Ask Paul: September 13 (Premium)

Happy Friday! I’m still reeling from the trip to Berlin, but I’m home and sort of rested, and ready for an early start to the weekend.

Let’s dive in.

AI gotta be me

spacecamel asks:

Why do I feel that Apple is going to integrate AI into MacOS better than Microsoft into Windows? Both companies are really good at software but it seems that you know Apple is going to get it right and Microsoft is going to produce something and never update it.

We’re going to look back on this several year period or whatever it turns out to be and laugh. Microsoft under Satya Nadella had been the slowest moving, most conservative tech giant imaginable–almost IBM-like, dare I say–which made its sudden pivot on AI so confusing. And then the sheer speed at which it moved to make it happen was both alarming and chaotic. It seems like a completely different company now.

But for all the handwringing from its fan base, Apple has simply done what Apple has long done in taking a slow, measured approach. Whether it is as successful as it was entering markets for MP3 players, phones, tablets, wearables, and headphones/earbuds (or whatever) remains to be seen. But its established a clear positioning for itself, and if it can do with AI what it’s done for its cross-device ecosystem integration generally, it could emerge as a real leader. Then again, this is the company that sat on Siri for a decade. It’s difficult to say. But my money is on Apple maybe not nailing it per se, but getting it right in the broad strokes.

Microsoft? I don’t know. I’ve expressed my worries for its AI business model when it comes to first-party services a few times, but the short version is that I don’t see a future in charging customers specifically for AI. The model there is somewhat established, however: Individuals and companies today license Microsoft 365 for their own reasons–the OneDrive storage, perhaps, the desktop Office apps, or whatever–and then they just get the rest of it for “free” and use it or don’t. This can work with AI features, I guess. It can work for Google. It may even work someday for Apple (there are rumors of a coming AI subscription of some kind). But the silver lining for Microsoft is that it can always play that (IBM-like) role of providing the infrastructure for those services that consumers/businesses do pay for. And be the electricity of the AI age in a way (as will Amazon and, to some degree, Google will as well). So they’ll be OK.

But what you’re really expressing is the thing I care about as well. I couldn’t care less about Azure if I tried. But I do care about Windows and what I think of as the entire client stack, from Office and Outlook to whatever else. And you can see the impact of the chaotic nature of Microsoft’s approach to AI everywhere in these products. Just looking at Copilot in Windows, Microsoft spaz-launched it ahead of 23H2 to force it on the user base and then changed the UI and moved the location of its Taskbar icon several times. Just in 9 months or so. They have no idea what they’re doing. When Microsoft announced Windows 11, the big news was the move to one feature update a year. Now they literally add features every single month. What. Why?

So, to your point: Yes. Apple will never do that. And while some may view its approach as slow or whatever, I see it as measured and mature. AI caught everyone by surprise, just like the iPhone did in a previous generation. But the world is so different now, and I don’t see Apple declining because of this. I see AI as lifting all (computing platform) boats roughly equally. It will just be everywhere. And if history is any guide, yes, we will have second rate experiences in Windows, because that’s all this team is capable of. And we’ll see more well-considered capabilities on Apple’s platforms. Whether this moves the needle on the relative popularity of these platforms is unclear, but I’m betting it doesn’t. It’s not like the incredible AI advances in the new Pixels will turn these phones into a market power.

Same old, same old.

50

Leo_W was:

I’ve experienced a YouTube Music issue in the browser and even the Windows app. For long road trips I will create a lengthy playlist. When playing the list at home in a web browser–I’ve tried Chrome and Edge–while I’m working on other things I notice it only puts 50 songs in the queue. It stops at the end of those 50 songs. I’ve also tried the Windows YouTube Music app with the same result. When using the Android app it will play all of the songs. Have you experienced that? Any work arounds that you’re familiar with.

I hadn’t noticed this, but then I only rarely play music at length in desktop web browser. When I flew to Berlin last week, for example, I downloaded several of my playlists in YouTube Music on the Pixel and it all worked normally. In fact, I commented to my wife about one playlist I had grabbed as a curiosity because of its name (“YouTube Music is trying too hard”) and because I didn’t even know where it had come from: There are over 500 songs in this, and it was going most of the night during that overnight flight and I never heard the same song twice.

This morning, I took at look at YouTube Music in Brave on this laptop and decided to rifle through a playlist that has over 100 songs. I could have saved myself some time, as it turns out, but I let each song play for a bit and hit next, repeating that for a while. And then I did some math: I can see 9 songs in the list onscreen at once, so I went down 5 screens worth of songs, added another 5 and … hit the end. That was the end of the now playing list. Could it be? I counted the songs more accurately and, sure enough, it’s exactly 50 songs. The playlist I had started has 132 tracks. But only 50 were in now playing.

So it’s clearly a bug (or known issue or maybe even a known limitation). I Googled this, of course, and found a support thread from July that was shot down rather abruptly and never really answered. (This is on Android, however, so I’m not sure what’s going on there.) Google’s response was simply to send them this feedback from YouTube Music. Which makes me believe they know about it.

As for workarounds, I guess it just comes down to not playing the playlist from your PC. It seems to work on mobile, based on my recent experience and on years of music nights. It’s like the joke where you tell your doctor that doing a certain thing hurts and is answer is to stop doing that. Hopefully, Google will fix this.

Progressive isn’t a four-letter word

christianwilson asks:

I know you listen to a lot of classic rock but do you listen to much progressive rock, particularly the foundational works from the 70s?

When I was growing up, this was just rock, I guess. It only became classic when I got older. 🙂 That said, I did listen to music from the 50s, 60s, and 70s during the 1980s, so I guess I’ve always listened to classic rock/pop in a way. But yeah, my big push into progressive rock came after it had mostly come and gone when I got really into Yes in the very late 1980s and early 1990s. I used to listen to the CD versions of 1970s Yes albums like Fragile, Close to the Edge, Relayer, and so on using a pair of over-the-year headphones. This reached a kind of apex during the Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe run and then the band’s reunion tour for Union, and then it calmed down quite a bit.

The only band of that rough genre that impacted me as much or more is Pink Floyd, which feels rather obvious, but I came to that later in life. And I would say their long-term influence and interest is now greater than that of Yes. I’m a huge fan of Gilmour-era Pink Floyd, and I appreciate a lot of the David Gilmour solo stuff as well. (He has a new album right now, in fact.) Pink Floyd is one of my regular downloads for flights as noted above.

I could write/talk about Yes and Pink Floyd quite a bit. But beyond those two bands, it’s mostly just one-off tracks. Is Rush considered progressive rock? Probably not, but they’re in the same pantheon.

Indifference

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

I am finding that Windows 11 leaves me feeling indifferent with regards to Windows. I don’t hate it, but I don’t find that I particularly want to use it. The constant yet inconsistent upgrades, not respecting user choice, and the interface changes which seem to be steps backwards. It almost feels like they are trying to make it a mobile operating system and it isn’t.

I get that to some degree.

There are objective and subjective angles to this. Objectively, Windows 11 launched in a very incomplete state, and it had all kinds of functional regressions. Those are mostly fixed, but as you note, that success is somewhat countered by the enshittification stuff. I wrote A Windows 11 Enshittification Checklist (Premium) almost for myself, as I reference it constantly to see where we’re at and whether specific third-party utilities solve any of those issues.

But most of them don’t impact me personally.

The big one, of course, is forced OneDrive folder backup, and I will never understand a system explicitly asking the user, repeatedly, what they want and then silently ignoring that choice. But I “fix” that (really, workaround it) by using Google Drive instead. (With a temporary pause this summer until Google Drive works with Windows 11 on Arm.) Related to this, Office apps likewise badger you to use OneDrive and there’s no way to turn that off. So I just don’t use Office. Problem solved.

The second most offensive behavior in Windows, to me, is the forced Edge usage, though that doesn’t come up all that often. I’m weirded out that Edge also berates those users who do choose Microsoft’s browser but are silly enough to try and change some defaults. But I don’t typically use Edge, so … whatever.

Those aren’t great, for sure. But it’s also three years later. Copilot, which was working out to be the next big annoyance, is now just an app, so it can be uninstalled or, more important to me, quickly closed (with a Ctrl + W) when it appears, unwanted, because I mistakenly hit that stupid new key on laptop keyboards. Beyond that, Windows 11 is objectively in a better place than it was when it first came out.

Subjectively, Windows 10 looks dated to me. And while one could perform the same work in Windows 10 as they would with Windows 11, I very much prefer the Windows 11 look and feel. You mention mobile OSes, but I think the concession Microsoft has made internally is that it cannot turn Windows into a mobile OS, those efforts failed. But the user interface they’ve adopted is vaguely mobile OS-like and offers similar interfaces (Start, Quick settings, and so on). And … I like it. I feel like the rough UX commonality can make sense, just as Apple might do this more explicitly between iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. But I get it. This is subjective. You may see that differently.

Forgetting that what you do revolves around writing about Windows, could you be happy using another system, whether it be Chrome, Linux, or Mac? Is there a specific Windows only app that you depend on that would keep you on Windows not matter what?

If you had asked me this question 20 years ago, I probably would have cited the vast library of Windows-specific apps as the key reason one would pick this platform over whatever competitors. Since then, however, that advantage is somewhat diminished. In part by the rise of web apps, but also in part by the natural evolution of how we experience personal computing: In the 1990s and early 2000s, the PC was it, but now we do a lot of these tasks on smartphones. So to me, the PC is all about what I call traditional productivity tasks–word processing, spreadsheets, etc.–and it’s useful for its big screen and good for content creation of whatever kind (video editing, etc.) I’m of a generation that would never do anything important (buy plane tickets, whatever) on a phone: That’s for the PC.

Today, my response is that I prefer Windows because of Windows. Not because of the apps, though there are a handful that are Windows-specific or just better on Windows. This, too, is subjective, or experience-based, or even specific to one’s needs and expectations. There are people who play games on PCs, for example, and that experience is not possible on the Mac, or Chromebooks, or whatever. But for me, I could get work done in ChromeOS, or a Mac, and get on with my life quite easily. But I do prefer Windows overall. The multitasking is better, full stop. This isn’t tied to writing per se, but I am a heavy user of keyboard shortcuts and that, too, is “better” in Windows in that it’s just super-familiar to me.

I feel like I have to keep defending this position, but there is an assumption out there that if I didn’t focus on Windows professionally, I would switch to the Mac or something else. But that’s not true. If I suddenly won the lottery and didn’t need to work, I would keep using Windows. Maybe on a nicer, more expensive PC. But it would still be Windows. This year was all about me trying to get that MacBook Air experience with Windows. And I spent a lot of money on a Surface Laptop, which is something I’ve not spent money on in a long, long time. That worked out great, in my opinion. Very happy with that.

But here’s the thing.

There is no reason to not research and think about these other platforms. I would spend time noodling in Linux, especially, since it’s free, if you’re bored or indifferent to Windows 11. You have these options. I do this all the time. I’m happy to experience these things, and I’m always open to change. But I have to do what’s right for me. And to date, Windows has withstood the challenges. That’s me. You may go in a completely different direction.

Podcasts

j5 asks:

What non-tech podcasts have you been listening to? Are you still using PocketCasts? I love the new bookmark feature.

I do still use Pocket Casts. And most of the podcasts I listen to regularly aren’t in any way tech-related. Listed in order of preference (time spent listening), my go-to’s are The Rewatchables, If Books Could Kill, Maintenance Phase (though this one can be grating and has gotten less frequent), Rolling Stone Music Now (select episodes), and That Chapter (which I like less now that he has a regular co-host). I haven’t gotten too far into yet, but I also just subscribed to a new podcast put out by the NSA (yes, the National Security Agency) called No Such Podcast (a riff on the agency’s unofficial name, No Such Agency). We’ll see if it sticks but it looks interesting.

Unremarkable

j5 asks:

Have you ever looked into the Remarkable e-ink tablet and other e-ink tablets? I caught a headline that they have a new color display model. I couldn’t give up my iPad Mini, which I mostly use for a pure e-ink reader. But the long battery life and lighter weight make it compelling. What do you think of these e-ink tablets?

I was just discussing this with my wife. With the caveat that a color e-ink-based Android tablet might actually satisfy this need, I’m holding for an color e-ink Kindle. And I’m confused that Amazon has never really released such a thing. My guess is that Amazon’s hardware devices kind of fall into an anti-Apple (or Bizarro World Apple, where everything is the opposite) positioning, meaning cheap and underpowered, and that color e-ink is still too expensive to bother with. But Amazon has sold some very expensive Kindles here and there. And I would have purchased a new large-screen grayscale Kindle, even, if they still sold such a thing. But they don’t.

Anyway. If Amazon announced a color e-ink Kindle today, I would buy it immediately. In the meantime, I do look at whatever color e-ink devices there are, and I have considered the reMarkable tablet. But I don’t care about note-taking and using a stylus, and would never need or use that. I just want it for reading. That’s pretty much all I do on my iPad, which I use every day. But I would replace it in a heartbeat if Amazon ever woke up.

Just plain Yoghurt

j5 asks:

Clara Peller voice (Wendy’s commercial) “Where’s the Thurrott merch?” Any word on how this is coming along?

Sorry, nothing yet. I had (not) joked that this would happen because my wife was on it, and she is/was, but like everyone else, we get caught up in more important matters and things like this fall by the wayside. I will forward this to her, and I know she does want to get this going.

Quick update: My wife is visiting family in the Boston area, so I texted her about this. She told me it’s in her calendar, which means it’s an active to-do (she emails me weekly reminders if I don’t finish things using the same system). The short version of her answer is that there are many services for this, and she wants to make sure we don’t go with something cheap. And she’s seeing an old coworker today who may have some insights about this and will ask her as well. So it’s not completely forgotten.

Us IT guys are all the same

Christian-Gaeng asks:

We use Microsoft Edge Enterprise at work and I noticed that it is a little more user-friendly then the standard Edge browser for private use. Do you see any real advantages over the normal customer version?

There should be a word or term for this. But something I suspect many will relate to is this behavior that we’ve all engaged in over the years in which we apply work-oriented software or services to our personal lives. Hopefully, few of you have ever gone down the extreme path of implementing, say, a Windows Server-based Active Directory infrastructure at home, or the even more extreme path of forcing your family members to be managed that way. But … we all have some version of that. I had Windows Servers at home for many years, and even had racked-mounted servers briefly. It feels silly now, but it was a different era, and that gave way to small business and then home servers and then NASes and .. here we are.

In this online-first world, these things are at least simpler. And I did go down the path of experimenting with Windows 11 Enterprise earlier this year to see whether it offered any relief for the Windows 11 enshittification issues. (Spoiler alert: Not really.) This is vaguely reminiscent of people running Windows Server on a PC back in the day as a replacement for the client version of Windows, because it was more lightweight and modular and didn’t have a lot of the cruft. Of course, as we moved forward into the Server Core truly minimalist Windows Server era, that became less viable. But I get it. I’ve lived it.

I don’t have a lot of experience with Microsoft Edge for Business (which I think is what you mean), which is more of a mode than a different product. But I have used it here and there in signing in with my Microsoft 365 commercial account on some PCs and for the book. And I don’t see it has a huge digression from the traditional Edge experience. But if you can use that, there’s no reason not to, and I vaguely like the idea of using policy to decrapify Edge (like using an automated install script to do that for Windows). I think you would have a more minimalist, less busy experience with Brave or Firefox, though. Better overall, for sure.

Taking a Proton Pass

Christian-Gaeng asks:

Regarding your testing of various password managers. Are you still using Proton Pass and how is it going for you in your work day?

Yes. I’ve fully moved to Proton Pass, in fact. Dashlane is great, and so, too, is 1Password. But there’s something about Proton Pass that really works for me. It’s just there and always works, and I never have to keep reauthenticating. And I love that. So, yeah. All-in on Proton Pass. And now I need to start thinking about the rest of their product line. For example, I just saw this come across my feed the other day. Interesting.

Upsell yourself

Christian-Gaeng asks:

I recently bought a HP ProDesk with an 8 gen Intel CPU and 8 GB RAM. I was surprised as I notices that the PC runs smoothly without any problems with just that little RAM. Dont you think the PC industry run into the problems they have with selling new PC by making PCs last longer and run effectively even with a few years on the hump? And that Copilot + PCs wont make much difference because there are still so many old once in service?

I was just thinking about this.

And speaking of something there should be a word or term for, it’s best explained by an example: Lured into the car dealership by an advertisement for a surprisingly inexpensive car, you walk out the door with a much more expensive model and you justify that because of you want, need, or benefit from whatever additional features you got. In the PC space, I think of this mentality as “what-if-ism.” You buy a convertible PC or 2-in-1 because you might one day want to take notes or draw with a stylus in tablet mode, or watch a movie in tent mode, or whatever. But then you just use it like a laptop every day. This is good for PC makers–these are higher margin premium PCs–and it’s probably just human nature. “You never know” is a powerful driver. I certainly fall for this all the time.

Obviously, we all have different needs. But we all probably suffer from similar delusions when it comes to what we think we need, with PCs or phones or whatever else, too. For all the nonsense around these Copilot+ PCs–the brand is terrible, the AI features that are currently available are not particularly interesting, etc.–there is a subtle advancing of the PC as a platform there that I think is important. In previous versions of my Windows 11 book, I would reference Microsoft’s minimum requirements and then suggest higher specifications that made more sense (to me) for real-world usage; for example, the minimum RAM for Windows 11 is just 4 GB, so I would recommend 8 GB of more. But in the latest version, I’ve gotten more aggressive on the minimums for what I consider a modern PC–16 GB, in the case of RAM–and it’s interesting to me that the Copilot+ PC minimum specs roughly match what I think most people should have in a new PC today. The Windows 11 minimums are ludicrous.

We’re seeing this with phones, too–the Pixel 9 Pros come with 16 GB of RAM, which is incredible, and the new iPhones have 8 GB, both up dramatically from before–and, yeah, it’s because of AI and the needs of dealing with on-device language models and whatever. But these are also perhaps more “correct” in the sense that they are more future-proof. And these benefit hardware makers, too. Copilot+ PCs aren’t inordinately expensive, but they are still premium PCs and probably have margins, and they serve to help bring this industry out of its post-netbook funk in which PC makers undermined their own businesses by shooting for the bottom.

This may feel like a bit of a stretch but give it a second. (And it will be particularly strange for you, since this isn’t an issue in Germany.) This reminds me of the issues we see now in the United States where everyone is complaining about the sudden expansion of tipping, both in terms of who is asking for tips and then in terms of the percentages getting higher. But we, as Americans, have no idea how much things cost, how much things are worth, and how little money these people are making. And yes, the system is broken, but this is an attempt to help level set that. It’s weird to me that affluent people will complain about going from a 15 percent tip to a 20 percent tip, but that’s what entitlement and ignorance looks like. To bring this full circle, PCs are expensive. But if we can get a high quality PC, pay a bit extra for it, and it’s a win-win–we use it for years, the PC maker actually profits from the sale–then we should just embrace that. Spending more and not realizing the value is unfortunate. Spending more and getting more … well, that’s different.

I guess what I’m saying is that we’ve been lowballing it in the PC space for so long that I think we’ve lost sight of what’s important. And it goes both ways. If you can work successful on a laptop with 8 GB of RAM and save money by doing that, it’s a win. It’s a win for common sense, and for stepping out of that upsell mentality, the “what-if-ism” we all feel to some degree, and for all kinds of other things. I could do that to some degree. But I also engage in certain activities on the PC–software development, often with two or more instances of Visual Studio–game-playing, video editing, and whatever else. And I feel like 16 GB is my new minimum. 32 GB is better.

You may have seen some of the griping about Intel’s Lunar Lake capping out at 32 GB of RAM. The people complaining about that are possible insane. Lunar Lake is a new ultra-mobile SKU, and there will be Arrow Lake chips that target more powerful mobile (H-series, etc.) and desktop PC systems. And they will support more RAM. But the number of people who need north of 32 GB of RAM is negligible. The number of people who need it on an ultra-mobile laptop are collectively a rounding error. This is a great example of faux outrage, but also an extreme example of “what-if-ism.” We can a little nuts about this stuff.

In the end, this is really about self awareness, understanding what your needs really are and, to some degree, what they may be in the future. And then making buying decisions that logically make sense and meet those needs.

He says, having just spent $1200 on an iPhone that is probably a minor if not negligible improvement over the fully paid-for iPhone I already own.*

(* In my defense–and, yes, this is rationalization–I might argue that because of my job and career that I can justify this expense, and of course, there are other mitigating factors. But … yeah. As Brad jokes, spending $1000 so you can run the same three apps requires some mental contortions.)