Ask Paul: November 8 (Premium)

Happy Friday! And welcome to a monster installment of Ask Paul with a terrific collection of reader questions to kick off the weekend.

Also, my test mug purchase from the Thurrott swag store finally arrived.  It’s … fine.

Windows Android something something

helix2301 asks:

Did you ever review that laptop that came with Android tablet any everything? Maybe I missed it?

I have two more hardware reviews to finish before we come back from Mexico in 11 days, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i 15 Aura Edition and the Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid, which is the laptop you’re referring to. Normally, I’d finish the ThinkBook Plus review first, because it’s the next one chronologically, but Lenovo sent the Yoga Slim here, to Mexico, so I need to ship that back before we leave here. So that’s next, and I should have that review up sometime this weekend.

I had hoped to be more timely on these, but it’s been an incredibly busy month, much worse than expected. I had come into this trip hoping to make big progress on two books, the Windows 11 Field Guide updates for 24H2 and the Eternal Spring book my wife and I are writing. And I’ve/we’ve done that, actually, it’s pretty impressive on some level. But it’s also been more work and time than expected and here we are six weeks into this trip and I feel like I’ve still behind on all of it. Anyway. Yes, it will happen.

Best Arm laptop

helix2301 asks:

Do you still think best arm laptop is mac?

It’s difficult to make such a general assertion. Because of macOS alone, the MacBook Air will never be the “best” laptop, Arm or otherwise … to me. But I think what you’re really asking is where things stand with performance, battery life, efficiency, reliability, and instant-on. And that’s been a big focus for me this year. What I can say with certainty is that Microsoft and Qualcomm finally offer a platform in Windows 11 on Arm + Snapdragon X that achieves two miraculous feats: It works well enough (compatibility + performance) for mainstream Windows users to make the switch, and it offers a compelling response to the Apple Silicon-based MacBooks. It’s incredible that this happened all at once and sort of out of nowhere; the platform was previously so bad it was the butt of jokes.

But these things are moving targets. The M4 family obviously raises the bar yet again, and Qualcomm didn’t announce a second generation Snapdragon X at its annual event in October. So we’ll see where it goes. But looking at the laptops I have used this year, the MacBook Air M3 offers better battery life and efficiency than any Windows laptop, Arm or otherwise. The Snapdragon X laptops come close–about 11 hours of battery life on average, vs. 15 for the MacBook Air–and that’s good enough. They have fans, as everyone points out, but that’s rarely an issue, and is literally never an issue with the Surface Laptop 7 I purchased. That, to me, is the “best” Arm laptop, it’s my favorite laptop overall from 2024. The HP OmniBook Ultra I just reviewed–which is AMD Zen 5-based, not Arm–is probably a close second.

Related to this, sabertooth920 asks:

Is a MacBook Air clone that runs Windows natively your holy grail? Why have the various pc vendors experienced such trouble replicating this device? Even the new Qualcomm devices still have fans.

I’m not sure I’d put it that way. But there is something magical about the current-generation MacBook Air in that it’s incredibly thin and light, especially given the 15-inch screen on the unit I bought, there’s no fan, and the performance, reliability, battery life, etc. is off the charts. And yeah, I would love that form factor–but also all those magical qualities–in a Windows laptop. The Surface Laptop and other Snapdragon X-based laptops come closest, but it’s important to acknowledge than none “beats” the MacBook Air in certain ways. That each runs Windows is a plus, and they are close enough–in the ballpark–in all the ways that matter. That they have fans was initially troubling to me. But the fans are not an issue, certainly not in my Surface. I never hear the fans. Ever.

As to the “why,” there are many reasons. The PC market is often criticized for being slow. But that first (2008) MBA was a joke, and this product only got interesting with the iconic tapered design Apple introduced in 2010. And Intel and the PC makers responded to that with the first Ultrabooks very quickly. I bought the first Ultrabook, the Asus Zenbook UX21, in 2011, so I guess I have been chasing this dragon since the beginning. I also bought a Windows 7-based Samsung Series 9 Ultrabook right before Windows 8 launched in 2012, and that was a terrific laptop. (It was the first laptop sold at the Boston Microsoft Store on opening day.)

The shift to Apple Silicon complicated things, though. PC makers are/were stuck with Intel and x86, thanks to decades of back-room payments aimed at keeping AMD and Arm at bay. And Intel didn’t keep up with the competition when it came to efficiency, power management, and battery life. The world was moving to more reliable smartphones and consumer electronics, and the PC market got left behind. That was always the push for Arm in the PC space, dating back to Windows RT in 2012, to make the PC as reliable and efficient as phones and tablets. And it’s never taken off because of so many reasons. But it’s there now. It’s better than it’s ever been.

So, we’ll see. Windows 11 on Arm with Snapdragon X is better than we have a right to expect, given the history. It’s a huge leap forward.

AI shift

j5 asks:

I’m curious how the AI market (AI services and consumers) will react when Apple Intelligence is fully rolled out on Apple devices and that it’ll be free for all Apple users?

Apple’s roll out of AI features to its core platforms has been criticized in some circles, and while I sort of understand that, when I look at the chaotic way that Microsoft and Google are rolling out their own AI features, I see the value of “slow and steady.” It’s pretty clear that Microsoft, in particular, has no idea what it’s doing when it comes to client-side AI features for individuals.

But whatever. The point of I Will Not Pay for AI (Premium) is not “I will not use AI” or “AI is pointless,” I’m not an AI denier. The point is, AI is going to be part of all software and services. Some will be free, or at least a part of the platforms/apps we use. And some will be paid, like Microsoft 365.

I was listening to today’s FRD and they’re right that $20 bucks a month is a lot for these AI services. Especially if you’re a normie user and still if you’re a geek like us. I mean how often are you using it compared to the cost of a streaming service, a backup service, or some other subscription that you have?

I have complained about Microsoft charging for AI ever since Microsoft said it would charge for AI. I already pay for Microsoft 365, charging me another $20 to $30 per user per month is unacceptable. These are the types of things we used to get for “free” as part of the subscription. If you want to raise the price of that subscription a bit, hey, great, that makes sense. But I’m not going from a $99 per year subscription for 6 people to another $20 per user per month. That’s crazy talk.

Will the subscriptions go down in price? Start doing deals “first month free” or free when you subscribe to some other service? I think if Microsoft included Co-Pilot with Office 365 subscriptions they’d gain more Office subscriptions and the increase in user data to help build up Co-Pilot. Maybe the initial revenue wouldn’t be there like a solo Co-Pilot subscription. But in the long run I think it would lead to increased revenue.

No, there’s no version of subscription prices going down. In the streaming media world, they get around this by introducing ad-supported tiers that somehow do well. That’s not possible with Microsoft 365, etc. But we’ll see a “classic” version with no AI, sort of like perpetual Office releases, that will appeal to that crowd. And then no one will care because we’ll move on to the next wave and AI will just be everywhere, like spell-checking and autocomplete.

The oil and gas company I work for is rolling Co-Pilot out for all employees next year. So I’m sure there was a cost to Microsoft to do this. But that’s not that much compare to how much Microsoft could see if the consumer market started to subscribe.

Microsoft’s consumer subscriber bases are relatively small. There must be 40-60 million Game Pass subscribers, Microsoft hasn’t said in a while. And there are now 84.4 million consumer Microsoft 365 subscribers. But there are over 1 billion Windows users. And 1.5 billion-ish Office users. Each of those subscribers is lucrative to Microsoft, but there aren’t many of them when you compare those numbers to the broader user base. Copilot Pro was never going to take off, it never made any sense.

Related to this, will asks:

Have you heard anything on how the Copilot adoption has been going? With so many free and paid AI options, and how AI really should just be baked into apps, curious where you think Microsoft will be positioning Copilot next? They have been removing functions from the Windows Copilot app and Microsoft is pushing Copilot into apps more and more. Do they have a game plan or are they making this up as each month goes by?

They’re clearly making it up as they go. But I think we got our clearest sign yet on Copilot adoption and what the market will bear, albeit in the least clear way imaginable: Microsoft Asia mis-announced changes to that Microsoft 365 consumer subscriptions that include features that are coming to Windows 11 in the future and were revealed later the same day. This shift is important. The $20 per month Copilot Pro subscription is not working, so Microsoft will raise the price of Microsoft 365 a bit and just add those features where they always belonged in the first place, per the discussion above.

Double-edge sword

jaybac asks:

I presently use Windows 11 Pro (23H2) on a Razer Laptop with an 11th Gen Core i-9. It has more than ample the suggested recommended specs and memory, with fast SSDs (in this case 2 Samsung 990 Pros) and yet every time I simply try to use the File Explorer to navigate the file system, each click rewards me with the penalty box, spending anywhere between a 2 to 20 second time-out with the occasional 30 to 60 second delay to just simply execute the action, i.e. open a folder, open a file, look at a picture etc. which frustratingly is the opposite of snappy. Curiously though I have never really had this issue previously or historically on the versions of Windows and hardware I have used over time going back to Windows XP.

With apologies, I’ve cut out most of the question just to save space. But the short version is that there’s a very specific performance and reliability issue here, on a specific laptop, and there’s no clear reason why this is happening. It shouldn’t be happening: Laptops several years older than this can run Windows 11 effectively.

But this speaks to my now-daily frustration with technology in general, but also Microsoft products more specifically, and Windows most specifically, since that is my focus. And … I have similar issues. We have two 16-inch laptops here in Mexico, nearly identical to each other, and I’ve paved each over several times–one I’ve done twice just on this trip–to try and solve a specific reliability issue related to one of the two USB-C ports and whatever dock/USB hub we’re using. And … I just can’t fix it. I simplify my discussion of this kind of thing by referring to technology as being more black magic than science because these things feel unexplainable. They don’t make sense.

A lot of people will read through the description of your issue and something will spring to mind. To me, it’s the two SSDs. And while this is likely a waste of your time, I’d recommend trying it with just one to see if that changes anything. And if not, swapping the two and using just the other. But it could be anything. Some fault in a RAM module. Something specific to that model or your exact PC. These things are sometimes impossible to solve.

As things are shaping up across the board presently, the projection appears to be that only Apple is interested in doing something with the privacy of the end user as the central focus. Their marketed approach to AI is looking really interesting, and I am curious to see how that develops, and if that will actually be the case. At the moment Apple appears more thoughtful than what I have been able to see coming from Microsoft.

That’s a good way to put it. I agree: Apple is approaching AI from the perspective of what can this do for our users, and how can we create value and differentiation by focusing on privacy, something that companies like Google and Microsoft talk about but don’t really provide. This is absolutely a more thoughtful approach.

I have yet to try to use or integrate Co-Pilot personally at the OS level even with baked in as I prefer to leave it dormant like a sleeping dragon, in anything that is production ready (partly because I lack a NPU, thus making it network dependent) as it appears that it is a work in progress and that the dust has yet to settle. I acknowledge the Arm situation is interesting as well, but that seems early days also, and maybe that is just the shift of where we are now at the end of 2024, as progress accelerates.

Yeah. It’s weird that we’re 12 years out from the first Windows on Arm release, and it’s still early days for the platform. But it’s there, finally. And while many are a bit too focused on compatibility issues that will impact almost no one, I think there’s too little focus on the benefits of the simpler, more reliable underlying platform being a better foundation for moving Windows forward. But whatever. It’s still a big question mark for so many, and that’s too bad.

As I have historically leaned towards Windows and have always preferred it as well, my perception generates the concern that; will the trajectory of Windows continue to degrade and shift towards this effort of more and more telemetry/activity collection, facilitating this surveillance overhead performance tax of end users to feed what is assumed the ai development ambition, and will this continue come at the expense of usability not to mention privacy?

You’re voicing my concerns quite eloquently. I sort of obsess over this. I’ve spent a big chunk of the past two weeks or so on a very specific workaround to some of these issues–and will likely post a book chapter update today that’s related to this–but I’ve been struggling with this more generally for a while, and it’s distressing to recount how the situation gets worse and worse with each passing release. There are the little inroads, like Windows 11 Home users not even getting an option in Windows Setup to disable OneDrive Folder Backup, to the much bigger issues, like Windows 11 silently enabling that same feature after you’ve explicitly rejected the choice several times. These things are troubling. And with rare exception, they’re just keep getting worse.

I keep repeating myself on this, but I would gladly pay for a clean Windows experience. That could take all kinds of forms, but whatever. I just want to get work done without being harassed by the tools I use this feels reasonable to me. But it’s apparently not an option.

I don’t think or feel that Microsoft is currently interested in the privacy of the end user, and that this AI gold rush has led to that shift. With that and all these new “objectives and features” in looking forward, do you think Windows 11 will ever become as rock solid as Windows 10/7/XP/2000 was, or are we futilely, or optimistically simply waiting for Windows 12 if that comes at all? This is assuming this will be a central or even a peripheral priority for Microsoft in delivering a rock-solid operating system to their customer in the future, but is that still on the table?

It’s hard to say.

The things that set me off are not an issue for some. I have a wife who I’m not sure even noticed when her PC was upgraded from Windows 10 to 11. For those of us who live and breathe this stuff, we all have our own lines, so to speak, and for some, Windows 11 is over that line and irredeemable. I actually like Windows 11. I want it to be better. But there’s that objective reality that quality is going downhill, the focus is no longer on making it rock-solid and reliable, and you can see the baloney they put in there with each passing month. Windows 11 version 24H2 is probably the least reliable version of the least reliable and most enshittified release of Windows that Microsoft has ever made, and there are new bugs every time they update the damn thing. This team has to have set a record for the most fixes released for fixes, if that makes sense. Every update seems to need an update to fix its problems.

Microsoft could fix Windows 11. And by fix, I mean, end the nonsense and improve reliability. But I don’t believe that the team responsible for this product is capable of that, nor do I think the higher-ups care in the slightest because they are focused on something else (AI, for now). So this is all secondary to them, or worse.

It’s probably worth reminding ourselves that it’s not just Microsoft and Windows. But that’s what I focus on. I know the grass isn’t greener elsewhere, if it was, I’d have moved next door already. But I hate seeing this happen, and my blood boils every time a new pop-up appears advertising whatever stupidity. So I keep trying to solve this problem in whatever way is possible.

In your case, this is so specific that it’s unlikely you’ll ever get Windows 11 working reliably on that one laptop. There are so many variables. And it seems like you’ve wasted too much of your time already. I wish I had something to offer here that made sense. Sorry.

Pushing my buttons

wright_is asks:

Do you have a recommendation for a good Android phone with buttons? We are looking at replacing the physical phones in the production with Android phones with a VOIP client, but in some areas they have to wear protective gloves and a touch display is useless, so they need to at least be able to accept a call and finish the call afterwards.

No, this whole world is going to on-screen gestures and I feel like you need some vertical/industrial or even ruggedized solution that’s outside the consumer mainstream (and maybe is not technically a phone). Even here in Mexico, which is full of low-end Android phones, the cheapest phones available are all-screen devices without buttons. (This phone is currently on sale for $45 USD. WTH.)

I wonder if anyone else has any thoughts on this.

You wouldn’t like what the world thinks of us right now

eeisner asks:

So… planning on spending a bit more time in CDMX over the next 4 years than originally planned? (Only slightly kidding, lol).

Well, we’re planning on spending more time in Mexico City regardless. We’re currently on our longest trip yet, 7 weeks, and we’re planning on spending at least three months here in early 2025. We’ll see what happens.

On a more serious note, I am curious what it was like for you as a part-time expat watching the election in CDMX. How are the locals, your fellow expat friends, and (if you don’t mind sharing) you and Stephanie reacting to the election, and how if at all is this going to change how you two travel between PA and CDMX?

Having traveled pretty extensively over the years, it was always interesting to me to speak to people from other countries about the United States. This would always be initiated by them, for whatever that’s worth. Here, it’s the same, but the difference between Mexico and pretty much everywhere else in the world is that the people here are incredibly nice, polite, and deferential in ways that don’t even make sense.

So the position of those we know here in Mexico City, universally, is a great sadness, that this country they respect so much could be revealed to be so terrible. But of course, they only see the people who travel and get outside their insular bubbles, so this is confusing to them. This whole thing makes me sad as well. Our country is divided, consumed by great a stupidity, and the toxic nature of politics is undermining not just our democracy but our common sense and human decency. I love my country. I wish it could think clearly.

That said, I don’t know that anything happening in the world will change how we split time between Pennsylvania and Mexico. That was shifting anyway, and we’ll do what we do according to what we can do. I assume we will keep spending more time in Mexico for as long as is possible. And then life will happen, and things will change, and we’ll adapt as needed.

Mexico City

Vladimir asks:

Hi Paul! Next week i’m going to be in Mexico City for a conference (!!!).I am very excited about this trip 🙂 Of course, I have looked at your posts on the city and some of your YouTube videos as well. However, I’m looking for some sort of “beginner’s guide”. As far as I understand your travel book is not out yet. Do you have some pointers or can you suggest the 3-5 places/attractions that can’t be missed?

Ah boy. Congrats, and enjoy the city. We obviously love it here.

My wife and I have been working on this book since around April, I think, on and off all summer. We’ve made a lot of progress, but also had some setbacks. And on the technical/back-end that I am of course in charge of, I’ve restarted the thing from scratch at least three times. I will likely write something about that, because it’s a curious problem, making a book like this, and despite all the books I’ve done, and all the writing we’ve both done, getting this right is elusive. And so we came into this trip determined to make headway, and to release a first version, a preview or whatever, by the end of the trip. By the end of October ideally.

As noted above somewhere, we have indeed worked on this book every day during this trip over the six weeks we’ve been here. Every single day. And in early October, maybe two weeks in, we had a plan for releasing a partial book, a preview, and then updating that every week going forward. We even recorded a video for it. And one night, I was dreaming about this, I guess, tossing and turning, and not sleeping well. And I suddenly had this concrete idea, yet another change, a way forward that made sense. And I was awake, fully. So I got out of bed, it was 3 am, sat in front of the laptop, and recreated the book from scratch–I think for the fourth time, I’m losing track–and pasted in bits and pieces from before so that by the time my wife got up at a normal time, I had something to show here. And the short version is that in starting over yet again, I think we finally got it right. So we’ve working to make that ever since.

And still don’t feel good about putting it out there yet. October came and went without the first preview release I expected to publish. We vaguely hope to still make that happen before we leave here. But there’s a lot to it. Right now, the book is a bit under 200 pages long, though a “page” is a bit different since the PDF is formatted for a guidebook-like size (5.5 x 8 inches), as opposed to the 8.5 x 11 inch Windows 11 Field Guide. There are maps, which I’ve also redone at least a dozen times, that’s a lot of work, and photos, reviews, and whatever else. The TOC that we see for the first edition (it will be annual) is like so:

Welcome
Mexico City
Orientation
See and do
Eat and drink
Centro Juarez and Reforma
Polanco and Chapultepec
Condesa
Roma Norte
Roma Sur
Further afield
Connections
Practicalities
Resources

But it’s likely that the first preview, whenever that happens, will be a subset of that, and then we’ll add content each week and build it out, as I’ve done for my books. The first release will be at least:

Welcome
Mexico City
Orientation
See and do
Eat and drink
Centro Roma Norte

But we’ll see. I can tell you that being forced to choose our favorite places has been interesting. But we do have lists. So, for places, we go with:

• El Ángel de la Independencia
• Arena México (Lucha Libre)
• Avenida Amsterdam
• Avenida Paseo de la Reforma
• Gran Hotel Ciudad de Mexico
• Museo Frida Kahlo
• Museo Nacional de Antropologia *
• Palacio de Bellas Artes *
• Palacio Postal
• Plaza de la Constitución (Zócalo) *
• Teotihuacán
• Torre Latinoamericana
• Xochilmilco

And for restaurants/bars, our favorites are:

• La Azotea
• Baltra Bar
• Café de Tacuba
• Café Tacobar del Sur
• Licorería Limantour
• Merotoro
• Oxa
• Pargot Restaurante
• Primer Cuadro
• Pujol
• San Ángel Inn *
• Sud 777
• Tacos los Alexis
• Taquería
• Álvaro Obregón
• Taquería Los Cocuyos *
• Terraza Gran Hotel *
• El Tizconcito Vigneron

I’m sure we’ll add to each list even before the preview, but that’s where they are for now. All of these are incredible. I tried to pick the top three (with the *) in each because you asked.

We’ll keep working on it, but I really hope to get something out soon.

Also, email me if you have time to grab coffee or a drink or whatever when you’re here.

Which laptop

jeroendegrebber asks:

I’m looking for a new business/office laptop. I like the Surface Laptop, but that’s mostly my inner child saying “the blue one looks so nice!”. So, after spending quite too much time on reading and watching reviews, I’m still unsure or confused by the new Intel and AMD offerings and suffer from FUD-ing on the Snapdragon. My understanding so far: the new Lunar Lake CPU’s have order-of-magnitude-comparable battery life to Snapdragon’s, but at the cost of lower peak performance. To which the counter point is made that a user rarely needs peak performance. Lunar Lake’s GPU seems to decisively win over Qualcomm’s (but then you’re talking about games, at which point peak CPU performance again becomes relevant? Also, don’t really care about gaming on a laptop). AMD is somewhere in between I guess, this part is completely unclear to me. Is this a reasonable summary so far or missing important points?

So, I have a reasonable amount of experience with Snapdragon X, but I’ve only used one AMD Ryzen AI (Zen 5)-based laptop and one Intel Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) laptop, so my views on those things are incomplete. But here’s where I’m at.

Snapdragon X is great across the board assuming you don’t expect to play games on the PC. It has the best battery life (11 hours on average), the best efficiency, the best reliability. Day to day performance is excellent, fan noise is non-existent. Technically, it lags on GPU, but this never comes up in productivity work. I’ve been hammering Surface Laptop on this trip, no issues at all.

Zen 5 is maybe the perfect compromise here. Performance is terrific, especially with the GPU, it’s the best of the lot, and it can play AAA games well. Battery life is great, about 8.5 hours. Efficiency/instant-on is very reliable. If you have a compatibility concern with Arm for whatever reason, this is the choice.

Lunar Lake has been troubling. The performance is terrible and weird, with pauses and glitches, and you have to put it in Best Performance mode, or it’s unusable. Battery life isn’t great, I’m not done on this one yet, but it’s the worst of the three. GPU performance is pretty good, but not as good as AMD. Reliability/efficiency is poor. I keep expecting–and getting–firmware updates, but nothing seems to work. I would stay away from Lunar Lake.

What worries me most and is my core question: the number of apps that can run on ARM / x86 emulation. Should this be a worry? Raising this point seems like a FUD tactic from Intel, but unfortunately, the seed of doubt has taken root in my mind.

This has never been an issue for me. Ever. I never think about whether an app is native or not. Everything works great.

I use Surface Laptop every single day and I love it. It’s the best laptop I’ve used this year, or ever. The only qualifier I would put on it is games, but that’s not a primary use case for me. For getting work done, the performance is terrific, and I’ve stopped thinking about battery. There is no fan noise. It’s got a huge screen. I can’t stress enough how hard it is to focus on these other laptops. It’s distracting just having it here.

But I get it. If that nagging doubt is getting to you, the Zen 5-based OmniBook I just reviewed is quite amazing. I do need more experience with these things. But that’s where I’m at right now.

Kindle Colorsoft

SeattleMike asks:

Hey Paul, what do you think of the new Color Kindle? Are you planning on writing a review of it?

I will review it, yes, but it’s sitting in the post office in Macungie waiting for us to come home from Mexico. So I won’t even see it until November 20 or whatever. I can’t wait. But all I can do for now is read reviews and watch the calendar, sorry.