Ask Paul: June 23 (Premium)

Happy Friday after a depressingly long week. Here’s another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.

Thurrott logo merchandise

j5 asks:

Where’s the Thurrott.com merch?

It’s funny you ask this: I was just discussing this with my wife and we’ve started investigating the best way to do this. Long story short, it will happen.

I know we briefly offered at least coffee mugs for sale back in the day, but I think the issue was that the supplier was using fragile cups (not mugs) that would often break in transit. But now that we’re more involved in the business side of Thurrott.com, we’re going to make it happen.

I remember back in the day there was a picture on your site of you drinking out of a coffee cup that had the Thurrott logo on it. I always thought that was a cool cup because your logo is different from other tech logos out there.

Yeah.

I may have told this story, but that photo comes from a February 2007 trip that we took with the kids to Rome. We were walking around near the Roman Forum when it started to rain and so we ducked into a café to stay dry, and my wife and I got coffees while the kids had ice cream. And as I do, I started taking pictures of the rest of the family, but this time we ended up all taking pictures of each other for whatever reason. And the one my wife took of me was sort of perfect.

My cup of cappuccino was huge, and it reminded me of the scene in So I Married an Axe Murderer in which Michael Myers’ character says when getting a humorously humongous cup of cappuccino, “I believe I ordered the large cappuccino.” (We actually owned an even bigger cappuccino cup than the one in the movie and used it to hold keys and other items.)

Anyway, that image became my logo at the SuperSite for Windows. We used it everywhere, including on the mobile app we had for Windows Phone and iPhone, and we had different versions over timex, including a stylized version that looked like a drawing. (This was the only SuperSite logo/design that I did not create myself. I think it looks terrible.)

When I moved to Thurrott.com, we had to find a new logo and it was our original designer, Sean, who came up with the design we still use. I still like that logo a lot.

Currently on Twitter

DKRowe asks:

The section on each article page with the heading “Currently on Twitter” does not seem to be populating with content for the last week or two. Is that a victim of the API changes they made?

I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t even notice that. Will try to figure that out ASAP. I’m not sure what’s causing it.

Linux

andrew b. asks:

Any more Linux adventures lately? I know you were liking Zorin, I’d  be curious to hear your opinion of a desktop experience less similar to Windows, like the default Gnome environment found on Fedora.

No, sorry. I’ve been consumed with a series of big projects lately, including the books and whatever is happening here on Thurrott.com. But I have been keeping up to date with new Linux distribution version releases and have to say that Microsoft’s constant enshittification of Windows 11 is causing some internal debate. I hope to return to this as this other stuff lightens up.

Adobe dominance

helix2301 asks:

Paul the Adobe’s $20 Billion Figma Acquisition Likely To Face EU Investigation was big news. I don’t understand why this is such big deal. I’ve never heard of this company there are so many alternatives not sure why they are trying to stop this any ideas?

It’s because Adobe is so dominant in the creative market. They’re the Microsoft Office in that field. And to be fair, I feel like that deal needs to be scrutinized more than Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Unlike with Microsoft, Adobe is spending money that other companies cannot spend in order to maintain its dominance in a market it already controls. As for Microsoft, it’s trying to spend money that other companies cannot spend to make up for its inability to compete effectively in a market it has never dominated.

But whatever the details, Adobe faces the same issues that any dominant market player faces, where there are smaller, faster, and hungrier competitors coming up on the Internet, be them online services like Canva or standalone apps like Affinity Photo. These solutions undercut Adobe’s prices, which isn’t hard, and that chips away at its dominance. So its two obvious answers are to buy up the competition or create lower-cost alternatives that keep people in the Adobe fold. It’s trying both, I guess. (Adobe Express is an answer to Canva, for example.) I feel like lowering the price of CC would help a lot too, but I assume Adobe has a handle on what makes sense there.

Plus, this is the EU. They seem overly eager to go after Big Tech, which is all US-based.

IT support at home

Akis asks:

As an IT guy I am the one managing my family members’ computers. Sometimes this extends to friends and extended family too. I’m sure you know how it is!

Indeed.

I’ve been looking for a tool/app that I could get some reporting from and do some basic management of  these devices remotely (like checking for patching, remoting in if needed, checking event logs, etc). I am not interested in an enterprise solution of course, but a simple one, like running an agent in the background, reporting events and having a simple security dashboard. I’m sure this is a scenario you are familiar with and wondering how you make it easier.

I’m not aware of anything like that, though you could likely use some kind of a remote access tool—with the other people’s permission—to check in occasionally and make sure everything is up to date. Back in the day, I briefly considered putting all of my household’s computers in an Active Directory domain, I knew many people at Microsoft and in the industry who did just that in their own homes. But I don’t know of anyone who does that anymore.

We had an incident recently where my “stepmom”—the woman who was married to my father and sold us our previous home—was complaining about her iPhone and how slow it was. And then things stopped working, like group chats. We assumed it was user error, and eventually my nephew, who just graduated from college with a degree in the computer security field, looked at it and realized it was drowning in malware. Fortunately, she didn’t have anything important on there, so they wiped the phone, and it’s fine now. But I came away from this incident with two reactions. One, that it was nice not to be on the line for that. And two, that my assumption that just letting devices update themselves would be enough to protect non-technical people from most issues was wrong. My knee-jerk reaction to your question was that maybe these people don’t need that level of oversight. Except that, of course, they probably do.

But maybe the best approach is just to take a quick look at their PCs and devices when you see them, like a doctor’s checkup. You don’t want this to become a second career.

Windows 11 hardware requirements, a moving target

kkern asks:

Has Microsoft given any hints as to what will happen with “unsupported” CPUs using Windows 11 going forward?

Ha! Sorry, I did laugh out loud when I read this. Microsoft and good communication rarely intersect.

I’m curious because I have a Dell desktop with an i5-7500T processor, and using Windows 11 created with the Media Creation Tool (22H2), the OS installed with no complaints. But Microsoft’s Support CPU chart (from May 25, 2023) does not list the i5-7500T as a supported CPU. The only 7th generation CPUs are i7-78xx and i9-79xx. Just for “fun”, I used the same USB on a Dell desktop with an i5-6700 and no message about unsupported hardware, and the install completed. I did test on a Dell i5-4570, which did produce the general “not support” message, but it did not specify what was not supported. It just gave the link to the specs and requirements page, which linked to the above mentioned CPU chart. Is the CPU requirement quietly being ignored?  Or does “8th generation or better” no longer matter?  Maybe this is why Intel is downplaying the “generation” label going forward.

Here’s what we know.

Microsoft has a specific set of hardware requirements for Windows 11, and it updates those requirements from time to time. In fact, it just did: as Neowin notes, the software giant quietly updated those requirements this very week. There’s nothing major to report, but it’s worth remembering that this is a moving target. And that, as we saw with Windows 10, there is reason to believe that some hardware could actually drop off the list over time too.

But the hardware requirements are not a hard block. Indeed, Microsoft actually documents the workaround you used to get Windows 11 installed on PCs with older-generation Intel chipsets. The point here is that technical people—and corporations—are free to do this, but they can’t expect Microsoft to support them if something goes wrong. What you and everyone else has found out, of course, is that Windows 11 runs just as well on any given PC as does Windows 10. Of course it does. But over time, this might change as specific Windows features require or work better with newer hardware components.

Microsoft has experimented with putting a watermark on the Windows 11 desktop indicating that the hardware is unsupported, and some people have reported seeing this. I have not, but here, too, we know of the Registry changes needed to remove the watermark. So even that can be circumvented. It may need to be reapplied after Feature Updates or whatever.

Which reminds me: PCs in unsupported states may need to be manually upgraded to new Feature updates each year, meaning these updates may not appear for them in Windows Update. This isn’t hugely onerous, as you can just use the latest ISO to do an in-place upgrade, and once you do, future updates appear normally.

To me, these workarounds are collectively a small price to pay for the implicit agreement that we have with Microsoft here. Legally, it can’t and won’t support these PCs. But it also won’t prevent you from doing it. This is similar (OK, identical) to the situation with Windows 7/8.x retail product keys working to activate Windows 10 (and now 11): Microsoft said it would work for one year, and it has never stopped working.

Could it change? Sure. But I think Microsoft likes the current arrangement because it takes the onus of support off of them and doesn’t hurt the broader community in any way. (How is a Windows 11 PC without TPM 2.0 any less secure than a Windows 10 PC without that?) It seems to work well for everyone.

I suppose we might look to the end of support for Windows 10 as an interesting milestone, however. At that point, it might make more sense for Microsoft to be stricter about the Windows 11 hardware requirements. But more likely is that Windows 12 will simply have its own set of requirements and on and on we go.

Reddit, the new Twitter

TomKer asks:

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what’s happening at Reddit these days.

I don’t use Reddit at all, and so I have watched the recent developments in a more detached mode than I have with, say, Twitter, which I use regularly. And while the popularity of the service is obvious—it’s a big service, with 57 million daily users, 100,000 communities, and roughly 13 billion posts overall—I had never really considered how this might impact things like the quality of Google Search.

For those that are unfamiliar, Reddit is basically doing what Twitter is doing and charging for high-usage access to its APIs. It’s doing this specifically because AI is using Reddit’s vast trove of data as a major underpinning of its own machine learning models, and Reddit feels that it should benefit from that. The issue is that Reddit is a massive set of communities powered by people who really care about the topics they discuss. And in that way, I guess Reddit is the anti-Twitter, more about quality than noise. But topic-based subreddits have been going dark protesting the API money grab.

I’m not sure what the answer is here. Some apps and services that rely on Reddit will be forced to shut down. And it’s not like there’s an obvious Mastodon-like alternative that former Reddit fans can move to. And to be fair to Reddit, it’s never been profitable. One wonders if there isn’t a profit-sharing option that might work so that the unpaid people who run subreddits and/or key contributors could somehow benefit from the licensing of APIs. Or perhaps it should only specifically charge companies using Reddit data to train AI?

For now, we’re just in a holding pattern.

Xbox now or later?

harmjr asks:

My nephew now wants an Xbox for xmas. Should I buy it now or wait? He loves Minecraft. I do think I want one with a CD drive as my sister/his mom loves the older games.

I’d wait. With one caveat.

First, Christmas is still several months away. It’s possible we’ll see sales or bundles during the holiday period that will be more attractive than what’s available today.

And while I don’t know your nephew’s age, it’s possible his preferences will change between now and then. Given what’s going on with Microsoft and Activision Blizzard, he may suddenly decide he’s a Nintendo or PS5 fan. Minecraft is pretty much available everywhere.

And regarding the optical drive, that’s only on the Xbox Series X, as you know, but the availability of older games is excellent digitally too, so unless you know they have older Xbox games on disc or you believe it will be easier/cheaper to find those games on disc, going with a Series S could make sense. It’s a lot less expensive, is quieter and smaller, and can play all the older games in digital form. Granted, you will need more storage to go all-digital.

The caveat? It’s possible that the Xbox Series X will be more expensive by the time you do decide to buy it: Microsoft is raising prices on this console outside the U.S., but it’s possible that price hike could come here too (or to wherever you live).

Maybe set up a price alert and see what the trends are?