Ask Paul: June 7 (Premium)

Happy Friday from Mexico City! In this Microsoft Recall-heavy edition of Ask Paul, I am not surprised to discover that many of you are asking the right questions. I’ll do my best.

Quick update on “What You Use”

I meant to get this started a few weeks ago–OK, several weeks ago–but I think I have figured out a good way to kick of what I think of as “What You Use,” a series of articles/videos in which Premium members can discuss their hardware and software configurations with others similar to my What I Use articles.

I asked my friends over at Windows Intelligence–JR and Chris–if they wouldn’t mind being the first guinea pigs, er, participants, and they’ve nicely agreed to do so. We just flew to Mexico this past week, so I’m still getting adjusted to the time zone change and other travel-related tiredness, but I will connect with them next week and see how that goes. And then you can see the results and decide if you’d like to do something similar.

Sorry for the delays on this, but I think it will end up in a good place.

Moving on…

Surface Laptop 7th Generation

rtillie asks:

I still have lots of questions surrounding the new Surface.

Don’t we all. 🙂

If you haven’t seen it, I pre-ordered a Snapdragon X-based Surface Laptop, and while I always over-think everything I do, especially big purchases like this, I haven’t wavered on this yet. That said, I will be reviewing other Snapdragon X-based laptops, all of which are less expensive than Surface Laptop, and it’s possible that some negative early reviews will trigger a rethinking. So far so good, however.

Do you think over time the Surface Laptop will be available in all configurations? I would love a blue 15 inch Elite with 32GB and 1TB. Here in the EU blue is only possible for 13 inch.

Same here in the U.S., and having seen that Sapphire blue color in person now, it’s the one I’d choose too, if it was possible. In that article linked above, I explain how limited the choices here are, you get fewer color choices by going with the 15-inch version and then only one choice, black, if you want more than 16 GB of RAM. (There are other limitations, too, around RAM and storage combinations.)

What we’re seeing here is Microsoft’s limitations as a PC maker. It’s the biggest company in the world, but its PC business is almost a boutique start-up compared to traditional PC makers, and that means it doesn’t get precedence when it comes to getting parts and materials. And this explains, I think, why the choices are so limited: Given the prices it has to pay, Microsoft is clearly anticipating which color/configuration combinations will sell the best and optimizing for that. But the real impact here is on potential customers. Black isn’t my last choice, that Dune color is terrible in person, but it’s also the last color I’d choose otherwise.

As to whether this will improve, I can only guess. I would hope so, but that will anger early buyers, too. I don’t foresee big wait times on these things once the products are available, and there’s no real wait time if you pre-order right now. So if this isn’t a need right now, I would hold off at least a few weeks and see how it pans out.

Any opinion on the plus vs. elite?

Nothing intelligent. I had a bit of hands-on time with a Snapdragon X Plus-based prototype laptop at a Qualcomm press event back in April, but the real focus (for everyone there) was the Snapdragon X Elite. I will need to review some shipping hardware before I can weigh in, but based just on the benchmarks and anecdotal information from Qualcomm, my guess is that it will be perfectly acceptable for mainstream productivity tasks and on-device AI. And that you will want an X Elite for higher-end creator and gaming workloads.

But we’ll see. I’m curious that there are no fanless X Plus configurations at least (Surface Pro, etc.).

What I was wondering, as I am a developer, does it run every program? I found out it runs VS Code natively, but how about Visual Studio itself? Is there a list somewhere detailing all the apps that run natively?

You would think. I referenced the Windows on Arm Ready Software website yesterday, but it only lists games right now. (Microsoft points to this as well.) And I’ve been holding on to these graphics since Build that depicts native apps that are, or soon will be, native on Arm.

This is native apps:

And this is with emulated apps too:

But one of the big stories about the Snapdragon X is that the emulation engine is dramatically faster than with the previous generation Snapdragon chips. And basically any 64-bit x86 (x64) app should just work. “Big” Visual Studio is native on Arm.

I opted to wait on your review of the new Surface, really looking forward to it!

Thanks. I’m eager to get this PC myself. And other Snapdragon X PCs, too. It’s an exciting time.

You put the PU in NPU

anderb asks:

How long do you think it will be before Microsoft starts using the NPU for its own nefarious purposes? e.g. building user profiles for targeted advertising.

It’s hard not to be cynical here. That is, what makes you think they’re not already doing this? 🙂

Looking on the bright side, at least it will be more efficient.

But seriously, it’s impossible to believe it won’t do this. I wrote something a few years back that I can’t find for some reason–Recall, save me–but it amounted to Microsoft should position itself on the PC as Apple does with the iPhone. That is, “What happens on your PC stays on your PC.” That’s a good slogan for Recall, of course, with the caveat that no one trusts Microsoft for obvious reasons, and because Recall will make more sense when it syncs to the cloud so you can get your activity from every device, not just the one you’re currently using.

In any event, yes, I do think Microsoft will use the NPU for enshittification purposes. Why wouldn’t it?

Well, that was depressing.

Microsoft, privacy, and security, oh my

will asks:

This week Microsoft has been in the news for the wrong reasons with Recall. Zac over at Windows Central has very good article on the problem that Microsoft has, and Recall really is the straw on the camel. For years, Microsoft has been silently doing what it wants with Windows and then being very coy about why. Everything from telemetry, to ads, to features being turned on and many more that you have outlined.

UPDATE: Microsoft is updating Recall to address the complaints. –Paul

Sure. I feel like I’ve led the charge on this topic, honestly: I’ve been complaining about the enshittification in Windows 11 for so long–literally since before the initial release–that it predates the term. Since Windows 10. And Windows 8. This is kind of my thing.

Generally speaking, Windows and Microsoft kind of slipped under the radar with regulators thanks to the success of mobile, which is a much bigger market. And with that attention focused elsewhere, combined with diminishing returns on Windows, plus a need to make the product make sense in a cloud-first Microsoft, forced the Windows team to do things that don’t really make sense for customers. (A literal definition of enshittification.) It’s only gotten worse over time, and in each Windows version.

The problem here is that regulators have finally woken up to Big Tech, and they are, quite understandably, tackling the biggest offenders that impact the biggest audiences first. The low-hanging fruit, essentially. And while 600-whatever million Windows 11 users is a big number, it’s nothing like the audiences that use Android, iPhone, Facebook, and so on. So this “backwater” gets little attention. Not from Microsoft–which is focused on AI now, obviously–and not from regulators. So customers who rely on Windows are kind of in a tough spot.

The motivations here are interesting. You saw, I’m sure, that Microsoft has (re)added a Beta channel to the Windows Insider Program for Windows 10 less than 18 months before that product hits end-of-life, specifically for testing new features. This tells us a few things–primarily that most customers have stuck to Windows 10–but it also suggests things, like maybe that EOL date isn’t so solid. And today’s Windows team, like the previous two, is beholden to the same basic edict that this business make sense in the modern Microsoft. So it’s scrambling to add AI while it continues to enshittify Windows with ridiculous anti-customer behavior. I don’t think these two initiatives can co-exist.

I believe he has a valid point that the damage has been done, but I have a bigger concern and that is about how Microsoft could silently enable or turn on features with recall that while might be good, could be a process that never stops. The best example of this is what happened with Apple a year or so ago announcing they were going to start scanning photos for certain material. This caused a massive backlash and Apple backed off. What if Microsoft does the same thing with Recall, since it would be taking photos of what is on your screen and if it was something it determined is bad sends a little note to someone. I am not being specific here as not to get into the weeds to much, but the reason is a valid one. With AI being pushed into Windows, NPUs doing the background processing, it would be easy for Microsoft to say “we detected xxxx and alerted yyyyy” without you even knowing it.

Right. Here’s the good news: For all the complaining, which is justified, Microsoft does listen to feedback. It doesn’t always move quickly enough to address it, but it does do so. And there is no version of this story where Microsoft doesn’t address the feedback it’s received so far about Recall.

But there are questions. When and how it will do that. And whether it feels that much of the outrage over Recall is just faux outrage and baseless. As I’ve written, we’ll see what happens when this is real and out in the world, and all the “hacks” and whatever we’ve seen so far in no way represent the reality of Recall on Copilot+ PCs. To be clear, I do not expect a single critic of this feature to suddenly come around when they are others get real Copilot+ PC hardware. But it will be interesting to see what does happen and how Microsoft adjust things.

And it will make changes. I mean, that was always true.

Will it cancel Recall? That’s not Microsoft’s style. A more on-point response would be to delay it, test things with Insiders, and then silently kill it a year later without telling anyone.

But I think it’s more likely it just ships as-is, in preview as was always the case, and then it makes changes up to the (and past) the “final” release of 24H2 and the “final” (non preview) version of Recall. That could be a year or more.

The problem is that while Recall would and can be an amazing product, it is the track record of the company and the product that it is in is the problem. Plus, I can not see how this could ever be allowed in a corporate or government setting based on the vague “local only” storage.

Richard made a compelling case for the opposite on this week’s Windows Weekly: Corporations already monitor their employees and will embrace this technology to ensure they’re not giving away secrets, communicating with competitors, and so on. That’s dystopian, but it’s also in keeping with today’s reality. Regardless, companies can disable or manage Recall with policy. And unlike with us, the individuals, Microsoft listens to that audience. The fear here, to me, is not with companies, it’s with us. With the people that Microsoft silently enables OneDrive Folder Backup for when we’ve said no repeatedly. There’s a history there we can’t ignore.

The only saving grace on that point is that Recall is such a privacy concern that even the Windows team can’t be so predacious to silently enable this thing. And why would it? That wouldn’t benefit Microsoft. It’s already tracking you online, there’s no additional benefit to knowing more about you. It knows targeted advertising doesn’t work.

All this amounts to is … we’ll see. The Windows team has not proven itself worthy of our trust, but AI is super-important to Microsoft, and the adults outside of Windows could dictate that these people step it up to benefit the broader company in ways that don’t suck. Or … they won’t. Hope springs eternal, but we’ll see.

New Arm, same as the old Arm?

ianceicys asks:

In the 1980’s Coca-Cola seemingly lost their minds when they completely changed the recipe of their soda and introduced New Coke. Coke solely focused on sample taste testers, and Coke never took into account that sweeter drinks ALWAYS fair better in taste tests. With Apple, it seems like longer battery life ALWAYS fairs better and hence the push to the ARM platform for Windows. Could moving to ARM be a repeat of that 1980s disaster of New Coke? Longer battery life doesn’t matter to high-end desktop workstation/gaming machines?

You’re touching on something I’ve been trying to turn into a coherent discussion for a few weeks now, so let me babble through it a bit here.

When Microsoft first made the push to Arm with Windows RT, the goal was to address the mobile threat, primarily from iPhone and iPad. But that Windows team didn’t want to just recompile the product for Arm, it wanted the resulting platform to be a viable alternative to the iPad, primarily, a mobile-first offering with improved efficiency and reliability across the board. It was constrained by time–artificially, and another year might have made all the difference–and by some market realities: Customers would not accept something called Windows that wasn’t full Windows, PC makers wanted to differentiate their products more than was possible with Arm, and developers (including Office in-house) only cared about Win32 and the installed base.

In other words, there was resistance across the board, and so the thing that shipped, RT, looked like Windows, had the desktop, had desktop Office, was a giant compromise. The other thing that shipped, Windows 8, was also a giant compromise, imposing a touch-first mobile platform and UX, with mobile apps, on existing customers. The problem is that there’s no real answer here: Microsoft could have made a fully vertical Windows RT with no desktop or Office, except no one would want that. Office not adopting the WinRT runtime was the end of that dream. (That they fully embraced the iPad was problematic internally, but the feeling was they already had the best Office on Windows, why make a second version that was lackluster?)

Anyway. Flash forward to Windows 10 on Arm and the goal posts had moved, largely because of the experience with Windows RT. And it was clear what the market wanted: The full Windows experience, no matter which platform. And so Windows 10 on Arm used emulation to run x86 apps, which was slow, but something not possible at all with Windows RT-era hardware. Microsoft improved the platform, Qualcomm improved the hardware, and here we are on the cusp of a new era: A version of Windows 11 on Arm, running on Snapdragon X with few/no compatibility or performance issues. Fantastic!

But is it?

The original goal for Windows RT was sound. And it had nothing to do with bringing forward the complexity of “full” Windows. It was about creating a new Windows that was thinner, lighter, simpler, and had all the good mobile attributes around efficiency and reliability. Just recompiling Windows on Arm doesn’t achieve any of that. Well, it achieves some of that. But it’s not a new thing. It’s the old thing running on a different kind of hardware. There are advantages … and there are disadvantages.

The headwinds that Windows 11 on Arm faces today are a bit different from those of Windows RT, but they’re just as real. Some software has been ported to Arm64, and the emulator is improved, so performance and compatibility should be solid across the board. But this is the PC market, and it seems that almost every user, certainly every technical user, has some esoteric requirement, an app, a hardware driver, whatever, that could undermine the experience. Businesses, not the fastest moving group, tend to upgrade slowly and stick to what they know, and Arm is unfamiliar and untested, and ignoring it this year could put off Arm deployments by up to a decade. Nothing is certain.

But the thing I’ve been wrestling with and still can’t quite explain clearly is this question around how a recompiled/optimized version of Windows 11 on Arm is “better” than full boat x86/x64 Windows at a technical level. Yes, the resulting devices should get very good battery life and even very good performance. But that’s happening on the AMD/Intel side, finally, too, and Intel’s marketing message for Lunar Lake–essentially, performance and efficiency without any compromises–is solid and will resonate with many customers.

Put another way, there has been architectural work like that seen in Windows 10X to modernize Windows as a platform. Some of that stuff is in Windows 11, but it’s certainly not the full experience Microsoft wanted. Some is in these Copilot+ PCs on Snapdragon. But it’s all just Windows, with all the cruft of the past.

I don’t know. We were driving to the airport the other day in an Uber, it was a normal gas-powered Camry or whatever, a nice car, and a Tesla drove by. I was thinking about how these things are like Snapdragon X PCs, in that they offer better performance and efficiency than gas-powered cars. That you could rev up a classic 8-cylinder Mustang GT or whatever in a race, make a lot of noise and go pretty fast, and it still wouldn’t beat the Tesla. And that we can pretend the world isn’t changing and ignore the advances, and stick to what “works,” really, what’s familiar. But that, in the end, we are going to change.

(In this, the PC isn’t so much a truck as it is a muscle car, I guess. Where an Arm PC is an electric car.)

And in the PC world, too, we are going to change. That change will be driven by Arm–more efficiency with better performance, a kind of performance per watt calculation–but we may experience that change through traditional hardware makers like AMD and Intel that are forced to change because of Arm. We see that happening with the recent Computex announcements: That Intel Core Ultra Gen 2 chipset is barely recognizable compared to its predecessor. After all this time, Intel finally got the memo.

In the end, I don’t care which company wins. I just care that the platform improves, that we get “there,” wherever there is. This is what Terry Myerson wanted with Windows 10 on Arm: He told me he’d be happy to see Intel win, it just needed to do what Arm was doing. But Intel resisted, as always. Until now, it seems.

Anyway. I will keep working this over in my brain. Maybe I can articulate this better in the future. Maybe this is all I got. 🙂

You’ve been recalled

simont asks:

With Steve Gibson and all the other security commentors pointing out what they see as flaws in the current version of Recall, do you think it will be a good idea to use Recall when/if it comes out?

UPDATE: Microsoft is updating Recall to address the complaints. –Paul

I love Steve Gibson and you should obviously take his opinions about any security matter seriously. But he’s also an alarmist of sorts, and that type of highly technical personality we see so often that doesn’t always move past the black and white to see the nuances. And I gave a retort, of sorts, to that commentary on Windows Weekly, based largely on what I wrote earlier in Microsoft, Please Address the Recall Concerns Immediately (Premium).

What it amounts to is obvious enough: No one who has hacked Recall to work on a non-Copilot+ PC has proven anything, and anyone who starts off an argument against Recall with, “first, gain full admin control of the PC,” has made a point about anything. We need to wait on shipping hardware and, as noted above, a potential Microsoft response to the criticisms, before we can know for sure.

(To be clear, if there are problems with Recall on shipping hardware, that doesn’t mean those critics were somehow “right.” What they’ve done to date is bogus and should be condemned, not promoted with breathless, speculative stories. Let’s see what really happens. Recall could have issues. It’s Microsoft. It probably does.)

The thing is, I had my wife watch the Recall part of the Copilot+ PC announcement and her reaction is almost certainly more representative of the wider world (i.e. non-technical, mainstream users) than what we’re seeing in our little insular, too-technical bubble. She cannot wait to use this feature. She asked how soon she could upgrade to get it.

My wife is not an idiot. In fact, I’ve been told a few times she’s smarter than I am, and she’s certainly smarter than most people. So … should she use Recall? Do I, as a somewhat technical person, have qualms about that? No, not really. She should use Recall as soon as she can because she sees the value in it, but that won’t happen until Recall is real and Copilot+ PCs are proven. This isn’t about trading privacy for functionality: She doesn’t see this as a privacy concern. (Neither do I.)

But, can I, should I, recommend that readers use this feature?

No, it’s too soon. I need to experience it for myself first. We all need to see what really happens when those who want Recall to fail get their hands on real Copilot+ PC hardware. Will there be vulnerabilities or flaws, or whatever? Do they undermine the experience and/or does Microsoft address them before Recall exits preview and impacts more people? We need to wait and see.

I can tell you this: I have to use Recall. I have to be able to understand it and write about it intelligently–and correctly–both here on the site and in the Windows 11 Field Guide. So I will use it immediately. Not now in hacked form, that’s stupid. But on real Copilot+ PC hardware when I get it.

With the current controversy of Recall on Copilot + branded devices, do you think this will hurt the general copilot brand?

Microsoft has been undermining the Windows brand for several years and I just don’t see any widespread condemnation the behaviors I’ve been highlighting for years. But Microsoft has also gotten a lot of attention for its AI work, and, yes, there is always the chance that it could undermine itself with bad PR, whether it’s deserved or not.

I look at Google and I see this same worry: This company should be dominating in AI given its history, but it has stepped on a metaphorical rake repeatedly, and almost at every turn. It risks becoming not just a laughingstock but an also-ran. And, yet, as with Microsoft and Windows 11, I don’t see this concern out in the wider world. So maybe this is all my version of the too-technical, insular bubble: I’m not making up issues, but I raise them, and it doesn’t appear to impact mainstream users much for whatever reason.

In other words, we’re so involved in this space, and we feel like Microsoft is just making mistake after mistake. But mainstream users aren’t aware of this. And Recall, Copilot+ PCs, and Snapdragon X laptops will just sink or swim as they will, unencumbered by the things we’re so worried about.

This is a good perspective moment. If Recall was shipping on one billion PCs and Microsoft was found to have been secretly collecting that data and selling it to advertisers, there would be major news stories, investigations, and antitrust charges. But Microsoft shipping Recall in preview on PCs no one can or will buy (in volume), even if it’s as insecure and buggy as the critics believe, is comparatively a non-event. There’s no way to know the audience size that will be impacted in 2024, but there are 1.5 billion-ish Windows PCs out in the world. How many Snapdragon X PCs will be in use by January? 5 million? 10? How many will enable Recall? How many will be in businesses that turn it off? Even 10 million is a tiny number when you compare it to 1.5 billion. It’s 0.67 percent of the user base. Negligible.

Looked at from another angle, how many PCs succumb to ransomware each year? Is this on the news, ever, as some kind of massive, worldwide issue that we all suffer from? (Other than sensationalistic reports.) Has this prevented any normal people from using PCs every day? Whatever that number is, it’s bigger than the number of people impacted by Recall, I bet. And it’s kind of a non-event to the average user day-to-day.

We’re all a bit too far up Microsoft’s ass, I think. We know too much. We have worries that mainstream users never even consider and wouldn’t care about if we told them. And I mean “we” here: I am very much in this world and care very much about these issues. But we need to keep this in perspective. That’s really my only point when it comes to Recall, not that every criticism is wrong and that Recall is perfect. Just that we don’t know yet, and even when we do, this impact only a few people and will improve before it goes mainstream. If it ever does.