Ask Paul: January 23 ⭐

Happy Friday! It’s a bit chilly here in Mexico City, but nothing like the deep freeze and snowstorms back home. But either way, grab something warm to drink and settle in. It’s time to kick off the weekend a bit early.

⌨️ In case you were wondering

gg1 asks:

My current Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard is starting to trouble me, so I went to check Incase’s website on their current slate of “Designed by Microsoft” hardware. All I found was: a few full-price items, a bunch of out-of-stock items, and unreleased items that were promised for early next year (case in point the Compact Ergonomic Keyboard that was expected one full year ago).

All these years later, I still very much prefer (and use) the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard and Mouse set (minus the numeric keypad which I literally throw away). While Microsoft made its own hardware peripherals, including the more recent Surface-branded devices, I was always curious about whatever new ergonomic (and pseudo-ergonomic) keyboards, especially, that it came up with. But none have ever replaced the Sculpt. It’s just unique.

Microsoft killing off its hardware peripheral business never made sense to me. Microsoft sticking with just its Surface-branded hardware peripherals, devices that are, overall, inferior to the best of the Microsoft-branded hardware, made even less sense to me. But Microsoft licensing those designs to Incase was like a little burst of hope. Maybe this would be OK.

I guess it is OK. It is better than these things just disappearing. But Incase has moved slowly to just (re)release the existing Microsoft designs it inherited. Last April, I wrote that it appeared that it had finally started shipping a nearly-complete collection of Designed by Microsoft peripherals. Looking at its website now, it doesn’t seem horrible to me. There are dozens of Microsoft keyboards, mice, and other peripherals. And that does include the Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop set. Though I note that it is still marked as “coming soon,” as are many of those devices. Granted, it is available on Amazon, though there just the keyboard costs $119, not $79 for the full set as advertised on the Incase website. The mouse is $73 (!). (The original Microsoft unit costs $488 on Amazon because of course it does.)

I don’t know what’s happening. To me, the first order of business is just shipping the existing lineup as-is. And then you move on to improving them. The Sculpt set, for example, should come with a USB-C dongle (or no dongle). I wouldn’t like this personally, but it should have a Copilot key. Perhaps there are new models/devices to be made that fit within this series. Etc. But nothing has happened.

What was the point of ceding the Microsoft hardware line to Incase? They seem to be doing an even worse job of managing it than Microsoft. Am I missing something here?

Microsoft actually did a nice job of managing this hardware lineup when it was there, but Incase has definitely dropped the ball. Maybe the market for this stuff collapsed or never existed in the first place. I don’t know. But I like Incase products, generally speaking, and I am a bit surprised by how much its promoting the Microsoft-branded stuff on its homepage. But perhaps its mobile products are the better direction for the company. Hard to say.

I wish this was better. Some of these products really deserve some love. Including the Sculpt series you and I use. They’re just terrific.

?️ Have you turned it off and turned it on?

Bitrot asks:

I have what some might call an “old school” hands on question. I recently bought an Acer desktop with a i7-14700 raptor lake chip while it was on sale. My question Is, is it normal for the chip to sometimes run in the 4.5 and above GHz range even when it is basically idling with hardly any CPU use? It has gone as high as 5.5 with no fan running when i run more power intensive tasks. The average cpu temp. is usually a little below 90 degrees Fahrenheit and rarely passes 110 when in heavy use. The fan has never run except when doing a CPU test so i know its active.This feels like some kind of BAI (Before AI) question from the stone age. (PS: Its only been 3 weeks i have it,so i haven’t explored much in BOIS etc.

I’m not familiar with what Intel probably isn’t calling a 14th Gen Core processor line specifically; I feel like I’ve been exclusively getting Intel Core Ultra-based laptops for review (so, Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, and now Panther Lake) for at least a few years now. Plus, this is a desktop class chip with much higher power capabilities (65 watts up to 219, which is nuts). But it’s the same basic design as most modern Intel Core/Core Ultra chips in that it has Performance and Efficient cores, each with different base and max frequencies. And so it should technically work similarly with regards to power use/clock frequencies when idle or under load.

I don’t monitor CPUs for temperature or clock speed normally anymore, but what you’re seeing does seem excessive. The laptop I’m writing this on has an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H processor, which is high-end for a mobile chip in the Arrow Lake generation (meaning it’s not Copilot+ PC compatible), but not quite the core count your chip has and not even close from a base/max power output perspective (28/115 watts). But looking at HWINFO now, connected to power and on default settings (Best Performance in Power settings), it’s doesn’t seem to be doing anything unusual. I don’t notice heat or fan noise per se, games excluded. (And there is an Nvidia laptop GPU in there.) As I write this, the temperature is about 50 degrees Celsius plus or minus.

Anyway, with the caveat of me not being an expert here, it does seem that your idle clock speeds and temperatures are too high. I’m not sure what you use the PC for or how it’s configured, of course, but yes, I would look at the firmware; perhaps there is a power management or other setting that isn’t letting the OS handle that properly (runtime power management, idle power states, etc.). I wonder whether there is something wrong with the fan. And I assume you are using the Intel Driver Utility to make sure that’s up to date. Acer may have its own system utility software (like Lenovo has in Vantage) that could be screwing with this as well.

Hopefully someone else here is more familiar with this type of thing. I’m mostly on laptops now, and even the desktops I use are either mini-PC designs or all-in-ones for the most part that use what are essentially mobile chipsets.

? A no-brainer is a terrible thing to waste

Christian-Gaeng asks:

We’ve discussed subscriptions in the Microsoft ecosystem quite a few times here, and the question of whether, for example, the Office subscriptions are still the famous “no-brainers.”

I have an Office Family subscription and a Microsoft 365 Business Standard subscription. I don’t use OneDrive because I use a German cloud service.

In your opinion, are the Office subscriptions still a “no-brainer”? Or has the scope of services and what you get for your money deteriorated so much that you should think twice before subscribing?

I’ve also been thinking about this recently, go figure. Related to this is the notion that any decision one makes is essentially a matrix of mini-decisions, and that each of those is in some way weighted because some aspects of a decision are more important than others, and each can be specific to an individual.

The idea that Microsoft 365 can be a no-brainer is tied to two things. The desirability of the desktop Office apps (and, to a lesser degree, full functionality of the web and mobile Office apps). And that OneDrive cloud storage. (Other aspects of this subscription, like the Skype credits we used to get were, to me, more minor decision points but they may have mattered to others.) And then there is the cost. When a Microsoft 365 Family subscription is available for five (now six) people, and you have that many people using it, each with their own 1 TB of OneDrive storage, and the cost is just $99 per year or whatever, that subscription makes sense. It’s a no-brainer because you really do need those things and the value is real.

Over time, the value proposition shifts a bit.

Our need for more and more cloud storage grows, but where Google moved from 1 TB to 2 TB as a sort of base paid storage tier (through Google One now), Microsoft 365 stuck to 1 TB. Not a deal-breaker, but noticeable.

Microsoft then started adding paid Copilot tiers on top of these subscriptions that muddle the value proposition. If you just got all of those things for “free” as part of the subscription, and especially if every user in a Family subscription did, one might effectively argue that it was still very much a no-brainer, assuming you wanted that. But that’s not the case. It costs more. A lot more.

The need for cloud storage is real. But you are getting that somewhere else, so the availability of OneDrive storage doesn’t matter to you.

The need for those Office apps is there are not. For me, I don’t care about or use any Office apps anymore. They come on the PCs I own and review, and I do have a Microsoft 365 (Family) subscription because my wife, kids, and father-in-law all use it. My wife is arguably the only one of us who “needs” those Office apps every single day. I bet my kids do not. I bet my father-in-law just expects that and will never move on regardless. But for me, this is nothing. The OneDrive storage is more important.

So this will vary by individual. And it will change in time. There have been little things chipping away at the important of Office over time, like Google Docs and now things like Notion. And we have AI that can create things that previously required Office apps, like charts (Excel) and presentations (PowerPoint) that will further chip away at this need. I see these apps as going away. But many still require them now.

If this is you as an individual, I don’t see where a Microsoft 365 subscription makes sense. This is especially true under two conditions: You use a single PC and don’t want any of the Copilot/AI functionality. If both are true, you are possibly better off with a standalone Office suite.

There are other factors. I don’t know why you have both consumer and commercial Microsoft 365 subscriptions, but it’s possible you could get by with just one. If the commercial subscription is mostly about an email service with a custom domain or whatever, there are cheaper ways to do that. Google, which you may not like, or Proton, or whatever.

My situation is complicated by whatever factors, but one is that I write about this stuff professionally, so keeping consumer and commercial Microsoft 365 subscriptions makes sense. If this was just me as an individual, I would not pay for Microsoft 365 at all.

? Work or school, or not

Christian-Gaeng asks:

My wife got a new laptop that she uses for work, and I naturally configured it with her business email address (a Microsoft 365 Business Standard account). During setup, I specified that I would be using it for an organization and for work. So why on earth does Microsoft still install all that junk as if it were a personal computer? What’s the point of the selection during setup then?

You’re seeing the default experience. In a larger business, an admin/IT staff could configure policies that determine which apps are installed and how certain features are configured. If this is just you and your wife and you’ve not done that, you just get the defaults. Which is a “normal” Windows 11 install for the most part. (There are some other small differences, but not the default set of in-box apps.) I have never really explored what it would look as an individual/very small business to do otherwise because it would likely require Intune or similar and would incur an ongoing cost. To me, it’s just easier to use Tiny11 Builder or WinDebloat or whatever to get the system where I want it.

? You can spell Mexico without AI

train_wreck asks:

How much AI exposure do you see out in Mexico, and how many people there have you come across using, or mentioning using, any of the popular AI implementations?

I asked my wife about this one because I never really considered this per se, and Mexico is both different and similar to the U.S. in different ways that complicate matters.

Mexico has a class system that’s similar to that in India but less publicly overt. Meaning there are very real class divisions that sometimes come up in ways that I will never be OK with, like (literally) barking or yelling at/to those in a service position like in a restaurant or bar.

There’s also a history here of indigenous people, outsiders (primarily but not exclusively Spanish) who conquered the country and were then overthrown, and a mix of the two at various levels, either literally or through traditions and customs. For example, Mexico is perhaps the most Catholic nation on earth despite having gained independence from the Spanish oppressors who forced that on them. Spanish is likewise the language. Etc.

Mexico has a related slang term, Güero, that refers to light-skinned Mexicans who are thus either of Spanish or other outsider origin or perhaps the result of earlier intermingling. These people are both looked up to, because they tend to be richer and thus more upper-class, and looked at derisively, and for the same reasons: They’re entitled, rich, and relatively immune to the day-to-day issues that poorer people experience.

The people we know personally are either Güeros, meaning they are upper-class, like the Mexican people who own apartments in our building or are business owners and so on, or they are not. Güeros will own iPhones or high-end Android phones, and MacBooks, and all the rest. The others will own Android phones, often from Chinese brands. That kind of thing. And so the exposure we have to people using AI is minimal and exclusive to Güeros. For example, we know of two people, both friends from our building, who pay for ChatGPT each month and use it extensively in their respective businesses. They’re on social media and online and are like Americans in many ways. They’re upper-middle class or better here in Mexico.

Out in the world, I don’t see AI anywhere per se, but that’s true in the U.S. We don’t watch TV or whatever. We do what we do online, but that is consistent in both places.

Also, lot of the work here is human-based and manual and Mexico is also somewhat unique in that the lowest cost part of any transaction is often the person. They just don’t get paid that much. So where you can’t do things like manufacturing in the U.S. because of the human costs, that’s not the case in Mexico. The jobs that AI takes away, so to speak, will be white-collar (largely unnecessary anyway) or automation-related. And this society is not at all automated. Every morning, people pour into every neighbor to clean streets and sidewalks, trim trees, collect garbage, and offer services like knife sharpening, gas tank replacements, water, and so on. AI is not going to impact those people at all.

In my little bubble, it’s mostly the same as the U.S. Out in the broader world, AI is a non-event for most here, I bet.

? Read my mind

helix2301 asks:

Paul do you or your wife use ereader or do you only read on iPad

My wife reads news on an iPad mini in the morning, primarily Apple News. And she has a Kindle Colorsoft e-reader that she reads books on before going to sleep at night.

I read exclusively on an iPad.

Since pocket is gone how do you save articles now

I use Instapaper. It’s very similar to Pocket, and free, and there are mobile clients and web browser extensions, which is key since I often find something I want to read later, but want to do so on the iPad.

Wondering about your reading work flow these days

When I get up in the morning, I read on the iPad, primarily news and tech feeds. In order: The New York Times (just the “front page”), Apple News (News or just Technology), Google News > Technology, feeed (an iPhone/iPad-only newsreader), and Google (Discovery fee).

I read the saved articles in Instapaper when there’s time or the mood strikes. I use Inoreader as the modern version of what used to be Google Reader throughout the day, keeping up as things happen. This is on the iPad and my PC web browsers.

I read Substack occasionally and subscribe to various newsletters via email, some via Substack but many just random websites/blogs that I like. For example, I still get the old Pocket newsletter (now called Ten Tabs) and the Instapaper equivalent.

And I read books in the Kindle app before I go to bed, on the iPad.