Ask Paul: July 16 (Premium)

It’s the Ides of July, or something, so let’s kick off the weekend early again with another great set of reader questions.

Educational discounts

jwpear asks:

Is Microsoft moving away from offering student discounts on devices? Recently noticed that there was no way to check if one qualified for a student discount when looking at the Surface Laptop 4. I see it for other Surface devices. Maybe they’re just doing this because Surface Laptop inventory is low due to component shortages.

I can’t imagine that Microsoft would ever walk away from discounting PCs and other products for the education market. It’s already in a tough spot with regards to Macs, in particular, and it doesn’t help that Chromebooks are coming at the market from the low-end. I suspect it’s either a bug or what you describe, that perhaps Microsoft is getting ready to launch new Surface PCs.

Taskbar layout in Windows 11

hrlngrv asks:

Will MSFT add anything to the left side of the taskbar?

It doesn’t appear so. When I first saw Windows 11, I figured that the right side of the taskbar would change dramatically and be made much smaller, because the whole thing seems so lopsided. That didn’t happen, exactly, though they did bundle a bunch of UI into a single thing now called Quick Settings (WINKEY + A) and switched the clock/time/Action Center to a notification center/calendar display (WINKEY + N). As for the left side… it’s still empty, and I bet that doesn’t change.

Or will they leave it available for shifting everything to left-aligned?

I have a hard time imagining Microsoft not letting customers customize the taskbar so that things are left-aligned as before (which is currently a feature), use the old Start menu, or let them also move the taskbar to different screen edges. There are too many people who would want that and, for businesses, not having to train people on a new UI is key. That said, only some of this works now.

What would you want on the left side if you had the Start button and pinned icons centered?

There are two things that could be interesting, but I assume these were tested internally and voted down. The first would be simply moving the Start button over to the far left. The second would be literally centering the entire taskbar so that what we used to call the tray area (which I believe is now called “the taskbar corner,” which is terrible) is “attached” to the left of the various application shortcut buttons, and that whole thing was centered. Then the taskbar could expand and contract, and change spacing, as more applications ran and their icons were added to the mix.

The thing is, I don’t understand why the tray area stuff needs to be right-aligned and in a fixed position but the Start button doesn’t. If anything, people access Start more, and you can make a case for keeping that thing in the same place it’s been for over 25 years.

All this said, I’m getting used to Windows 11 as-is, and I don’t feel strongly about any of this now.

Windows 11 and ads

justme asks:

As Windows 11 builds have matured, have you seen an increase in advertising within the OS? Have you seen indications of locations outside of the Start menu’s Recommended area where it looks like Microsoft could/would serve you ads?

No, we’ve not seen much in the way of advertising in Windows 11 yet, but … come on, of course we will. The Widgets interface is an obvious landing spot alongside the new Recommended section in Start, and Microsoft will continue to pop-up notifications from “Suggested” that are really just ads. Every time you touch a Bing-based service, as you can from Start search, you’re opening up yourself to the possibility of ads and tracking.

I’ve described ads in Windows as a slippery slope, the point being that, once you go down this path, you don’t stop, and you only expand it over time. And that is what’s happened so far. And it will continue to happen in Windows 11.

Windows and Steam Deck

crunchyfrog asks:

Valve’s new Steam Deck is available for pre-order. I have to admit that I am tempted even though I doubt it will be much fun to use with a 2-8 hours battery life (let’s just call it sub-3 hours for gaming) and that’s on Linux. Last year, Alienware had a prototype unit on demo that created a stir that did the same thing except I believe it was much bigger and had a very short expected battery life. I’ve heard nothing about it since.

I wrote about Steam Deck here if you didn’t see it.

This device is neatly tied to the Steam service, however it appears from what I have read that under the hood it’s just a PC and you can load Windows on it which means it could be made to run Xbox Game Pass or any other gaming service. Aside from some of the obvious hardware limitations, what do you think it would be like to run a full Windows OS like Windows 11 on a device like this? I am sure that Windows could scale but would it be such a miserable experience on a 7″ screen like this that it would be a waste of money?

This doesn’t seem like much of a gaming PC to me, but I suppose the low-resolution of the display will help. We talked about Steam Deck today on First Ring Daily, and the issue I pointed out was that screen resolution, scaling, and display size are all issues today in Windows, and with services like xCloud where Microsoft is streaming console games designed for Full HD and 4K displays down to mobile devices that often have tiny displays. It’s not clear to me how well PC games will translate to a 7-inch display. I can say that this is a non-starter for me, with my aging eyes. My 23-year-old son would probably be fine with it.

But when you think about running Windows 10 or 11 on such a device, it’s unclear. Obviously, you’d want one of the more expensive ($529 or $649) models with faster/bigger storage, and 16 GB is fine for both Windows and gaming. The battery life is a big issue. But it should work, and I’m curious to see what that looks like.

Overall, though, I don’t see Steam Deck setting the world on fire. Instead, it will be yet another way to play games, and it could appeal to those with big Steam libraries who want to play those games on the go. And that’s great: Choices are always good and if it can work well and fill that niche, good for them.

Mint Mobile

dkrowe asks:

Have you had any issues swapping Mint Mobile service between devices? Comments on the recent data breach? US Cellular and another MVNO (Boost?) have also been targeted with social attacks recently.

So, no, not exactly. I’ve moved my Mint SIM repeatedly between handsets over time. And I guess I have a few observations.

One, and this really bothers me, when you move it to an iPhone, it automatically sets everything up, including visual voicemail. There is literally nothing to do. I don’t believe this was always the case, but it is now.

Two, the instructions for configuring your phone for Mint are inconsistent. There is a FAQ on its website, but you get a few text messages when you add the SIM to a phone, and the instructions those messages provide are different from the website. Guys, seriously.

I’ve had a few persistent issues too. Sometimes a phone will just detect the SIM as T-Mobile and everything works fine, but on other phones, texting and/or phone calls over cellular don’t work and you need to go through a lot of manual configuration. And then sometimes, again, depending on the phone, it will switch configurations between Mint and T-Mobile and things stop working.

To be clear, a lot of this is because of what I do: I have to switch phones a lot for testing and reviewing. But still. There’s too much manual configuration and that it doesn’t always “stick” or work is disconcerting.

Is it worth it? Of course. I pay Mint Mobile $300 per year, which works out to $25 per month, but I could get away with a lot less data and thus pay a lot less too. On Google Fi, the minimum monthly outlay is $30 before taxes and fees, and if I use more than 1 GB of data, which is typical, it’s even more each month. I did the math when I switched, but I’m saving money.

International is an issue, of course, but I figured out something that worked. Again, I wrote about all that in early 2020 when I first switched. And in the good news front, I did get a couple of fun text messages from Ryan Reynolds during the pandemic, which I enjoyed.

As for the data breach, it doesn’t seem too bad, impacting “only a few customers,” etc. But Mint has never contacted me about it, so I assume I wasn’t part of that.

Windows 365

bschnatt asks:

It looks like Microsoft is curating the apps that can run on Windows 365. Do you think they will ever allow “side-loading” of apps that (for whatever reason) will never be allowed by Microsoft? (I am not following this that closely, so I may be proceeding from a false assumption…)

I’ve not heard this, but given that all Windows 365 subscriptions will be centrally managed—either by commercial customers or by Microsoft—I assume that the former, and not Microsoft, will be able to determine which applications its users can install and use. This service doesn’t make sense if Microsoft somehow limits which apps that users can have. If the expected consumer offering ever arrives, perhaps that will be further restricted.

Netflix and gaming

bschnatt also asks:

Netflix is apparently getting into game streaming. I think this is nuts. I’d rather they concentrate on getting better content (and fulfilling their promise to get the last season of the Lost In Space reboot on-air!) Aren’t they still beholden to Amazon for their backend? Your thoughts?

This is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard. Period.

I think this line of thinking is tied to the need for public corporations to continually grow, and it what’s leads to chocolate bar/breakfast cereal crossovers. In the tech world, I guess I kind of equate it to Spotify, which recently got into podcasts in a big way. That kind of makes sense since music and podcasts are both “audio,” but I also feel that these things are very different. And that one of the central ways in which people can make decisions about which services they use is to focus on those services that only do one thing and do it well. Spotify is great for music, but it’s only OK for podcasts. Netflix is great for streaming video, both movies and TV shows, and both original content and licensed content. But podcasts would make far more sense than gaming for Netflix: Its users are consuming content and relaxing, not interacting with it.

Maybe history will prove me wrong. After all, video games are already bigger than Hollywood, depending on how you measure things. And one could argue that gaming and video streaming “compete” with each other to some degree. But so do reading, sleeping, and listening to music. Where does it end? Why does every company have to do everything?