Ask Paul: August 30 (Premium)

Happy Friday! We’re heading into a long holiday weekend here in the U.S. so this one is coming together a little more quickly than usual.

Meteor shower

christianwilson asks:

I have a question regarding that Meteor Lake laptop that was so bad you decided not to review it. I was curious why you decided not to write the review. I think there can be benefit to fairly reviewing a bad laptop, assuming it is done in a tasteful manner, but I could also understand not wanting to put the time and effort into writing the review when there are so many others of higher quality that warrant your attention. Just curious about your philosophy on how you choose which devices to review. Thanks!

I don’t have a formal policy or whatever. And I have internally debated the right way to handle such a thing. But it doesn’t come up frequently. And this year has introduced additional challenges that contributed to the decision I’ve referenced recently.

In general, PC makers offer me PCs to review, and I agree to do so or not based on my schedule, how many PCs may or may not be in the queue already, the expected interest in the device (mine and/or readers), and probably other factors. But even in a slower year, I don’t just say yes to everything.

This year has been an outlier. It’s not just busier than usual, in terms of PCs offered for review, it is dramatically busier. I haven’t tallied it, and would have to go back and look at last year, at least, for a rough comparable. But I’ve easily been offered almost three times as many PCs as is usually the case. It’s overwhelming, and with my self-imposed schedule demanding that I spend at least three weeks with each PC, it’s impossible to review everything I’ve been offered in a timely manner. (Adding to this, I also have a keyboard, an external display, and some earbuds in for review, and I’ve barely mentioned any of that, or not at all in some cases.)

From a broader perspective, things are changing. Windows on Arm finally became viable this year with Snapdragon X and so I feel obligated to push that to the front of my queue. But Intel and AMD are racing to catch up, too, and that makes for some interesting dynamics. The Meteor Lake-based PCs that are the most common this year are already orphaned for a new Intel architecture. That’s unprecedented, but it also adds a weird wrinkle to reviews because these PCs, though selling in big numbers relative to the rest of the market, are one-offs and temporary, and may not be as well-supported going forward. Worse, they’re terrible in some ways. This has gotten better over time, but I’ve identified major efficiency issues and battery life deficiencies common in Meteor Lake-based laptops, and that’s with the beefier H-series versions. Some of the year-over-year comparables are terrible. But again, maybe temporary too.

This summer, I almost halted my review of a Meteor Lake laptop because it had major reliability issues in addition to the usual efficiency/battery life problems. The PC maker shipped a set of firmware updates partway through the process that rescued that from happening, and while the battery life issues remained unsolved at the time of the review, I went through with it.

Coincidental to all this, the requests keep coming in. I have several PCs from two different PC makers and keep getting offers for more devices. I keep saying no, they keep telling me that it’s OK, but you should just take a look. And so these things are stacking up, and I’m trying to stay on top of it. Plus, I was behind on the Copilot+ PCs because these same companies that can’t stop sending me hardware suddenly never sent me the Snapdragon X-based PCs they both told me were on the way. It was a perfect storm of terrible. I was in Mexico, making that process more complicated. The clock was ticking. Etc.

Anyway, the laptop in question was simply the victim of too much volume, too little time, and life is too short to waste on something that was horrible right out of the box and never got better. This was the first U-series Meteor Lake PC I’d seen, and it was almost comically underpowered. And I figured that was it, I’d just never bother with a U-series PC and maybe that was the bar. I’ve since gotten two other U-series Meteor Lake PCs in for review, though, including the ThinkPad X12 Detachable Gen 2 I recently wrote about. And I’ll try to stick with that one as it’s possible that Intel and/or the PC makers have made low-level improvements since the beginning of year that weren’t available when that first one had arrived.

And we’re already in a new era: The next-gen AMD chips have shipped and Intel’s Meteor Lake replacement arrives next week. I still have more Meteor Lake PCs to write up, but we’re quickly moving into a new round of devices based on newer hardware. So there’s never enough time.

Anyway, it’s just numerous things all piled up in a busy year. It’s not worth me spending time with a PC like that.

Armed and loaded

j5 asks:

Tinkering: personally, I use a MacBook Air M2. I don’t think I’ll switch back to Windows for personal usage, but at least not in the foreseeable future. I use Windows 10 on an HP Elite laptop for work and it’s extremely locked down, as it should be. But it would be nice to mess around in Windows 11 and try Co-Pilot out for myself.

Gaming: I’m a casual gamer and like to play many older games…ah nostalgia. I have a Switch and recently bought an Anbernic RG35V. So I’m a casual gamer and enjoy playing older games. So I have many older games on my Steam account that don’t work on MacOS because it’s Mac and because I have an M series chip. So I want to play games like XCOM: Enemy Unknown one of my favorites, lots of fun. And older ones like Morrowind, Fallout 3, and the Dungeon Siege series.

What ARM chip laptops or mini PCs would you recommend for my usage? I’m in no rush to buy one right now. I’m just exploring this. I’m also open to waiting for the next iteration of Windows ARM chips. Thanks, I appreciate it!

If you’re going to play games on the PC, you can’t get an Arm-based PC. It’s just not a good experience, even with older games. I recommend getting an inexpensive AMD-based PC with Radeon graphics instead. I haven’t yet experienced the latest generation (Zen 5) AMD chips, but the previous Zen 4 chips, like the Ryzen 7 8845HS in the IdeaPad 5 2-in-1 I’m currently reviewing–that review should be out any day now–are terrific. This laptop is less than $700, so it’s a reasonable choice, as is anything like it. Or perhaps a NUC-like SFF PC based on that chipset or similar. I’m not as familiar with those, sorry, so I don’t have anything specific to recommend. But perhaps something like this. That’s something I have considered.

Looking ahead, I suspect the next-gen Intel (Lunar Lake) chips will be similarly good, but … we’ll know more in the next week or so.

If you have nothing nice to say, just whisper it

ianceicys asks:

Paul, you write a lot about what’s being said by Microsoft in their blog posts and their insider ring updates, have you ever considered all of the things that are being left “unsaid” and do you have any notions about what’s driving things to be “unsaid”. I would love to hear your thoughts about what’s left unsaid about HoloLens vis-a-via VisionPro, left unsaid about Intel/AMD and Copilot+PCs, unsaid about the next version of Windows, what’s being unsaid about Xbox, Activision, and Xbox GamePass. What’s something that being left unsaid that’s piquing your curiosity at the moment, or will be VERY much said a year from now (July 2025)?

I spend most of my waking hours wondering why Microsoft doesn’t communicate more effectively, but what’s left unsaid is a key component of every Microsoft financial report and another key frustration of mine. To your specific topics…

HoloLens would have been canceled had the U.S. Army not rescued it with a financial injection Microsoft couldn’t ignore. But the HoloLens Microsoft custom-tailors for the Army won’t benefit others, and while the company will listlessly explain that it’s just waiting on silicon advances to make a next-gen unit, I can’t imagine that’s ever going to happen. (This is like saying you’re waiting on flying cars to get a driver’s license.) I think it’s dead because the vertical markets Microsoft hoped would emerge are too small to make it viable.

This isn’t “unsaid,” but my personal analysis of this is that HoloLens is the perfect example of how Satya Nadella makes bets, and given the history since, it suggests to me that he would be a horrible poker player and maybe shouldn’t be running Microsoft. He saw the tech, thought it was so cool that Microsoft should productize it before another company came up with something similar or better, and then it did so without having any plan whatsoever for how it might be successful. Literally, just throw it out there and see what happens. It’s exactly what they’re doing now with AI, but the difference there is that AI is now costing Microsoft tens of billions of dollars every quarter. This guy might be dangerous.

The next version of Windows: This is Windows 11 version 24H2, but it was originally going to be called Windows 12, and it’s important to understand that there are architectural changes in there that Microsoft hasn’t communicated well. I assume they will at some point. There are little hints about this, like the changes that make AMD chips run up to 25 percent faster, that are now being back-ported to 23H2 too. And the Windows 11 on Arm, Prism, AutoSR, Recall, and other advances. But the full picture isn’t well known outside an inner circle. I’m curious what else is going on there and what else was on the drawing board but then didn’t gel enough in time for 24H2.

The other big thing for Windows is that recent financial reporting change. We might soon learn, roughly, how much the commercial side contributes to Windows revenues, and I suspect it’s much bigger than two-thirds overall. We’ll see. But this could show us why Microsoft spends so little effort–and with its least talented employees–on the end user features in Windows. The consumer bit is tiny, I bet.

With regard to the silicon makers–Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm–that story has been unfolding over decades, and it’s a big part of the Then and Now series I recently started. What this comes down to is a set of big partnerships that also includes the biggest PC makers, all of which have conflicting strategies that require them to undermine each other despite needing each other. This set of relationships is a mess, and it has held back the PC for decades. And Qualcomm finally being successful has thrown a real wrench in the works. It could lead to the end of Intel, not literally, but at least as the sole dominant player in that market. And that was inconceivable even a few years ago, though the warning signs have been there for what feels like forever. These companies all hate each other and hate how much they rely on each other. They are always looking to replace the others. It’s rather incredible. (And almost makes Apple’s unilateral approach to hardware development look like the only logical approach.)

Activision Blizzard is nothing but things left unsaid. In the year and a half leading up to that acquisition, Microsoft never stopped making detailed, eloquent pitches for why this made sense, and it made an incredible set of concessions to make it happen. And it wouldn’t do that all that unless what happened on the other side of it was amazing. But what’s happened on the other side of that has been amazing, just not in a good way. I am not aware of any parallel to this, just because of its size. But obviously, you could compare it to Nokia–where that company stopped developing new phones to save money while the regulatory process unfolded–or aQuantive for the only reasonable comparisons. The supposition being that Microsoft discovered something it had not counted on–it could be as simple as distribution contracts–that prevented it from releasing all those games on Xbox Game Pass as expected.

The big thing left unsaid with Xbox is obvious enough: Microsoft needs to get out of the console market, but Microsoft will kill Xbox as a brand if it ever says that explicitly, and so it pretends otherwise. But Activision was always about making Xbox make sense as a business. And that business is successful when there is no hardware, there are many studios making games that work everywhere, and there are successful subscription services. Microsoft/Xbox has all the pieces it needs for that. And a nervous customer base that doesn’t like any of what I just described. It’s almost like it’s frozen in fear. But there will be books about this. And there is a lot we don’t know. It will come out.

The biggest thing in our industry over the past year has been AI, it’s not even close, and that will continue. The question is whether this hype cycle, which is bigger and has moved more quickly than any in the past, will result in disappointment or a realization of the promises. I feel like it’s inevitably going to fail, in the sense that nothing could live up to the hype. But that will be devastating, and anyone rooting for that outcome is, sorry, an idiot. This could tank financial markets in a historically rare or even unprecedented way, and that will impact all of us. I’m worried about that. The speed and size of this change is scary.

The second biggest is the long-overdue awakening of antitrust regulators to the threat of Big Tech. It is breathtaking watching them aggressively go after Apple and Google, especially, and dismantling their illegal, abusive businesses. A year from now, this world could be very different. We should all stand up and applaud these efforts and those companies–Epic Games, Spotify, Yelp, etc.–that are standing up to the bullies that have kicked sand in the face of innovation for all these years. It’s so great.

Closer to home, will Microsoft ever wake up and stop ruining Windows? Will AMD and Intel counter Arm effectively, or will one or the other simply give in and adopt that architecture? Will Intel survive in its current form, or will it be split into two businesses, one of which is a foundry? Will platforms like macOS and ChromeOS ever make meaningful marketshare gains against Windows?

Cats, snapdragons, and lakes

BobSC asks:

How goes the cats with their new home? For a primary laptop, 14inch like the new Snapdragon laptops seem to be? Or how do you compare them and your Surface laptop to the MacBook Air 15″? And then even the MacBook Pro 14″? I was just able to use this week a new MacBook Air 13″ model. Very nice and light. I want to try out the MBAir 15″ and see. PS: You do have me convinced to not buy any Intel CPU PC right now for sure.

The cats have settled right into their new lives. Our daughter sends us a few photos each week, and they seem to have acclimated to this change well. Probably because they all grew up together.

The hardware platform question is more nuanced. We’re in the middle of a shift here, and it’s not clear where things will land.

With Intel, the way I would put this is, I would never buy a Meteor Lake PC with my own money. It’s clear that PC makers have at least partially figured out how to work around the issues, but as noted earlier, this platform is a one-off orphan and not a long-term concern. AMD feels safer for now. We’ll see what happens with Lunar Lake. Given how long Intel ignored the efficiency needs of modern PCs and its spastic series of architectural resets and changes lately, I can’t say that I trust this company to get it right. But you never know.

Regarding Snapdragon X Copilot+ PCs vs. Apple Silicon/MacBook whatever, I love what Microsoft and Qualcomm have accomplished, it’s long overdue. But it’s important to remember that Apple is still ahead in some key areas. For example, the Copilot+ PCs I’ve reviewed typically get about 10 hours of real-world battery life, which is terrific. But the MacBook Air gets 15 hours. The instant-on performance of Copilot+ PCs is consistently reliable and instant, unless you leave it there for a 5 to 7 days, in which case it reverts to a normal boot process. The MacBook Air comes on instantly no matter how long it’s on the shelf. Etc.

But it depends on what’s important to you. I very much prefer Windows to the Mac, and 10 hours is terrific, as is the real-world instant-on/efficiency of those PCs. So that’s where I land.

I don’t have any opinions about the MacBook Pro vs. the Air. The last Pro I owned was 13-inch MacBook Pro M1, which was the old Touch Bar-based design. I was looking at the latest-gen MacBook Pros in a store recently and was struck by how thick and heavy the 16-inch version was, in particular. The MacBook Air is incredibly thin and light–almost magically so–and that was surprising. If were going to stick with the Mac, the Air would be my choice.

In the Copilot+ PC space, the Surface Laptop is the most similar to the MacBook Air, though it’s thicker and heavier. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x 14 is probably the best choice for most. It’s thin, light, and gets the best battery life of the lot, and it’s inexpensive.

Mobile apps on desktop

helix2301 asks:

I have three questions one with Windows on Arm I know you mentioned the other day that its a shame Microsoft killed subsystem for Android but do you think there is still a market for mobile apps on Windows maybe that’s the bigger play here by Microsoft?

That’s a great question. Apple and Google have both done good work to bring their mobile app platforms to their desktop platforms directly, and Apple is adding an iPhone Mirroring feature to macOS Sequoia. Microsoft had the Android subsystem, but it was limited to the Amazon Appstore, and its remote phone/apps capabilities in Phone Link are really cool, but limited to Samsung flagships and a handful of other phones. The issue for Microsoft, as always is that it doesn’t have its own mobile platform. That makes things challenging.

Presented with this idea of mobile apps on desktop, I’ve always thought it was a good idea. The mobile apps ecosystems are much more vibrant and engaged than is the case on desktop. And because there are so many mobile apps that are not and will never appear on desktop or even the web, these apps could be a “last mile”-type thing. But it’s not clear how successful these efforts are from a usage perspective, despite the years of work. So my theory may be just that, a theory. I don’t know.

Unofficial polling of the people in the car as I write this–we’re in the Finger Lakes for the long weekend–was interesting. Two of the three others were aware of the Phone Link functionality in Windows, one was not. None of them use it. One of them was openly cynical and distrustful of this functionality, arguing that it was yet another way these companies could see everything you do. Which, honestly, is probably insightful. Even I hadn’t thought of that.

Anyway, this is a tough one for Microsoft. Without a mobile platform, there’s only so much it can do.

The power of defaults

helix2301 asks:

The next question is Jason Snell on Sixcolors said that iWork (sheets, pages, etc) is put on every Mac and iPhone as a way of Apple defending the Space and using the power of defaults to get market share. But this reminds me of the same situation as Internet Explorer and Chrome. Most people despise having those free apps get Microsoft Office.

To be fair to Apple, the iWork apps are more than “good enough,” they hit at a good place functionality-wise that likely meets most people’s needs. Similar to Google Docs, I guess. But yes, having good apps in the OS will typically help with user retention and prevent them from looking around. Which is interesting in the Microsoft space. Given the quality of iWork as the obvious example, how does one defend an app like Media Player in Windows? Some of the built-in apps–Outlook, Clipchamp, Photos, and some others–are good to great. But many feel pointless and amateurish, where the iWork apps are at least strategic.

It might be worth evaluating the in-box apps in Windows 11, finding which ones fall short, and then identifying the best alternatives for each. Hm. Though I guess I sort of do that informally by installing various alternatives for video playback, photo viewing, and more

Labor of love

helix2301 asks:

My friends and I were kicking around do you think Microsoft is intentionally releasing COD Beta on Labor Day weekend because a lot of people are off on holiday weekend? I know two gamer friends who are off on Friday just because they want get jump on the weekend and early start on COD Beta.

I hope so: That’s smart. But I feel like the Call of Duty beta comes out at roughly this time each year. Maybe this was a coincidence of timing. Either way, that’s not a horrible way to spend the time off. I hope.