Ask Paul: September 15 (Premium)

Whew! Happy Friday, and welcome to another mammoth and curiously personal installment of Ask Paul to kick off the weekend a bit early. This, again, is one of the biggest yet.
Ahsoka
helix2301 asks:

Did you watch Ahsoka yet? Did you like it?

I’m only partway through Ahsoka, mostly because of time issues: I watch most TV/movie content with my wife, and she would not be interested in this, and I don’t do much cardio at the gym anymore. But I will say, I do like it quite a bit. My favorite Star Wars show so far is still Obi-Wan Kenobi, because it really captures the feel of the movies, and of course the return of Hayden Christensen was amazing. (He’s underrated. I really like the guy.) The two previous shows---The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett in particular---have this weird, constricted (and identical) feel that just feels like what they are, mostly filmed in some relatively small green screen studio. But Ohsoka might be my second favorite Star Wars show, we’ll see. It’s definitely up there so far.

And speaking of embarrassing, I haven’t finished Andor either. I started that, too, and that one is quite unique among the series. I bet it lands near the top whenever I can get to that as well.
Phone Link and iPhone
helix2301 asks:

When is phone connect for iPhone coming to windows I had it on a dell then it got discontinued because Microsoft bought the tech but it still not in Windows. I bought dell for this feature and now its gone. Dell Connect was great feature for iPhone users

I thought you meant iPhone support in Phone Link at first: That’s been available since April, though it is very limited compared to Android. But right, Dell Mobile Connect: That was a neat solution for integrating an iPhone with a PC, but it was only available via Dell computers. And then Intel purchased the company that made Mobile Connect in 2021, forcing Dell to discontinue it. Intel re-released it as Unison in late 2022, but it’s sadly only made available via “select PCs” from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others running 13th Gen Core processors. Only one of which, the Lenovo Yoga 9i, I’ve reviewed, and I’m sorry to say I barely noticed it (and was using a Pixel at the time anyway.) I can’t explain why Intel doesn’t just release this app publicly. (Like Phone Link and other similar apps, it requires an app on the iPhone as well.)
Latency and cloud gaming
SherlockHolmes asks:

Hi Paul, I was playing Baldurs Gate 3 for the past few days on an old gaming PC over Nvidia Geforce Now. I was using a Powerline Adapter on a 100 MBps line with a latency from 5 to 10 ms. So it actually works pretty well. Why do you think cloud gaming isnt or wouldnt be a thing for Microsoft and other cloud gaming services?

For a variety of reasons, but to be clear, I don’t mean that it won’t work at all, or generally. I mean that it won’t work for many people---for bandwidth and latency reasons---and for many types of games, especiall...