Ask Paul: October 7 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Well, I thought last week’s installment was epic, but this week is even longer, so let’s settle in for the long haul.

International connectivity

cwfinn asks:

Based on your extensive foreign travel, what’s a better option for my month-long trip to Australia in 2 weeks? AT&T offers U$10/day (only for the days I use it) for unlimited talk/text/data including calls back to the USA, keeping my US mobile number.

Telstra offers a lower rate (they’re cagey about the exact amount but about U$100 for a month) but would provide me with an Australian number, so people would need to us a new mobile number AND potentially cost them money to call me.

I’m leaning toward the AT&T solution but would value your input.

Obviously, this is something I’ve struggled with over the years, and I hope I’ve written somewhere—if so, I can’t find it—about how transformative the evolution of international connectivity has been over the past 20 years.

For example, when we went to Germany in 2003, we drove into Boston ahead of the trip to pick up a rental Nokia phone with an international SIM card so that we could call home to check in with the kids, who were staying with our parents (or vice-versa). And when we were in France in the summer of 2007 on a home swap with the first iPhone—which had no sense of roaming/not roaming let alone international usage, and people were reporting coming home from Europe and receiving $5000 AT&T bills on a stack of paper that was inches high—I was terrified to even turn the thing on.

Today, things are much easier. But the question you’re asking is one that reminds me of more recent years, when the phone I was using had a single SIM card and I had to decide what to do on an international trip. I could use my AT&T SIM and keep my phone number but pay a lot for limited international usage (this could be off, but I recall paying hundreds of dollars for 800 Mb of data, which required me babysitting connectivity as I couldn’t add more). I could buy a SIM at the location I was traveling to. Or, eventually, I swap out my SIM card for a Google Fi SIM and use that while I was away; in the latter two cases, I would lose my phone number while I was away. And when I was only on Google Fi I could just use that normally while away.

I did each of those things multiple times. But these days, my phones all have dual SIMs. So I could—and, in one case, have—use two accounts at the same time, one my normal account (now T-Mobile) and one with another SIM for international use; I did so this past year on the Pixel 6 Pro, which had both Google Fi and a Mexico AT&T SIMs in it.

So the first thing I would suggest is going the dual SIM route if you can. The issue is that you may need to communicate with people back home, will likely get text messages and phone calls, and that will make it difficult to just give up that number while you’re away. Especially for that length of time. Even if you just enable this SIM every few days, it will likely be worth doing so.

But it will be cheaper to get some form of local SIM either way. I’d get that there, not here in the U.S., because it will be less expensive. And $100 for a month of access is a great deal. I would certainly choose that.

If you for some reason only have a single SIM phone, which seems unlikely, I guess you’ll have to figure out swapping out the SIM sometimes just to check-in. Obviously, you can give your Australian number to people who need it, but you never know what kind of communications you may get. Hopefully, you have dual SIMs. That will make life easier. And if you have an eSIM/nano-SIM combo, which is pretty common, look into getting your AT&T account on the eSIM before you go if it isn’t already.

Problems with 22H2

ggolcher asks:

I’ve been reading about a bunch of bugs popping up in Windows 11 22H2 that seem to be related to business-related use cases (printers, SSDs, SMB file copy, provisioning, etc.). This is surprising considering that the Insider program has been testing this release for like 3-4 months — my only conclusion is that businesses are not testing Windows 11 *at all* before release.

Well, it’s only surprising if you believe two things: that there is real engagement in the Insider Program these days and that Microsoft is actually triaging and responding to feedback correctly. I don’t believe that either is true: thanks in part to the demoralizing way in which the Insider Program no longer meets people’s expectations and most channels don’t map to specific Windows versions anymore, there are far fewer active Insiders (is my educated guess). And Microsoft’s record on feedback is notably poor. Remember, this is the company that shipped Windows 11 21H2 after three months of public testing and didn’t have time to even incorporate feedback into that release. It is now testing features in Dev that address complaints from 22H1. It’s unbelievable.

With regards to businesses, nothing has changed: businesses have no interest in moving to new Windows versions, no matter how much Microsoft streamlines the process. And despite its claims around 22H2, Windows 11—and even just 22H2 itself—do require training in many cases. Consider a company like UPS, which has thousands of employees all over the country, each with various degrees of technical acumen. You can’t just start moving things around or taking away features. Etc. Businesses will upgrade when they’re forced to (and some not even then, we all have seen Windows XP and 7 out in the world).

Furthermore, I read that Microsoft is accelerating the rollout of this version right when all these bugs are coming to light.

This is true. If you go back and look at my Windows 11 Version 22H2, an Upgrade Story (Premium) story from two weeks ago, you’ll see that most of the PCs I tested were not offered 22H2 initially and were not even displaying a “Windows 11 is coming soon” message. Since Microsoft revealed that it was expanding the rollout, I retested four of those machines and two were offered 22H2.

From my vantage point, it seems like Microsoft is doing exactly the opposite of what it should be doing. Furthermore, it seems like yet more evidence that the Insider program is not an acceptable substitute to proper QA.

Agreed.

The thing is, Microsoft doesn’t really rely on Insiders. They rely on telemetry data. And the idea behind this strategy was always flawed: Terry Myerson’s Windows team laid off internal testers, the theory being that telemetry data was all they needed. But history has shown that this over-reliance on telemetry data is a mistake. And every single time there is an issue with a particular Windows version, we can point to how Insiders had reported the issue and Microsoft ignored it.

The problem is that this isn’t easily fixed because Insider engagement is going down too. So even that data point is less useful over time.

Overall, it seems to me like insanity that Microsoft is increasing rollout of this version of W11, and that it insists on the Insider program as its measure of quality. Am I missing something here? What’s your take?

(Similarly, JustMe asked: “Given the recent spate of bugs that have been discovered in 22H2 (the file copying issues, printer issues, NVidia graphics card issues, etc) – do you think Microsoft rushed this release?  While the graphics card issue has been patched as far as I know, I have to think businesses would be very wary about adopting or upgrading an OS that has fundamental issues which would affect their core.  Will Microsoft ever understand that even a modest QA team is better than relying on only or mostly Insiders?)

I may surprise you with this one.

I don’t think it’s a huge issue. And the reason is not tied to anything in the conversation above but rather to what I think is the weird way in which this rollout is allegedly happening. So let’s step back and think about this for a moment: Microsoft had one year to plan for this, as did its PC maker and hardware maker partners. And there are no major changes at all to compatibility, for the most part. So this should be the smoothest thing in the world. Windows 11 was really just Windows 10 version 21H2 with a new UI, and Windows 11 22H2 is just a minor upgrade to that. So what’s the big deal? In the scope of feature updates/product upgrades, these are both minor at best from the perspective of compatibility.

Despite this, Windows 11 22H2 arrived and Microsoft deployed it to only a small sliver of the user base. But what was this sliver? All of the PCs that were deemed fully compatible, met the hardware requirements, and didn’t have any blocking issues? Or just a subset of them?

It was just a subset of them. And the reason we know this is true is by reading Microsoft’s own description of how it is now expanding availability:

“We are increasing its availability to all who check for updates on eligible Windows devices,” the company explains. “If we detect that your device might have an issue, such as an application incompatibility, we might put a safeguard hold in place and not offer the update until that issue is resolved.”

Think about what that actually says. If you check for the update and meet the requirements, you now have a bigger chance of getting it. Not, we improved the compatibility and thus more PCs will get. They’re just opening it up to more PCs that were already compatible.

Put another way, nothing has changed from the perspective of whether your PC is deemed compatible with 22H2. Microsoft is just allowing the update to appear on a bigger set of PCs that were already compatible. It was artificially limiting how many PCs got it before. And the pool of PCs that could get it has always, to date, been further limited by requiring users to look for it in the first place. Even with this expansion, no one is going to just get upgraded in the background. (That will come later.) This is literally just about people who want it and go to look for it. (And even then, it doesn’t auto-install. You have to choose to do so.)

It’s easy to get cynical about this, I mastered that long ago, but one reality hasn’t changed from the 1990s: you can test a version of Windows in a beta program back in the day, or in the Insider Program today, and some number of issues will be uncovered. But when you put it in front of millions of normal users, more issues will appear.

What has changed is that these issues have been caught by Insiders in recent years. And Microsoft has ignored that feedback. And that, to me, is the real problem here. Exacerbated by the fact that Microsoft has also ruined the Insider program for many, leading to some of their best fans leaving or just giving up.

This was all avoidable.

The good book

JustMe asks:

I’ve enjoyed going through your book chapters online.  Have you ever considered having a “Power User/Enthusiast” chapter (or section for chapters)?  A place where you could put tips or tricks that normal users might not consider?  An example could be something a simple as a hidden group policy setting, a registry hack, or a DISM trick that might take care of one annoyance or another?

Thanks. And, yes, I’m not sure how much sense I make when I write about how I changed the book for Windows 11, but aside from it being almost completely rewritten from scratch, one of my big goals was to break it down into more and smaller chapters (“componentize it”), and for a few different reasons. It’s easier to update when Microsoft changes things, which it does a lot these days. It makes the book make more sense as a website, with each chapter being an article. And, to your point, it makes it easier to add content, and, if needed, shuffle things around.

This is hard to explain, but it’s hard to conceptualize the whole book and remember/figure out where things are when there is only a relatively short list of chapters. I am interested to see how the big changes structurally as we move forward. That is, I will be adding chapters to the “end” of what you see now, of course. But I will also be adding chapters that will fit inside of what you already see.

Which is a long way of saying, yes, I have long wanted to do that kind of thing. And I have plans for chapters related to more advanced topics that I’ve always wanted to get in there, like command lines (with separate chapters for Terminal, Command Prompt, PowerShell, and Linux; I already wrote a big chunk of that already, it’s just far off in the TOC), virtualization (Hyper-V Client and Windows Sandbox), accessibility, and Power Automate.

But the type of thing you’re describing is content that could be added to the book after the related sections are already available. And I have one theoretical example that came up this past week: you can “hide” Widgets but not remove it because it’s always accessible via the WINKEY + W keyboard shortcut, and it’s not hard to imagine hitting that by mistake since it’s very close to CTRL + W, which is very commonly used. But maybe there is a hidden Group Policy setting, Registry hack, or a DISM trick that would actually remove Widgets. That would be a great tip if it exists (I don’t know), and I will absolutely add that to the book if so.

Related to this, there are many Microsoft (PowerToys) and third-party (Stardock, etc.) utilities that surface these backend capabilities with friendly GUIs, and I want to make sure that those make it into the book as well. So, for example, I will be adding tips/sections about Start 11 to the Start and Taskbar chapters (and maybe elsewhere) because it addresses issues with those features. Job One is getting the basics done first (i.e. what is literally in Windows 11), but once that’s done, the book can become an even better resource by adding this other stuff.

So, yes. 🙂

NextDNS

JustMe asks:

Regarding your experiment with NextDNS – are you still using it on a device-by-device basis?  Have you experimented with configuring your home router to use it?  Are you still pleased with it?

Yes, I am very happy with NextDNS and I won’t be changing how I’m using it—configuring it on specific devices rather than network-wide, at the router level—for now. The reason hasn’t changed: I really just need this on portable devices, and it’s easy enough to get that going; with PCs, using Brave solves the problem for the most part, though I could imagine further stupidity in Windows may be changing that.

That said, I’m going to make a Wi-Fi change sometime relatively soon, and when that happens, I’ll evaluate whether it makes sense to add NextDNS to the router (if that’s even possible).

Privacy

erich82 asks:

Hello Paul, Is privacy something you still think of, and strive for? Although absolute privacy and anonymity is impossible, is increased privacy even worth striving for? If you’ve come to realize that privacy isn’t worth the effort, how did you come to terms with this? It’s a struggle, and some services are very sticky, such as Google Photos.

I’m not sure if you watched the Made by Google ’22 event yesterday, but if you go back to the video now, you’ll find a curiously serious segment on privacy (it starts at about the 14:37 mark, or you can view this standalone video). I always find that there’s a weird disconnect between what Google says and what it does, and it’s weird. That is, I’m sure that Google is doing all kinds of work to protect our privacy in some ways, as it says there. But we know that it is also violating our privacy routinely online, rearchitecting its browser to ensure that this practice is easier even if you install extensions, and then selling that data to advertisers, which is its core business. And that these two acts are contradictory.

And it’s not just Google, of course. Microsoft does this in Windows. Facebook does this everywhere. Even Apple, to some degree, though it is much more concerned about third-party tracking than first-party tracking thanks to its coming advertising services blitz. Privacy advocates like to cart out the old chestnut that if you didn’t pay for the product, you are the product, but that’s out of date. It doesn’t matter if you paid for the product. You are the product regardless.

I expressed some of my frustration with this reality in Enough with the F#*!ing Ads (Premium), which led to a sporadic and still ongoing series of articles that includes, among other things, information about my move to NextDNS for whole-house tracker blocking (though I’m not technically using it for the whole house as noted above).

But generally speaking, privacy is a tough one. You can’t be truly anonymous online, well I certainly can’t, and so it’s a matter of what you can do and what’s effective and what isn’t. There’s also a tradeoff that people make explicitly or unknowingly where you get something in return (good directions from Google Maps) for giving up some privacy (your location data, which is the most valuable personal data of all, I understand). We’re not going to be truly protected until and unless regulators step in and force Big Tech to stop these practices, and that’s been a long haul. And may never happen.

Even among those who understand the issues, most have simply given up. My wife is very smart, but she doesn’t think about this at all, and she uses Google products and services regularly. Like many, she’s chosen convenience over privacy. And that’s where we’re at. So I do what I can do. I use an iPhone. I use NextDNS. I use Brave on my PCs and mobile devices. Etc.

It’s not ideal and in some cases is pointless. But that hopefully improves over time.

Game streaming services

christianwilson asks:

Are you still trying the different cloud gaming providers or have you settled on Xbox Cloud Gaming? Amazon Luna keeps getting better, and I’m curious if you’ve tried GeForce Now. I continue to hear good things about Nvidia’s service but have yet to try it.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I was just thinking about this.

I haven’t done this yet, but in writing Stadia is Dead and Xbox Needs its Best Feature (Premium), it occurred to me that I need to go back and use Stadia (before it’s gone) and Luna again to see how or whether those services have gotten better since I last used them. The issue, of course, is that I no longer have the in-house controllers for either, but I figured it would still be interesting to use a wired Xbox controller with a PC and see where they’re at. And I will do so.

I have used GeForce Now, and it’s a good service, but the one thing I know about myself is that I’m now a console gamer and I don’t see that changing. More specifically, an Xbox gamer, and the interesting thing about Xbox Cloud Gaming is that it puts those console games in more places. And may soon include the Call of Duty games I generally stick to. But saying I’m a console gamer really means I prefer to game with a controller instead of a keyboard and mouse. And so anything I do on a PC will still involve a controller. (I recently replayed Quake in its entirety, including some new levels, for example, but I did so on the Xbox with a controller.)

So that’s where I’m at, and that means I’ll almost certainly end up sticking with Xbox, and thus Xbox Cloud Gaming.

But yeah, I’ll give Luna another shot for sure.

Apple Fitness+

MattHewitt asks:

Any plans to review / write up your take on Apple Fitness+? I’ve been using it pretty regularly for about a month now for functional strength training and I find it to be a pretty amazing / professionally done library of content.

No, but I agree that it looks great and, if life changes in certain ways, I could see doing so.

The issue with Apple Fitness+ until very recently was that it required an Apple Watch: I always figured that anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV should still be able to access the service, even though they wouldn’t get the detailed tracking. But Apple recently opened it up to iPhone users, too, so that’s a bit of progress.

That said, I do now suddenly have an Apple Watch, so Fitness+ is a possibility. The issue is that everyone is different when it comes to exercising and being motivated to do so. And for some reason—or reasons, really—going to the gym works for me. I only like to workout in the morning—I won’t go after lunch, ever—and whatever combination of elliptical and weights machines seems to be working OK in the sense that I do it regularly (4-5 times per week for about 45 minutes). When the pandemic hit two years ago and the gym closed for 2-3 months, we bought a decent Total Gym Apex in-home exercise machine that worked mostly off of body weight, but I just couldn’t get motivated to use it regularly. And then the gym opened back up and I just kept going regularly.

Which is a long way of saying that I suspect Fitness+ would be like that for me. My wife would love it, and would probably use it regularly (well, other than the fact that she’s a Samsung user). But for me, personally, I just know I wouldn’t.

That could change in the future. If we end up spending more time in Mexico City, for example, I could see using that for weights and then just walking at that high altitude for cardio, and maybe that would make sense. I have thought about it. But we’ll see.

Pixel 7?

yoshi asks:

I feel like I’m the resident Pixel asker when it comes to Ask Paul – so here it is – what are your thoughts on the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro? Any chance of giving Pixel another shot? Or has the Apple Watch solidified your choice of iPhone?

This came up on First Ring Daily this morning, and I am going to write a related article about ecosystems soon (maybe this afternoon, maybe over the weekend) because this plays into a broader discussion involving Amazon and Apple too. But I assume everyone here understands that, yeah, I absolutely thought about this, have spent an inordinate amount of time going through the configurators at the Google Store to see whether upgrading from my Pixel 6 Pro made any sense at all, and will likely continue doing so.

But there’s a lot going on right now. And tied to the conversations around my need/desire to upgrade my Wi-Fi is a harsh reality related to money: this has been a very expensive year for us because of the apartment, and it’s gotten even more expensive because of interest rates going up (our monthly cost has literally doubled, and it was already a stretch), and we’re literally right now replacing the turbo in our car at a cost of at least $4000, which is yet more money we don’t have, and … you get the idea.

Brass tacks, I would have to spend $450ish to upgrade to a Pixel 7 Pro (with my trade-in) and it just doesn’t make sense right now. That said, I may still do so at some point, if only for the new photography features, especially the new zoom capabilities.

It’s also remotely possible that Google will lend me a device for review. They did so with the Pixel 6a, which was a first. That would solve a lot of problems for me, obviously.

All this said, I can’t imagine switching from the iPhone to the Pixel 7 Pro this year regardless. (Minor possibility: reviews could sway me. But I doubt it.) That doesn’t mean I’ve given up on Pixel (or Google more broadly), and anything could change at any time. But part of that ecosystem article I will write is tied to this notion of picking the best products and services from each ecosystem, and that’s kind of where I’m at right now. Not that I’ve figured it out, but rather that I’m still sorting through it.

There’s always room at the top

helix2301 asks:

On Twit this week Leo spoke about how google bought their way to top and only ever had few hits they did not buy AdWords, docs, Android etc.

Apple kind did the same thing. Apple bought bunch of software to make iPhone work it’s in Steve Jobs book they got gui for Mac from xerox.

My question for you is what do you think was Microsoft biggest acquisitions that paid off big for them or failed?

So that’s an interesting take on Google and Apple.

Google did create its search business in-house—people probably forget this, but Yahoo started out as a hand-curated list of good websites created by a college student—and it was/is quite a technical accomplishment. But yes, it’s fair to say that Google bought its way into its current business model, which is advertising. This couldn’t have happened without the search engine, but fair enough: all the Google products and services we use today would not exist if it weren’t for that ad business. Few of them would even be profitable, even as much smaller businesses.

Apple didn’t directly pay for its peek at the Xerox PARC technology it stole per se—though the firm had just invested in Apple—but it did, in fact, copy the Star GUI as closely as possible. What people forget here is the central improvement it made over what Xerox did: Xerox was faking overlapping GUI windows, but Apple didn’t know this. And so Bill Atkinson, an absolute genius, actually implemented this functionality. Yes, dragged Mac windows had to appear as outlines because of the low power/resources of the early Macs, but it worked. And windows could literally be overlapped, a first.

(It’s important to remember, too, that the Mac was not successful. In the 1980s, all of Apple’s profits and revenues came from the Apple II line, which it had created internally. It wasn’t until desktop publishing and desktop publishing happened that the Mac found a purpose and more than a niche market for itself. And Apple road that to some success with consumers until the company imploded in the mid-1990s and almost disappeared.)

Microsoft never really invented anything, but its central innovation (for lack of a better term) was taking the innovations of others, lowering the prices, and bringing them to the masses. It did this from the very beginning, including with its first product, BASIC for the Altair, but most famously (and lucratively) with Windows, which was absolutely based on the Mac (and thus the Xerox Star), but designed to run within the confines of less expensive PCs (and thus worked solely with keyboards and on low-resolution displays). We might see this as predatory, but from a business perspective, it was just smart, if not genius. And it’s hard to argue with the success Microsoft had building off of Windows in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was just dominant.

The phrase “successful Microsoft acquisitions” almost reads like an oxymoron, as its biggest acquisitions to date have had little impact, from what I can tell: the top five are LinkedIn, Nuance, Skype, ZeniMax Media (games), and GitHub. And some—like Nokia ($7.2 billion) and aQuantive ($6 billion)—were literal disasters. (Both were written off/down.)

Where Microsoft has been successful, at times, is with personnel acquisitions: Anders Hejlsberg co-invented .NET and created C# and TypeScript, for example, and Miguel de Icaza is almost single-handedly responsible for .NET being relevant and viable today thanks to his early cross-platform efforts. And there were many early hires—Steve Ballmer, Jim Allchin, and so on—who had even bigger impacts.

But, no, Microsoft never bought its way to the top. If anything, it failed across the board in that regard.