Ask Paul: December 19 ⭐

Happy Friday! And where did this month go? While we sort that one out, let’s kick off the weekend a bit early with one of the longer Ask Pauls in recent memory.

? The enshittification of the supply chain

Leo_W asks:

Micron Crucial is getting out of the consumer space to focus on delivering only to AI data centers. Other suppliers may follow. The warnings I’m hearing from vendors is we’re on the verge of a supply chain issue that could be bigger than experienced during the pandemic. Prices for the next six months to a year could double on some components. This would affect desktop, server, and mobile devices. What have you heard from your contacts in the industry?

I don’t have any contacts on this side of the industry, but I do know several people at PC and device makers, and the reactions I’ve seen vary between ambivalence and vague worrying. With the insane tariffs that hobbled them in the first half of the year, especially, and these new component shortages, I think we’re in for a dark era of higher prices and longer wait times. This is the opposite of what we’ve been trained to accept from Amazon, especially, but also whatever other instant gratification-type services (DoorDash, etc.)

Looking at this from a PC-centric place, as I often do, I’m not sure the changes are all that dramatic for most consumers. No one “normal” is building or upgrading PCs or related devices like NASes anyway, and that has long been a sort of niche use case anyway. We had two-ish years of GPU shortages thanks to AI, and now we’ve moved onto RAM, and we’ll see where/if it ends. But those who are doing this sort of thing will find it a lot more expensive, at least for now.

One rumor I saw is borderline troubling but might have a silver lining: Again, thanks to AI, phone makers have been expanding the amount of RAM in phones over the past few years, and we’re finally at the point where any flagship or mid-level phone will ship with what I think of as a reasonable amount of RAM for this era (12+ GB). But because of the rise in component prices, it’s possible we’ll see that reverse, with phone makers going back to lower amounts of RAM or least freezing the RAM size increases.

If true, this may force that “life will find a way” moment, similar to what we saw earlier this past year with DeepSeek, where companies pushing AI will do so in more efficient ways. And so maybe we do more with less, so to speak.

This is bad timing, not that there’s ever a good time for these sorts of issues. Phone makers and Microsoft/PC makers have been pushing on-device AI for years and that requires much more powerful chips and more RAM. You could make an argument, vaguely, that even a 20 percent price hike on a phone can make financial sense vs. paying for the cloud infrastructure for AI over whatever number of years that you own the device. But almost no one thinks that way, and one of the appeals of a subscription service is that it spreads out the payments over time, making things more affordable. $20 per month for two or three years is an easier pill to swallow than a phone that costs $1200 now upfront. Or whatever.

Having been briefed on what I assume is most or all of the PC and chip-related announcements coming at CES next month, I can’t really be too specific here. But what I’ve seen for the short term, meaning the first half of 2026, is all very positive and not impacted by any of the pricing issues we saw this past year. But part of that might be tied to the development schedules and we’ll just see higher prices when these products do arrive. The Steam Machine pricing silence is perhaps notable (as is the lack of schedule clarity).

? 2FA, MFA, and you

jwpear asks:

As I understand it, it’s best practice to remove one’s phone number as a second factor or recovery method for online accounts. I’ve removed my phone number from my Microsoft account. I’m constantly nagged about this in Windows 11. Do you know of any way to turn this off?

I see the same nagging from Google, Amazon, and others. It’s quite frustrating. I’m guessing they all do this because the phone number lowers the number of support requests for them.

I wouldn’t personally remove the phone number associated with an important online account (Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, especially). The concern here is more about getting 2FA codes via text message, which can be intercepted and used by a malicious outsider to gain access to that account. But the trick with 2FA/MFA is that you need multiple ways to authenticate yourself. And everyone has a phone number. This is the classic problem with security: Convenience vs. better security.

From a security/convenience perspective, the best ways to handle a 2FA request are, in order, a passkey, a code generated by an authenticator app, a code sent to your email address, and then a code sent via text to your smartphone. (I’m generalizing here, as there are physical security keys like YubiKey, and ecosystems like Apple and Meta that rely on you having another signed in device or app somewhere else, too.) But having a passkey for, say, your Google or Microsoft account doesn’t negate the need to have secondary forms of authentication. Plus a password in most cases, though Microsoft lets you remove that too.

I don’t know how your Microsoft account is configured, but if you go to the Microsoft account website and then click “Manage how I sign in” under “Account Security,” you can see and configure which authentication methods you have. In my case, I have two email addresses, a phone number, sign-in notifications (through the Microsoft Authenticator app), and passkeys. But whatever choices you make here, you need at least two alternatives. Two email addresses (ideally, different services) would suffice, but those are “last call” choices to me: I would always use a passkey (with a third-party password/identity manager that works everywhere; I use Proton Authenticator except for Microsoft accounts, where I use Microsoft Authenticator) first, followed by an authenticator-app based code. Notably, both require (for the most part) you to have a phone (but not necessarily a phone number).

I’m curious how/where Microsoft nags you about this. I typically just use a single MSA for PC sign-ins, but I’m sure I have at least one MSA without an associated phone number. I would like to test that and see what it’s doing.

✈️ Travel is as travel does

train_wreck asks:

I’ve been liking the Desk to Destination podcast and hope to see more. How does that show align with the Eternal Spring project? They seem complementary to a certain degree in that they both involve travel advice.

They’re definitely complementary in that they’re both related to travel, but they’re also distinct in that Desk to Destination is mostly about using tech to ease the difficult parts of traveling, whether it’s for work or personal reasons. And Eternal Spring is very specifically about a single location (Mexico City) and was started because my wife and I were surprised that there were no good sources of information, literally anywhere, for people who may want to buy a (first or second) home there.

So Desk to Destination is more general, if that makes sense, though there is overlap. I was just updating the Eternal Spring guidebook to the 2026 edition and I had to read through and then edit the “Welcome” bit, as a year has gone by and the book is much more complete and thorough now. And we had started Desk to Destination in the past year and it occurred to me that I had to add that to the list of podcasts I do in that part of the book. And that these things were related enough that we may want to cross-promote Desk to Destination more explicitly in Eternal Spring (book and/or website).

We’ll see. Neither is meant to be a direct money maker per se, and both are more about just establishing a presence in this space (or these spaces, perhaps, if they’re different). But I do think some Eternal Spring readers would find Desk to Destination interesting. I guess that’s true, but less likely, in the other direction.

? I wear my sunglasses at night

TallGuySE asks:

Hi Paul – non-tech subject here. You’ve mentioned your eyesight many times. Are you aware of or have you considered Intraocular Lenses? I was essentially losing my eyesight due to “young persons” cataracts and had to get treatment. I went with extended depth-of-focus (EDOF) lenses and they are amazing. I can see my phone crystal clear, my desktop monitor and anything beyond without readers or contacts/glasses. Really a life-changing surgery.

I had never heard of this surgery, and though I can sort of tell what it must be by the name, I looked it up and I have no doubt that this kind of thing is amazing now and will only get better in time. Whether it can benefit me is unclear, but I will ask my eye doctor about this.

My eye issues are mostly manageable, unlike my mother, who has macular degeneration and is now legally blind. I’ve had severe myopia all my life, was put in the front of the class in the 2nd grade so I could see the chalkboard, and then got glasses heading into the 3rd grade. I got contacts between my junior and senior years of high school, and that was a godsend compared to the very thick glasses that were common at the time.

The shape of my eyes is problematic in some ways, I guess. I have to be careful with high blood pressure and anything that might cause a blood vessel burst or a retinal detachment. I am very sensitive to bright light, which makes being in Mexico City (also with high altitude) a bit concerning. So I wear sunglasses more often than most, to the point where friends have asked about it. I have a microscopic tear in my eye that will need to be fixed with a laser this coming year. And I am starting to develop cataracts like many people my age, though I’m probably years away from needing to get that fixed, it just started appearing.

But my prescription hasn’t changed much in recent years. I considered LASIK surgery like many, and I will ask about this lens implant you mentioned. I would love to not have to deal with all the nonsense I deal with now, but it’s also not as bad as it could be (as with my mother), and I try to stay on top of this because vision is so important.

Anyway, thank you. I will ask about this.

?️ Your old videos are right where I moved them

j5 asks:

Paul what happened to your YouTube channel that you dumped a ton of old videos from an old HDD. I think it was part of one of your NAS project posts. I know it was all old videos, but I enjoyed putting those on when I was working on stuff and revisiting nostalgia.

They’re on the Thurrott.com YouTube channel now. If you go to the Playlists page, there are named playlists for things like Windows 2000, Zune, Internet Explorer, and whatever else with all those videos. (I had consolidated and then moved all that as part of an online accounts/digital decluttering push.)

? You will pay for AI

JustMe asks:

With AI being pushed nearly everywhere these days, how long will it be before companies put what is now offered for “free” behind a paywall to try and earn back part/all of their investment. Will people be willing to pay for what is offered “free” now?

This is one of the curious things about the AI era. The speed, for sure. The sheer volume of new and improved capabilities everywhere. But also the cost. We aren’t seeing the real cost of these services yet. And it’s not clear when we will or what form it will take.

That said, it’s clear that we will pay for this one way or another. The most obvious way is that the web took, with advertising. But the cost of AI is so great that we’re seeing paid subscriptions more quickly. With the web, some publications only belatedly erected paywalls after realizing that the ad-based model wasn’t going to work. (The New York Times did this, for example.)

I think we’re going to see a three-tier model persist in which we get some amount of AI access for free, some more with an ad-based experience, and then more still if we just pay on a monthly basis. That will devolve into a two-tier model in which the low end is free with ads, obviously, but maybe not universally.

The hope here is that on-device AI improves to the point where that becomes the free version, and hopefully without ads. This is what Google, Microsoft, and others want for cost reasons. It’s what Apple and others will sell as privacy. And it’s one of those things that just hasn’t seemed to pay off that much, especially in the PC space, though I feel like it will.

In the interview I wrote about in Microsoft AI Chief Succeeds Where Copilot Does Not ⭐, Mustafa Suleyman brought up a number that I feel needs more publicity: “The cost of production is going through the floor,” he said. “It costs 90 percent less to ask a question of one of the best AI models in the world than it did two years ago. When the cost goes down, everybody gets access.”

The issue, I assume, is that AI usage has risen almost exponentially, so even though the cost per prompt/transaction is much, much lower than was the case two years ago (and, we should add, the capabilities are dramatically more impressive), the total cost just keeps going up. This will have to level off at some point and/or implode if the AI bubble does burst. But either way, we’ll get ahead of the costs. And I do think on-device AI plays a big part in that.

I think what you’re essentially asking is when does AI (as we know it now, in chatbot form, but also in whatever agentic future) become enshittified. And I think that is inevitable. You’re seeing the first part of that curve now, where the value for free users, especially, is high, and services like Gemini and ChatGPT do not serve ads. But they will. Of course they will. And if one or a few of these things become dominant again, these terrible companies will go back to the old playbook and enshittify them further to improve their margins. The timing is the only thing that’s not clear.

The good news is that we also live in a golden era of what I call Little Tech alternatives. And this competition, much of which will be free or lower cost, will help too. As will regulation, if we can ever get around to that: Any company that is being investigated now for platform abuses that is doing AI in any way needs to be scrutinized sooner rather than later. But even small things like yesterday’s news that Duck.ai added image generation capabilities is instructive. This is free (with limits). It’s using Big Tech models alongside Little Tech models, but it’s also anonymizing everything you do. And the results are fantastic. I used it to create the image at the top of that article. Life will find a way, and I trust DuckDuckGo about 1000x more than I trust Google or Microsoft.

What do you think this will mean for the future of Windows – how much of the OS will Microsoft put behind a paywall given that so much of it relies on backend services and AI is being baked in to nearly everything? EDIT: I personally dont believe the OS will move to a subscription model, but I do believe there will be large swaths of services that will only be fully accessible via subscription.

We’ve been worried about a Windows subscription model for many years, but I don’t think customers would accept that. Ironically, given my feelings about never-ending subscriptions for things we used to be able to pay for outright, I would happily pay a subscription fee to Microsoft right now that completely de-enshittified Windows. Happily.

But they won’t do that. Instead, what they are doing is less direct. One might call it passive-aggressive.

Windows and Microsoft 365 are the obvious places for Microsoft to deploy AI capabilities. Windows is already the orchestrator for whatever personal computing tasks we perform on PCs, and Microsoft 365 is all about productivity. So that makes sense.

The interactions between the two are fuzzier. Microsoft 365 has a free “tier” which amounts to you having a Microsoft account and accessing the web apps without paying for anything, with some limits. But for the most part, this is about paid subscriptions, per user, per month, for both consumers and businesses. So that’s a direct relationship: You pay (and keep paying) for whatever service and you get that service.

Windows is more complicated. No one is charging consumers for OS upgrades anymore for the most part, and Microsoft can’t do that. And the PC market is already about as low-margin as a thing can be that’s not a charity. So it can’t just charge those companies more money for each Windows license.

Instead, we get upsells. Some are overt, like the HP or Lenovo ads that pop-up on those PCs. Some are less overt, like bundled crapware, some of which are tied to kickback-based subscriptions of their own (McAfee). Some are subtle. Microsoft will push you into OneDrive folder backup in Windows 11, inarguably a good idea for most people, but that leads to higher storage needs and that leads to you paying (and then paying more) for that storage.

God help anyone trying to figure out how AI credits work in Windows 11 for those with a paid Microsoft 365 subscription, but this reminds me of when Zune first launched and Microsoft had a points-based system for paying for things because doing all those microtransactions (like one person buying one song) killed the margins. Today, microtransactions are easy and cheap, especially for Microsoft. It’s not clear why we can’t pay as we go, as with an in-app payment, when we need to use a feature in Paint or whatever but don’t have any AI credits. This feels inevitable.

But the subtleness also extends to things like Copilot+ PCs. This is another indirect way to improve margins for everyone. It’s not clear that Microsoft charges PC makers for this, but you can get a Copilot+ PC with a choice of three processor makers (so there’s some form of competition there and pricing smoothness) and with Windows 11 Home or Pro, so they can save there too and just use Home. These PCs are premium by nature, so they cost more, have higher margins, and can be profitable. And the customer pays more to get one, but gets some additional capabilities in Windows 11. Few of those features are reason enough to buy a Copilot+ PC, but several of them are very useful. So it’s an upsell of sorts.

Directly charging customers for Copilot Pro did not work. It’s too much money, it was only for a single user, and the price ratio compared to the underlying M365 subscription was so off that I’m sure many didn’t even understand what the point of it was. Adding most of those features to “normal” paid M365 subscriptions makes more sense to me, even if the price goes up a bit. But that’s also not Windows. And that’s where another subtle upsell kicks in. Microsoft is now adding features to Windows 11 that require you to be the account holder of a Microsoft 365 paid subscription (for consumers) to use. So this is the classic “better together” scenario Microsoft used to always promote, and while the benefits are obvious, less obvious is the other side of that coin: You will pay more when you pay for more than one thing.

Again, this is subtle. But because consumers will never pay for Windows, at once or in monthly chunks, there’s little in the way of meaningful direct upsell there once you get past additional OneDrive storage. Consumers did not want to pay for AI outright (Copilot Pro), and it felt offensive given the M365 requirement too. But consumers will pay for Microsoft 365, and so expanding the tiers and raising prices in a reasonable fashion may make more sense. It’s what they’re doing. And if they can add more and more features in Windows that actually require a Microsoft 365 paid account, then there’s the opening. I think that’s where this is going: More Copilot+ PC features, more Microsoft 365 features in Windows.

If you think about it, this is how AI works (and will evolve to work). You get something for free, in this case Windows, which, yes, your PC maker did pay for. But you get more when you pay, in this case indirectly through Microsoft 365 (and, less frequently, upsells like OneDrive and Game Pass). But a direct payment to Microsoft for Windows? I just don’t see it happening.

?️ Wintunita

wright_is asks:

Have you ever looked at the management tools for Windows, like InTune? The de-enschitification possibilities for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android there are really good, but obviously aimed at corporate users.

Not in a long time, though in my years at what became Windows IT Pro, this was obviously a big focus, and the transition from top-heavy server-based management solutions like System Center to simpler, mobile device management (MDM)-based solutions like Intune was a multi-year process with lots of pushback (from reduced overall functionality) and relearning requirements. I guess this started with, or was parallel to, the shift from Active Directory (AD) to Azure Active Directory (AAD), now Entra ID.

I can tell you this. If Microsoft had a bigger presence with consumers, there would absolutely be a toned-down Intune for consumers (in Mexico, they would call it Wintunita, or “little Intune”). This company spent a lot of time and effort bringing enterprise management capabilities down to smaller businesses with some success, and to consumers with almost no success. You can see this in products like Windows Home Server, which did make sense for that era, but also assumed some individual trained in server management, to make it work, especially at first. I know lots of us, myself included, literally implemented server environments at home. This is what we do.

I am currently working my way through setting up our tenant for InTune – hybrid domain connection to our on-premises devices, so they all come into InTune. It is a shame they don’t offer something like this for home users, although it is complicated to set it up correctly, so for home users it would need to be a lot simpler, but having all (family) devices under a single management interface would be useful, I would have though.

The differences between Intune and System Center are staggering, but the general benefit is simplicity, of course. Microsoft adapted Windows to be manageable via MDM solutions like Intune, and these things are just a lot more approachable. But the need for centralized management of multiple PCs and other devices in a family setting is temporary (by the time your kids are using these devices, they’re old enough to not be interested in these constraints), and people have shifted mostly to phones and mobile devices anyway. And a Microsoft product or whatever would not go over well in this space.

This comes up again below, but Microsoft is finally starting to improve the security and reliability functionality in Windows, and I think the collective benefits of those changes will have wide-ranging benefits for everyone who uses a PC. But there will be difficulties before they get this all fixed. At least they’re doing it.

If you are familiar with how Apple devices work in the context of a family, I feel like that level of “management” is all that most people can handle. I have my kids and wife in my Apple “family,” so they can access all the apps or content I purchase, all the benefits of whatever Apple One subscription I have, and so on. We all share our location with each other, which is obviously huge when you have kids. They are adults within this system, but there are rules for actual children and so on. It’s not perfect, but serving a primarily consumer audience has helped Apple create something that makes sense. (And costs money.) This might be the better model for this sort of thing, for consumers, but this is where Microsoft has no real play too.

Speaking of which …

? Windows is like Jenga, but less stable

jrzoomer asks:

Paul wanted to know your thoughts on the Windows architecture today. Being that Windows 11 ultimately goes back to NT, do you think Windows NT’s architecture decisions from the early 90s still hold Windows back today? How much technical debt from DOS and Windows 95 is still in Windows 11? And last, does Apple hold an advantage in this regard with MacOS today?

The basic architecture of NT was a response to failings that those people (Dave Cutler and the team that originally came from DEC) saw in Unix. So it is a modern enough architecture in the sense that all rival OS platforms today are based in large part on Unix, literally, or something very much like Unix, typically Linux.

There are pros and cons to both, of course. One thing from Unix that NT tried to “fix” was the elimination of text-based configuration files, but the resulting solution, the Registry, is a freaking disaster that can’t die soon enough. Plain text would have been better. (This may seem like an odd comparison, but an over-engineered and complex system like the Registry is to plain text what System Center was/is to Intune. Sort of.)

But today, these modernized NT/Unix platforms are mostly in a good place. Windows scaled up, to server and then to the cloud. And Unix scaled down, all the way down to phones and IoT boards and devices. Apple did an amazing job of scaling Mac OS X down to what’s now called iOS. Microsoft and Apple did amazing jobs of handling different processor architectures over time. And when you look at computing today, the combination of Arm hardware and modern OS platforms is solid.

Apple was always “better” than Microsoft at getting rid of older technologies, but the flip side of that is that Microsoft was always better with backward compatibility. And that (only partially) helps explain why Apple resonates with individuals while Microsoft resonates with businesses, in a general sense. Each audience has different expectations and needs, and different risk tolerance. That said, the pushback against Liquid Glass today is curious. It’s not a Windows 8-level resistance. But it’s real.

Windows definitely has more technical debt embedded inside it than macOS (or other Apple platforms). But this is both good and bad, and one of the curious side benefits of moving to Arm is that you get some of the Apple-style benefit of it not being burdened by as much legacy tech. This is where the real pushback on Windows 11 on Arm comes from. You’ve got people like me who use these things and never want to go back, but you also have those people who can’t even consider it because there is one app, one 20-year-old printer, or whatever, that they rely on that doesn’t work. This is a balancing act between moving forward and respecting the past. There’s no right answer, not really. You have to compromise somewhere.

(You could extend this line of thinking to things like Apple TV or Apple Watch. They do specific things, of course, but they’re also simpler in many ways than the iOS codebase on which they were no doubt built. So that modularity is important, and it’s something we used to think about more in the Windows space. It’s not as necessary now, as Windows is pretty much just for PCs. So the cleanest version, so to speak, is basically Windows on Arm.)

The real advantage for Apple, and this is something Microsoft can’t really duplicate, is the cross-device stuff. When you buy into Apple, you get this crazy number of “better together” scenarios that offer real benefits to consumers. It’s magical when you copy something to the clipboard on an iPhone and then paste it somewhere on a Mac. The list of those events goes up dramatically the more devices you have (and the more you spend, of course).

? Pages are out of the Loop

christianwilson asks:

I know you have said you don’t utilize AI as part of your writing process but have you ever played around with Copilot’s Pages feature? I am curious of your thoughts on it as a basic AI-backed writing app.

I’m embarrassed to say that I have never used Copilot Pages. And that’s tied to two things. I struggle to see where I can add AI to my workflow, and will never use it for literal writing. And I don’t like or want to use Copilot. I often remove it from the PCs I use. I hate that it pops up when I hit that key by mistake. Hate it.

But I also have this reality in that I write about Windows primarily and this personal computing space more generally, and I kind of do need to know how these things work. This issue is tied to the problems I’m having getting the next edition of the Windows 11 Field Guide moving along: I keep thinking that I’ve found a format that makes sense but when I apply it to different topics, especially the new AI-based features, it’s not working. And so I keep trying to figure that out so I can move forward.

Stephen Rose chimed in on this question in the comments to the original post, so it is perhaps coincidental that I found a sort of esoteric use case for AI that’s related. We record a podcast called Desk to Destination, also mentioned above, and like Hands-On Windows, it’s not usually topical or news-based, and I/we can record two or three episodes at a time and then queue them up for publication later.

For someone like me on a daily treadmill of content generation, this is a wonderful thing. But it also has a downside. I have all these videos recorded, and they have names and whatever else. But when it’s time to post them, it’s often a month, or some number of months, later, and I have to actually watch/listen to the podcasts when I post them so I can be reminded of the topic, hear what we actually discussed, and then write the description (and make a thumbnail).

This is tedious and time consuming. So I decided to get transcripts for each. I tried cloud services, but that is also time consuming and you have to pay eventually. And so I went down a crazy route: I used a command line tool called FFmeg to convert each video to audio. And then I use the dictation feature in Microsoft Word to create the transcript. The conversion takes less than 5 seconds per video, which is amazing. I have to read the transcript to write the summary.

I’m caught up now, but it occurred to me I could use some AI to summarize the transcripts, creating a first draft of the description I have been writing manually. So I may try that. But now that I’m caught up, I may also just take notes as we record these things like the non-idiot I would like to be. And that would save me even more time.

Anyway. I am behind on anything Copilot and AI in Windows 11 related. And that is going to be a focus as I keep pushing to get this book updated somewhere that makes sense. I’m just not there yet, sorry.

? Always in motion is the future

louiem3 asks:

Hi Paul, curious if you have any tech or Microsoft predications going into 2026? Such as any updates on Windows 12, or what (if any) future Surface hardware looks like?

I’m not a great prognosticator, but I am working on those year-end articles that will include a look back and a look forward for Windows in particular. So I don’t want to step on that per se. But I feel like we have to get a Windows 12 announcement, at least, this year. (Having considered this a possibility for the past two years.) And that what we’re now calling 26H1 is the start of that. And I would be surprised if we saw anything new and different from Surface from a form factor perspective. I love Surface, but the market has spoken here and all the form factor experimentation since Surface Pro 3 has gone nowhere. I see them sticking to the models they have.

Apologies for the brevity. But I will be writing more about this soon.

? One of many Achilles Heels

Anlong08 asks:

What a back of the napkin dollar amount that you spend on products that you know you’ll write about in some way? I imagine there’s a hundred ways to sub categorize that so it’s not so simple.

This one is tough. I am terrible at being organized about turning my purchases into articles, even though many of them do inform what I write. Some people are good at that. I wish I was.

I spend several thousand dollars a year on hardware products, software, and services, and I assume it goes up and down each year depending on the circumstances. Last year was big for PC purchases (MacBook Air, Surface Laptop 7), but this year and last year were also big for electronics in general. And every year, I have major phone expenses. I bought an iPhone 17 Pro Max and a Google Pixel Pro Fold in November and haven’t reviewed either yet, though I will.

Just this month, I purchased two inexpensive Logitech mice so I can have one in a bag when I travel and then a backup in Mexico. (I have other mice here.) I just bought the smart light switches and wall plate that will be part of my second write-up about recent smart home changes. I bought Battlefield 6 for the PC (and will buy a second copy for my son for Christmas). I ordered an Xbox Wireless Controller because it was on sale for $38, and these things are really expensive now and break all the time (and it arrive until early January). I bought a Blink 2K+ Outdoor camera that may or may not replace the Full-HD unit we have in Mexico, or may I will return it because it’s not that much better. I bought a 27-inch monitor, also on sale, because my display here died, but I don’t like it and will return it soon. I bought the Philips Hue bulbs for outside and the four smart plugs mentioned in that previous smart home post, a laptop stand because all my good stands are in Mexico, and four Amazon Basics 6-outlet power strips.

And I just get stuff, too. I have three more review laptops in. A 4K camera that TWiT sent me that maybe I don’t need. It never ends.

And that’s just December. And most of that, I don’t know. Do I write about it? Does it just get mentioned somewhere? Is there a “Tech I bought and then immediately returned” post that makes sense? I don’t know. There should be an “I buy too much crap” post, perhaps. But some of this is more side requirements of my job than it is me being compulsive.

I guess I’m curious if you or anyone else can make sense of what would or would not be interesting. I’ve been kind of just flying blind here.