Ask Paul: May 8

Happy Friday! It’s shaping up to be a busy day, and we fly home from Mexico one week from today. But Ask Paul is blessedly light, so that will buy me some time. Let’s jump in.

💻 Above the Surface

Gary asks:

Microsoft Surface laptop 8th edition, either Intel or Qualcomm, any predictions for launch date?

My understanding is that we will see both, and I did see a rumor suggesting that the Intel version, which will be for businesses, may be announced first. But I do expect a Snapdragon X2-based version for consumers as well.

Speaking of which, I’m surprised the rollout of Snapdragon X2 laptops has been so muted. CES came and went with just a few announcements that were lost in all the Intel/AMD announcements. Then Mobile World Congress in February came and went with literally nothing. This whole year, so far, I’ve been waiting for … something substantial.

So far, that’s not happened yet. There was the ASUS Zenbook A16, which uses the highest-end Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme chip, so that’s automatically interesting, and I’m excited to finally see that when we fly home. And then Lenovo has the Snapdragon X2 Elite-based Yoga Slim 7x and the X2 Plus-based IdeaPad Slim 5x that I will review after we get back as well. (Having to fly back and forth with these things is not the greatest, but that’s the timing, unfortunately.) And … that’s about it. So far.

Of course, with Surface, there’s always that back-of-the-mind worry that Microsoft will finally give up on this product line. It’s always been unprofitable, it’s post-Pro attempts to create new product categories have all fallen flat, and the product line has been scaled back dramatically.

But it’s also overdue for a Snapdragon X2 refresh, of course, Pro and Laptop. And if the business edition uses a Panther Lake processor, that will be quite interesting too. I do think they happen, and soon-ish (maybe by or at Build, which is in June this year). I just hope this isn’t the swansong. I really like Surface, and despite all the issues over the years, the current product line at least makes sense.

Tied to this, Qualcomm this week coincidentally launched a Snapdragon Compute 2026 marketing push called “Snapdragon. That’s How” this week. There’s a new landing page for Snapdragon X/X2 on its website and a new YouTube playlist.

“Meta’s Embrace of A.I. Is Making Its Employees Miserable”

Working at Meta should be enough to make its employees miserable

🎧 Living la vida metadata

spacecamel asks:

On WW, you mentioned that you were going back to the MP3 life for music streaming. Have you considered making your own streaming server on your Synology with your MP3s? There are some very good opensource servers that run on Synology’s Container Manager such as Navidrome that work well. There are apps that work on Android, iOS, TVOS and Windows.

There’s a story here, sorry. A long story.

I get a lot of PR outreach, as you might imagine. Hilariously, some of it is horribly off-brand, meaning not technology-related in any way. And that’s weird, but also indicative of my email address being in whatever PR databases. Anyway, I get a lot of email. One of the off-brand regulars is a book publisher that emails regularly about new titles coming soon that I could get advanced copies of for review, and though these things are never tech-related, I do love to read, so I always look through these emails and then almost never take them up on the offer.

I had gotten so used to this that I wasn’t surprised when I received an email about a book called Against Convenience. But it’s not the same publisher, oddly, and it’s not coming out until September. And when I read the description, quoted below, I thought, right. This is weird timing, this topic has been weighing on me, I had started writing something I originally called “Convenient,” and now I have to read this book.

“In a world where our lives are increasingly dominated by apps, subscriptions, countless tools and innovations that encourage us to go faster, hustle harder, and swipe, tap, and click away our days without a second thought, I am elated to share journalist Gabe Bullard’s anti-productivity and contrarian approach to our times and critique of convenience culture, AGAINST CONVENIENCE (On sale: September 15, 2026; Hanover Square Press).

From Lyft to Seamless; Spotify to Netflix; Rent the Runway to the Starbucks mobile app, Bullard speaks to widely relatable apps and tools that have embedded themselves in our everyday lives.”

So I actually wrote them back and said, Sure, I’d love to read and review this book. And so I will. As of today, I’ve not read a word of it, I had been writing the article noted above, which I finished and renamed to From the Editor’s Desk: Inconvenient ⭐️, and I made a couple of changes. Among them, I took out a few examples of convenient/inconvenient processes and stuck with just one, which is the thing you’re asking about: A subset of the music experience that involves finding new music (via Shazam on iPhone or the built-in feature on Pixel) and then adding it to playlists in the music streaming service(s).

I took out the other examples because the post was getting too long. But also because I had this creeping sensation that this was going to turn into something bigger. An article series, of course. But maybe also a book that is sort of a how-to about “unf#$king your life,” for lack of a better term, which has a personal tech angle. I have started taking notes about what that might entail, and it’s mostly high-level ideas, like:

• Inconvenience
• Simplify
• Minimalism
• Unf#$k your life
• The disease of ownership
• Necessary vs. nice to have
• Eliminating noise

And so on. So we’ll see where this goes. But it’s interesting how this ties into some of the big themes I’ve blundered into over the past few years, from enshittification and Little Tech/Little AI to even things like online accounts and security. There’s a big idea in here, perhaps. These things are all intertwined.

And you did not ask me about that. Again, sorry. But my brain is all over the map right now, which is why I’m taking notes.

To your question, I love music, of course. Even though I’m older now, I still actively try to find music. I create playlists, where I used to create mix cassette tapes in the 1980s and early 1990s and mix audio CDs after that. I had any number of stereo systems over the years, with lots of Sony components and Bose speakers in the pre-digital age. My wife and I actively/purposely listen to music via “music nights” here in Mexico and in Pennsylvania. And that all ties into how we do these things, which services we use, which speakers and ecosystems we have, and all kinds of other things. Every time something happens in this space, like this past week’s Bose smart speaker announcement, I kind of sit up and pay attention, think about whether this would make any sense, and all that.

There are all kinds of issues to consider here. Change is hard, for starters. Switching is difficult. The simple act of creating a playlist on one service and copying it to another, perfectly and with no mismatches, is curiously difficult. I have friends who share playlists with me on Spotify, a service I pay for but do not actively use. I mostly use YouTube Music for good reasons–it’s one of the few services that still lets you upload your music, and I can add music videos to playlists where they can be listened to like actual songs–but I also dabble in Apple Music because I use a lot of Apple stuff in the consumer and music spaces, because AirPlay is ideal, and because I’m already paying for whatever Apple One subscription. So it’s all kind of a mess. It feels temporary and volatile. I could change at any time.

Anyway. As with the Little Tech stuff, the goal isn’t to 100 percent eliminate this thing that I’ve identified as “bad”—Big Tech in that case, one or more streaming music services in this case–but rather to once again reconsider how I do things. There are many good reasons for this, including the monthly cost, the complexity, and more, but there are also weird side problems that are tied to what I do for a living. One could argue that I “need” to keep up with this stuff so that I can have educated opinions about whatever services or products. That in moving back and forth between these things, I can identify problems or benefits that those in one ecosystem might not understand.

But. I do still have this pretty big MP3 collection on the NASes. It’s replicating between Mexico and Pennsylvania like all the other data, and it’s available remotely if I want it to be, could be streamed or downloaded to devices, etc. It’s also out-of-date in the sense that there’s not a lot of newer music in there, as I stopped buying CDs so long ago I can’t remember when that was. So part of the calculation here–which is really multiple calculations that include both cost and convenience, the heart of the matter, so to speak–is whether so radical a shift would make any sense at all.

I mentioned this bigger topic, the convenience/cost thing, to my wife for all the obvious reasons. And she introduced another wrench with regard to physical conveniences people pay for, like gym memberships they never use and food delivery, setting me off in yet another direction. And then I mentioned it on this week’s Windows Weekly as well, and it’s always interesting to hear what others think about this type of thing. But I mentioned the music example because it’s the one I kept in the article.

One of the things that I did think of, and I’m not sure whether I expressed this clearly in that article if at all, is that this isn’t all or nothing. I would like to reduce my monthly payouts to services, especially to those I rarely or never use. But I also don’t mind paying for things I get value from, especially those I use a lot. My wife made an insightful remark about the types of services and how they’re very different: Music is different from movies because we listen to it all the time and will listen to the same songs a lot, whereas with movies, there are only a handful that I/we would ever watch multiple times or repeatedly over the years. I write that with the embarrassment of having purchased literally several hundred movies over the years in all kinds of formats, physical and digital. But it’s a very good point.

Again, sorry. This is all over the place. But that’s speaks to the complexities of this. And I will try to proceed rationally. Part of that involves researching what streaming from the NASes would look like, both on the NAS side and on clients like mobile and Apple TV, as you mention. I feel like there may be some hybrid approach that makes sense. It’s unlikely that I’ll drop every music stream service, and for all kinds of reasons. But getting rid of one or two of them does make sense. This could evolve into using, say, YouTube Music to discover music, which will be convenient because it’s this massive collection with instant access. And then building my playlists on whatever NAS-based platforms, syncing that to devices, and so on.

I really don’t know where this is going to go. But it’s not just music, it’s a lot of things, and that list is growing as I do, and so it will be big and complex, and I think there will be multiple articles and each service/product decision will be unique. It doesn’t help that so many of these things are intermingled. YouTube Music is tied to not seeing ads on YouTube (for videos), and YouTube may well be the “best” video service in that we watch it so much, so there’s that value there. Big Tech is excellent at lock-in. It’s everywhere.

Anyway. Sorry for the lengthy mind dump there. I feel like this is turning into something. In short, there will be more.

“Google denies copying Liquid Glass, but nobody’s buying it”

Even Google isn’t that intellectually bankrupt. He writes, wondering about the name Fitbit Air

🗂️ The call is coming from inside the house

gg1 asks:

You mentioned the business was running into issues. Anything you can share with us?

I may have worded that poorly, sorry. The issue with the business isn’t the business per se, it’s me. It’s just not where my interest is, where I want to spend my time. I can hurt it through neglect. I finally decided to talk to my wife about this because she handles our personal finances and knows what’s she doing, and she’s more engaged with her career on the contracts/money side than I’ve ever been. She’s good at it, basically, and I’m not.

I’m lucky in many ways. Laurent is incredible, a great writer, and he really adds to the site and frees up my time to focus on Premium content and all the things I have to do around that. Robert, who does the back-end web/technology stuff, is likewise incredible, and not just for all the obvious reasons, he’s also brilliant about business, has great ideas, and is always offering advice. And so part of this shift will be me doing what I have been doing, which is focusing on content, the thing I care about, and my wife stepping in on the business side. Which is interesting because now Robert will be dealing with both of us.

Sorry, Robert. 🙂

More importantly, is there anything we can do to support the business beyond our subs?

No, and thank you so much for even asking. The notion of asking anyone to pay me money is a difficult thing for me. I went into Thurrott Premium kicking and screaming, and that was when someone who knew about running a business was calling the shots. I have books, but I am giving those to subscribers because I can and it’s the right thing to do. I get paid to do Windows Weekly and Hands-On Windows, and that helps. (There’s a good case to be made that Windows Weekly basically paid for my kids to go to college.)

I always wanted to be part of something. When I started WinInfo (and other newsletter) in the 1990s, I imagined this team of people in a newsroom writing all day. I enjoyed being part of Duke Publishing, which became part of Penton, and that camaraderie, and I would have stayed there for my entire career without a second thought if the management at Penton hadn’t completely jumped the shark and fired everyone but me and Rod Trent. I would have stuck with George until the end, whatever that looks like, and I still miss him and everyone else.

But life is what life is, and there is some freedom to being independent, and if everything does fall apart completely someday, there’s always a path forward. For now, I’m OK with where things are at, especially now that my wife is paying attention to the business. And not me.

But you guys? No, nothing really. It’s humbling that you even asked. I feel a huge responsibility to be here for you all and do right by this relationship. My wife stepping in will help with that.

“MacBook Neo Could Get New Colors to Cushion Potential Price Hike”

Yeah, because that’s what’s wrong with the MacBook Neo

🏥 Health of tech reporter

eeisner asks:

I haven’t seen a health & tech article as of late but would love to ask you about that.

On TWiT a week ago, a reporter from the verge spoke about her experience using as continuous glucose monitor in her attempt to understand the health optimization trend, and in the process both developed disordered eating from the gamification of the CGMs app and had early onset non-alcoholic fatty live diagnosed.

I intended to get a continuous glucose monitor while we were in Mexico on this trip and just zoned on it, I guess. It’s been a while since I’ve done that, and though I do get my blood sugar measured 2-3 times per year–and will do so soon after we get back–it was incredibly useful seeing how certain foods spiked my blood sugar, and to what degree and for how long. It’s useful data.

I do have mixed feelings about gamification. I use Duolingo to help with Spanish and I got pretty obsessive with it. During this trip, I planned to get ahead of this, maybe for months, because I was spending so much time every day just to come in first place in my league, which I usually did. And it was just stress and a waste of time. I’m surprised to report that I did put a stop to that, about a month ago, I guess. I still do Duolingo every week, and depending on the randomness of who else is in there, I even win my league sometimes. But I don’t care: I make sure to complete the daily quests each day (usually something like complete 3 lessons, listen to 7 exercises, and read the next story on the path or whatever) but not much else, and I spend less than 30 minutes on it now. I think it’s important to do, but it also was mentally bad, if that makes sense. So that, at least, is in a better place.

I believe you tested a CGM at one point. I’m curious your thoughts on health monitors like this for people who don’t technically need them, other gamified fitness monitors like Oura Rings, and the trend of using tech to optimize health. Did you experience more positives or negatives? Have you tried the Oura? Do you think about and worry about the obsession of optimizing health this way?

Yes.

I think that everyone, including those who are healthy, should use a CGM at least once–they last 2-3 weeks–and experiment with food to find out which are the worst for them: Glucose spikes aren’t dangerous in isolation per se, but a lifetime of this, repeatedly each day perhaps, will cause lasting damage, including in extreme cases damage you can’t really recover from. But avoiding the obsession bit is key, and this is another topic that falls into that “convenience” thing I noted above, I think. One of the notes I have is about “Where you are spending the most time,” and that and “What’s necessary vs. what’s nice to have” kind of apply here. Gamification can be a useful strategy, but it can take over too.

I have, of course, considered Oura, but I haven’t tried one because I discovered that I look at the time a lot on my Apple Watch/Pixel Watch. This is the same reason the recently announced Fitbit Air isn’t particularly interesting to me, there’s no screen. (I will point out, however, that the “pebble” design could probably accommodate a band with a small screen too, so anything is possible. Also, Laurent may review the Fitbit Air.) On the flipside of this, while I like the Apple Watch/Pixel Watch in part because of the big screen—the Fitbit tracker displays are often too small for my eyes–I do not like how busy/complicated they are; these things do way more than I want or need.

But everyone is different. I mentioned the Fitbit Air to my wife when it was announced, and she said that she always uses the notifications feature to quickly see who is calling or texting and that helps her determine whether it’s important (friends, family) or spam and then proceed with her phone or not. I don’t care so much about that, personally, but that’s a big deal for her.

Also tied to that “convenience” thing is the notion of “anything”-maxxing, in that case convenience-maxxing. I hate these terms–which, incidentally, is another list I’m making, of words and phrases (daily carry, doubling down, etc.) that I cannot stand. Anyone who is fitness or health maxxing is, by definition, engaging in unhealthy, obsessive behavior. Which is ironic when you think about it. Yes, pay attention to your health. Eat well. Exercise as is possible. Do more, sit less. Etc. This is all painfully obvious and painfully boring/uninteresting, but it’s the right thing to do. But do not obsess over this. (This vaguely reminds me of things like people obsessively defragging their hard drives constantly back in the day; maybe just use the computer instead.)

I’ve settled into a comfortable rhythm of sorts where I’m much more active in Mexico because we walk so much here. And then less so in PA, though I need to work on that. I tend to gain weight there and lose weight here, which is interesting because I eat out every day in Mexico. But this trip has been different. I have not lost weight. And part of them problem, I think, is that I screwed up my knee somehow and will be getting an MRI when I get back home: I think I tore a ligament or tendon in my knee. I don’t know when it happened, oddly, but it gives out randomly, and so I’ve been wearing a knee brace and am walking less and/or more slowly. I tore the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in both of my knees when I was younger, at different times, and had surgery both times and then played basketball my entire adult life and never had issues. So I don’t think that’s what this is, but it could be, of course. I will find out.

Other than that, no major changes. Mexico City is very high altitude–7,400-ish feet–and so just walking here is a bit more exercise than at sea level, though I assume that tapers off over time, like my resting heart rate does. But I have been using an Apple Watch on this trip, and it does sleep tracking now, and while I don’t check my stats all the time, I do close the three rings just about every day with rare exceptions. So that’s just sort of happening. I don’t obsess over it.

But I do need to get back to the gym, speaking of things one pays for and doesn’t use. I will make that effort when we get back to PA. Plus get a check-up with the doctor that will include those blood tests. And we’ll see where I’m at. It’s not as good as it’s been the past few years, mostly because of the knee, but hopefully it’s not fallen off a cliff.