Ask Paul: April 11 (Premium)

At the intersection of memory, justice, and truth
At the intersection of memory, justice, and truth

Happy Friday! These things just keep getting more epic, so buckle up, it’s going to be quite the ride. And away we go …

? Windows … 12?

helix2301 asks:

I was wondering if you have heard anything about Windows 12 seems like 11 is having a long life cycle like 10 did. I am waiting for the field guide to Windows 12 😉

I’m eager to find out what happens here and for the same reason: I would like to figure out what’s going on with the book(s). I’m going to post something about that soon, but since you ask, I will say that part of the reason I created the Windows 11 Feature Tracker was because it will help me keep the book updated: Knowing when certain features are arriving is nice for that planning. (There are other reasons, like episode planning for Hands-On Windows. But that’s the big one.)

I feel like I need a Copilot feature tracker too, as that is updated regularly, and a side issue I’m considering is whether it makes sense to have a Microsoft Copilot Field Guide or whatever. But that would be a thankless task in some ways. It’s updated so frequently that it would be difficult to keep up-to-date, and Microsoft current changes the UI so often that it would be doubly difficult.

In any event, consider how much has changed in just two weeks.

That’s the subject of that coming post about the book, but the short version is that I’m going to update the existing Windows 11 Field Guide for all the new features in the current version of the tracker. Doing so will require a new AI section with three chapters, AI and Windows 11 (new), Copilot (updated for 24H2, new features), and Copilot+ PC, plus updates across more chapters/topics than I can count (Phone Link, File Explorer, Xbox, Share, Snap, Snipping Tool, Recovery, Security, more). And I have to figure out how/where to address the changes to Paint, Photos, and Notepad (hopefully in that new AI and Windows 11 chapter). I spent a lot of yesterday afternoon working on this, and since I already wrote some of this material, I am blocking that out in the book and will likely have some updates soon.

Beyond that, we’ll see what the future holds for 24H2 and this version of the book. But at some point, there will be 25H2 or a Windows 12, and that will be a new book. I would like that book to be shorter and more concise and so it will likely be structured differently. I’ve been working on that for a while, actually. But we’ll see where it goes. For now, this is all a huge question mark. Name/brand, timing, and features. No one knows. And I would really like to know at least the first two of those things so I can get started on it.

Regarding your lifecycle questions, Windows 10 is about to hit EOL (but not really because of the extended support over three years) after 10 years of support. Windows 11 is oddly just four years old, though it feels longer. So there is this natural expectation that we’ll get some major v.Next release with a new name (Windows 12, most likely). And I do feel like this can/should happen this year in preview form at least. But the reality here is that Microsoft can keep Windows 11 going without another release for a few more years since there will be two–and then, starting in October, three–Windows 11 versions in support anyway. The name makes this confusing, but they are really different versions of Windows from a support perspective. So Microsoft doesn’t really need to announce a Windows 12 yet.

? Windows 11.1

Also, hastin asks:

Is it just me, or does it feel like Microsoft is finally getting their butts in gear to improve Windows 11 customization and core features (start menu, file explorer, others) just before Windows 10 goes EOL? Some of this new stuff feels so basic, it should have shipped in the release version, 21H2.

Windows 11 shipped in such an unfinished state that I questioned the entire point of that release. But it’s gotten better over time, and I feel like most of the complaints from those who stuck with Windows 10 have long since been addressed, or will be soon. But part of the gnawing at the back of my brain that led to that Windows 11 Feature Tracker was that I knew Microsoft had shifted to a model by which it adds new features literally every month, but I was unclear on just how much it was adding and when. And it was a revelation of sorts when I finally saw this clearly.

We can debate whether a mature OS like Windows needs this level of attention. I’m firmly in the “no” camp on that one. But I also need to face the reality on the ground, so to speak. And the reality is that Microsoft has inexplicably escalated the addition of new features while simultaneously throwing out its own rulebook for how it does so.

Consider the new Copilot features noted in the bulleted list above. Microsoft released that new Copilot app version to all Insider channels this past Tuesday (on Patch Tuesday, no less). But where did these features come from? They’d never been tested anywhere in the Insider Program before, which I know because I just made a feature tracker. It turns out the first we’d heard about them, specifically in the context of Copilot in Windows 11, came just four days earlier: Microsoft announced these and several other Copilot features–across Windows, mobile, web, Bing, and maybe elsewhere–just four days earlier.

Well. Sort of. It announced that Copilot in Windows 11 (and on mobile) would get a feature called Copilot Vision four days earlier. Vision had debuted in Copilot on the web last December, after it was first announced the previous October (and then only to Copilot Pro subscribers). But where did the other feature, which the Insider team describes only as “file search,” come from? I have no idea. Not specifically, anyway: This isn’t about file search in the file system, it’s about files you’ve uploaded to Copilot for whatever reason (files you’ve “worked on together”).

That suggests it’s possibly tied to the Copilot Memory feature that Microsoft also announced four days prior. That said, Microsoft’s description of Memory doesn’t mention files. Or maybe it’s tied to Vision. Seriously, Microsoft, can’t you just tell us? I have the proper Copilot app version on a PC I have that’s enrolled in the Insider Program and I can’t get this feature to work.

This is what chaos looks like. Haphazard features tossed at Windows on no schedule whatsoever and backed by terrible communication. So yeah, Windows 11 is finally getting there. But the problem is that it never stops changing.

? I can’t recall

Tied to the above, gg1 asks:

With the availability of much Copilot+ functionality to the Release Preview channel, it’s looking imminent that it’ll be released to the public.

Yes. Looking at the calendar, we can expect to see the contents of this Release Preview build–Recall, Click to Do, semantic search, etc.–appear in a preview update for 24H2 on Tuesday, April 22. And then in stable in the May Patch Tuesday update.

I assume the non-Copilot+ PC features will also be added to 23H2, but we’ll see if we get a Release Preview build for 23H2 before then as well. Either way, this is a pretty big update.

Do you think Recall is ready for release? Do you foresee any form of agitation over this feature spring up again or has that ship sailed?

Yes, I do think Recall is ready and has been for months. But Microsoft will play it safe and label both Recall and Click to Do as previews. Normally, this would make sense to me. But the audience for these features is still incredibly small, so it’s unclear what broader availability will mean from a quality/feedback perspective.

Regarding the Chicken Littles, there are two salient points. As I noted previously, we haven’t heard a single complaint from the self-promoters about Recall and the supposed issues they were so concerned with since it appeared in the Dev channel on real Windows Hello ESS-protected Copilot+ PCs. And this is Microsoft, and Windows, so it’s not like there can’t or won’t be issues. So we’ll see. but I don’t expect any major issues. If anything, Recall is much more of a non-event than expected in day-to-day use. To me, at least, Click to Do and semantic search are far more important.

? Healthy living through science

eeisner asks:

I love reading your perspective on tech and health, and how you use tech to better your physical health.

I’m very curious on your thoughts about GLP1s/Ozempic, both in terms of using this kind of medication to ‘hack’ the body for weight loss and impulse control and then how it will impact the broader technology industry that relies on addiction in many ways, ie gaming and internet gambling. Thoughts?

I routinely experience this strange phenomenon with Ask Paul where someone will ask me about a topic that I am literally writing about separately at the time, or planning to. Sometimes this isn’t particularly coincidental. As per the conversation above about Windows v.Next, it makes sense that this topic would be on our minds. But there are two health-related questions this week, and I am writing about both of them. Very strange.

In your case, I started an article called Cheater in which I commingle the debates around Ozempic (and other weight loss drugs) and AI, with the argument on one side being that anyone who uses these things is somehow cheating. I cannot disagree more with that assertion. I hope to still publish Cheater, but I will discuss the weight loss bit and using tech for health more generally here, at least a bit. This has been on my mind a lot lately too.

Tied to this, brettscoast writes:

Hi Paul I know that you have written a lot about your health over the years regarding diet and exercise, the amount time we spend sitting down looking at screens be it our PC’s or tablets, smartphones. Many readers including myself have enjoyed these articles as a lot of the same stuff around our health is applicable.to most of us. Healthy diet and exercise is vital in combination and I am sure we have all swung between a healthy weight and a not so healthy weight over the years. I have to take medications every day to provide what my body doesn’t produce naturally due to a thyroid problem and I am sure there are a lot of folks out there in similar situations the downside of these medicines is you can tend to put weight on quickly which adds another level of vigilance when monitoring our health. Regular visits to the GP for checkups, blood tests, referrals to specialists where necessary & regular eye tests are also important. If we keep on top of this then managing our health better seems not so arduous. So, routine I find is vital I get up early to power walk 30 mins every morning barring any major weather events ie storms, heavy rain, visiting the gym at least 3 times a week. As we age we simply have to keep moving even it it’s to keep the old man out.

To both questions, I have so many thoughts. So in a sort of rapid fire fashion …

Regarding weight loss drugs, I’ve wanted something like this for decades. Of course, what I really want is an actual pill, or even an embedded device or whatever, and not a needle or daily invasion. But yeah. I just want to fix the problem.

People misunderstand obesity on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to even start. But the reality is that most weight gain is not the individual’s fault. It could be genetic. It could be a side effect from other required medication. Nutrition and health have been hugely distorted by the food industry and government complicity, and we’ve been taught bad information about what to eat, what not to eat, and how to be healthy.

I was talking to my brother-in-law last year about cholesterol medication because my doctor had been bugging me to take it, and I didn’t want to. Cholesterol is among the many things that are misunderstood these days, and in this case, also by doctors, and my research on this topic–what I would call the “facts”–doesn’t match her concerns. Anyway, she feels that my cholesterol “issues,” such as they are, are genetic and not something I can control with diet, because it’s been a while and I’ve been doing all the right things. My brother-in-law told me something I found interesting. He takes a pill for cholesterol because he, like me and most other middle-aged white guys apparently need this, but now he doesn’t worry about cholesterol. He kind of bragged about being able to eat whatever he wants. This felt cynical to me at first, but thinking about it, it almost made sense. Apply that thinking to Ozempic or whatever. Keeping it just to weight (there are other issues here, diet-wise), you can just eat whatever you want, you won’t gain weight. But the drug will prevent you from eating too much. You get full quick.

I started on whatever lifestyle change almost two years ago, and I go back and forth on diet a bit, veering between a strict keto regime and what I would call a healthy, low-carb diet (meaning I do eat lots of salads and fruit, and whole foods that some keto people would not do). My wife and I both have the same experience when we’re in Mexico where we seem to lose weight on every trip. And last year, I literally noticed weight loss on each trip here and then some weight gain when we were home. At the end of last year, between Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, I was really looking forward to coming here, if only for the weight loss. And that’s happened.

The healthiness of our lifestyle here is tied to several factors, I think. There’s the high altitude, which makes even light exercise like walking more strenuous and thus “better” for you physiologically, especially for the first month or so. We walk every day, a lot. Not 10,000 steps, but I’m averaging about 6,000 a day. We eat out every day, but we’re not eating out like we might in the US, this is much healthier food. From my keto diet/lifestyle switch, I haven’t eaten breakfast regularly in years, so I only eat twice a day, and both are pretty small meals here.

One of the biggest issues I still faced coming into this trip was psychological (for lack of a better term). I have been able to eat a lot of food for my entire adult life, and my brain still looked at a plate of food and saw something I could consume fully. But because of the two meals per day bit, and the fasting that occurs between dinner and the next day’s lunch, I can actually get by fine with a lot less food. And so on an almost daily basis, I would eat whatever meal and then feel overly full afterward. I kind of hated myself for this.

So on this trip, I decided to work on it. This is part of what I’ll write about separately–the other bit is just my smartwatch health data over the course of the trip–soon. Instead of overeating, I literally just eat less. And order less. And then I was surprised at first that I was full and everything was fine, and I didn’t need more. And so over the course of this trip, I just started adapting to this. And I am curious, and a bit nervous, about continuing this when we get home again. It’s a different daily schedule with less walking, etc. We’ll see what happens.

Two final points to all this.

We have friends who visit us here from the US. Or sometimes I’ll just be sitting next to someone at a taco bar. And the difference between what they eat and what I eat is astonishing. The most recent example of this happened a few days ago. My wife and I normally eat lunch at one or three or four local “cocina economicas,” these little family-run eateries that are cheap and have really good food. But we hadn’t been to a local taco place in a while, so we went there. My wife had two tacos, one of which was vegetarian. I had two tacos, both meat-based, but I only ate the (corn-based, and homemade) tortilla from one. The guy next to me order three tacos, ate them, order two more, ate that, and then ordered and ate a sixth. And had a glass of Coke. (I had sparkling water.) He was younger and thinner than me, I guess he has a great metabolism or whatever. But I could barely get through two of these things, and I was actually a bit overly full afterward. I couldn’t have eaten more if I had tried.

Tied to my point above about us as a society misunderstanding health and nutrition, we could all skip a meal every day and be better off for it. People assume you’ll be starving or something, and you will … at first. The only time I’m hungry in the morning now is when I overdue it–food and/or drink–late at night, the night before. And this is the cycle I think most of us, most Americans, certainly, get caught up in. They eat all day. They eat all night, maybe snacking or drinking while watching TV or whatever. And then they’re starving when they get up. And this feels normal. But what most don’t understand is that you’re only starving because you ate at night. If you stop doing this, you can skip breakfast every day. You will lose weight. You will not feel hungry. You will feel better.

I’m all over the place here, sorry. But I will write up something about my health/nutrition stuff during the trip before we head home in early May.

Ⓜ️ To M365 or to Not M365, That is the Question

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

Do you see a time, perhaps in the near future, when you will not have an Office 365 Family subscription?

I don’t see that in the near term, and I’m not actively working toward it. But I am always thinking about these things, of course. I’m always reevaluating whatever tools I use, and the past few years have been interesting (to me) because of how much my usage has shifted to what I’ll call third-party tools.

But there is something I should communicate more clearly here. In an ideal world, Microsoft 365–in my case, Microsoft Word and OneDrive, mostly, but maybe Loop if they ever get that right, and whatever else–would just meet my needs. They would just work, and work well, and not harass me or ignore my explicit choices. And in that world, I would happily use these tools. Not just because they were “better,” but because my primary computing platform is Windows, and they integrate with and/or are part of Windows. I don’t want to have to install other things. If they worked–for me–I would just use them. That would be wonderful. So that is one of those things I am absolutely open to.

(The alternative, of course, is that they keep getting worse. This is where being open to whatever pays off, I guess. But I hate taking the nuclear option.)

The other concern here is that my family literally uses this subscription: My wife, son, daughter, and father-in-law are all in there, and each actually uses it. And I suspect they don’t experience the issues I do, or care, or whatever. My wife isn’t into technology in any way, and I know I bore her to tears sometimes when I can’t help myself in discussing whatever it is that’s going on in my work life. (Which is just a big chunk of my life, I guess, not to excuse that.) But she’s a writer too. We’re working on a book together now, coincidentally. And we talk about these workflow things, and tools, and, recently, AI. She even brings this stuff up now. And she uses Word and OneDrive daily and seems fine with it.

If you read my You’re Not an Enterprise (Premium) article, which is an expansion of The DIY Personal Productivity Tech Stack (Premium) from the previous day, you may have realized that I (inadvertantly) omitted something important. Sometimes you have to use certain tools, typically because it’s a work requirement. For example, one might be fervently anti-Microsoft for whatever reason, but they have some job, and they have to use a Windows PC, and maybe the Microsoft 365 apps and whatever else. So you can’t fight that, not really.

My wife isn’t anti-Microsoft, and as noted, she seems to like Word and OneDrive (and Windows) just fine. But Word is literally a requirement for her because her clients expect Word documents. It doesn’t matter whether she “likes” Word, she has to use it. It’s a fact of life for her, as I suspect it is for many others.

I can get away with not using Word. So I do. But if it was better, if it worked well and didn’t harass me, I might work differently. I might not, I’ve grown to really like the tools I use now. It doesn’t matter. I’ll just use what works best for me when I can. And in those cases when I have to use some tool I may or may not like (Slack comes to mind), I’ll do that. The articles I wrote above were about those times when you can make a choice, and I feel like many people just don’t think about these things.

⌨️ Dave’s Garage

train_wreck asks:

I posted in the forum about one of the Dave’s Garage videos on Longhorn. You replied that there were a few “inaccuracies” in there. Care to elaborate on that?

Sure, though my memory is such that I may have since forgotten some of the details, since I watched the video over two weeks ago. But I should be clear here that I am a huge fan of the Dave’s Garage YouTube channel, I subscribe, and I watch every video he makes. And my comment about a few inaccuracies was a side point, I was more surprised that he didn’t have a single new tidbit of information in that video. More on that in a moment.

For those unfamiliar, Dave’s Garage is hosted by Dave Plummer, a former Microsoft engineer who worked on MS-DOS and then Windows NT. He is perhaps best known for having created Task Manager, and though his channel focuses on a lot of old-school Microsoft stuff, he also discusses other technical topics I always find interesting. And like so many of us from the same era, he belatedly came to understand that his super-power/Achilles Heel is that he is on the spectrum, in his case with autism and ADHD. I met him briefly in November 2023 during Ignite and he was unimpressed and/or uninterested, which I attribute more to his mental health than to me being an absolute bore. But either way, it doesn’t impact my opinions of him. I love the channel and his content.

And that’s why I was so excited when I brought up YouTube one day and saw he had posted a video about Longhorn. This was an ideal topic for me. Not to be an ass about it, but few people know more about Longhorn than I do, especially outside of Microsoft. (Longhorn is a major topic in my book Windows Everywhere, with six chapters in the Longhorn section and six more in the Vista section.) And he was there, for crying out loud. He was on the team. This was going to be great.

Except that it wasn’t.

As I noted in my comment to your forum post, I was really surprised there wasn’t any new information in there. This is out of order, but I’ve since looked this up to find out the timing, and it turns out there’s a reason. He wasn’t there. Dave Plummer left Microsoft in 2003. So at the very most, he experienced the development of this product through its initial public outing at PDC 2003 that October. All the interesting stuff happened after that.

There is an understandable but somewhat curious bias in the Longhorn video that comes from his affinity to NT creator Dave Cutler, and if you haven’t watched his epic 3+ hour interview of Cutler, stop reading this right now and go watch it. Incredible. Anyway, Cutler is a character, and one of the greatest engineers who ever lived, and there was a real us vs. them mentality on the NT team where “them” was everyone at Microsoft working on something not named NT. They were the adults, and they viewed the rest of the company as amateurs. It was almost cult-like, but Cutler was right so many times about so many things, it’s understandable.

As NT evolved to become Windows, Cutler’s role shifted. He never really wanted to manage people, and so he stepped back from a leadership role in a management sense and stepped into more of an engineering leadership role. Before the first Microsoft reviewer’s workshop I attended in person, for NT 5.0 in August 1998, I approached Yusuf Mehdi, who was getting ready on the stage, and asked him if Cutler would attend. I wanted to meet my hero. But no, I was told. He was “off working on 64-bit stuff.” Meaning, where NT–soon to be Windows–would be going next, at that time via the Compaq Alpha processor. What happened since then is that it was Cutler who ordained AMD’s x64 instruction set as the future for 64-bit computing. And that’s what we use today, still.

Anyway, it is curious in retrospect that Cutler twice ran afoul of Jim Allchin, though based on everything he’s said about Allchin, it appears that they always liked and respected each other.

First, when Cutler’s NT team was working on the follow-ups to NT 3.1 (the first version), Allchin started a separate team to fork the NT codebase to make a futurist version code-named Cairo. That cratered, of course, and by the time Cutler was ready to ship NT 4.0 (after versions 3.5 and 3.51), it simply grabbed the less sophisticated shell from Windows 95 and used that instead of whatever futurist nonsense Cairo would have delivered.

The second instance came after Microsoft had shipped Windows XP, the first version to combine technologies from NT/2000 with the DOS-based 9x lineup. Allchin was leading Windows by this point, and he planned two follow-ups to XP, a minor release called Longhorn and a major release called Blackcomb. As Plummer describes in his Longhorn video, feature creep set in and Longhorn became a major release instead.

Where Cutler/Plumber veer from reality a bit is in the telling of what happened there. The Windows client and server teams veered off on different schedules, whereas on Cutler’s NT teams these things had happened in lockstep. They did so for good reasons, key among them that client needed to move more quickly. But they used the same kernel and codebase. XP is when the security problems started. One of the inaccuracies (of omission, in this case) in Plumber’s version of this story is that he didn’t mention the first issue: A UPnP security issue popped up right after XP shipped that was so serious Jim Allchin had to cancel a vacation and fly home. This was the beginning of a series of security issues that triggered Bill Gates’ Trustworthy Computing initiative. Microsoft had just shipped a major new version of Windows that was designed for connectivity–it was the first to include Wi-Fi support in the box, plus UPnP for automatic configuration of network-attached PCs and other devices–and it was inherently insecure.

This is why .NET was so important, and according to the original vision for Longhorn, the next version of Windows, its key interfaces would all be made with .NET and protected by its memory safety and garbage collection features. (This never happened, but let’s get into the weeds too much here.)

Longhorn was Allchin’s baby. Allchin was responsible for XP. And over on the side, “off working on 64-bit stuff,” was Cutler. And in this time frame, 64-bit was happening first on Server. There was, of course, a 64-bit XP Pro edition that no one bought or used that shipped alongside Server 2003. But the memory needs of 64-bits would solve were more pressing on the Server. So Cutler’s forks of the NT/2000 codebase at this time were mostly focused on Server, not client. That Cutler would disrespect the work others at Microsoft were doing was inevitable. That Longhorn went off the rails didn’t help. It made it even worse.

In the Plummer/Cutler version of this story, Cutler is the hero. He got it right with AMD/x64, he got it right with Server, and he told Allchin that he should move from his “buggy” kernel/codebase to the versions Cutler had built. But these were the same codebases, essentially. Certainly, they were in public. Where the client team kept revving and shipping, across SP1, Media Center Edition, and Tablet PC Edition, server hadn’t shipped a single version since Windows 2000 Server. (Windows Server 2003 shipped in early 2003, finally.) And when Trustworthy Computing happened, all the fixes that occurred went into Windows XP too. That was SP2. And that happened before the release of Longhorn/Vista. Obviously, this code would go into the next version too.

So it’s a revisionist story, where the teller, as always, is the hero. The thing is, Cutler is a genius. And he was right about x64. And about getting Longhorn (client) and server back on the same development path. And so that did happen. But the reset that occurred with Longhorn had nothing–literally nothing–to do with the kernel or using the Server codebase or whatever; that had already happened. It was all about too many features, from too many teams, coming from too many directions all at the same time, and then about it just not working. Longhorn, like Cairo, was too much too soon. And like Cairo, it imploded.

When it did, the client team used the latest version of the codebase. And since there would be mainstream x64 versions for the first time, this was Cutler’s fork, basically. But the security fixes Plummer and Cutler both claim wouldn’t have been in Longhorn otherwise is untrue. That was all happening across both client and server. They shipped in both.

Coming from Cutler, this kind of bullying is at least somewhat understandable. It’s a bit harder to take from Plummer. He wasn’t there. His information is as second-hand as anything I got at the time. And both of them conveniently leave out something important because it makes Cutler look bad. The biggest problems with Vista at launch, performance and compatibility, where the biggest problems with NT at launch, and they were caused by the same underlying reasons and, in both cases, were essentially Cutler’s fault. It wasn’t all the new features in Vista that made it slow and less compatible, it was Cutler’s architecture. As with NT, that was improved over time. But Allchin was gone by then, and he was a convenient foil. Allchin was responsible for the management failures in Cairo and Longhorn, essentially feature overreach. He was a dreamer. But Cutler is why they were so slow. These issues were fixed in time.

Plummer leaves out, maybe doesn’t know, that the original Longhorn demo at PDC 2003 was a fake, a lie. It wasn’t real code. The real code was garbage. It’s what we got from Microsoft publicly. He blames WinFS for the performance issues, and that was likely a big part of it. But WinFS wasn’t even enabled in most Longhorn builds we got, and they were always terrible.

Anyway, what happened, happened. I do agree that getting client and server in lockstep, even when server doesn’t ship as often, is “right,” and that did come from Cutler. His demeaning takes on the client team are a bit tough, and feel unfair, but that group was always pretty chaotic until Sinofsky took over. By which time Cutler was “off working on Xbox.” He created a Hyper-V-based architecture that’s still use by the consoles today. He’s a genius. But he’s also a bully, and I don’t hear a lot of self-awareness or self-criticism there. From him or Plummer.

The other thing I remember as inaccurate is his comments about Palladium, a security technology Microsoft created as part of Trustworthy Computing. Plummer says this was “dropped from the road map,” as I recall it. But Palladium led to the TPM chip that’s in every PC today, BitLocker drive encryption, Secure Boot, and the hypervisor in Hyper-V. Like a lot of Longhorn-era technologies, it eventually shipped one form or another, and if you look at a Copilot+ PC, you can see a new avenue for that work, especially its integration with Windows Hello ESS.

Again, I love Dave’s Garage. This was a weird episode for me. I expected something, just one thing, I’d not heard before. And was surprised when that didn’t happen.

We’re all living in the matrix

David-Fake asks:

What is your take on the state of VR/AR? Google, Microsoft and Apple have all swung and missed(Apple primarily because of an absurd price point). Only Meta has gained any kind of traction-and even that is kind of marginal. Is it because the public isn’t all that interested(kind of how 3-D TV came and went) or is it because the right device at the right price hasn’t been created, yet?

The three big personal computing platform makers–Apple, Google, and Microsoft–have all tried and failed. Facebook went so far down this rabbit hole that it renamed itself to Meta, for crying out loud, but that business is nothing but a financial black hole. If companies with that much money can’t make a go of this, it’s unclear what the future holds.

That said, there are signs of life. Meta, inexplicably, keeps working away at this. Apple has slowed but not killed Vision Pro development. Google is partnering with Samsung and presumably others to get another VR/MR/whatever it’s called platform going. Microsoft put its key productivity software on Meta, and actually, on Vision Pro,  come to think of it. I feel like these companies see something I’m not seeing.

But I’m still curious.

When Stephen Rose was in Mexico City back in March, he mentioned that he traveled with Viture AR/XR glasses and would use them on the plane to watch videos, which is honestly quite interesting. I’ve seen other examples where people might use a Vision Pro or Meta whatever as a sort of extended desktop, and that has interesting applications wherever, at home, work, or when traveling. And I think this all speaks to the central issue here. We can see a future where this can make sense. But the current hardware is too big and bulky and so it mostly doesn’t make sense. For now.

The problem with this notion of VR/MR/XR/whatever being “the next wave” is that it’s never going to be the next wave. The Viture AR/VR glasses aren’t standalone, they work with Android and Windows PCs. And that’s how this makes the most sense to me. They’re a display, basically. If you’re out in the world, you might wear glasses, but you always have your phone, so it can all run through that. At home/work, it can work with a PC.

I suppose there are still using with eye fatigue or whatever other issues. (I assume Vision Pro is incredibly stressful to your head and neck.) But the idea of sitting on a plane, maybe playing a videogame or writing, or coding, or whatever, using a pair of glasses and a large virtual display is very interesting to me. It using yet another computing platform is less so. But even if that is the future, an interim step where it works with whatever we already use today sounds pretty good.

What’s on your Xbox? Mud

madthinus asks:

Thoughts on that terrible new Xbox advert.

I assume you’re referring to the Xbox “Wake Up” Brand Trailer? I hadn’t actually seen it until I saw your question. And while I assume a shorter version would be more effective, it’s not difficult to imagine how this could have been more pleasant. The issue is obvious enough, it’s the rats. No one likes rats. And it goes on for too long. All they had to do was make it a dreary world where everything is dark, drab, and terrible, and then you go home, turn on the Xbox and everything is bright, colorful, and fun. Kind of like the beginning of The Wizard of Oz, where it goes from black and white to color.

It’s too bad because the end message is solid enough (if ironic, in many ways, playing videogames is a solitary activity, even when you play “with” others you know virtually). I don’t see this tanking the Xbox brand or whatever. The nice thing about bad advertising is that you can just stop showing it.

I’m not surprised this is David Fincher’s work. It’s so dark and awful. Which is good mood setting for a thriller or horror movie. But less than ideal for any product you’re trying to sell. And the whole rat (i.e. “rat race”) bit feels unsophisticated.

Mr. Fincher, please. Mindhunter season 3. Stat.

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