Ask Paul: September 12 ⭐

Happy Friday! I finally had some time to wind down a bit between trips this week, but this weekend should be even better. So let’s kick it off a bit early. I need the time.

One more membership reminder

Last week, I wrote a bit about the membership transition and what you can do if you clicked through that banner that mistakenly appeared for some Alpha members or had other issues. I think I got through most of the subsequent support requests, but I also have this nagging feeling I might have missed something. And I know there are at least a few people I contacted via email how haven’t written me back.

The newsletter issue should be resolved by next week: The service we were using on the backend changed, so I’m going to send out a few tests soon and then resume that next week (or the week after if need be).

Also, we know that the Alpha badge isn’t displaying at all or inconsistently. There are some changes in the works, but we will get that sorted out too.

Apart from those things, if you are still having an issue related to the new membership system, please email me. I really do want to get ahead of this quickly and then move on to a broader transition and some new features (like this one that someone has already noticed in its early release). My end game, so to speak, is just making this all work well for everyone, you and me. There’s more work to do, but we’ll get it there.

? If an app fell in a store and no one bought it

helix2301 asks:

Microsoft announced that [it] has removed the one-time fees for its store, and developers no longer need a credit card. Do you think this is Microsoft trying to get more developers trying to entice people just wondering your thoughts on things.

The Microsoft Store has gone through many permutations since it launched as the Windows Store with Windows 8 in 2012. As originally envisioned, the Store was a front-end to a then-new mobile apps platform called Metro that was part of a broader initiative to bring mobile-like features to the PC. This was never going to work, and it didn’t, but Microsoft adapted many, many times over the years. The app platform changed repeatedly. But the Store changed even more.

Charting those changes is beyond my mental capacity this morning. But at a high level, the biggest changes were the steady increase in the types of apps one could offer through the Store, the steady dissolution of technical and licensing requirements to make the Store more appealing to developers who might otherwise only distribute on the web, and the ways in which developers got/get paid.

The original Windows Store offered developers the same 70/30 percent revenue split that Apple turned into a de facto industry standard despite it being completely unfair and arbitrary. But there was a twist, and this is the type of thing that competition brings to the market: “Successful apps,” meaning those that earned $25,000 or more in revenues, would see a better 80/20 revenue split. (There were also other incentives that made even that first version of the Store a better deal for developers. I wrote a bit about this in Programming Windows: Reimagining Feedback.)

To me, the Microsoft Store mirrors what happened with Windows as a Service (WaaS), the “forced” updating scheme later introduced for Windows 10: It started off as a terrible idea, changed dramatically over time, and is today something that just works. Even though there are apps that bypass some of the best elements of the Store (Affinity Photo, for example, just uses its own user account system, bypassing Store licensing, or how if you download Adobe Photoshop from the Store, it just downloads the Creative Cloud installer and you go from there), the core benefits remain: Most apps can be installed on numerous PCs without worry, they’re attached to your sign-in account (MSA), they update automatically, and so on. And the Microsoft Store is one of two repositories for the apps you can install and maintain via the Windows Package Manager (winget), which I use to bulk-install apps on new review laptops all the time. I always choose a Microsoft Store app version over a web-based version when available.

This latest development, which Microsoft announced at Build 2025 and then implemented this past week is just the latest in that long series of changes over the years aimed at making the Store more attractive to developers. And this time, the focus is on upfront costs, which mostly impacts individual developers and enthusiasts. Which, when you think about it, brings the Store full circle: Most of the first apps in the Windows 8 era were from individuals and enthusiasts, and they were mostly amateurish and of low quality. Obviously, the tools and technologies are better today. But this is still a sort of quantity over quality play in a sense, and like previous changes, it’s driven by the relatively low number of people who use this Store (250 million monthly active users) compared to those using the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, both of which have to be in the billions and generating much more money, activity, and app usage.

But this isn’t really a big change. Microsoft already chipped away at all the issues now causing antitrust problems for Apple and Google. It stopped requiring developers to use its in-app payment systems. It allows third-party app and game stores in the Store. It allows apps that use third-party browser engines, including web browsers. It changed the revenue split repeatedly, including a possible 95/5 percent split in 2019; depending on a number of factors, the fee structure today is 0 percent if you make apps and use a third-party commerce platform, or 88/12 or 85/15 percent if you use Microsoft and/or are publishing a game. There are probably others.

Not having to pay a small one-time fee the first time you publish an app or game on the Microsoft Store is… nice. I guess. But it’s not going to change the dynamics here. The Microsoft Store is what it is, and it’s great for users and I guess for developers. But the engagement and transaction volume are small fractions of what we see on mobile. PCs and smartphones are just different things.

? Reining in Big Tech

JustMe asks:

The EU recently fined Google approximately $3B (just under 3B Euros) for breaching antitrust rules with its advertising technology. While that is a lot of money and Google will naturally appeal – is there anything governments can do to reign in longstanding abusive/bad behavior by big tech companies? Legislation would help, but legislation has yet to keep pace with the advancement of technology and the things big tech does with it.

I feel like the EU is handling Big Tech correctly, in general. And that the way you prevent these companies from destroying competition any further is to enact laws that protect competition (check), actively enforce those laws (check), and then sanction and fine those companies that break the law (check). So they’re doing the “right” thing. But the EU also moves slowly, which to me is the bigger issue. All regulatory bodies and governments do, of course. But the EU seems particularly problematic because the pace doesn’t match the urgency of its aggressive policies and laws.

Cory Doctorow, who coined the term enshittification, will soon publish a book called Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, and I suspect it will be a good read. It’s a follow-up to Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, and aside from the general subject matter and the fact that both titles are based on a term he invented (the newer of which is much more successful in the sense that it’s widely-known), the part that interests me most is also in both titles: They’re not just educating readers about what happened, they contain ideas about how to fix the problem.

I strongly recommend that anyone interested in antitrust and Big Tech at least watch this recent Doctorow talk about enshittification. The biggest problem with this topic is how uneducated people are on it, and Doctorow cuts to the chase, and the facts, in a very clear-headed way.

For example, he neatly destroys the myth that Apple is somehow better than Google, and doesn’t make its customers and partners the product. For one, when Apple added a dialog to iOS letting users opt out of tracking from third-party apps, it also secretly started tracking users on iOS itself but with no opt-out choice.

“This is exactly the same purpose, targeting ads to you based on the places you’ve been, the things you’d searched for, the communications you’d had, the links you’d clicked on,” he says. “Now, Apple did not ask its customers for permission to spy on them. It didn’t let them opt out of the spying. It didn’t tell them about the spying when the newspapers printed that it was illegally and secretly spying on its users. Apple lied about it.”

Worse, it overcharges developers for in-app purchases, prevents them from communicating with their own customers, and everything else we know is terrible about this company.

“Apple treats its business customers, the app vendors, like they’re the product,” he notes, taking on that famous but silly phrase. “It takes 30 cents out of every euro that those app vendors bring in. That is 3,000 percent of the normal payment processing fee. Apple treats its end users like the product. You shell out €1,000 for a phone and you still get spied on to target ads to you. Apple is treating everyone like the product. In in enshittification, the product is just whatever you can productize. Everyone is the product.”

I will read and review his new book in October when it comes out.

? Requirements or just guidelines?

JustMe asks:

The end of Windows 10 is nearly here and has been well-known for a while now, yet uptake of 11 is still stubbornly problematic even with its ESU offering. Microsoft will insist that 11 wont run on older hardware, yet tools like Tiny11 seem to make a mockery of that stance. What happens at the end of October? Do you think Microsoft will ever relent on its Windows 11 requirements, or do we have the current unstable state of play until a mythical Windows 12 appears?

I don’t see Microsoft ever stepping back the Windows 11 hardware requirements. In fact, I see this as the first step in tightening hardware requirements in general, with Copilot+ PC as the second step. And I have little doubt that when/if a Windows 12 ever appears, those requirements will evolve yet again. This is the new normal, in other words.

But I also don’t see this as a problem. And that’s based on history and experience. Which I guess are the same thing in some cases.

Microsoft often enacts rules, policies, requirements, or whatever you call these things. In the Windows world, many will recall a key example that’s relevant here: When it introduced Windows 10 in 2015, it said that anyone with a valid Windows 7 or 8.x product key could use that key to activate a new install of Windows 10 for the first year that that product was in the market. But then the keys just kept working. For many years. It wasn’t until October 2023 that it finally put a stop to this process.

So why announce a restriction and then not enforce it? My guess is that this is legal in nature, that Microsoft needed to have some policy in place for legal reasons, but it also didn’t really care if anyone was using a valid product key from a few years earlier to activate a newer, safer version of Windows, as that was better for everyone. When it did halt this process, it was most likely because so few were using it anyway, not because no one was upgrading to Windows 10 (or 11, by then).

Looking at the Windows 11 hardware requirements, two immediate thoughts come to mind with four years of experience in the rear-view mirror:

• The requirements seemed artificial when they were first announced, because they were. But in time, advances in Windows 11 security finally mapped to those requirements, making them retroactively defensible. For the vast majority of users, trying to install and use Windows 11 on a PC with a processor from 2016 or older isn’t just unwise, it’s stupid.
• These requirements can all be bypassed using well-known workarounds and tools like Rufus, Tiny11, and about 1,000 others.

In other words, this situation parallels what we saw with using Windows 7/8 product keys to activate Windows 10. Microsoft has worked to eliminate some workarounds, but it can never really enforce its requirements and workarounds/tools will always be available. So none of this bothers me.

I’ve been working on the Windows 11 Field Guide 25H2 Edition, and when Microsoft finally released the Windows 11 version 25H2 ISOs this past week, I set out to see whether one could still workaround the blockers in Setup tied to those requirements. And you still can. It all still works.

But also … why worry about this? Again, who is going to install Windows 11 on a 10-year old computer right now?

I guess the one thing I would worry about regarding hardware requirements is that Microsoft did finally kill its product key loophole. So perhaps there will be a time when these things get more problematic. But so far so good.

?️ Abusive relationships start at home

JustMe asks:

CNBC recently reported that Satya Nadella told employees that the company needed to do better with employee relations after the recent round of layoffs and a recent announcement requiring employees to be in the office at least a set number of days per week. What do you make of it? Does the fact that Nadella made the comments indicate things (from an employee perspective) are worse at Microsoft than is known?

I find this to be infuriating.

This guy has indiscriminately laid off employees ever since he became CEO, but never as badly as this past year and never in so offensive a manner. For him to then write what amounts to a “thoughts and prayers” memo back in July and now this latest nonsense, which is tied to the recent back to the office order, is an insult to everyone still working there. This is like getting a thank you note from the person who stole your car. Beyond meaningless.

Things are absolutely worse for employees now than ever before in Microsoft’s history. I have heard this from every single employee I’ve spoken to, without exception.

What I make of this is tied to the enshittification conversation above, in a way. Because this is ultimately another form of enshittification, one that directly impacts those who work at this company. Meaning, it will impact people and businesses who use Microsoft’s products indirectly as well, because the people making the software we use no longer have job security and, you know, might be a bit distracted right now. This isn’t an environment in which anyone can do their best work.

Put simply, Microsoft—meaning, I guess, Nadella and perhaps the board of directors and/or senior leadership team, though there have to be defectors by this point—collectively decided that AI is too big of a market to ignore and that the company is uniquely placed to take advantage of this. For that to happen effectively, all detractors have to be silenced, and all employees have to align on this strategy. And if whatever rules or policies it enacts are uncomfortable, inconvenient, or unfair to the people working there, then that’s too bad. This is an opportunity of historic import, as is the potential windfall. For good, bad, or indifferent, Microsoft is all-in.

But Microsoft is also an enormous company with 200,000+ employees, many smart and opinionated who don’t necessarily agree with the direction or perhaps specific initiatives. Game studios are unionizing. Pro-Palestinians are protesting. Everyone is questioning Microsoft’s insane Open AI relationship and why it needed to bring in outsiders to lead its two most recent AI organizations in the company. And so here we are: Silence the complainers. Instill fear to quell any potential future complaints. And then offer your “thoughts and prayers” when confronted by any of this while continuing to do exactly what you were already doing.

What we keep learning with Big Tech is that these companies, no matter how virtuous their marketing, are all terrible. They will sacrifice their users, their partners, and their own employees to get ahead, maintain their monopolies, and extend their dominance into new generations of tech, like AI. To believe that Microsoft, or Satya Nadella, gives one iota of a crap about some employee toiling away in whatever now non-essential part of that company is the saddest position to take I can imagine. They do not care. And they never will.

“We can only do better.” No kidding.

?‍? Made by Paul in Pennsylvania

spacecamel asks:

Love the “artisanal tech journalism”.

LOL. But yes, that’s a curiously correct term for this AI era.

A few weeks ago, you mentioned that you were having trouble with iMessage and switching numbers between Mexico and the US. Did you ever find a solution to this? I have had a similar issue when I switch between my work and home countries. The only solution that I found was to carry two phone. I do not think iOS (or android) switches numbers well and eSIMs seem to make the problem worse.

I can’t say that I found a solution per se. But I can tell you what I did this time and it did appear to “work.” I need more evidence.

In the past, when I switched from an iPhone to an Android phone, I would Google what you were supposed to do with regard to iMessage (and FaceTime) because this is a sticking point. Apple has instructions for those who still have their iPhone and separate instructions for those who have already sent it in on trade or otherwise reset it or sold/gave it away. I have done both, many times, and I’ve sometimes done the first and then checked in with the second method to make sure it had happened. But it’s never worked. I always miss texts, parts or all of group texts, and experience other issues.

These things are difficult if not impossible to troubleshoot. I only do this 2 or 3 times per year, and most people only do it once. So there isn’t a wide body of work out there to help anyone with this issue.

So what I did this time was disable iMessage and FaceTime on the iPhone one week or so before I switched the eSIM over to the Pixel 10 Pro XL. In the interim, I also looked at the iMessage and FaceTime configurations on my iPad and Mac to make sure they weren’t somehow still connected. (In the past, I had seen text messages come in on my iPad, in Messages, after I was already using a Pixel, because this system is tied to your Apple account, not your phone number.)

And then I waited. And when the Pixel arrived, I moved Google Fi and my phone number over to that phone, and I braced myself for the usual problems. But it was fine. There were no issues. I have a group chat with our kids who both use iPhones, a group chat with my sister and brother-in-law, one of whom uses an iPhone, and individual chats with people who use either type of phone. And it seemed to just work. I don’t think I missed anything, which is a first. Literally in many, many years.

I will try to do similarly going forward and amass more experience. There is something to the other devices, I think. So if you have an iPad or whatever, I would look there too.

? It’s Apple season

Thanks to a timing issue I knew was going to occur before it was official, I can’t preorder anything that Apple just announced. We’re flying to Mexico City the morning of September 19, which is the day those preorders will arrive.

This is good and bad.

In one sense, it clarifies things and makes it less urgent that I figure out which, if any, iPhone to get. But it also means I can’t be part of any initial wave of reviews. I can live with it.

The one product I am absolutely sure of is the AirPods Pro 3. I will be buying those earbuds, and if it makes sense to do so while we’re in Mexico, I will. It probably won’t: The AirPods Pro 3 cost MEX$5,799, which is about $314 in U.S. dollars. In the U.S., the AirPods Pro 3 cost $249. But I can at least use the new live translation feature with the AirPods Pro 2 I do have, and being in Mexico will be an ideal time/place for that.

I will not be getting an Apple Watch Series 11 regardless of where my life goes. It’s not a big upgrade from the Series 10 I have, and I’m not even sure I want to keep using a smart watch. I would prefer something like a Fitbit with a big screen that gets several days of battery life. For now, I’ll ride things out with what I have (I’m using my year-old Pixel Watch 3, which I also will not replace, with the Pixels).

Last year, I almost bought an iPhone 16 Plus instead of the iPhone 16 Pro Max and I still sort of regret not doing so. But this year, that phone was replaced with the iPhone Air, which has a bigger screen than the standard iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro, but not as big as the Pro Max. So if I do get an iPhone of this generation, it would need to be an Air or a Pro Max. And it won’t happen until we come home from Mexico in mid-November. (The iPhone 17 Pro Max starts at MEX$30,999 in Mexico, which is almost $1700 USD, compared to $1200 in the U.S.)

Waiting, again, is both good and bad. But this will give me time to see what reviewers say about the two things I’m most curious about the iPhone Air: The battery life and the camera quality. And who knows? Maybe reviews of the Pro Max will be lackluster enough that I don’t bother. Right now I can’t say I’m excited about either phone, but I am curious. I will watch the event again. Read the reviews. And we’ll see.

Looking forward, I am very curious about some products that weren’t part of this week’s event.

• Apple TV
• HomePod Mini
• iPad Pro M5

I could see getting each of these, and I will be writing about the “why” of the iPad Pro bit by next week, when iPadOS 26 and the other Apple ‘26 OSes ship to existing devices.

? And it just works, said no one ever

akubert asks:

I heard your recent rant on Lunar Lake on First Ring Daily. I’d like to twist that theme a bit from “things that just don’t work” to “things that just work”. It would be great to hear about some things that you use (hardware, software, whatever) that just reliably work all the time—leading to simple joys. If too lengthy for “Ask Paul”, maybe a good topic for an article.

Personal technology is endlessly frustrating, even for an enthusiast like me, and I have experienced these bizarre instances in which it seems like so many things are going wrong at the same time that it’s like being cursed. I had a complete meltdown on the plane ride to Berlin and then another one in Berlin because of this. And it wasn’t just the laptop, though that was perhaps the worst of it, and it kept happening, including after we had gotten home. I may write about that, it was weird.

Those things that just work, the exceptions, are rare. And yes, I do feel like this maybe deserves its own article if not a series of articles in which each installment focuses on a single product. But we can at least get it rolling, because there are some things that do just work, consistently delight, and just kind of surprise me because they don’t ever fail or betray me in some way.

The most obvious, which I’ve written about, is Notion. It’s free, and I’ve never been asked to pay despite how much I use it. It works incredibly well. I’ve tried to replace it repeatedly, as I do with many of the tools I rely on. But I keep using it because there is nothing out there, and I’ve tried them all, that works as well.

The complaints about Notion are well understood. Its lack of offline support, now “fixed” in a basic sense. The inability to “self-host” it so that you can store its contents where you want, perhaps in OneDrive or whatever. And then vague, ideological-type things like it not being open source or whatever. These all bother me to some degree. But none have ever gotten in the way of me using it. And so I keep using Notion. And the truth is, I kind of love the thing. I could use it for more, including day-to-day writing. I’m not sure why I don’t, but then that second complaint above is perhaps why. I don’t know.

The other one that comes to mind is Snapdragon X. We exist in a community that can’t stop complaining about everything, and there is something about the whole Windows 11 on Arm/Snapdragon X thing that just seems to set people off. They can’t stop mentioning the one random thing that still doesn’t work even though it impacts nobody. Here’s my experience. It just works. All the time. Every time. Without fail. I have never had a bad experience with a Snapdragon X-based laptop. Not. One. Time.

And to bring this back to Lunar Lake, I spent a week in Berlin that was fun and worthwhile on a personal level, but incredibly frustrating from a tech perspective, largely because of that Lunar Lake laptop. When I got home, I pulled out the $580 HP OmniBook 5 that I bought in August with my own money, opened it up, and got to work. And here’s what I experienced using this entry-level Snapdragon X-based laptop with low-end specs: Immediate and ongoing operational perfection. I performed the same tasks I had with that expensive Lunar Lake laptop, the things that cause that hunk of crap to grind to a literal halt repeatedly, and the Snapdragon X laptop just kept working without any drama or issues. I’m using it right now to write this. I wonder why.

Oh, right. I love when things just work. And this thing just works. And I need to get things done and then move on to the next thing, not try to get things done, fail because some tech product doesn’t work right, waste time, get distracted, and then end the day further behind. Which is all too common.

I will be writing soon about the iPad, as noted above, and perhaps that makes the list too. Clipchamp is close. Proton Pass and Proton Authenticator? Affinity Photo may come close, though that app oddly did fail me while we were in Germany on one of two laptops, a first. There’s definitely a list in there somewhere. I will think on this, and I’m curious if others have any thoughts.

?️ Is DIY RIP?

mcerdas asks

Given the stricter hardware requirements for Windows Hello, and how this feature is becoming more integrated with Windows security, do you believe that DIY desktops have a future?

This is related to the Windows 11 hardware requirements bit above, which makes sense, of course. In this case, the way I think of this is that building a PC for yourself has long been a kind of niche thing, and not something any mainstream user would do. And as things change, the impact is pretty small. Put another way, no one is really doing this now anyway. I mean, some are. But statistically, not really.

Richard had been talking for months about building a couple of PCs, and he was initially waiting to see whether it was possible to build a Copilot+ PC, ideally using Snapdragon X parts, but if not, maybe something AMD-based. In retrospect, this was never going to work: The Copilot+ PC specs require Windows Hello Enhanced Sign-In Security (ESS), which requires an incredibly strenuous process of oversight at the factory when the PC is built, so it’s not something an individual could do. That could change, but for now, it makes that a non-starter.

But in the same way that an individual could install Windows 11 on a PC that doesn’t meet the requirements, individuals can today build the PC of their choice, for the most part. There’s no DIY Snapdragon X motherboard or whatever out there, but you could build a PC around the latest AMD chips, and that would be pretty remarkable. Whether it would get the Copilot+ PC-specific features is unclear. But the general feeling is that this will happen in time, as will support for PCs that don’t have the right NPU but do have a modern GPU.

And there are degrees of DIY, if that makes sense. In addition to building big tower PCs, I’ve assembled Raspberry Pis and NUC PCs in the past using a Kit and RAM and storage I bought separately. And Framework has a modular desktop PC now that you can configure online as with other PCs and then later swap out any/all of the parts, as per the Framework laptops.

I guess you could compare this market to that for automobiles. We’re getting more complete solutions these days, and we’ve thankfully stepped back from the cliff of sealed boxes thanks to right to repair regulations. So I don’t see DIY going away. It was always a small slice of the market, and it always will be. But it’s also kept alive by enthusiasts. And these are the types of people who can work around technical restrictions.