Ask Paul: August 25 (Premium)

Happy Friday and welcome to the final Ask Paul for August! Let’s kick off the weekend a bit early with another great set of reader questions.

OG TWiT

helix2301 asks:

Paul recently Steve Gibson announced he is not going to retire from Security Now and it was a big deal at TWIT Lisa, Leo, and a few others at the studio were caught on camera being excited to hear the show was going on. I think many people like me who have been with Twit since the early days forget you, Steve and Leo are like the originals on that network. TWIG and many of the other shows have had almost complete host turnover except for Leo.

I’ve always had a remote relationship with the other OG TWiT podcasts, but I’ve spent time with Steve and love the guy, and that’s true of many of the TWiG, MBW, whatever folks as well. And I’ve absolutely cherished the times I’ve been able to interact with them on various shows, which I’ve done many times over the years. Late last year, for example, I was in a year-end retrospective with Leo, Steve, Jeff Jarvis, and Doc Searls, I had never met Doc and really enjoyed meeting him and interacting with all of them. (I was also the youngest guy in the room, and I don’t get to say that much anymore.)

Point being, this thing is an extended family, and while it’s a remote family usually, it’s still a family, and so there’s a personal connection there across the board. I love being part of it, I love that we can keep doing it all these years later. I also do understand that things end, that it’s a business and times are tough right now, and that people are in different places and some may just want to move on. But that combination of sadness and respect when it does happen is, of course, familiar and normal.

I’ll do Windows Weekly as long as I’m able. I love Leo and Lisa (his wife) and what they’ve done for me, and I’ve loved everyone I’ve worked with, both inside of TWiT and the co-hosts I’ve had. But I know it will end at some point, and I do feel good about what we’ve done. I’m sure there are complaints, there always are. But I hope above all that it’s viewed as honest, informative, and entertaining. It’s a lot of work that I don’t mind at all.

Do you ever think hands-on windows will be released to non club twit members?

My guess is that it will never be successful enough on its own right for that to happen. And that the future of TWiT may in fact be purely subscription-based, meaning that if Club TWiT is truly successful, they won’t need to scrape and scrabble for advertisers anymore. But this is my view from the outside: I don’t have any insight into the business beyond what they tell me and say publicly.

I’m OK with that. And I would understand if the show didn’t meet some usage/interest standards. The nice thing for me is that it’s forced me to think about these topics more visually as opposed to writing. I’m not saying I’m any good at it, but as we move forward, I look at things like how-to’s on the site or the book and wonder how video might be part of it. In fact, when Lisa first approached me about HOW, I was literally seeing whether it would make sense to include video elements in the book. Them taking over the production and paying me to do that obviously put it over the top.

I recently updated our Podcasts page, by the way, and we now list all of the publicly available episodes of Hands-On Windows. They will show up in the feed going forward too.

Windows and creators

helix2301 asks:

All these improvements and creator updates to Windows does Microsoft really think creators are going to leave Apple and run to Windows? I am wondering what is the point as someone who writes a lot code I would rather code on a Windows machine I find it to be more open and flexible than Mac. But I do like macOS when I am doing content creation.

I’m not sure it’s about creators leaving the Mac or whatever so much as it is that almost 10 times as many people use Windows compared to the Mac and that many of them are creators of whatever stripe. As I’m sure you know, I spend a lot of time talking to PC makers and being briefed about various products, and one of the big themes over many years now is that premium PCs are the only lucrative part of this market, with higher margins, etc. Premium PCs to date have consisted of gaming PCs (always lucrative) and premium PCs for executives in businesses and developers, which is all sort of niche. (Previously, developers would often buy gaming PCs.) But every PC maker I speak with now talks about and markets PCs specifically designed for creators. This is probably going to be the biggest part of that subset of the market if it isn’t already. (And I suppose developers are now lumped into that creator bucket.) I will say that this is how I think of myself, and that I’ve always sort of wanted that “Ultrabook plus a bit of oomph” product. That’s what this is about.

I enjoyed the conversation between you and Brad on FRD about what going to push people to the next version of Windows or how Microsoft gets more widespread adoption I loved it. Like making artificial hardware requirements or Windows 12 or big feature updates.

To my mind (on the outside of Microsoft), this feels like the natural extension of the “make it up as you go along” support approach that Microsoft took with Windows 10, and this realization that keeping Windows stuck on a single product (Windows 10) made for little PC upgrade incentive. And so we’re back to marketing new versions, the issue being that most people got quite used to not upgrading so often. (Kind of like businesses got used to not sending employees traveling around the world during the pandemic. Suddenly, it’s like, “Why were we even doing that?”) The artificial hardware requirements thing (again, to me) is them realizing that they have to sort of force the issue. Because no one was going to look at Windows 11 and say, sure, I’ve been getting upgrades for free for years, but I will pay for that.

With Windows 12, I’m guessing, there will be more of that (NPUs recommended, for example, and then later required). But the trick this time will be marketing AI using real-world use cases that make sense to and resonate with both people and businesses. There is nothing in Windows Copilot or 23H2 that reaches that bar, so I’m curious what they can do, if anything, with Windows 12.

Why so many services?

madthinus asks:

As someone that is doing the one streaming service at a time, cancelling and then moving on to the next, I am curious as to why you have so many. Is it a case of wanting to see things day and date or just a variety. Currently we are paying for two services, PrimeVideo (Amazon not in our country) and Youtube Premium because the ads are just insane. We will move I suspect in October to the next video service as the pickings are getting slim. I should also confess, both of us enjoy gaming, so TV watching is a secondary evening activity.

This is more excuse than reason, but it’s because of the kids. They’re adults, sort of, but we’ve also been paying for such things as tuition, rent, gas, groceries, cell phone plans, car insurance, medication, and so on as they’ve worked their way through college. Our son, Mark, has graduated and has a job, so most of that has ended in his case (we still pay for his car insurance, for example). But that’s a recent development. And Kelly still has a year of school left (and then 2-3 more years because now she wants to get a master’s degree as well, so that’s fantastic).

But that was part of my story in Subscription Sticker Shock: Streaming Video, Music, Storage, and More (Premium), this notion that my son is actually not as financially reliant on us as he used to be. In fact, he’s pretty much moved on (which is great). My daughter is younger and in a different place, so she’s more reliant. Anyway, we’re making some services cuts. (My wife and I are literally bingeing a final show on Max right now so we can drop that.) And as things change over time, we’ll make more.

I do agree that bingeing shows on one or some small number of services each month is the right approach. We’ll get there.

Learning ASL

jrzoomer asks:

Paul on a recent Windows Weekly you mentioned you had some interest in learning ASL. I’m interested in knowing how your son learned it, and also, if you were to, what would be your approach to go about learning it?

There’s a bit about learning foreign languages below, and this bit of common knowledge is as true there as it is here: to truly learn a language and become fluent, you need to be immersed in it, and that is something you cannot do with an app, through remote learning, in-person classes, or anything else. You have to be in a place where that is the norm, suffer over time, learn, ask questions, and make progress. And you can’t do that part-time, you can only do it full-time.

In my son’s case, he’s deaf but has cochlear implants, and two factors combined so that he never learned ASL as a child. First, that was the standard for the day, that people with his issues should focus on (re)learning how to hear and speak, and that’s what he did. But that’s no longer the case: had this just now happened to him, he would have learned ASL from the start as well. And two, Mark was lucky enough to have the best possible outcome with the implants, which is not always the case: he hears exceptionally well, speaks clearly (without that deaf “lisp” that many have), learned to read lips expertly on his own, and successfully mainstreamed into the public school system without needing much in the way of assistance. Today, his workplace has offered him assistance, but he doesn’t need or want it. This is so wonderful for him and us, but it’s unusual. He’s been very lucky in that regard.

When it was time for Mark to go to college, we very much directed him to the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) because it has a first-class program for the deaf and a vibrant deaf community in the area. And so he showed up there a bit of an outlier: he was deaf but did better than almost everyone with the implants and he didn’t know ASL. (Not sure exactly, but we think that roughly half of the deaf students at RIT do not even have implants, so ASL and lip-reading are it.) He met people and made friends, as one does, and many of the classes he took had an ASL interpreter. And he learned ASL almost purely through immersion, and with the help of his friends. And he is now fluent. (He actually took one ASL class early on but dropped it because he didn’t need it.) Again, he was very lucky, really. Smart and lucky.

I’m not sure how I would learn ASL right now but my wife and I agree that we should. We are, however, busy learning another language. More on that below.

Language learning

EricGriffith asks:

My wife has been using Duolingo to learn Spanish.   What app do you use?  With your purchase in Mexico City, you must be using something to learn Spanish. 

I am using Duolingo right now, but I’ve gone back and forth, and these apps have changed a lot over the years. I started with Duolingo in 2014, the app tells me, and back in the day, I went through the entire French and Spanish lessons they had and completed both at least once. (I think I did French twice.) But these lessons have expanded dramatically since then, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever finish Duolingo Spanish at my current rate. There is so much content there now.

I switched off of Duolingo a few years ago when it got aggravating and used (and paid for Busuu) for at least a year, which was nicely different from Duolingo, making it more engaging. But Duolingo has also improved a lot since then, and so coming back to it made sense to me and still does.

My wife also uses Duolingo, but when we bought the apartment in Mexico City last year, she looked around for something more immersive, with the understanding that we couldn’t go full immersive (by just being there all or most of the time) yet. And she came across a service called italki that links learners like her with tutors remotely (she uses Zoom mostly). She lucked into a great tutor from northern Mexico who she immediately liked, and she usually has hour-long sessions with her once or twice a week. This is a nice half-step between an app and full immersion, I guess. But I’m not ready for that yet myself. (I am currently on a 143-day streak with Duolingo, but back in the day I had gone over one year at least once.)

Music products and services

EricGriffith also asks:

Second, we copied several 100 CD’s to Apple Music and then moved them to Google.  Which then forced us to move to Youtube Music.  What do you use?  Also, we are considering re copying because of variations in sound levels.  We use Sonos for speakers too.  What platform would you recommend today?

These are tougher questions than they sound. (Ahem.)

Let me start with the latter because it informs the other stuff: after experimenting with Sonos before moving to Pennsylvania and then setting up a stereo pair of Sonos:1 speakers (at the time, the cheapest option) in our living room, we went all-in over time on Sonos in our previous house, which had a dedicated space for music (with two Sonos Fives purchased used from Brad) and a Sonos Sub, all of which were/are very expensive. We had a Sonos Move in the main bathroom (which we took outside), (Sonos-based) IKEA Symfonisk Wi-Fi Bookshelf Speakers in the kitchen, a few loose Sonos Ones around the house, a Sonos Beam soundbar in the living room, and even a Sonos Roam mini-speaker, which we never used much. We love Sonos for the sound and build quality, for the multi-room capabilities, and for the broad services support

And … now we live in a small apartment. And that means we can’t use most of that. We do have a few strays around, but we use the Beam for the TV, of course, and the two Fives for music (albeit at much lower volumes than before). But the Sub is in the corner unused, it would be too much for the people around us.

Would I do something different now? Maybe. There’s little benefit to a Sonos soundbar, so when we do get something for our place in Mexico, it will likely just be whatever standalone soundbar is best value-wise. We’re temporarily using a Bluetooth-based JBL Charge 5 with our TV in Mexico, for example, as it sounds much better than the TV’s speakers, but will upgrade someday. But a stereo pair of JBL Charge 5’s sounds surprisingly great. Given the size of a room or whatever even something like that works well. I really don’t know.

(Complicating matters, we could be moving in October/November, and if one option does pan out, we would be in a bigger space with no connecting neighbors, so we would bring the Sub back online. We’ll see.)

Because of our focus on Sonos over 6+ years, I don’t have much to compare to. It’s worked well for us, for the most part. But it’s expensive too.

Regarding CD collections, I ripped mine to various formats (WMA, MP3, and then AAC, in varying quality levels) many times, like it was a second career. I used to studiously correct meta-data, especially album cover art. Backed up the whole thing repeatedly. Moved a copy into Apple iTunes Match, which I still pay for (see the bit above regarding me paying for subscription services). And still have a copy on my NAS.

And I don’t know. For a while, there was some music in my collection that I couldn’t get on various services (and maybe there still is). Some services offered the ability to upload your own music, which I did, repeatedly, but most of those services are either gone (Zune), no longer offer that feature (Amazon Music), or are so limited and hard to work with in this regard (Spotify) that I’ve found myself backed into a corner.

The last great service to offer this for free was Google Play Music, which as you may know is now YouTube Music. And so I switched to YouTube Music during that transition, partially against my will. But it has improved dramatically over time, and I now very much prefer it. And because I pay for it, I get an added bonus that I think really puts it over the top (and this is in addition to ad-free YouTube, which is crucial): you can add music videos from YouTube to your music-only playlists/collection and just listen to them as music. And YouTube has a ton of music, including many rare or unique selections, such as live recordings. This is huge for music fans.

Tied to this, because we were moving ever further into the Sonos ecosystem during all this, Sonos compatibility was key. As noted, Sonos does offer good compatibility with services, but two sticking points have impacted me over time. First, I also listen to podcasts, and so I was sort of pushed into using PocketCasts because it’s Sonos compatible. (And has become quite good on its own, thankfully.) Second, Google’s theft of Sonos IP has caused a rift between the two companies. And that means that Google Podcasts (which I loved) never came to Sonos (it’s basically gone now regardless). And that while Google Play Music used to be able to control Sonos (as you can do with Spotify), YouTube Music cannot and likely never will unless these two companies settle their differences.

What this means is that when I listen to music with Sonos, I have to use the Sonos app. Which I don’t loathe per se but do not like. It’s not as easy/nice to use as the YouTube Music app. I used to love controlling Sonos with Google Play Music, but now I have to use this other thing. It’s not horrible. But it’s not ideal.

Regarding sound leveling, this is a big problem and I think it’s common to all services. I have to manually adjust the volume on music nights for certain songs, for example. And don’t get me started on sound leveling in TV shows and movies: no matter what I do, the sound effects and action sounds are too loud and the spoken dialog is too low. I babysit the remote like an idiot. (Sonos Beam does offer a voice boost feature, but the issue is the content and our crazy world, not Sonos.)

I can’t imagine that helped a bit. But that’s where I’m at.

Surface, NPUs, and Windows

Daishi asks:

Based on the practice of the past several years I have been expecting, from a tech spec’s perspective at least, any coming Surface hardware to be a simple bump to the current Intel chips weeks or months before it is made obsolete by Intel. The way they have been.

This is a reasonable assumption.

On Windows Weekly, though, you were discussing the coming event and said you’d heard that all the coming hardware was going to have NPUs. The thing is while Qualcomm’s chips have had one for some time and AMD’s latest Zen 4 mobile chips have one, as far as I can see, the 13th Gen Intel chips, that above pattern should have them upgrading to, don’t. They are coming to 14th Gen whenever they are released later this year, though.

AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm all have NPUs integrated with at least some PC-based chipset now, and by next year this will be the norm, at least in chips for mainstream and high-end PCs. (As you note, Qualcomm has oddly led this charge, though that is likely tied to the fact that mobile chipsets got these capabilities first.)

What I heard, literally (and, I should say, from only one insider source, though I do trust them explicitly) was that “all future Surface devices will have NPUs.” But reading between the lines a bit, there are high-end Surfaces and low-end Surfaces, and it’s unlikely that the less expensive models, with their low-end chipsets, will see NPU capabilities in 2023. We’ll see, but the timing of the event next month suggests that the new high-end Surfaces will at least come with AMD or Intel chipsets that offer NPU capabilities.

So, assuming both those things to be true (all Surfaces must have NPUs and 13th gen chips don’t have one), how do you see them squaring that circle? Will they just add separate NPU chips to the board for a single generation? Might they announce them now, to go along with a Windows 12 announcement say, but not actually ship them for a couple of months with 14th Gen, despite all their past baggage? Or could we see the long fantasised switch of Surface on the whole to AMD?

So, we can only guess. But here, history is a guide: Microsoft has delivered custom versions of Qualcomm and AMD chipsets in the past in Surface PCs, and it has worked with all of its hardware partners to get them to integrate its Pluton security chipset into their SOCs (Intel has since demurred, claiming that its own security solution is as good or better). So my guess is that we could see a custom Microsoft-branded NPU and/or that they will partner in whatever fashion to ensure that NPUs happen on their own PCs.

Which models they do announce will be interesting. Obviously, the most successful Surface PCs are portables, and this is where the x86-based stuff becomes limiting until the 14th Gen Intel (and AMD equivalents) arrive in early 2024.

Of course, this is Surface so we should prepare for disappointment. Either because they’re always behind from a tech perspective or because their small market share makes it less appealing for AMD or Intel to go out of their way for them right now. (That is, they can just wait until next year like everyone else.)

I will add that IFA is coming up in less than a week, and will occur before the Surface event. We should all be looking at what NPU (and equivalent) chipset revelations occur via other PC makers, if any. (IFA is one of two big annual events for big PC announcements.)

MSA, the creepening

nerdyoldgeek asks:

The new Windows 11 Quick Assist requires a Microsoft account to use. I am the IT person for a school and we have Google Workspace for email and apps. Most of our staff do not have Microsoft Accounts (we use a local AD to log into Windows PCs).

I know the old Remote Assistance and Invite Someone to Help feature is still there and does not require a Microsoft Account to use. Do you think Microsoft will keep the old one, or do you think they will force everyone to use the new Quick Assist?

It’s inevitable that the old-school remote assistance solution is deprecated and then removed from Windows, though I’m unaware of anything explicit there. Regarding MSAs, this has been a feature creep thing over the years, with more and more Windows experiences requiring that (including now, in Windows 11 Home, just signing into the computer). For the most part, I don’t see this as a huge problem, but in your case, the issue is obvious.

I don’t see too many options here. You could complain to Microsoft, of course, and to be fair the company does seem to respond to this kind of feedback by stepping back from a self-imposed cliff. Or you could examine whether there is a cheap or even free remote assistance solution that meets your needs. (And, of course, just keep using the legacy solution as long as possible in the meantime.)

Asking staff to set up MSAs for this one feature obviously doesn’t make a ton of sense, though I suppose if you were to go that route, you could specify that they use their existing Google (or AD) accounts as MSAs. I normally don’t recommend doing that, but in this case, it makes sense since the accounts are associated with the school and if they leave, they won’t need the associated MSA anyway.

I wonder whether anyone has a good remote assistance solution to recommend.