Ask Paul: June 28 (Premium)

Hola from Mexico City, and happy Friday! We’re heading home tomorrow, so here’s one last Ask Paul for the road. See you on the other side.

Shutting out the noise

jeroendegrebber asks:

On my recent flight, I tried my Buds 2, and found their noise cancelling to be … wanting. My old MDR1000X were excellent and made the flight so much more pleasant, because the airplane noise was really cancelled out. The comparison is a bit unfair given in ear vs over ear. What do you use in flight and what are your experiences?

I had been using a pair of OG Bose QuietComfort Earbuds for a few years, I guess, and I tried to upgrade to a second-gen pair last year, but none of the tips fit my ears well, and they didn’t seem to have the same level of active noise cancelation (ANC), so I gave them to my wife. More recently, I got a pair of Apple AirPods Pro 2 earbuds and was surprised that the ANC was slightly better at the gym and on planes. And so I’ve worn those on the past few trips, I guess. The battery life is better too.

That said, earbuds are easy to lose, especially on a plane (though the AirPods being white helps; the Bose earbuds are black and it’s a nightmare when one falls out on a plane). And even though I hate over-the-air headphones, I’ve been thinking about getting something with ANC just for flights. But I’m not even sure what that would be, and will need to research it.

(Semi-related, my daughter’s headphones recently broke and in discussing this with her, I was surprised that she wasn’t an earbuds fan: But they fall out too easily, which makes sense. She ended up getting a pair of Beats Solo 4 headphones on sale, but they don’t have ANC.)

Doomed

anderb asks:

How do you feel about buying Doom 2016 the day before it was discounted by 80% in the Steam store?

I don’t even understand the question. 🙂 I just wanted to test a game, and it’s a work expense. I don’t “feel” anything.

That said, Doom (2016) for PC is on sale for just $3.99 right now on Steam (and Doom Eternal is just $9.99), so if you don’t have either title and are interested, this is the time. Many other games are on sale as well, of course: The Steam Summer Sale runs through July 11.

Efficiency

spacecamel asks:

Since Apple can integrate their OS so tightly with the chip, do you think Microsoft will be able to get the same power efficiency results from their laptops or will they just get close?

When I started writing about my first Copilot+ PC experiences, I plotted out several articles, and the one I published yesterday, Snapdragon X Copilot+ PC: Early Thoughts on Battery Life, was originally focused on efficiency, which is sort of a vague target that encompasses more than just battery life. But it kind of took on a life of its own, which is fine, as I was struggling to explain why efficiency—which we might see as a “performance per watt”-type thing–even matters. Well, that and the fact that I’d been comparing the Snapdragon X to what we used to call Ultrabooks, which were thin and light laptops based on 15-watt U-series Intel Core chips, and these are essentially 28-watt designs, similar to the 12th and 13th Gen Intel Core P-series chips. But those numbers, while not quite meaningless, don’t tell the full story. I don’t, and most people don’t, care how much using such a laptop would “cost” in electricity costs over a year or whatever because the differences in real-world terms compared to a less efficient laptop is actually miniscule. And Snapdragon X chips can operate in a range of TDP (thermal design power), which is a measurement of generated heat, just like any other chip. In this case, between roughly 15 and 80 watts. And … measuring efficiency is difficult, basically. As is comparing the efficiency of one chip against another. It may in some ways be pointless compared to more easily understood metrics like battery life and observable heat and fan noise.

To your question, what we’re wondering here is whether a Snapdragon X-based Copilot+ PC can deliver that same combination of magical qualities we see with the M3-based MacBook Air: A thin and light design that is fanless (no active cooling and thus silent) and yet delivers incredible performance, battery life, and reliability. Reliability being a vague term, too, which to my mind encompasses all kinds of things, including a consistent, immediate instant-on experience every single time you open the display lid, no drama when it comes to the OS itself or the apps you use, a sort of literal “it just works” thing. Efficiency, which is sort of a subset of that combination of qualities—performance, battery life, instant-on reliability, etc.—is a big part of it. But I guess I’m thinking of this holistically, the total package.

The answer today is no. But to be fair to Qualcomm and Microsoft, the situation is dramatically better than it’s ever been thanks to the hardware improvements in the Snapdragon X chips and the software improvements in Windows on Arm. As I wrote yesterday and previously, all we have a right to hope for is that these PCs are in the ballpark when compared to the MacBook Air. And while my experience is limited, I review many, many laptops every year, and I’ve used PCs based on each generation of Qualcomm chips. And this is night and day: A massive improvement. It does not match or exceed the MacBook Air, but it does run Windows 11, which I prefer. And it comes close.

Will it ever get there?

That’s impossible to say for sure. But Apple has a few inherent benefits that will be difficult to overcome. Leaving aside subjective preferences like mine for Windows, the company makes the hardware and the software and can tailor each in ways that partnerships like Microsoft/Qualcomm cannot. Not only do these companies had different agendas—Qualcomm will use this architecture as the basis for future flagship mobile chips, too—but many PC makers are involved, and they, too, have different agendas: PC makers are far more concerned with beating other PC makers than they are with beating Apple. That reality may skew the designs we see.

I mentioned this yesterday, but it’s an important point: Apple transitioned to Arm, and the developer base went along with it and updated their apps to run natively on the new platform. But Microsoft is adding Arm to the mix, not replacing x86/x64. And because of the exclusive decades-long focus on x86/x64, Windows and the apps that run on it are optimized for that architecture, and many apps will never be ported at all. Here, we have a weird chicken-and-egg problem: Because Windows now runs on both x86/x64 and Arm, and because x86/x64 is dominant, Microsoft has had to make and then improve an emulator on Windows on Arm so that those apps just work. And because the new version of this emulator, Prism, works so well, developers may be less inclined to port their x86/x64 apps to Arm. I mean, why go to the trouble if it just works? This piles on the normal porting issues, where the scarcity of Arm PCs makes it unattractive to do this work to begin with.

Is there some future where Arm becomes the mainstream platform for Windows? Maybe. But that is many years away, and it kind of doesn’t matter: x86/x64 apps will be the reality in Windows for basically forever. And while we have seen lots of app port wins thanks to the Snapdragon X, it will never be like it is with Apple’s ecosystem. That transition is complete. We’ll always be straddling the two worlds. Or rm will fail, and we’ll be stuck on x86/x64 (well, x64) forever. At least it will be more efficient.

This goes back to the original goals for Windows 10 on Arm, which was not about replacing Intel (and AMD, I guess, but really Intel) with Arm, but rather about forcing them to compete and evolve their chips to be more efficient. Among the things Terry Myerson told me was beating Intel didn’t matter. What mattered was making Intel change. And that is finally, belatedly, happening. The next-gen Intel Lunar Lake chips look very interesting, we’ll see, and AMD will offer similar advances. And we may simply arrive at a place where x64 is efficient too, but it offers full compatibility with apps natively, including games, and including optional discrete graphics, and none of this will matter. There are all kinds of possible outcomes.

But as Windows users, we need to be comfortable with the dark side of the choices we have in terms of hardware on the PC side comes with a dark side, too: What we have will always be less elegant and more kludgy than what Apple can offer. It’s just reality. But Apple will have a more limited set of choices. So you pick which you prefer. So far, the Windows kludgy world has won in the market and by a wide margin. And though Apple Silicon is successful, that hasn’t helped the Mac make meaningful inroads against Windows. Even small efficiency gains—that “being in the same ballpark” thing—are likely enough to prevent a mass exodus. That is, we can’t be as efficient on the PC side, but we can get close, and I bet that will be good enough.

Related to this, Markld asks:

Just reading your post ‘Snapdragon X Copilot+ PC: Early Thoughts on Battery Life’, very nice!

Thanks. 🙂

The question which came to my mind really bugged me then begged me to ask is how did Apple pull off their Mac M1 versus Microsoft’s Windows on Arm and their rather pitiful efforts?  How were they able to do it? Is it because Windows is too complicated and the MacOS is not? Are there more capable engineers at Apple?  Why was Apple so able to pull off what they did? I could answer some of these, but some would require a book, too, but would love a response, thanks!

This is explained above: It’s because Apple transitioned the entire platform to Arm-based Apple Silicon chips. We’re not doing that with Windows. We’ll always have both (unless Arm just fails).

It helps that Apple’s developers seem quite complaint. But Apple also made it very easy to produce universal binaries that run on both Intel and Arm Macs. In time, they will shut off the Intel side of that (as they did before with PowerPC).

Apple should get a lot of credit for its work porting macOS across two architecture shifts. But Microsoft’s been doing that for years. Windows on Arm is just the latest in a long list of PC-based architectures, but there are and were multiple cross-platform Windows derivatives across server, cloud, portable/mobile devices, embedded devices, IoT, and more. Microsoft has far more expertise with this than Apple, in part because it never just abandoned a platform to move to a new one. It kept going on multiple platforms and still does.

With regards to Windows on Arm, honestly, the most impressive thing is that they kept going. It would have been very easy to give up on this, given the lack of enthusiasm over the past decade-plus. But it’s in a good place now. Wrangling that many cats—all the OS work, all the app compatibility and emulator work, years of partnering with Qualcomm to evolve the hardware to where it is now, convincing PC makers to accept less hardware customizability and other limitations, etc.—it’s a miracle this even happened. That other chipmakers may jump onboard soon is further incredible. It’s easy to be cynical, but we should see this for the accomplishment it is.

Total recall

rbwatson0 said:

Is there any updated timeline for the Recall feature to roll out to the Copilot+ PCs?

No, no one has said a word.

My guess is that we’ll wake up one day to a random Windows Insider Program blog post explaining that this feature is available for testing in whatever channel(s), and that it will expand through the system over a few months, hit Release Preview in September, arrive as a Week D preview update later that month, and then land in stable (General Availability channel) in October as part of the second major release of Windows 11 version 24H2. And that the initial release will still be a preview. And then it will be sometime in 2025 before it’s considered stable.

I further assume the AMD/Intel-based Copilot+ PCs will ship with that updated Windows 11 24H2 with the Recall preview.

Installing Windows while offline

Christian-Gaeng asks:

I’ve been using a Huawei Matebook D16 2024 laptop since March and am mostly very happy with it, but I have a problem. The laptop doesn’t have a LAN connection. When I installed 24H2, I had the problem of not having internet to log in with my Microsoft account. I solved the problem by first installing Windows 10 with a local account and then updating to Windows 11 24H2. Is there another way to reinstall a laptop without a LAN without going through Windows 10? I know Rufus offers the option of bypassing the account requirement. But that didn’t work last time.

Microsoft killed all the Windows 11 Setup Internet and Microsoft account (MSA) requirement workarounds I documented in the Windows 11 Field Guide in Windows 11 version 24H2. I’m aware of one way to avoid signing in without using an MSA (or work or school account) that I’ll be writing about soon, but I’m not aware of any way to do it without being online, at least not yet.

I sometimes run into this issue when I use the Microsoft ISO to reset a laptop. My solution is to use an Ethernet cable with a USB-A or USB-C dongle (depending on the laptop) so it will get past that part of Setup. But I’m still looking for a workaround for this.

You could also just use Reset this PC. That should work and not require a wired connection, as the built-in restore image includes the necessary Wi-Fi drivers.

Mac and AI

helix2301 asks:

Paul people are going crazy over some of Mac features this year like window tiling and iPhone mirroring again all features Microsoft had first with Samsung and tiling windows was something that Microsoft had along time ago.

I don’t think iPhone mirroring is going to be all that interesting: I’ve been using the similar feature in Phone Link with Samsung flagship phones over the past month and it’s not super-compelling. There was a similar excitement around running iPhone and iPad apps in macOS, and you don’t hear anything about that anymore.

And the AI built into MacOS is so far behind Microsoft. I’m actually a Mac fan and I’m like wow Apple the one place Microsoft still a head of Apple is the desktop OS.

I’m not sure what to say to that: Microsoft has definitely moved more aggressively than Apple (or Google, really) to add AI capabilities to Windows, but it’s not like any of them are game-changing. So far, these just amount to specific features—like Background removal—in specific apps—Paint, Photos—and they’re the types of things all similar apps will soon have. Apple will add these things to their own apps too. (And Google is already doing the same.)

I’m suprised Apple has not built AI into Final Cut I mean they have big user base for that product they need to add AI before they loose it to others.

It will. But when I use an app like Clipchamp, it’s not obvious or important that 2 or 3 of the features in there are in some way AI-based. They’re just features. All video editing apps will be updated with AI capabilities, across all platforms. We’re still in the early days of this. (Even Adobe Premiere doesn’t have any NPU-based capabilities yet.)

Anyway. Don’t worry about Apple. They’ll get there. 🙂

Feeling loopy

Ruvger asks:

What’s up with Loop? Is it getting any traction?

I’ve lost track of Loop as a standalone app, it just doesn’t seem to have any traction at all. By comparison, when Microsoft launched OneNote over 20 years ago, it was very exciting, and many people—students, professionals, whomever—could immediately see the need. But with Loop, it’s … another way to do the same thing? Something that is an awful lot like Notion? Another note-taking app? It just doesn’t feel obvious.

The magic of Loop is in the backend, of course. But getting people excited about that is like getting them excited about OLE or COM back in the day: We expect to copy and paste between apps and no one cares how it works, and we expect shared content stored in the cloud to always be up-to-date even with multiple contributors, and similarly don’t care how that works. Notion, for example, doesn’t have a sophisticated backend like Loop, and you can’t access Notion “components” in other apps. But Notion is simple and it just works. And that’s the type of thing that normal people do care about.

I’m not sure I see Loop ever taking off at this point. Even before Microsoft’s AI push, it was on the slow boat, and it never generated even a tiny percentage of the interest we saw and still see in Teams. But now it just feels lost in all the noise.

Quantum computing + AI = Skynet

beewacker asks:

If we are at the start of the age of “ai learning” based on x64 architecture. What will happen when quantum computing is commonplace and learning becomes knowledge? How long do we have before this is a reality?

Quantum computing feels like fusion energy, a wonderful hope for the future that may never be realized. And it’s not like we’re seeing major advances there as we are suddenly with AI. It’s going to be a while.

But AI doesn’t need quantum computing to be useful, obviously. Should that ever happen, though, the results will be both wonderful and terrifying. I think that could be when AI “learning” turns into literal AI learning, hopefully the end of the hallucinating, and the beginning of a new age of advances.

But baby steps. I’m still struggling to figure out if a new chipset design makes sense for Windows laptops. Computing at the speed of light and solving cancer are on another level entirely. The good news is it won’t happen anytime soon, if at all.

The great outdoors

j5 asks:

Hey Paul are ya’ll campers or into the outdoors?

My wife and I love the outdoors, but we’re not interested in camping at all. As Stephanie puts it, I just want to sleep in a bed.

I recently came back from a week-long Boy Scout summer camp as a Scout Leader in NorthEastern Tennessee. We had zero cell service except for when you were at specific buildings that had WiFi. And even then only adults were allowed to carry phones, the Scouts had to leave all electronics in the cars in the parking lot. It was so nice to unplug from the Matrix, so to speak.

Yes, nice. We’ve lost touch with so much in this modern world, not just this sort of thing, but where food comes from, what real food is, and so on. But unplugging is important.

Now I’m fully plugged into everything again it’s kind of sickening feeling. But unfortunately smartphones, email, computers, screens are a necessary double edged sword in our modern lives.

Indeed.

I know you need to be connected because it’s your job. But do you have ways to unplug/reset from constantly being plugged in?

I’m in a bit of a tough spot here because my job is all about technology. But I’ve always tried to keep it sane. When you think about the smart phone stuff, for example, to me, it’s a balance of need and simplicity, and we’ve done far less of that than many in my position have. I don’t sleep with a phone next to me, it’s out in the kitchen charging, but I do read on a device (usually an iPad), and I try to focus on nonwork reading, like books. We walk a lot, and while I do take photos here and there, it’s not about the phone (and we don’t wear earbuds or whatever). Here in Mexico, a big part of the experience is walking and discovering new places, nothing tech related.

But you have to strike a balance. I’m not going to buy and collect physical books because that’s silly, devices are better. We watch TV using an Apple TV and online services because that makes sense. Etc.

Oddly, this came up recently. I’ve long felt that we had an overreaction to smartphones and that things would settle down, but many people are more immersed in their devices. We were walking up the street here in Mexico City, and we saw this guy, face in phone, almost walk into traffic before a driver blasted the horn and scared the hell out of him. I told my wife, who has never been into science fiction, that Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, and Arthur C. Clarke, for all their predictive skills, could never have seen that coming.

She asked what I meant, and I said that Asimov essentially invented this notion of tablet-like computing devices that could answer any question almost 100 years ago. But in his stories, these devices were just a part of life, a thing everyone had and never needed to think about. In today’s world, we’re obsessed. I don’t think he ever imagined such a thing, that a tool would be our collective obsession.

It’s something to work on, for sure.