copilot app; the ability to uninstall even more “features” (like the Bing Web Search extensions); and Wi-Fi 7 support (among other features) are instantly appreciated. This release stands in contrast to more recent releases, where the improvements were barely noticed. I wanted to ask: with the new leadership in the Windows team after the departure of Panos, do you think we’re seeing the fruits of a new strategy or is it just that this release happened to tick several boxes for me and it’s not reflective of a new direction?

I spent this morning installing 24H2 on several PCs—I’ll post a tip about this today—with an eye on updating my list of to-dos for the Windows 11 Field Guide. And I don’t know. I appreciate that Copilot is now an app, for example (and that Recall, a new feature, is an app too). But I’m not going to praise them for getting there 9 months late: They early-released this into 22H2 in September/October, re-released it in 23H2, changed the way it displays several times, moved the freaking icon across the Taskbar, and now they are moving it to a third location (it’s an app, so the icon will just appear like any other shortcut). And that’s all been since September. So I can’t get excited or happy about this. It’s an example of what’s really happening with Windows, which is rapid-release features that aren’t fully baked, get complaints, slowly fix the problems, and then finally ship the features in the right shape months or years later. This has happened with Widgets too. It’s all over the place.

So, yes. On the one hand, we might argue that 23H2 was sort of where Windows 11 should have been when it first shipped. And that some of these features—Copilot and Widgets, especially—are finally where they should be too. But Microsoft introduced so much uncertainty and change and it did so in haphazard ways. I can’t celebrate that or compliment them for doing it. It’s just wrong.

There’s no new strategy to be seen in 24H2. This is yet another spastic release, albeit a new type of chaos in which there are two main releases, one now/soon and one in late 2024, and then all kinds of churn in-between and many preview features (Recall) that are only available to a tiny subset of customers who buy specific PCs. Again. I can’t celebrate this. It’s not any better than before. It’s just more of the same nonsense.

I like Pavan. I like what he says. But until Microsoft actually fixes the problems—like all the nonsense ads and dark patterns—I can’t trust any of it. Fix Windows, then we can talk.

Arm FTW

gg1 asks:

With Qualcomm finally releasing a superior ARM processor, and considering that ARM exclusivity for Qualcomm supposedly ends soon, where does this leave other potential entrants like NVIDIA and AMD? Is there still a worthwhile opportunity and benefit to them in this market?

AMD and Intel have some choices to make here. They have a viable market for specific types of PCs that will not go away anytime soon. But the most important parts of the market—Ultrabooks, basically—are going Arm because that’s where its specific optimizations make the most sense. And I think this will happen much more quickly than anyone I spoke with at Build. There are also going to be multiple Arm silicon vendors in the market by holiday 2025, which will give Qualcomm some much-needed competition in this space and benefit us all because each of these companies will need to out-do the others. It’s possible that AMD is one of those companies, by the way. But I expect Intel to collapse.

Regarding Nvidia, most of its revenues come from cloud computing for AI now, not from the PC. So “losing” this market won’t matter to them. (That said, I would love to see some kind of Arm chipset with support for dedicated graphics in time. If that happens, x86 will disappear.)

WPF WTF

gg1 asks:

Why do you think Microsoft brought back WPF after all this time?

So, there’s the official line. And then the truth.

The Build session Navigating Win32 App Development with WinUI and WPF provides the official company line: Microsoft meets developers where they are, and when it comes to desktop apps, it supports new desktop app development with web technologies (React Native, mostly, but others too), new cross-platform mobile app development with MAUI, new web app development with ASP.NET Core and Blazor, and, more to the point for this conversation, modernizing existing UWP and C++ apps with the Windows App SDK. But WPF, despite being 20+ years old, is still in use by many of its corporate customers, and so it too is supporting modernization via support for specific modern Windows features (themes, etc.) and by supporting WinUI 3. (It also supports some modernization for Windows Forms, which is even older than WPF, but this is largely community-driven and isn’t getting the same attention as WPF.)

Here’s the truth.

WinUI 3 is going away. So this WinUI 3 stuff at Build (and in Visual Studio 17.10) is rather hilarious, or sad, depending on your perspective. The future here is WPF or, more specifically, the WPF flavor of XAML. This explains why adding WinUI to WPF now is OK, they’ll be a path forward.

And that also explains why WPF is sticking around. It’s not just that businesses are still using it for existing apps that need to be modernized (like those guys will ever modernize them anyway). It’s really modernizing WPF because this is the future of native app UIs on Windows. It’s the successor to WinUI 3.

This raises an interesting point, however.

With WPF suddenly on the front burner again, one might make the argument that it’s a good choice for new native apps too. (Not just front-ends.) And that’s absolutely true, assuming you ignore that there is almost zero need for such a thing in 2024. (I know WPF is .NET-based and that there’s some argument that these apps aren’t truly native. This is not worth debating.) I am going to take a look at modern WPF with WinUI 3 soon. I am personally very curious about this, in part because the WPF version of my .NETpad app was my favorite and the most full-featured.

I can’t recall

ianceicys asks:

Paul, for screenshots I am hardcore user of SnagIt. In 2021 I took 3447 screenshots, in 2022 I took 3699 screenshots, in 2023 I took 3879 screenshots, and in 2024 I’ve taken 1782 screenshots. Each screenshot has nice automatic rich metadata (date/time/application name / annotations-arrows/lines). SnagIt has a super powerful search capability, and I find I am constantly able to quickly find screenshots from 1,2, and 3 years ago that are useful today. I can’t think Recall being limited to 3 months is nearly long enough to be useful.

This is a very specific and unusual use case. Recall isn’t about screenshots. The screenshots you took, you took explicitly, and for whatever reasons. (I take a lot for the book, of course.) Recall’s screenshot functionality isn’t about taking screenshots, it’s a fallback for those times when the app(s) you’re using don’t explicitly support Recall. Remember that you can, as a developer, use the coming Windows Copilot “Runtime” APIs to do that. The fallback is that it uses image-to-text AI. That’s all this is.

Also, most of my screenshots of Excel spreadsheets (complex formulas and fancy graphs) and documents/code. I can’t image that Recall and OCR text search will be useful when the screen is 90% an excel document with dozens of columns of numbers, can it?

I think that could work fine, but Excel will natively support Recall, so that won’t be an issue regardless.

Also, I use multiple monitors (1 setup vertical, long code in VS Code) and screenshots have to limited to a screen, or part of a screen, or are useless as a single screenshot of ALL monitors is too big (all my monitors are 4k) to be meaningful (one monitor has email/teams/zoom at all times). Given how windows re-orders monitor arrangements when you test recall can you explicitly test how it works with docking and undocking with multiple monitors and aspect ratios, I think Recall is going to be significantly limited in capability for such scenarios.

Yes, of course. Like everything does in Windows 11, it’s half-assed, rushed out the door before it’s finished, and isn’t feature-complete. (And please, no one argue that it being a “preview” makes this OK. Preview it in the Insider Program. Microsoft literally wanted this surprise for the Copilot+ PC launch, and so it didn’t test this feature before shipping it in stable.) It will improve over time, and as more apps come on board with native support (assuming that happens), the need for screenshots, which take up a lot of space on disk, will lessen dramatically, I bet.

I met the guy who designed this feature and pointed out two limitations of my own: Recall snapshots don’t survive Reset This PC (because of space issues) and Recall can’t sync with the cloud so you could access all your snapshot data from everywhere. He knew about and acknowledged these limitations and hinted they were both on a to-do list. As noted above, these things tend to improve over time, so I’m sure we’ll get a fully realized Recall in Windows 11 version 26H2 or whatever.

Surface Studio Laptop in 2024

helix2301 asks:

Paul, I was thinking about getting a surface studio laptop but I was thinking should I wait to see what Microsoft does or should I just get a surface laptop?

It depends on your needs, of course. The Surface Laptop Studio has dedicated graphics but also terrible battery life, and it’s a 2-in-1 so you can do the touch/pen stuff if that’s important to you. The Surface Laptop is a straight-up laptop with no pen support (of course) but also no dGPU support. It gets much better battery life. Is less heavy. Might have compatibility issues, especially with esoteric/special use case hardware peripherals. It’s untested, basically.

Right now, my advice is to wait until the first reviews of these Snapdragon X-based laptops are available. People will pound on these things and see where the weaknesses are. And then you can make a more educated choice. Will this be a “wait for v3” thing? Or is this arguably v3 already? We’ll know in less than a month.

AI surrounds us and penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together

bigfire asks:

Thinking about the Copilot, and watching Nvidia’s meteoric success in datacenters, I’m curious if MS has an opinion on how the AI experience will break down once things stabilize. Do they expect to shift most of the load to local PCs with NPUs, or are we just on an endless arms race expanding datacenters?

Microsoft’s marketing message at Build was basically that the future of AI is hybrid. And for once, I buy the marketing: We will do as much as possible on-device, using efficient NPUs when possible, but GPUs or even CPUs when not. But the cloud-based AI never goes away because that’s the only place for the massive data set needed for AI to be fully useful.

Which you use at any given time will just depend on the job. If you’re getting AI help with writing, photo editing, or whatever, it makes sense to do that off the NPU on your device. If you’re looking for the type of data that would today require a web search or perhaps hitting or organization (or personal) data stores in OneDrive or whatever, that will require the cloud.

So it will be some of both, with these companies very eager to move as much as possible to the client to save money. But that’s good for users, too: Locally processed AI is more private—what happens in your NPU stays in your NPU, or whatever—and can be faster and more accurate for specific tasks using grounded datasets.

Which Snapdragon X laptop

bigfire asks:

I’m going to be purchasing a first wave Copilot PC. I was planning on buying a Surface Laptop, but I’m unhappy with their lack of an OLED option. First, aren’t they supposed to be the premium PCs? And why would the Pro get an OLED but not the laptops? Second, what did you think of the alternative laptops that were there. Are there any good contenders there vs Surface in terms of build quality and typing experience?

Yeah, the Yoga Slim 7x. I would look at that one. The display is OLED, and incredible, and it might just be the nicest of the new laptops overall.

Regarding premium, most of them are in so many ways, but not everyone wants OLED. A lot of the use case here is straight up productivity work, and I could see wanting a more matte/less glossy display for that. This will expand over time.

Sleepless in Seattle

SeattleMike asks:

How did you enjoy your time in Seattle and what are some of your favorite restaurants? 🙂

Seattle is one of my favorite cities, but the biggest draw for me, especially since I’ve not been traveling as much for work since the pandemic, is the people: I have so many friends there, many former or current Microsoft employees, and events like Build are all about catching up with them and with the other press and bloggers. So most of my trip was about that.

I come from Boston and grew up loving seafood, and Seattle of course has a great seafood scene, though most of it isn’t as good as what we get on the East Coast. (There are exceptions, obviously. I’m not that into salmon, though I did get it once in a “when in Rome” moment.) To me, the big food advantage there is Japanese/Asian cuisine. We usually hit a high-end sushi spot when we’re in Seattle (like Shiro’s), but this time we went for Japanese street food and soup dumplings (twice, in the latter case).

Not sure I have too many specific choices, as I don’t get there as much anymore. (That said, here’s an interesting coincidence: Since the pandemic, I’ve only flown three times domestically, and all three times were trips to Seattle.) Daniel’s Broiler is always great. The Pink Door and Place Pigalle (both in Pike Place) are great. Purple. Duke’s Seafood. There are many great bars (and dive bars) in Seattle. I wish I could get there more often.

Requirements, real and arbitrary

ianceicys asks:

On all things Surface, I have a question about Surface+PCs and the requirements for Recall, in March of this year (2 months ago) I purchased a Surface Studio 2 (heard Richard talk on Windows Weekly about how he and his wife bought a matching pair in January) which has a Microsoft integrated NPU, the Surface Studio 2 NPU has 48 TOPS.

The NPU in the Surface Laptop Studio 2 is an esoteric part, an Intel Gen3 Movidius 3700VC VPU AI Accelerator that was the basis for the NPUs in Meteor Lake and thus future Intel Core Ultra processors. But its TOPS score is only 7.1, so it doesn’t qualify for Copilot+ PC.

However I see that ALL the recent Microsoft AI announcements require a Surface+PC (limited to Qualcomm ARM with a minimum NPU with 40 TOPS), any thoughts on the strategy by the Surface team to now artificially limit AI software capabilities to Surface+PC branding and not technical requirements? (I will point out that one technical requirement the Surface Studio 2 doesn’t “meet” is having a Copilot Key on it’s keyboard)?

My guess about that 48 TOPS score is that it’s either a full processor score (NPU + GPU + CPU) or an NPU + GPU score, as the Surface Laptop Studio 2 also has dedicated graphics (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU, VIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU, or NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada Generation Laptop GPU).

Or have I missed the requirements and Copilot+PCs REQUIRE an integrated NPU in the SOC?

Not sure on that count, only that Surface Laptop Studio 2 doesn’t qualify. This is one of many issues with the Copilot+ PC: Microsoft is very specifically targeting an NPU only, rather than using a more intelligent orchestrator that could work across at least a GPU as well. This may be for expediency’s sake, meaning we’ll see more sophisticated processor use in the future and thus more PCs that qualify. (And if so, this is tied to my comments about Windows 11 features being introduced quickly and in half-assed form.) Or maybe they’re onto something, and know that the NPU is the way to go, at least on (or especially on) laptops. It’s hard to say. But for now, the Copilot+ PC umbrella is small and non-inclusive, and it requires brand new PCs.

People with honking big NVIDIA cards in workstations and gaming PCs have similar complaints. It just doesn’t make sense. But maybe it expands over time.