Ask Paul: June 14 (Updated) (Premium)

UPDATE: Embarrassingly, I missed some questions, sorry. I added those at the end. –Paul

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Happy Friday! This was another huge week, and we have another huge installment of Ask Paul to usher in our weekend a bit early. May we live in interesting times.

‘Twas the night before Snapdragon X, and all through the house…

madpapist asks:

Do you think that the introduction of performant Snapdragon+/Elite ARM processors and Copilot+ enabled hardware will result in the previously unfathamable prospect of Mac users switching over/back to Windows? 

No, but this is still important in addressing the advantages that the Apple Silicon-based Macs have over PCs, and if it goes well–it’s feeling like a bit of a long shot, suddenly, thanks to Microsoft’s bad PR theatrics around Recall–it could prevent future customers from considering moving to the PC. And/or just keep more customers on Windows and the PC vs. moving to whatever other platforms.

The thing we kind of lose sight of here is that, despite the very real advantages of these Macs, Apple’s desktop platform is still very low usage compared to Windows. Apple had just 8.7 percent of the PC market in 2023, flat with the year before. It was 7.8 percent in both of the previous two years, and that’s the entire lifetime of Apple Silicon in a nutshell. So you might argue that what Apple Silicon really accomplished was preventing the collapse of the Mac. There’s a big reality/perception divide there.

Having straddled the fence on this myself, I’ll wait for your hardware reviews to put at least 1 into the “switched back” column ?

I will say, I had this weird moment about three weeks into using the Mac where I found myself using it more and more and almost had to force myself to spend time on PCs. And the reasons were all about the “it just works” stuff, not about the respective OSes. I really do prefer Windows. But I got a few terrific review laptops in, and that was a healthy reminder that there are two sides to any story, and in this story, I want to use Windows. Which is why Snapdragon X and all the work evolving Windows on Arm matters so much to me: I want the reliability, efficiency, etc. of the MacBook Air … but on a Windows laptop. The AI stuff, to me, is a bit of a side show: This will evolve quickly, the first-gen Copilot+ PCs will quickly feel as out-of-date (from an AI perspective) as do the Meteor Lake PCs now, and as time goes on, this just becomes basic capabilities everywhere. The distinction will disappear. Recall, whatever. I just want to open a laptop lid and have the damn thing come on every single time.

wright_is adds:

The availability of Snapdragon Elite devices won’t help de-enshitify Windows, that is the main problem.

Yes. I think I babbled through this in the last Ask Paul or the one before, but this effort wasn’t about “fixing” the platform so much as it was about just getting it working properly. But that said, any architectural shift like this will trigger the culling of dead-weight technologies, so we may seem small benefits from that perspective.

But as far as user-facing enshittification–the OneDrive Folder Backup issue, or whatever I joked/not joked about in this tweet–right. Microsoft just needs to correct its behavior broadly. Windows on Arm won’t help with the behavioral issues.

Hamstrung gaming

madthinus asks:

An Xbox handheld: Is that a Windows PC with and Xbox interface or is it an Xbox handheld and the third kind of Xbox this generation?

We could both. Currently, there is this mini-market for Windows-based handheld gaming PCs that I previously compared to the brief moment in time in which 8.1-inch tablets were a thing. That doesn’t mean they’re doomed per se–and if Snapdragon X “works” that might make an excellent platform choice there–but … they are, right? Windows is just too big and heavy for such a device. And so Microsoft will have to adapt Windows for this if it seriously wants this form factor to succeed. I’ve heard nothing about that. The closest we’ve gotten is with the Xbox app, which now offers a compact mode that could be, as rumors suggest, a front-end for these Windows-based handhelds down the road. But architecturally, you’d need a Tiny11-like stripping down of the OS for this to even begin to make sense.

An Xbox handheld is inherently interesting and always has been. And while I used to imagine this as the sort of thing that would natively play previous-generation games, I’m increasingly wondering now whether this Arm shift is where it really makes sense. After all, the Xbox One and Series X|S are both x86-based, and so the only real advantage from a handheld system perspective is that the core OS is smaller/lighter than is Windows. But the games are just as big, etc. And they’ve been written to work on whatever the lowest-end Xbox One specs (screen resolution, RAM, etc.) are. An Arm-based Xbox handheld that could efficiently emulate older titles, or whatever titles, is interesting. And with that closed ecosystem, Microsoft could add that as a compatibility requirement for developers. So instead of using Xbox One or Xbox Series S as a baseline, maybe it could be this handheld.

The problems there are many, regardless of what the underlying platform is, and my experiences with Xbox Cloud Gaming on this trip show that streaming still isn’t the answer (my connection here is superior to that at home, especially on uploads, and it just doesn’t work well for the games I want to play). Microsoft has a smaller ecosystem than the competition. There are very real doubts about strategy and direction, and fears about all the gaming studios it owns. And it’s never been successful selling hardware, though it could go the PC route and let third parties do that. It feels like diminishing returns from a revenues/business perspective. Meaning, I’d love to see it, but it may never be successful for Microsoft.

I’d still love to see it. Windows has the volume but is not ideal for those types of devices, so an architectural change (or deep changes on x86) is required. And Xbox is low-volume enough that I could see it being a non-starter. Neither is ideal.

I’d still love to see it. 🙂 (Maybe if I repeat that enough, it will happen.)

The yin and the yang of AI

anderb asks:

Do you think AI will simply result in the enshittification of most apps it ends up in? Case in point: WhatsApp. I was recently forced to update the version of WhatsApp on my phone because expiring a version of an app that is working fine is apparently a thing now. The new version of WhatsApp has introduced an intrusive Meta AI search bar at the top of the screen that is pointless and cannot be turned off. How many other app makers are similarly going to inflict this sort of useless gimmick and app bloat on their users?

AI is like any technology in the sense that there will be good uses and bad uses, benefits and abuses. Your question reminded me of a comment I made early in Microsoft’s AI push, that AI was a bit like MSG, a flavor enhancer, something that could enhance anything it was added to. That assumes it’s always good, I guess, but that still feels right to me now that our understanding of AI has shifted as it’s advanced. That is, we have companies like Microsoft and Google trying to sell AI right now, but what they are really selling are products and services, not features. And that’s what AI: A set of features that enhance existing and new products and services. It’s like trying to sell object-oriented programming or whatever. It only makes sense briefly before everyone realizes that’s silly.

To your WhatsApp example, if you forget for a moment that the feature in question is about AI, and not just about AI, but about Meta’s Microsoft-like mad desire to secure a foothold in AI, then you can see that this is just the same as ever. Enshittification, because Meta is putting its needs above its customers. And a poorly implemented feature that you cannot disable (because, see above) that you do not want, that doesn’t make the app better. And maybe it makes it worse. But in the past, this could have been a weird AR/VR feature that you likewise didn’t want, or whatever. That it’s AI is sort of beside the point.

In this case specifically, users will or will not use this AI search bar and then the company will respond accordingly. (I see this in Facebook, too, though there it’s a little icon up in the corner so it’s not that offensive, yet.) We’re in a spastic, quickly moving era in which companies are just throwing this stuff at the wall to see what works. And history shows that almost nothing deployed that way ever works. So my guess is that Meta will calm down eventually and either remove that blight or at least figure out a version of it that is beneficial enough that people will want to use it. Or, the audience will move on to a non-enshittified message app that behaves how they wish. Any of those outcomes are OK.

But I guess the point is that AI is just the hot new thing right now, and this kind of push isn’t so much about AI as it is about enshittification.

Macs, NPUs, and Parallels

scj123 asks:

With the new Copilot+ PCs starting to appear next week, do you think there is any chance some of the AI stuff will be able to run on a Mac using parallels as they have a fairly decent neural engine in Apple Silicon. I am curious to try some of the features but don’t really want to buy a new laptop just to try them.

Yes, I think that will happen eventually, but I don’t see it working well on current generation Macs because the NPUs are fairly low-performance compared to Copilot+ PCs. (18 TOPS in the M3 family vs. 45 TOPS for Snapdragon X, so less than half.) The M4 hits 38 TOPS, which is right on the line, so we’ll get there. And maybe the M4 Pro/Ultras that come later for the Mac will be even better.

There is a nice thing happening between Microsoft, Parallels, and Apple Silicon-based Macs, of course, with the software giant formally supporting Windows on Arm via Parallels on those systems. And Parallels has always done a terrific job integrating the two OSes, which I’m sure you know if you use it. So I could see Parallels doing its own thing, too, and just letting it work. Or Microsoft formally supporting that when two conditions are met: M4x/whatever gets a 40+ TOPS NPU and the marketing window for Copilot+ PCs closes. Right now, Microsoft is really pushing this, but as Intel and AMD ease into that part of the market over time, it will just be open season.

Helping this, there is no doubt that we will third-party utilities of all kinds that bring the Copilot+ PCs features to NPU-less x86 PCs. And those efforts could help bring this stuff to any Apple Silicon-based Mac too. This is a genie in the bottle thing: It’s going to get out.

And let’s not forget the developer angle, which is core to Microsoft. There is only platform that lets you develop apps natively for all platforms, and that’s the Mac. Microsoft would be stupid to prevent Mac-based developers from creating AI-based solutions for Windows (or cross-platform). And bringing the NPU-based stuff to Apple Silicon feels inevitable, if only from that angle.

Fretbit

wright_is asks:

With Google dropping support for the website version of Fitbit and the continued enshitification of the Fitbit experience, do you feel that you will be moving away from Fitbit? Will you go back to the Apple Watch, or do you have any plans to look at alternatives, like Garmin and Polar? Although they are very much aimed at actual sports users.

I have used so many Fitbits over a lot of time, and these things, to me, are like the Kindle of the wearables world in that they get several days of battery life while providing a limited level of functionality that happens to perfectly match my needs. And what I’ve discovered trying various smartwatches, mostly Apple Watch and Wear OS/Pixel Watch, is that I can live with one day of battery but find the systems do too much. And so I very much do prefer Fitbit.

That said, there are so many compromises on Fitbit. The biggest is sleep tracking. It’s been notably bad for so long, it’s so useless I’d just disable it if I could.

And I look at the steady way in which Google is scaling back Fitbit with alarm: We’ve seen this story before, and we know how it ends. The recent Fitbit Ace LTE announcement felt like a notable exception until I discovered that it’s based on Wear OS. Guys, come on. There’s a place in the market between tiny wearables and full-blown smartwatches. And the previous generation Fitbit smartwatches landed in exactly the right place. But for whatever strategy reasons, they’re obviously dead.

Putting Fitbit in Wear OS is like putting NT in Windows, in a way: It’s the end of an era and a brand. But it’s also the end of something special. And it feels inevitable. All the focus in wearables, it seems, is in watches, not trackers. And I don’t personally want a watch. I feel like both should coexist. And Google is not a good steward in that regard.

So, yes. On one level, I do think about it. On another, I just “use” Fitbit now and don’t think about, right? Meaning, I don’t really do too much with it. I have only a few very basic needs there.

I have been testing a Samsung Galaxy Fit3 wearable for the past month and a half or so. This means, yes, that I have a wearable on each wrist, so I can compare them day-to-day. In many ways, this is a magical device. It gets even better battery life than my Fitbit Charge 5, despite its screen being almost literally twice the size. That screen is better, brighter, and much easier to read, and that’s huge given my middle-aged eyes. There is no version of me seeing the battery life reading on the Fitbit, ever, but I can see it on the Fit3 easily. And it is amazingly customizable, with far more watch faces than Fitbit offers.

It’s not perfect. Samsung doesn’t technically sell it in the US for some reason, though I was able to buy it on Amazon easily enough. And it only syncs with a Samsung app that’s only on Android, so you’re out of luck if you use an iPhone. (I have both, so this is only a minor issue.)

But I was just discussing this with my wife: When I lift my wrist, I only want to see a few things. The time, of course. My heart rate. The temperature/weather. Maybe my steps. Neither of these devices hit on all of those, though I suspect there is a Fit3 face that might or at least come closer. But the face I chose has heart rate, date, time, and battery life, and it’s so easy to read and beautiful, I really like it.

I’m not going to switch to the Fit3, exactly. But if my Fitbit just died, I would. I’ll continue forward for a while and see what happens in the meantime. Replacing Fitbit isn’t a priority, but I feel like this decision will be made for me when/if this device dies, Google never updates the wearables, or whatever. And I’ll move on. To what, I’m not yet sure.

The one thing I really miss from leaving Fitbit was that it would automatically register what I was doing and start tracking it in the background, if I forgot to start the session. Apple sometimes does this – with my bike, it will start to vibrate as I am riding, to ask if it should record the ride, but that is difficult, on a main road, wearing winter gloves, a thick pullover and a winter coat, it is hard to tap the screen! ? Fitbit would just automatically start recording.

Yes. I think the Pixel Watch 2 does this to some degree, as it has Fitbit inside, whatever that means. Apple Watch does too, but I don’t like the way it notifies you 10 minutes into a detected workout. But … yes.

I record workouts at the gym–and weights are manual on any device, I think. But for walks/steps/whatever, I just let it happen. I am concerned with things like resting heart rate (especially when in Mexico, but always) and blood oxygen measurements overnight (Fit3 told me recently that I hadn’t gone below 90 percent, which is good, especially here in Mexico). My wife really cares about phone notifications, she has a Fitbit Versa 4, but I don’t. I guess it depends.

Anyway, I would drop Fitbit like a bad habit if warranted. Sadly, that feels inevitable.

Related to this, AnOldAmigaUser asks:

As a Fitbit user, how do you feel about Google’s stewardship of the company? Does it concern you that the data collected is not subject to HIPAA?

As noted above, Google’s behavior here is concerning, and it feels like the end game is to integrate the Fitbit capabilities into its more strategically important platforms, not keep Fitbit going as a standalone business. The smartwatches must be dead, but I think/hope they’ll keep the trackers alive for at least a while.

Regarding HIPPA, no, not really. Google had to make privacy concessions to regulators in the EU before the Fitbit acquisition was approved, and while that doesn’t impact us here in the US, Google did pledge to protect user privacy by implementing its binding agreements with the EU worldwide. Can we trust Google?

I may have thrown up in my mouth a bit there. But … no, I’m not really worried about that.

You’ve been recalled

lindhartsen asks:

Curious if you have a take on how Microsoft fumbled the launch of Recall this poorly? The initial introduction brought good press, but it comes across like the company wasn’t prepared for the security hawks to tear apart a clear and obvious target.

The Recall mess is a perfect storm of Microsoft incompetence in that it involves a good idea poorly implemented that was rushed to market without any formal testing, bad timing–it is all about AI and landed right as Microsoft was forced to shift to focusing on security–and an utter lack of understanding of how important privacy is to customers. It’s incredible. You couldn’t make this up.

I discussed some of this on First Ring Daily this morning, but the Apple comparison is both obvious and necessary: Apple announced a slew of Apple Intelligence features that will arrive in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia, but what it didn’t say was that most of that stuff won’t be in 18.0/Sequoia 1.0, even in preview, and it will take several months for it to all happen. Microsoft, meanwhile, gets up on a stage in May, announces a crazy intrusive new AI feature called Recall, and plans to ship it on new PCs a month later … in preview because, seriously, Microsoft. The differences there are staggering, but Microsoft should have been on the same schedule as Apple, while being transparent about it. They’re just so excited to get AI out in the world, it’s like it’s clouding their judgment.

This was all so avoidable. But I feel like that’s true of all the awful stuff they’ve done to Windows 11. The thing that really bothers me is how clueless this company seems to be about how the world, their customers, regard them. No one should trust this company, not with this kind of thing, and yet they stand up on stage, somehow believing we’re all going to applaud and thank them, without laying out how they will protect our privacy and security. I wish they were more self-aware. They need to earn our trust, again and again. And they have done little to earn that trust recently. That makes their approach to announcing, marketing, and deploying Recall all the more bizarre. I mean, they must know we don’t trust them. Why pretend otherwise?

Only Microsoft could have f’ed this up so badly. It’s comical and sad.

What the what?

Markld asks:

This is a question about your questions for Ask Paul.

Do you ever ask yourself, ‘why did you[the reader] ask me that’?

No, not in Ask Paul. There are surprises, or things I could never have anticipated, but that’s one of the things I really like about doing this. There are also pretty frequent examples of questions that show me that people are thinking about the same things I am thinking about, which is always fascinating, almost telepathic. Ask Paul takes a lot of time to write–I often spend entire mornings on it, and it’s usually several thousand words long–but it’s something I really enjoy. It’s never confrontational, though I would never object to anyone calling me to task for whatever. It’s more of an in-depth conversation, in some ways. I like doing it.

That said, I routinely run into things in the comments to articles that make me wonder. I respect that we all have different backgrounds, experiences, and opinions. In personal relationships, I think of this in terms of, there are times when someone I care about will make the same decision I would, times they go in a different direction, but I understand it even if I don’t agree, and then those times when they make a WTF decision that I just can’t support. And that can be frustrating. Some comments are like that, of course.

In the end, I suffer from the same problem as anyone else in that I often feel the need to “prove” someone wrong or disagree when I’d probably be better off leaving it alone. I have a different level of responsibility there in that this is my site, of course, and if I was some kind of psycho, I guess I could just start deleting comments I disagree with or whatever. But I try for a reasonable balance tied to our community standards that breaks down to “treat others the way you wish to be treated,” meaning, go after opinions but not people, criticize companies and their representatives but not readers, and so on. It’s obvious in some ways, but also important to keep in mind. And sometimes I fail. Not so much in just deleting things, which I don’t do unless it’s something obviously egregious (i.e. not a disagreement), but rather in lashing out sometimes. I’m human. But it’s something that requires constant self-monitoring.

Do you get ‘answering’ block?

Not usually. More often, it’s a stream of consciousness type thing, where someone asks a question or set of questions that almost jumpstarts my brain and off I go. It’s halfway between a literally in-moment conversation, like one might have in person or on a podcast, and a formal editorial in which I’m researching things and fact checking, and making sure that what I’m writing is “correct” (defensible, I guess). But with Ask Paul, this feels more conversational. Maybe the starts of things that would otherwise turn into something more formal.

That said, there are interesting exceptions.

This came up above, and now here, so I looked it up. In last week’s Ask Paul, someone asked whether Windows on Arm was like New Coke in that it was this idea that seemed good but turned out being the wrong thing. I started off my answer with:

“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.” And what I wrote was based on something in Steven Sinofsky’s book Hardcore Software that I need to revisit based around the real reason behind the initial Windows on Arm push and how Windows RT did not realize that. And now we have the modern Windows 11 on Arm, which is even further from that vision in that it’s just Windows 11, but on Arm. And there’s a whole thing there I still think is worth writing up, but it’s not something I can clearly communicate yet. I will, I think. But this is an example of a writer’s block type thing in that I have this germ of an idea, and I think it’s interesting, but I can’t quite get there.

So I wrote what I wrote last week. And it’s … almost there. It’s a lot of words. But it’s not quite where I want it. And if I can get it there, it will turn into an article of whatever kind. I think what I answered was fine for Ask Paul, but this is an example of what I noted above, someone wondering about something I was wondering about, so that’s nice. But also an example of not quite getting there. Like there’s word on the tip of your tongue you can’t quite get out. And then hours later, you’re like, that’s it, I remember now.

I hope I get there. 🙂 The Windows on Arm stuff is deeply important to me.

How many times is it typical to edit your answers?

I try not to worry about that as much with Ask Paul as I do with formal editorials or other articles. As noted, I see this as conversational. Sometimes people will email me or comment on a podcast, and point out that I made some factual error or, more commonly left something out, and it’s like, yeah, sure. But that was recorded live, and I wasn’t reading a script, it’s just a conversation. Ask Paul is a step removed from that in the sense that I guess I could see editing or adding to an answer later. But it’s mostly a slice in time brain dump. And I think that has some value. I do an editing pass for spelling/grammar in the browser aside from whatever occurs in the editor I use to write it. But I don’t dwell on that: I’d rather spend the time just writing it.

Which reminds me.

I’m reviewing an HP ZBook Firefly 14 while I’m here in Mexico, and I do that the way I do every hardware review, where I make a copy of my laptop review template (in this case) and use that to take notes over time. So in this case, I’ll probably use the thing full-time for 2–3 weeks, at least, and as I go, I add to the document that will eventually become the review that will appear on the site. I open this thing just about every day, adding things.

And I write the bits of it that I can when I can. So, for example, the bits that communicate which components are in the review unit are all filled out now, but the commentary about performance, noise, and heat is still just in note form because that’s ongoing. In that section, I’ve written reminders about device-specific interfaces I’ve found for system control, performance control, and so on, not just where they are but what they do, and so on.

It occurred to me the other day that some might find this kind of thing interesting. I’m not sure how I’d write that up or explain it, per se. But over time, this document turns from being a shell, to being mostly notes, to being mostly a review, to being a finished review. And I mention this here because that’s what Ask Paul is, in some ways: A point between a shell of an idea and a formal write-up. It’s not quite fully formed. But maybe is, in some cases.

This may not make any sense, sorry. I can overthink the writing process, for sure.

Do answers come as easy as they appear in your posts, LOL?

I’ve told the story about how I had asked Gary, the guy who started me down this career path, what made him believe I’d be any good at writing. And how his answer–”I could just tell”–was so unsatisfying. And I’ve made various versions of the quip, “I can promise you a volume of writing, I just can’t promise any level of quality,” many times, I’m sure. But long story short, I can write. Whether I can write well is open to debate.

So, when it comes to “easy,” yes, writing comes naturally to me. I hope there’s a nexus of skill and knowledge in there somewhere, and self-awareness and self-deprecation, for that matter. Of empathy and understanding, and maybe, just maybe, this ability to make complicated topics more approachable or even help people get over some inset bias or stuck way of thinking. But I just do what I do, and everything I just wrote above is really just reflective and thinking back on what I’ve written, not some strategy or plan. I try. Sometimes I stick the landing. Sometimes I’m just a warning to others.

I think this is about being part of some peer group,  surrounded by others just like me. And that’s the conversational nature of all this, what makes this column special: It’s not just about me. I think that’s why this works.

Or something. I don’t know. 🙂

LIVE

christianwilson asks:

Who was the best band or musician you ever saw live? Mine is a toss up between Nine Inch Nails or Rush. Iron Maiden is high on the list, too.

Ah boy.

For whatever it’s worth, I’m a huge fan of live music, not just in person, but in recordings: I often choose a live version of a song over the studio version because of its rawer sound, which I feel is so much more “real.” I’m not a musician, so I may get the terminology here wrong, but I’ve often pointed out to my wife on music nights or whatever that most/many live songs are sped up a bit, a faster tempo I guess, compared to the studio versions, and that this gives them an urgency that doesn’t exist in the originals. It’s often fantastic.

As far as actual live performances, Def Leppard is at the top of the list: I’ve seen them a dozen times over the years dating back to 1998, and they are consistently excellent. Van Halen, obviously, in almost any form. There’s a Christian rock band called Stryper that had a good run in the late 1980s and early 1990s with mainstream rock songs, and their lead singer, Michael Sweet, has the strongest voice I’ve ever heard live, it was astonishing. (He has sung for Boston at times after Brad Delp’s passing.) On that note, Boston, incredible because they had four guitarists on stage, side by side, to emulate the sound of the original recordings. Collective Soul is consistently excellent, also one of my favorites, and they could overtake Def Leppard at some point, perhaps.

I have to be forgetting some. When I asked my wife, she mentioned Tori Amos. U2, of course. Kiss was spectacular right before the pandemic, like a Cirque du Soleil rock show. Fleetwood Mac, we saw them on their last tour with the full band.

Some of our best live music moments have happened in tiny rooms. Traditional Irish music (“trad”) in a pub outside of Dublin, with everyone singing along, magical. My favorite song, perhaps, is Volver A Comenzar by Café Tacvba, and there is an incredible live performance they did with an orchestra on MTV Unplugged that blew me away, but on our last trip to Mexico, we saw a two-piece band cover it in one of favorite holes in the wall up the street from here, and it was a delight. (You can’t get more extreme than going from a full orchestra to two guys in a room.)

Water crisis?

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

Have you been affected by the water crisis in Mexico City?

My wife and I will be doing a video about this soon for Eternal Spring. But no, nothing yet. We’re aware of it, of course, and we asked some friends in the building about this, but there’s been nothing in our area/building.

There was an interesting story about this that I’m struggling to find that basically said that Mexico City has plenty of water, it’s just not managed correctly. And the story there is probably familiar, but this city was built on a giant lake, and it’s been draining that lake for water for decades (or centuries, I guess) and so the surface is buckling, which leads to infrastructure issues in which buildings are all wavy and could topple, etc. It’s kind of fascinating, but you can see unlevel building everywhere. I was joking with my wife the other day that there isn’t a single right angle in all of Centro.

But out in Roma Norte, that’s not as bad. I think we’re geographically outside what used to be the lake.

Windows Hello? Hello?

OldITPro2000 asks:

First, where are the Windows Hello external cameras and/or monitors? I found scant choices in both categories, only four cameras and two monitors. I imagine this will be more of a problem with Copilot+ PCs which take more advantage of Hello. I would love it if Microsoft sold the monitor off of the Surface Studio 2+ separately.

Agreed. I thought a market for third-party Windows Hello cameras and fingerprint readers would occur, but there’s been precious little along those lines. (Anyone remember the Intel RealSense camera? I had one, but I don’t recall what became of it. Apparently, this product line is still a thing, though Windows Hello may be a thing of the past. Huh.)

Anyway. I wonder if there isn’t some security issue with USB-connected devices and how they could be spoofed. (I see wright_is says as much in the comments as well.)

Strong-Arming consumers

OldITPro2000 asks:

Why didn’t the Arm Dev Kit (Project Volterra) become a consumer product? I never use the laptop away from my desk, so the inking and screen folding features are just “nice to have.” The Volterra unit would have made a great replacement for the failed Dell. I imagine we will see Arm hardware for Windows in form factors besides laptops eventually, but the silence here is actually a little surprising.

Well, previously generation Qualcomm-based Arm chips for PCs were seriously lacking, and wouldn’t have been a good experience for consumers. It’s possible that the new Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows will fit the bill, though. It uses a Snapdragon X Elite processor, which has much better native and emulated performance, better compatibility, and supports things like AutoSR for games. I would like to see third-party NUC-type PCs, too, and Qualcomm has indicated that could happen. If Arm can fly on laptops, there’s no reason it can’t work in Small Form Factor (SFF) and other desktop PCs too.

 

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But wait. There’s more…

Preguntas

j5 asks:

Since you’re in Mexico right now thought I’d ask some questions about Mexico.

Do you like horchata? Don’t have to be in Mexico to try this of course. But it’s Mexican. My kids love it. We’ll make it sometimes or just buy it at the grocery store.

I don’t drink it all that much, but it’s not so much a like/dislike thing from a taste perspective. That said, I drink a lot of fruit drinks, where I don’t at home at all. Not so much juices as we know them in America, but aguas frescas (which are like blended whole fruits and vegetables with juice) and what they call aguas, which are basically just “light” fruit juices. I’ll try horchata the next time I see it.

Do you like Mexico Coke or American Coke. See if anyone else here knows the difference.

I don’t drink soda at all, but I have friends who do, and they claim that Mexican Coke is noticeably better. I assume it’s just a pure sugar thing.

How’s the Spanish coming along. If I remember correctly y’all were taking some personal coaching lessons online. I thought that was really cool.

My wife is taking lessons online with a teacher, I just use Duolingo. But it’s getting there. It’s clear that real immersion is required, as we do better just by being here and being forced to speak the language. If we can just figure out a longer schedule here, it would help a lot.

Have you ever considered changing one of your phones to Spanish to help learn it?

No, not yet. My wife does that full-time as it is (home or here), and I find it irritating. She’s an overachiever.

Ok last question what are some things that you really like about Mexico that you wish would be in the U.S.?

Generally speaking, the point of travel, as I see it, is to have different experiences. If everything is the same everywhere, what’s the point? And with Mexico City, we happened to land in this perfect mix of advantages related to cost, weather, accessibility, and so on, and there’s a lot to explore here, and Mexico City is a good hub for that.

But as far as things here in Mexico, I wish the US would adopt? Hm.

The health care system is vastly superior: You can get anything except controlled substances over the counter, there are doctors in neighborhood pharmacies, and everything (prescriptions, whatever) is dramatically less expensive. My wife had to get an antibiotic for her gums recently (she had a weird infection, perhaps from something getting between her tooth and gums) and it was a quick visit up the street, and inexpensive. In the US, this would have been an expensive nightmare.

The quality of the food supply is vastly superior, too. In the US, we rely on factory farms and ultra-processed foods, and to overcome that, you have to shop local at farmer’s markets and so on, and it’s expensive. Here, it’s sort of the same, but because the prices are so low (there’s a theme here, I think), good food–real food, I guess–is much more accessible. Mexicans are addicted to crap, sadly–candy, soda, etc.–but the food is there.

This is only true because we’re in a city, but we can walk to anything. Instead of driving to Costco or some giant supermarket once a week, we walk by a small abarrote (a bodega-like local mini-mart) and pick up stuff as we need it. This is healthier–we’re always walking–but also different in a kind of societal way. For example, last night, I picked one banana off a bunch and just bought that, and I saw an older woman buy a single pill (Tylenol or similar) out of a pill jar that they keep behind the counter. It’s a different way of thinking: Where Americans are stocked up, they get things as needed here.

One thing we’ve been serious about here is adapting to this place, not trying to make it adapt to the way we do things. This is something many expats here don’t do, and I don’t like seeing people not even trying to speak basic Spanish, as an obvious example. This happened last night with this loud US couple near us in a restaurant. Pipe down, idiots, and at least try. But many people don’t.

On the reverse, Mexicans are also addicted to noise. If I could bring anything from the US here, it would be to respect those around you by not blaring a stereo over the stereo right next door that for some reason is out on the sidewalk. That bit I will never agree with.

Copilot vs. Apple Intelligence vs. ChatGPT vs. Gemini

will – α asks:

In looking at how Apple announced Apple Intelligence this week at WWDC, what do you think Microsoft should do with Copilot to make it feel more a part of your life vs the paid add-on that it is now? Is this an uphill battle since Microsoft does not have a mobile solution where more people spend their time vs a desktop? Do you think Copilot could be added to Siri, the way ChatGPT was added, for business use?

This came up conceptually above, this notion that AI is not a product or service, but is rather a feature of existing or new products and services. And in that sense, Microsoft has sort of gotten it right: Copilot for Microsoft 365 makes Word, Excel, and whatever else better, Recall and the other AI features in Copilot+ PCs make that product better, and so on.

But I think the big difference between Apple and Microsoft, aside from their respective reputations, is that Apple is just making AI part of its apps and services, and making them better for “free,” while Microsoft is charging extra in many cases (Copilot Plus, Copilot for Microsoft 365, etc.). And it is this tiered subscription model thing that maybe feels weird here. Not because we don’t see this elsewhere—I mean, Apple One is like that, too–but because the benefits Microsoft is providing can/will be provided by others, often for free or at lower cost. This feels unsustainable.

Not owning a mobile platform is problematic for Microsoft, for sure. Why would anyone install a Copilot app when they can just get that in the OS? (Soon.) Apple has this entryway to an audience of billions of engaged users, where Microsoft has a big audience on Windows, but they’re not just not engaged, they’re openly hostile to any change. The reaction to the new Outlook is a typical example.

I do see a future in which Copilot is an option in Apple Intelligence and Siri, alongside ChatGPT, Gemini, and whatever else. It feels inevitable, but it requires more than a “choose your search engine” system for it to make sense to Microsoft. Ideally, a company could install a policy on a managed iPhone or other Apple device that, among other things, requires the use of Copilot because it understands the company’s data protection rules. And I’m not sure I see Apple allowing that. (Though I guess this is just MDM and could happen.)

I’m surprised Apple and Microsoft don’t partner up more often. Of course, I think that about Google and Microsoft too. There are deeper distrusts there, I guess. It’s too bad.

Quality

MartinusV2 asks:

How do you feel about the quality of the new ARM Surface (hardware/software) will be compared to the previous versions? Will Microsoft this time provide good firmware? I remember that there were many issues in the past. Very eager to read the reviews next week. Very tempted to buy one. I am evaluating my needs for work / gaming and personal use.

There is no doubt that this Snapdragon X generation is a major leap forward. I think I wrote this elsewhere, but I think of Windows on Arm as having three discrete generations–Windows RT, Windows 10/11 on Arm/Snapdragon 850/8cx, and now Windows 11 on ARM/Snapdragon X–and each was a big step forward. But the stars are aligning, it seems.

I am very curious about the reviews as well. I’m supposedly getting a review unit here in Mexico, but all review units have been delayed by Recall fiasco, so reviewers won’t get the first units until next week now. I will be paying close attention, which I don’t normally do, because I want to make sure I’m buying the right thing, assuming I want one at all. I think it will be good. But we’ve been burned so many times. It’s hard not to get twitchy about this.

Just a few days to go. Just remember that whatever write-ups you see up front will be hot takes. No one has these PCs as I write this.