Ask Paul: February 20 ⭐

Happy Friday! It’s going to be 85 degrees here in Mexico City today, so we’re hunkering down for that. But don’t feel bad that we’re missing out on the winter. Instead, let’s kick off the weekend a bit early with some great reader questions.

Note: I’m experimenting with putting Short Takes-style headline quips between each question/answer. I don’t know.

“iOS 27 will bring Liquid Glass changes, and I’m excited for one reason”

It’s because you’re an Apple fanboy.

? I know what you’re thinking

helix2301 asks:

Paul, have you used any of the new apps by Stardock that Brad was involved with creating? What do you think?

As I write this, I’ve not used Clairvoyance yet, sorry.

This is kind of a strange dynamic, but Brad and I are obviously friends and we both perhaps overcorrect sometimes when it comes to not abusing the relationship from a work perspective. We have at least discussed this product extensively, and he gave me a lengthy demo a few weeks ago. He and Brad Wardell, and presumably others at Stardock, see this as a potentially big product and also a new direction, and I get it. It is very interesting.

I did just sign-up for Clairvoyance, so I will write about this in the near future.

“Mark Zuckerberg said he reached out to Apple CEO Tim Cook to discuss ‘wellbeing of teens and kids'”

Yes, and Tim Cook reached out to Zuckerberg to discuss ‘go f#$k yourself,’ Mark”

? Windows Backup to the future

justme asks:

Windows Backup question for you. Its an app I dont use as I tend to backup my PCs offline and not in the cloud. Even if I did backup to cloud, I would be forced to backup to OneDrive and not a provider of my choice (unless something has changed to allow this).

Windows Backup is widely misunderstood and for good reason: It’s not a traditional backup app, and it’s not even a traditional app. It’s really just a front-end to services that, in most cases, have been in Windows for decades. And now there’s a work version that’s presumably controlled with policy. (Like most, I will ignore that.)

Before there was an app, you could access “Windows backup” in Settings, and it’s the same basic interface. The only thing resembling backup is the folder sync capability in OneDrive, also misnamed to Folder Backup. And then there are limited and undocumented app configurations, system settings, and credentials (Wi-Fi passwords, etc.) “back up” (really sync) capabilities.

To me, Windows Backup is borderline pointless. There’s no transparency in what you’re syncing (beyond the folders, which happens in OneDrive anyway). no granularity in what you sync (again, beyond the folders), and no way to manage this data in the cloud. And despite the appearance of this front-end in recent years, the amount of data this thing does sync has only gone down over the years. With one exception: Microsoft has integrated the backend of this into Windows Setup for restore purposes. Whatever. It’s many years later and this is still ridiculous.

I use very few Store apps, so I install anything I use with winget. Recently, I actually tried to uninstall the app from a PC and found that this task is gargantuan in difficulty. Why? I understand it may be linked to sync which is tightly integrated with Windows, but at the end of the day its still just an app. Why couldnt you just remove Backup and leave sync alone?

It’s unclear why you can’t uninstall the front-end. But the app itself didn’t exist until a few years ago, while the backend capabilities it connects to have existed since Windows 8 in 2012, and they’re integral to Windows Setup and how your Microsoft account syncs data and configures settings when you sign-in on a new PC.

OneDrive is evolving as I write this and the interactions between that and Windows Backup are as well, it seems. Having denied (or disabled) OneDrive Folder Backup, I see that Windows Backup no longer even gives me the ability to reenable that, which is new/recent. But that speaks to how innocuous this thing is. It never pops up to ask me to back anything up (sync) now. It’s like it’s not even there. So I don’t really think about it. (Oddly, the interface in Settings does still link to the Folder Backup window in OneDrive, where I could enable that if I wanted. I don’t.)

Anyway, there’s no clear way to uninstall this, but there’s also no reason to bother. It doesn’t really do anything anyway. And unlike a lot in Windows 11, it’s not particularly annoying.

“Microsoft develops glass data storage that lasts 10,000 years”

We are never getting rid of Copilot.

? No necesito

train_wreck

on February 19, 2026 at 06:22 PM

Do you ever miss having a car in Mexico? I was talking with an expat friend who occasionally rents a car in the country he’s in, not through necessity but just because he sometimes wants to drive, to explore the region and what not. Curious on your thoughts.

No. Not ever.

There’s no need for a car in Mexico City, which I assume is true of many/most big cities. But what sets Mexico City apart from many/most cities is the low cost of the alternatives.

We walk almost everywhere and if it’s too far away we use an Ecobici bike (we have a subscription that costs about $33 USD per year for unlimited trips up to 45 minutes each day), take an Uber, with an average cost of $3 to $4 USD per trip, or the Metro, which costs 25 cents USD. So there is no scenario in which buying a car makes financial sense. Plus, the logistics of that would be a nightmare as parking on the street near here is next to impossible and our building’s garage couldn’t be less convenient.

We could rent a car if we wanted to go somewhere outside the city. We’ve only done that once, back in 2021, and I hope to never do that again, as driving in Mexico City is a nightmare and that trip would need to begin and end here. But even then, it makes little sense unless the idea is to drive while you’re away too. Mexico City has luxury buses to nearby (and faraway) cities that are nicer and less expensive than anything I’ve seen in the U.S. or elsewhere, and we’ve used those for places like San Miguel de Allende (3.5 to 4 hours) and Puebla (2.5 hours). And domestic air travel, likewise ridiculously inexpensive (usually less than $100 for first class/business class) to cities like Acapulco, Oaxaca, Puerto Vallarta, all of which are one hour away or less by air.

Two quick stories semi-related to this.

My first car was a 1972 VW Super Beetle and I’ve been a classic VW fan for most of my life. There are still tons of Beetles (and other classic VWs) here in Mexico City, and many are in excellent or even mint condition. We had biked over to Polanco (almost exactly 45 minutes) a few weekends back and when we returned the bikes, a gorgeous mid-to-late 1960s VW Beetle pulled up and parked close by, and it was clearly for sale. I did have a moment there where I thought, maybe. But it was $8000 USD, which feels about twice as expensive as it should be. And it just wouldn’t make sense, even at $2000. It would just sit in the silly garage under our building.

America is well behind China in so many ways and most who live there now have no idea how bad that is. This is true in smartphones and also in electric cars, and Americans don’t see either in their country, so they have no idea. But these things are all over Mexico City and expanding rapidly. And they are dramatically superior. BYD vehicles are everywhere here, and we love when our Uber is a BYD, it’s a car we would buy for ourselves in the U.S. if we could. A base BYD Dolphin, its smallest/cheapest car here, is about $23,000 USD. The most expensive BYD SUV is probably cheaper than the cheapest EV you can buy in the U.S. It’s not even close.

Anyway. We will never need or want a car here.

There are other things like this. On the previous trip, I needed to print a return label for an Amazon return and I don’t have a printer here, of course. We see paper businesses all over the neighborhood that obviously do this sort of thing, but I checked in with a neighbor friend, from the U.S., who I figured would have a printer. But he did not, he just uses a local place.

So we went over to one with the PDF for the label on a USB flash drive and on my phone. The flash drive worked, the guy there asked if I wanted black and white or color, I chose the former, and two pages spat out. The cost? Two pesos. I double-taked on that and asked him to repeat it, sure that I had misheard. Two pesos is about 10 cents USD.

My wife had to fish around in her little change purse to find money this small. And when I handed the guy the coin she produced, he handed me back three even smaller slivers of silver. 10 cents. Here, as with a car, there is no scenario in which buying a printer would make sense. Aside from the cost of the printer itself, which would have to be $200 or $300 USD if not more, there’s the ink I’d never use, since I print so infrequently. I’d have to keep replacing that because it would just dry up and become unusable. But these places where you can print something are everywhere. If it weren’t for a building blocking the view, I could see the place I went from our balcony.

Mexico is amazing. This is only a small reason why, but it’s part of it.

“Yes, Chrome’s Home icon changed on Android”

Yes, this is how some people spend their time.

✨ Think global, act local

vladimir asks:

I wonder if you tried to install LLMs locally on the PC. If yes, i would be very interested to know what is your opinion and some comparison with the cloud based ones.

Sure. I wrote about this a bit in Little Tech, Little AI ⭐, but my opinion for now is that local AI isn’t there yet for the “bigger” tasks that many use cloud-based AI for—programming projects, etc.—but there’s little doubt that it will get there. Testing this requires work and some technical skill for now, but that too will change. I’ve wanted to record an episode about local AI for Hands-On Windows since at least last summer, but it keeps getting pushed back in my notes because it’s just not a mainstream thing yet. And there are issues with “where” local models run (against the CPU, GPU, or NPU) and so on. But this all just gets better all the time. It won’t be long.

“Apple accelerating development of AI-powered wearable devices”

Hey, it worked for the smart car.

? Another podcast

vladimir asks:

I wonder if you have ever considered doing a podcast on personal technology. I follow Windows Weekly, but as the name suggests, it is very much focused on Windows and Microsoft. It would be great to hear you discuss more other products as well, as you already do on your website.

There’s only so much time in the day/week, and I’m stretched thin as it is. That said, I still have vague plans for yet another podcast with an as-yet-unnamed partner that I suppose would touch on general personal technology topics though both of us have Windows backgrounds. I don’t know. We’ll see.

“As browser wars heat up, Chrome adds new productivity features”

… that other browsers have had for years

? Through the looking glass

mcerdas asks:

If memory serves me right, you once mentioned using one of those glasses that project a monitor in front of you. Are you going to write a review of them?

What I have is a pair of previous-generation Viture “XR” glasses. As you write, they’re really just a second display for whatever device, and they connect over a USB-C cable. Because they’re older—Stephen Rose gave me his pair and then bought a newer model—and because I don’t have them here in Mexico, I can’t really review them now, so I guess not. I did mean to bring them, they’re an interesting choice for watching movies and other videos on long flights. But between my poor eyesight and the relatively low resolution (1080p) of the model I do have, they’re not ideal for productivity work. But they could be, and I suspect newer models (and better eyes) would make a big difference.