Ask Paul: October 18 (Premium)

Where does the time go? This month is already half over and there’s so much left to do. But let’s take a quick break for another great set of reader questions. Happy Friday!

COD FTW

helix2301 asks:

There has been a lot of hype around the new COD release. My question is do you think it’s more of less than usual? I feel like everywhere I look I see COD promotion. I was wondering if Microsoft told Activision to beef up marketing or do you think this is normal?

I feel like there’s always a lot of promotion around each Call of Duty release and that this franchise was a consistent and primary driver of revenues for Activision pre-acquisition. But yeah, this is a big one for Microsoft, especially: It spent $68 billion on that company, and a big chunk of that was based on recurring revenues from its biggest game series, and COD is the biggest of the biggest.

I think there are two factors at play here. One, that this is a proof point for Game Pass, and if this goes well, it could set up the subscription-service future of the platform. And two, that COD has been same old/same old for a long time, and I assume there was a drop-off in usage over the past few games, both of which were well-worn sequels (and one of which was originally designed as an expansion pack). Of course, the new game is more of that as well. Hence the marketing: Microsoft wants this to be an event, and maybe COD can run on more than inertia.

It’s going to be an interesting test. Activision’s leadership was opposed to Game Pass previously, preferring to go with the traditional annual retail-type release schedule instead. And there were always questions about how many Game Pass subscription adds Microsoft would have to make for COD to make sense in a Game Pass world. It’s some ugly math, but that explains the elimination of Xbox Game Pass (with its day one perk) and the price bumps this past year: The math just didn’t work out previously. But I suspect it’s not certain now either. I’m curious to see how this goes.

Colorized

helix2301 asks:

Will you be doing a Kindle color review?

Yes.

I’m excited about the color Kindle, a device I’ve long wanted Amazon to make. Having just used and then discarded a new Kindle this past summer, I’m aware of the limitations–among them, I found the overall performance, which includes things like page turning, to be on the slow side–and color adds a new wrinkle.

When I look at my iPad usage, what I see is 80 to 90 percent reading in apps and some web browsing and other apps when home, and then occasional video viewing when traveling. The video bit isn’t a worry: I can do that easily enough on a laptop. But I do use various apps–newspaper apps, Google News, feeeed, Google Discover, Instapaper, etc.–on the iPad too. And I know Kindle won’t address all those needs. If it works out that the Kindle is additive–that is, I keep using an iPad–I’m OK with that. I like the idea of reading in a non-distraction way at night in bed, especially, and it’s not like I’d even notice the weight of a Kindle in a backpack. So either way, it’s all good.

Of course, what I really want is a color Kindle Scribe, with a 10.2-inch color display, or at least a bigger (dare I say iPad mini-sized) display. We’ll get there. I suspect the smaller panel helps with page turning performance. Related to this, one of the weird little specification tidbits I’ve not seen highlighted yet is that while the Kindle Colorsoft has a 300 ppi display, it only displays at 150 ppi in color. So color has some challenges. This will improve in time. I’m just happy something is finally available.

Living on the Edge

Christian-Gaeng asks:

just a quick update that it is currently not possible to uninstall Edge under Windows 11 24H2 in Germany. I dont know if that is temporary or not. Have you heared anything from others outside the US with the same problem?

I’ve not heard about this anywhere, no. It seems like this can’t be the intention, given not just the requirements of the DMA but two additional factors: Germany’s recent decision to regulate all of Microsoft according to the DMA and Microsoft’s reasonably transparent adherence to the DMA, which includes a public-facing compliance website. Looking at that website now, you can see that it’s not been updated since early March, which is when it went live, but the Microsoft Edge documentation in the “Windows annex” of its DMA Compliance report is clear enough:

“Microsoft redesigned Edge as an uninstallable application on Windows … all applications on Windows 10 and 11 are uninstallable … when users uninstall Microsoft Edge, they are shown a message about any applications or experiences that depend on Edge, such as installed progressive web apps (‘PWAs’) and widgets, that will no longer function if Edge is uninstalled. The user is asked to confirm that they would like to uninstall Edge in order to continue the uninstall process.” Etc.

There’s little chance Microsoft intended for Edge to be uninstallable only in 23H2 and prior versions of Windows 11. So perhaps this is among the many issues that have cropped up with Windows 11 version 24H2 for whatever reasons (and more have been uncovered since I wrote that post).

I will say that from my perspective, uninstalling Edge isn’t super-important to me. I am more concerned about decoupling all the artificial connections between Windows 11 and Edge–the “forced Edge usage”–related to Widgets, Search highlights, Copilot, and so on. That, too, is tied to Microsoft’s DMA compliance, and I assume that if you choose a different browser as the default in 24H2, it respects those choices when you use those Windows features. If that wasn’t the case, that would be much more concerning to me than being able to uninstall Edge.

But Microsoft doesn’t seem malicious–a la Apple–in its compliance with the DMA. This feels like a more familiar Windows quality issue than anything else.

It’s all Steve’s fault

spacecamel asks:

On windows weekly, you had a throw away line that Microsoft stopped charging for Windows when Apple stopped. Do you think Windows would be in the place that it is if they had kept charging for upgrades? I think it would be in a better place since people would value Windows more if they had to pay for it. The funny part is that in a James Burke Connections way, Steve Jobs can get some blame for the enshitifcation of Windows.

Inertia is a powerful force, and when you have a dominant product like Windows, in this case, and there’s no competition, there’s little—sorry, no–incentive to change behaviors that benefit you. Microsoft was always wary of Steve Jobs and the Mac, starting especially with the release of Mac OS X, but in real-world terms, Mac OS X did little to alter the competitive landscape. If anything, it became useful as a counter to any complaints about Microsoft’s dominance. It could simply point to the Mac–and to a much less degree, Linux–and claim that Windows had competition.

This all changed as Apple transitioned into a consumer electronics giant with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, in turn, of course. But the ability to charge for an OS upgrade became problematic first for Apple, not Microsoft, because of its low market share. When the Mac was the center of Apple’s ecosystem from a revenue perspective, charging for Mac OS X upgrades made sense. But when its devices outpaced the Mac, the Mac became secondary, and the value proposition shifted. Plus, Apple couldn’t charge for iPhone OS upgrades. I don’t recall the exact timing. But at some point, charging for the hardware and giving away the OS became the model. It certainly made sense for Apple, given the margins.

When Apple and Microsoft were both charging for OS upgrades, Apple/Jobs would ridicule Windows, and effectively, for having so many product editions while there was only a single Mac OS X for all Macs. When Apple shifted to free upgrades, it could add that the list of comparison points. This wouldn’t have been enough for Microsoft to stop charging–again, inertia and dominance would outweigh that–but eventually Microsoft had to follow suit. With each release of Windows, Microsoft had special offers to make the upgrade more enticing to consumers, and it hit an all-time low (in pricing) with Windows 8.

But that’s not the only reason why Windows upgrades became free. Windows revenues were long split between businesses (typically volume licenses, but also other revenues from smaller businesses), PC makers, and then retail sales. Retail sales were the first to dry up for obvious reasons: Windows upgrades were difficult and error-prone when they were paid, which made them unattractive, and they only became more seamless after they were made free. But the revenue mix shifted decisively to volume licensing, with the bulk of the remainder coming from PC makers, which, when you think about it, is a form of volume licensing too. And in that case, it’s not about one-off sales, it’s about license sales, and in the case of businesses, especially, those licenses are not tied to any specific Windows version. You pay, and you can get any version that’s still supported. This contributed to the end of paid upgrades too.

By the time Windows 10 came around, no individuals were going to pay for an OS upgrade, and businesses weren’t paying anyway. And so Microsoft could position the free upgrade as this wonderful gift to the user base. And where most wouldn’t undergo what they thought would be a perilous process regardless, and certainly wouldn’t pay for it, Windows 8 played a role in getting them over that hump. So many people hated Windows 8 so much that they were willing to go for it. And for all the problems with Windows as a Service (WaaS) and now “continuous innovation,” Microsoft did at least make this version over version upgrade more reliable. So we don’t really hear the upgrade horror stories anymore, not in any volume.

The problems for Microsoft, and for PC makers, are that PCs are more reliable now, too, and it’s difficult to differentiate new Windows releases in meaningful ways for customers. Not that it matters: PC users almost universally seem to want nothing to change, where mobile devices, especially phones, get a lot more attention. Nothing has changed for businesses at a high level–volume licensing continues–but consumers are content to stick with the PC they have. And this is why Microsoft has suddenly amped up the hardware requirements for Windows 11 and then Copilot+ PC: To drive new PC sales, which is the only way they’re going to get meaningful revenues from consumers.

To answer your question, there’s no version of history in which we would be paying for Windows upgrades in 2024. So whatever the factors that led to Windows upgrades becoming free, that was always going to happen. But we do pay for things like Microsoft 365 on an ongoing, subscription-based (and thus volume licensing-like) way in the consumer space, albeit at a much lower volume than is the case with businesses. So there’s no reason why Microsoft couldn’t offer a Windows subscription of whatever kind that would clean up the OS, remove all the crapware and tracking, and so on. I’ve been calling on Microsoft to do this for years, obviously. But now that we have the DMA in the EU, we have the model, the perfect description of the form this thing could take. And it would be easy: They’re already doing it in the EU, why not do it elsewhere and charge for it? It’s found money.

I hope they do this. They could do it as part of a new or existing Microsoft 365 product edition. I would happily pay for this. Until the inevitable day that regulators in the U.S. wake up and basically force the DMA on Microsoft elsewhere. It feels inevitable, though they need to get through the even more predacious Apple and Google first.

Qualcomm is not the problem (here)

lindhartsen asks:

The news broke on Thursday about Qualcomm cancelling their Snapdragon Dev Kit and refunding people who preordered it or received the product. At this point we’re months past the initial launch of devices in the marketplace. Should much be read into this for WOA in general, or chalk it up to a failure for Qualcomm to develop and release their own made hardware?

It’s weird to me how much attention this is receiving. I mean, not really. But I feel like we’ve lost the script on what this is/was, why it happened, and who is responsible.

First, this isn’t on Qualcomm beyond the fact that it partnered with an unknown hardware maker to produce these devices. It is that hardware maker, Arrow, that failed. Badly. And the signs were there all summer. You could sign up to get a device, and they took weeks to respond. The devices were continuously delayed. There were issues with the HDMI port, and then it was obvious the FCC was never going to clear this thing for sale. People who preordered saw their shipment dates delayed again and again. And so on.

And it wasn’t Qualcomm that offered this, it was Qualcomm Developer. And this product, called the Snapdragon Dev Kit, has the word Dev in its name, and is/was aimed only at developers. Yes, some enthusiasts would excitedly want to preorder one, just as they did with HoloLens. But that wasn’t the audience. This was about getting developers a box they could use for native Arm app development. That’s it. It wasn’t positioned as a Windows-based Mac mini by Qualcomm Developer. It was for developers.

There are plenty of Snapdragon X-based PCs to choose from. All of which would be a better choice even if the Dev Box was shipping in volume: What you want to test on Arm isn’t just that an app runs, but that it works well with the battery life and efficient capabilities of this platform, and you need a mobile device for that. This thing was perhaps ill-conceived to begin with. That may change when PC makers sell whatever Arm-based desktops. But when that happens, a Dev Box is pointless anyway.

(Also, Qualcomm Developers offers a Qualcomm Device Cloud service with Snapdragon X Elite and Copilot+ PC features for developers to test against. If a dev is just worried about Arm compatibility, that solves the problem too.)

Qualcomm’s failure here was choosing a terrible third party to do this work. But this got amplified beyond reason. It was not a PC for consumers, and a better approach would have been to subsidize lower-cost Snapdragon X-based PCs from one or more major PC makers instead. Any serious developer who can’t afford a PC maybe should be in another business.

Arm isn’t just the future, it’s the present

Ezzy asks:

I read recently that some believe that up to 40% of all personal computers sold will be ARM by 2029.

Hopefully, this was the same analyst firm that predicted when Windows Phone would overtake the iPhone.

A funny thing happened on the way to that bank though. Both Intel and AMD released their latest processors for laptops. Neither seem to promise any great leaps in performance at all, but both do promise much greater efficiency than in the past. (A PC Mag test, for instance, reported over 23 hours on the new Intel chip in an Asus laptop.)

Intel and AMD were always going to autocorrect if and when Arm chips for Windows finally made sense. Snapdragon X is such a home run though, coming after several years of over-promising and under-delivering, that it’s understandable they were caught off-guard. But it’s not fair or correct to claim that either company just eliminated the benefits of Arm. That hasn’t happened.

What has happened is that both companies took steps to address the inherent problems with the x86 architecture and, worse, in their own implementations, while trying to meet what Qualcomm accomplished in a single processor generation. (Snapdragon X is not based on previously Snapdragon-branded WOA chips.) But it will be a few more gens on the x86 side before they catch up. And that won’t matter because Qualcomm didn’t halt development. It, too, will advance its chips. So the bar will keep raising.

Here’s what I’ve seen, with the understanding that this is very limited dataset. The Snapdragon X-based PCs I’ve used get up to 11 hours of battery life on average, real-world. The AMD Zen 5-based laptop I’m using now is averaging about 7 hours. And the Lunar Lake laptop is under 4 hours and 45 minutes. Instant-on is very good for the Zen 5, but not 100 percent reliable as on Snapdragon, while the Lunar Lake laptop is spotty, sometimes fine, sometimes not. Both do a good job with battery life leak overnight, about 2 to 3 percent, same as Snapdragon X.

The x86 chips exceed Snapdragon in game compatibility and performance, of course. But I have no hardware compatibility issues on Snapdragon worth discussing, and my one software issue–Google Drive–will be resolved by the end of the year. So that compatibility thing is an issue for power users, I guess. It’s not a big deal for normal people. For most people.

There’s a little discussed benefit to Arm that Intel is awake to and working on, but few understand out in the world: It isn’t saddled with the legacy cruft that dogs x86 and makes it less efficient, less reliable, and more complex. Intel has been slowly trying to simplify x86 for years to help solve this issue, and now it’s working with AMD on that because Arm has taken over the world, and Intel is circling the drain.

So now, out of the blue, we will have a cornucopia of 20+ hour laptops.

Except that we don’t. Benchmarks are not real-world battery life. That’s always been true.

Some ARM, many x86. The whole ARM movement was supposed to save us from the evil inefficiencies of x86 which is starting to be questionable. Even more so when we have to deal with the emulation tax of non-native software.

This is a red herring. Most software can be recompiled to be native on Arm. And then it will be better than it is on x86. So much of this work has already been done. Most of what I use on Arm is native.

Is the ARM revolution dead already? Do we all sneak meekly back to our cubicles and accept, anew, our x86 overlords? I don’t see, for instance, business bothering with ARM at all by this point and while consumers matter, many times more PCs are purchased by business.

I’m trying to understand why anyone would worry about Arm, Windows 11 on Arm, or Snapdragon X at a time when the creator of x86 is literally failing and about to broken up and sold off in pieces.

Intel is so desperate to meet the high bar of Arm that it overspent to develop a single chipset generation faster than ever before and loses money on every single chip it sells. Intel is literally failing, and we’re concerned that x86 suddenly “caught up” to what Qualcomm did in just a few years?

We should be worried about Intel and x86, not Arm. That AMD partnership and Intel’s ongoing drama are the public-facing proof points of that. The sheer cost of Lunar Lake, a chip so expensive that it could not afford to do the same work on its desktop chips, is all you need to know. I hope Intel and Lunar Lake succeed. But this doesn’t “solve” the problem. Not only does Intel lose money every time someone buys one of those PCs, but the chips in them do not exceed the capabilities of Arm. They just get Intel into the discussion. This is huge, for sure. But it’s not a victory. it’s something that should have happened years ago. Now, it may be too late. For Intel. Not for Arm.

Of course, this is the PC market. We’re stuck in the past. We don’t just resist change, we complain about anything that’s even slightly different. So I do see x86 and Arm co-existing in the PC space no matter what happens. That’s what inertia looks like. But you can’t see x86 and not think “legacy,” and the future of personal computing is not x86, it’s Arm. I expect AMD to be one of the companies that ships Windows on Arm chips in 2025, and that will be another public-facing indication of this reality if and when it happens.

We’ll see. But championing the past is a lost cause. We deserve a simpler, more reliable platform. That platform is Arm.