Ask Paul: May 16 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Well, this has been another curiously busy week and then I’m off to Seattle for Build on Sunday. But first, another epic installment of Ask Paul!

? It feels faster

wright_is asks:

Given the new Microsoft Copilot+ PC ad, saying that their latest PCs are faster than a previous generation MacBook Air, are we going to see a new period of John Hodgman ads from Apple? ?

Windows users will be suffering from PTSD from those ads for the rest of our lives.

Seriously, comparing their high-end laptops against the entry level MacBook Air seems a little ridiculous, although the MBA is probably the best selling Mac, so at least it isn’t totally absurd.

So, I’m not going to defend this per se. But the positioning does make sense if we limit the discussion to Snapdragon X. The Snapdragon X Elite seems to align well with the M3 used by the MacBook Air and the first generation Copilot+ PCs are clearly a response to that product specifically. This is the market Qualcomm and Microsoft were addressing: A sort of “low-end premium” thin and light laptop in the PC space. Or in the Apple world, the MacBook Air. This was the messaging at the Copilot+ PC launch, which is why I made a video about Microsoft being obsessed with the MacBook Air M3 at the time.

But they are taking high end Snapdragon Elite and AMD Ryzen AI 9 and Lunar Lake processors and comparing them to the M3 and claiming that they are 58% faster than a Mac… If they had compared it to the M4 Max or M3 Ultra, I’d be impressed, or if they were comparing a Core i3 to the M3. This is just silly marketing.

Again, not defending this.

All marketing is silly to some degree. Or most marketing, I guess it can sometimes be both effective and honest. But usually not. To turn this on its head, Apple used to really push how much faster its PowerPC-based Macs were than the PCs of the day, and of course it cherry-picked the few areas where those machines did do better on benchmarks than Intel-based PCs. (Like floating point and how important this was to apps like Photoshop that matter to its audience.)

But that’s what marketing is about. Seize the weakness and exploit it. The 58 percent thing … without even worrying about what that even refers to, you can just asterisk the hell out of the message and point to the one area where this thing you’re selling is better. Let’s say it’s NPU horsepower, which it probably is, this is the big selling point. And yeah. It’s better. Is it necessary or even desirable for most people? No, I don’t think so. The big deal about Copilot+ PCs, especially those based on Snapdragon X, is that it puts Windows PCs of this class in the ballpark. The battery life and efficiency are great, and so is the performance and compatibility. They did it. So I can forgive the marketing. You can only sell what you have.

A few caveats here.

The AMD- and Intel-based Copilot+ PCs don’t have the same battery life and efficiency as do the Snapdragon X-based PCs. They do have great performance, and exceed Snapdragon (and Mac) in games. They have the expected compatibility, which isn’t normally a conversation on the PC side. But because those chips slot into roughly the same part of the market, and maybe go a bit higher to some degree, the comparison can kind of shift. They’re in the ballpark for battery/efficiency compared to Snapdragon and, I guess, to Mac. But the Mac is still better than them. Which maybe is why they don’t market that as heavily (or vs. the Mac directly).

Some of this is partner service. I’m sure AMD and Intel were/are unhappy with all the attention Qualcomm is getting from Microsoft. So now that they have capable chips, they are part of the story. But these things are more than 40+TOPS NPUs. It’s complicated.

The M4 is problematic, but the higher-end Max and Ultra-based Macs are also pricier. I don’t actually know where, say, the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro/Radeon 890M-type chips align with MacBook Pro-class Max and Ultra chips, but I assume they are expensive for PCs and less expensive than the Macs. Each will have some advantage over the other. But that’s not a volume part of the market.

Anyway, Snapdragon X and M3 arrived close to each other. Apple is revving quickly and, in the PC space at least, Qualcomm is not. But we need to give Qualcomm a pass here. This is literally version one. It hits at one exact part of the market. They’ve addressed PC maker needs by going lower on price now with X and X Plus 8-core. And gen 2 will address graphics. That’s less than four months away.

And the ad itself is so abominable, it looks like it is a satirical ad trying to replicate the 1990s.

I mean. Marketing. I don’t know.

Maybe we will see John Hodgman trying to get his message about Recall out, whilst he interrupts himself to “reboot” 6 times, before he gets to the end of the sentence. ?

Or re-runs Windows Update four times in a row, literally, to get all the models Recall needs before it will even work. And then the user tries it and realizes he doesn’t need this anyway. The possibilities there are literally endless.

? Apple can’t stop reminding us how terrible it really is

spacecamel asks:

What do you think of the situation with Apple not doing anything with Epic resubmitting Fortnite to the App store and just letting the app sit?

One’s character has a way of bubbling to the top, where the world can see it for what it is. It doesn’t matter what one says about themselves. What matters is what they do and what they are. You can judge people this way, and maybe should. But you can also judge companies, which are created and run by people, this way too. And Apple talks a good game, about privacy, about how it differentiates its products. Some of it is real, there are real advantages to some of the integration stuff you get in that ecosystem. But we need to be clear-eyed that this is the most profitable company on earth and that the money matters more to Apple and its leaders than anything else.

You can see that clearly in its malicious compliance with regulators in Europe and the U.S. And you saw it clearly in Apple’s testimony in the U.S. v. Google remedy hearings and its previous (three!) attempts to become more involved in that. All it really cares about are profits. Everything else it does is a means to that end.

This isn’t a problem per se, it’s a company not a charity. But it is a problem because of how it markets itself to the world and how its customers fall for that marketing and believe that Apple somehow aligns ethically or whatever with their own beliefs. And that makes Apple problematic. It doesn’t obviate what they do right. But it does raise serious concerns. Google at least dropped the “don’t be evil” schtick. But Apple still pretends. And anyone who defends that behavior is misinformed or malicious. Or both.

? MAUI yowee

MartinusV2 asks:

Is .MAUI in trouble? I keep reading and watching some people saying that Microsoft fired some key people working on it. Even someone saying to use Uno or Avalonia since they are more mature and maintained and upgraded more rapidly than what Microsoft can do with .MAI.

Yeah, I saw that and do worry about it myself. In some ways, MAUI is like Flutter in that it may be trying to do too much by targeting too many platforms. Maybe this should just be for mobile. This is sort of a niche use case, maybe, but I’ve been watching to see how they evolve MAUI for desktop apps and it’s like three minor changes per year, few of which move the needle. Maybe just don’t.

The one thing I like about MAUI is the one thing I like about anything in the .NET space these days, it’s a way for .NET and C# developers to bring their skills and codebases to new markets. Even in the dark days of WinRT, which wasn’t really .NET-based, there was always a way forward on desktop. And with the cross-platform nature of .NET today, you have choices across desktop, mobile, web, cloud, AI, etc.

There are things I don’t like. I sort of disagree with the need to update .NET with a major release every year. I have doubts about the support lifecycle that are tied to that. And there are pieces of this that seems to sit still for long periods of time despite those things. (And I know that the Windows App SDK isn’t part of .NET but WTF is happening there is beyond my ability to understand.)

And the fact that one of your articles mentioning that Microsoft work more with React for their projects. I am somewhat concerned to use .MAUI or Blazor. It’s like Silverlight, UWP all over again.

Well, React makes sense from a cross-platform standpoint in that it includes web, too. MAUI won’t ever really address that, though there are Blazor integration bits for moving web code/functionality to MAUI apps. If you’re a glass half-full type, you could just view the spectrum of choices that Microsoft gives devs, whether it’s on Windows specifically or via .NET/C# generally, there is a lot there. This just happened, so I’ve not written about it, but Microsoft just announced that there are now over 50 million monthly active users across Visual Studio and VS Code, so that seems pretty good. And what’s the alternative? Have you ever tried Android Studio? Yikes.

Hope that at Build, Microsoft can reassure developers that use C# for web and mobile.

Same. I’m not sure what to expect there, though. There will be a lot of AI, whatever that means. The .NET schedule aligns with Ignite, of all things, and maybe they should rethink that. We’ll know soon enough.

? No, I can’t sing

mcerdas asks:

Dear Mr. Thurrot: this will probably be the most out of context question you’ve ever received, and I’m going to preface it with a short story, so you can see where it comes from. Due to heavy rains the bus services were suspended, and my daughter called me and asked me to pick her up in the University. I was tired after a long day, and I needed something to help me fight drowsiness. As fate would have it, I had just finished downloading the latest episode of Windows Weekly, and that would do the trick nicely. I was about to leave, when my wife offered to accompany me. I asked her if she would mind if I listened to the podcast while driving, and fortunately for me she was fine with it. Now, neither my wife nor me are native English speakers (I’m writing from Costa Rica), and she doesn’t have any interest in tech topics. So, she sat there with me in the car, in the rain listening to Windows Weekly, when she asked me the question. When I told her that you read the questions in the forums, she asked to relay to it you. Thus, without further ado, here’s my wife’s question: “That fellow has a nice voice. Does he sing?”

Just in the shower and in the car, I guess. I don’t have a good singing voice and have never really trained for that or whatever. Sorry. 🙂

? Magic 8-balling Surface

digiguy asks:

Microsoft has discontinued the Surface Laptop Studio (2), as part of its streamlining of the Surface line, which is removing the more experimental products (Surface duo, Surface Studio, Surface Book and now SLS, plus the headphones, earbuds etc.).

Now, I know that you think that the Surface line makes no economic sense and some premium members think Microsoft should stop making Surface devices.

To clarify my stance on Surface, I felt very strongly that competing with its partners was a huge mistake when this launched in 2012, and the repercussions from included all the PC makers adopting Chrome OS. But Surface fizzled quickly, so that was mostly OK within a few years. Today, Surface is viewed as cute by these other companies and not a threat. But I’ve always liked Surface PCs personally, at least the premium products. Its expansion into experimental products and low-end models was problematic, though. If Microsoft is going to be in this market, it needs to make sense cohesively as a brand. And it needs to be profitable, or at least have a path to that.

I am in the camp of those who love this line and hopes it will never be discontinued, regardless. Like Tom Warren, I am a bit sad that the experimental devices are being discontinued but I am happy to see that Microsoft is doubling down on the 2 core devices, Laptop and Pro, and hopefully the Go.

Pragmatically, Microsoft can’t just keep an unprofitable product line like Surface going forever. It’s not clear what’s worse, killing it or keeping it going while everyone knows it’s just losing money, but trimming down always made sense. I think the current two products are all it needs.

Some on reddit speculate that with the SLS gone the Laptop will receive a dGPU.

Yes. They did this with the Surface Book. But given how laptop chipsets have evolved, using a high-end AMD Zen 5 chip makes just as much sense, if not more. These things are beasts and the battery life is great. I have a laptop in for review like this that I’ll post about soon. A Surface Laptop version would be amazing.

Tom Warren concludes his article saying “Like I said last week, Surface has become known for pushing the boundaries of Windows laptops, not just smaller iterative designs. Everyone copied the Surface Pro, including Apple [he refers to the iPad pro, created by Apple as a response to the success of the Surface pro 3, which in some ways is fun since Surface was itself a response to the iPad in the first place], but it increasingly looks like it’s Lenovo that’s willing to experiment more than Microsoft these days. It’s not a great sign that the Surface Studio and Surface Laptop Studio are seemingly gone, but perhaps — just like the Surface Book — they will pave the way for what’s next.”

I disagree with so much of this.

Surface was never known for pushing boundaries. This was a sort of stated goal, I guess. But where did they do this? Even once?

I’m not sure that “everyone” copied Surface Pro, but I am sure that not everyone makes a Surface Pro-like PC now. Most do not. Those that do, do not sell well.

Lenovo–and HP, Acer, and others–have always experimented more than Microsoft. I don’t know where that comes from. And was Surface Laptop Studio somehow a good design? It was always clunky and weird. Microsoft is so hell-bent on pushing touch everywhere, it’s like it’s lost sight of–or never understood–what people want. I love getting laptops without touch. It doesn’t make sense for most people, use cases, or form factors. I don’t mind that it exists, or is an option. But if this is their flag on the hill, they lost 15 years ago.

How did Surface Book pave a way for what’s next? Apple paved the way for what’s next. The key differentiator for iPad Pro is that it’s an iPad with apps, not a PC that requires a keyboard and touchpad. The Surface Pro makes the most sense as a PC, not as a tablet. The use cases for that form factor–note taking?–are better done on a device, not a PC.

Curious to know if you have an opinion about that, which is hopefully not just, Microsoft should shut Surface down. Also do you plan on reviewing the smaller devices that were recently announced and, finally, do you think, like Tom warrent that the 12″ Surface is no successor for the Go and that the Go will continue to exist and possibly move to ARM?

Oh, I have opinions. 🙂 Sorry.

I have almost pulled the trigger on a 13-inch Surface Laptop many times. But I prefer bigger PCs and would have to pay for that. I don’t think Microsoft needs any more Go PCs, so those should just disappear. The current PCs make sense to me. I have yet to review a Snapdragon X- or X Plus-based PC and would like to do so. We’ll see, but I have a backlog of review hardware now. So I’m not sure.s

⌨️ Just InCase

eeisner asks:

I use the Microsoft Sculpt set on your recommendation after experiencing some wrist pain from the old, flat Surface mouse. Unfortunately, my Sculpt Mouse is dying and needs replacement. Have you used the new Incase versions and compared to the old Microsoft manufactured products, and have you used other ergonomic mice and keyboard to compare to and have opinions on?

No, but I will be ordering a Sculpt Keyboard/Mouse set while we’re still in PA. I wouldn’t worry about this if you need a new mouse, just get it. But I assume they’re identical hardware-wise. I kind of wish they had gone Bluetooth, frankly, even just as an option. I’d love to get rid of that dongle.

? Catching up on TV

eeisner asks:

On another note, have you gotten through Andor yet and have any thoughts?

No, and I was just looking at that. Speaking of backlogs, we don’t really watch TV when we’re in Mexico, so we’ve started catching up on that here. We just finished watching Brooklyn 99, which we watch during lunch and might be the funniest show we’ve ever seen. (Scrubs is up there.) We just watched the final season of You. We will soon watch the final season of The Handmaid’s Tale and the latest season of Severance. But Andor is tough because I will have watch that on my own, as my wife couldn’t care less. And I do not watch a lot of TV (or whatever we’re calling this now) by myself. Maybe I will download the first half of that season for the trip to Seattle next week. I’m going to have to make time somehow.

?️ PerPlexity

Ruvger asks:

I was wondering if you use Plex and, if so, what your thoughts are on their new app. It seems there’s been quite a bit of pushback from the community, with many users frustrated by missing basic features and persistent bugs. Some are even comparing it to Sonosgate. I’d be interested to hear your take on it.

Interesting. I do use Plex, but semi-exclusively on the Apple TV. I have a friend with a public-facing Plex server we access and have never had issues with that. If anything, it’s gotten better in recent months thanks to an update that made big improvements to video startup time and the toggling of subtitles. (I noticed and asked him about it.)

Tied to this, I’m populating the NAS I just got with my data as I write this, and one of the things I need to figure out, probably after I get back from Seattle, is whether to go with Plex or Jellyfin for the media. I may experiment with both, but aside from the obvious stuff–media access from anywhere, quality, etc.–I know that I will need a Plex Pass for remote streaming, hardware transcoding, and whatever else, and that’s inconveniently now more expensive ($250 lifetime). If that makes sense, I’d do it. But I have to look into these choices more.

Anyway, I assume the drama about the new app refers to the mobile version? I haven’t noticed anything on Apple TV. But my Plex usage is now all video-based, and that’s where that will happen, so it’s OK. But yeah, if I relied on Plex on mobile or desktop, I could see this being problematic. I’ll look into this, apologies for being unfamiliar with the changes.

? Xbox, PC, or both?

christianwilson asks:

I’m not against Microsoft’s new direction of going multiplatform. It may be a mix of accepting the current reality that Xbox won’t be competitive in sales with PlayStation and reading the tea leaves that working with a closed ecosystem has limited appeal in the future. Either way, I think trying to be everywhere is their best chance as a thriving video game business.

The chicken and the egg on this is unclear, but once Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard, this strategy was inevitable. I also believe it’s the right approach given the market realities, and I like that those with game libraries have new ways forward. But it all hinges on content. That was more of a strength for Sony (and Nintendo) in the console space. But Activision has been a nice level set there.

I don’t have a lot of faith in a future Xbox console, though. Other than being a Game Pass delivery machine, what are you getting with another proprietary system when you can play the same games and plenty more on PlayStation? A console already a distant third that no longer even has exclusives should concern developers and publishers. If the device has limited appeal and sales, why bother developing for it?

We can only speculate at this point, and Microsoft seems to be testing the water on different approaches. The Switch 2 complicates the one possibility I think makes sense, but perhaps the Activision thing is what puts it over the top: Move the platform to Arm and make it a hybrid device where you dock it and get better performance and graphics, all while keeping your library intact. All theoretical at this point, but also based on what we’ve heard. Sony doesn’t have this. And Nintendo, to date, has been mostly about their own Disney-esque ecosystem, which doesn’t appeal to people like me (and/or the typical Xbox fan).

It sure sounds like we’ll see an ARM powered Xbox console or family of consoles. Would it make more sense for Microsoft to work on a backward compatibility layer and “big screen” frontend UI for Windows and turn Xbox into their gaming class PC hardware? The gaming specification equivalent of the CoPilot+ PC?

Oh. There you go. Yes. 🙂

That or the hybrid console noted above.

You could still have an Xbox under the TV and never see Windows behind the big screen UI but it could do both if you wanted it to. In a strange way, it’s the original idea behind the Xbox. A PC in the living room.

Also, OldITPro2000 asks:

I was thinking the other night about the future of Xbox. We’re seeing plenty of games go cross-platform day 1, more focus on Game Pass on a plethora of devices, and comments from Phil Spencer about others potentially building Xbox hardware. I believe in the future we’ll see Microsoft license an “Xbox OS” to other companies who can build their own Xbox. I don’t think Microsoft will give up on building their own hardware (see today’s news about them hiring in the Arm space), but I can see it becoming like Surface where they build a portfolio of premium devices but leave the bulk up to other companies. My question is, assuming this to be true, when will we see the first real evidence of this? I’m aware of the Asus ROG “Xbox” handheld coming later this year, but I expect that to still run Windows.

Yeah, this is still in the fog of war era, but between the ASUS ROG and Qualcomm leaks, we’re starting to see the beginning of whatever this next era is. I do think that Xbox OS and Windows move closer together, meaning that the underlying game platform is identical, and thus will require developers to target Arm explicitly with new games. I do think we will see third-party and Microsoft devices that are Xbox branded. Most likely, Microsoft keeps the console for itself, but you never know, and a modular Xbox architecture that can be upgraded like a PC is very interesting. That’s true whether it’s portable or console. But we don’t have modular Arm PCs. So … it’s still unclear.

I spend too much time thinking about things like this.

Same. But in using that Backbone Pro controller, it was impossible not to imagine a version in which the screen is bigger, like an iPad Mini, and thus like most handheld gaming PCs today, and see a future there. And of course the Switch is the best-selling console of this generation, so there is clearly a market for this form factor.

But all we can do for now is wait. And speculate. And then they will announce and we can move on to complaining. 🙂

?‍? Code mode

OldITPro2000 asks:

I recently picked up the second edition of Charles Petzold’s Code book. It’s great so far. I was wondering if you’ve read it or the first edition. You might have brought this up in a previous Ask Paul installment or elsewhere on the site, but I missed it.

Yes, I did read Code when the first edition came out, and I was a little surprised to see he had updated it a few years back. Petzold is retired now and, based on his social media posts, doesn’t seem to be too involved in this topic anymore. But I never did get the second edition. So I just ordered it on the Kindle and will read that next. Thanks for the reminder.

To me, Petzold is as important as Donald Knuth, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, and Bjarne Stroustrup when it comes to documenting software development languages/processes, and I cannot overstate how influential he was in my life. I’m not sure there will be individuals like this for future generations, but I’m happy to have gone along for the ride when I did.

I would love for Anders Hejlsberg to write a book. Any book.

Wait. What?