Ask Paul: February 7 (Premium)

Happy Friday! It almost feels like a reckoning on multiple fronts this week, but there's a lot going on, and many great questions. Let's jump in.
? China, tariffs, and ... Windows 10 EOL?
JustMe asks:

This one is a little out there, but it may make for some interesting discussion. What affect, if any, do you think the recent tarrifs on China announced by the US will have on Windows 10 end of life? My thought process was maybe a little, if the tarrifs cause chips to get more expensive thereby making new hardware more expensive and consumers (possibly small businesses as well) hold off on implementing any sort of hardware refresh/new PC buy until the prices come back down. I dont expect Microsoft to move the EOL date for W10, but I do wonder if this might catch a few people out.

Because of the volatile, unpredictable, and intellectually and morally challenged nature of the current administration, we don't need to worry about the established economic realities of tariffs here. That is, on paper, these tariffs should be incredibly challenging for chipmakers like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and Nvidia, not to mention the innumerable companies that make other hardware components that go into PCs and other electronic devices. But that's not how things work right now. Instead, there will be protectionist deals for U.S.-based companies, as there was for Apple previously. Of course, many of the components that go into PCs and devices aren't made by U.S.-based companies, and so prices will still go up for the customers--consumers, businesses, whatever--that buy the resulting product.

Will this be enough to impact the Windows 10 end of life (EOL) schedule? I don't see that happening. I was just looking at the Windows 10 extended security updates (ESU), and the costs for consumers ($30 for one year) and businesses ($45 to 61 per user for the first of three possible years), and feel like that's the end of it. This EOL date was telegraphed well in advance, companies should have been plotting whatever migrations or upgrades well in advance, and any mainstream use with a PC that doesn't qualify for Windows 11 by late 2025 or 2026 needs to upgrade, period.

It will be interesting to see the real-world impact on PC and device pricing. Given what's happened so far, I expect a lot of bluster and then very little in the way of change. Especially if those changes were to raise prices for Americans.

But the Windows 10 EOL? That train left the station.
?️ Secret sauce
louiem3 asks:

Hi Paul, simple question but I have been having a hard time finding an answer in regard to Copilot Pro. Do you know what LLM model it uses? Some places I've read it uses GPT-4 along with its own models that Microsoft has developed but nothing concrete.

Microsoft will never give us the specifics of how it modifies the output provided by OpenAI's models in Copilot, and there are rumors it will soon switch to a model in which Copilot could use different models, including...