Ask Paul: July 25 (Premium)

Happy Friday! This week’s Ask Paul is a contender for the longest of all time, so let’s kick off the weekend a bit early and get this started.

? A new battlefield

spacecamel asks:

Did you see the new Battlefield 6 trailer? Any chance that you switch from COD? I am hopeful it gives COD some real competition.

This has a real “here we go again” vibe to it. But this trailer also brought up an uncomfortable reminder of an ongoing worry.

So … yeah. I’m always open to whatever when it comes to how I spend my time, and with Call of Duty in particular, I would be happy to find something else to play that was somehow as engaging (by which I probably mean “addicting”). And Battlefield is clearly in the same wheelhouse, so to speak, and always has been, alongside other on-again/off-again series like Medal of Honor, Rainbow Six/Ghost Recon, and so on.

The Battlefield 6 trailer is technically and visually impressive, of course. It does feel a bit like a game engine demo in that there are repeated and similar scenes of helicopters crashing through buildings, various structures collapsing, and so on. And it has the visceral, movie-like world-building set up you expect from a big budget, action-oriented entertainment product. There are also moments reminiscent of other games, like the battle royale-style wing-suited soldiers flying through the air.

But it’s also just a single player reveal, and I pretty much focus on multiplayer these days. (There will be a multiplayer reveal on July 31, so I am looking forward to that.)

Battlefield rarely aligned with me as well as Call of Duty for some reason. This probably varied over time, but the Battlefield games tended to focus on larger, open space maps with more participants than was the case with COD, though the latter expanded over time to include more map and play types. And added its own battle royale game, separately, in Warzone. So COD has clearly been influenced by other popular games.

But this trailer also reminded me of an issue I struggle with pretty regularly, which I guess boils down to an inability to focus and handle longer-form content of whatever kinds. I usually think about this issue in terms of reading, where, even as a lifelong reader and someone who reads throughout the day, every day, I struggle with longer-form books and articles. It’s like the Internet has killed this ability. Worse, it’s killed the desire to even try. I bet many people are like that these days, it’s why an AI summary is suddenly so compelling. We don’t even have the attention span for a YouTube Short.

As the successor to the original Medal of Honor–it was made by many of the same people–COD started out as a mostly single player experience as it was trying to replicate the experience of fighting in World War II. I played that game originally on the PC, and it wasn’t until the Xbox 360 arrived, with Call of Duty 2 as one of the launch titles, that I switched exclusively to the console. And in the intervening years, a lot changed. One of the bigger things was the arrival of Halo–also single player focused–and then Halo 2, which was still excellent for single player but also the first in that series with a really compelling multiplayer experience. It was so good, Microsoft used it as the basis for many Xbox Live features.

Anyway, with the early COD titles on console, from COD2 on, I would play through the single player campaign all the way before starting on multiplayer. This worked fine for a while, but with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the multiplayer experience started getting complicated, with configurable loadouts, kill streaks (now score streaks), and whatever else. And it got worse over time. But that was the first time that I was clearly behind from the get-go, as I started playing multiplayer a few months after everyone else, and I had a difficult time even figuring it out. I had to enlist my son’s help, as he had been doing multiplayer from the beginning.

From then on, I mixed and matched single and multiplayer from the start. And I would always finish the single player campaign … until I didn’t. I can’t remember the cutoff exactly, but it was either Advanced Warfare or, more likely, Infinite Warfare, when I finally just didn’t care about the story and didn’t want to finish single player. So there are later games where I only barely or never even played single player. And random outliers like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2022), where I went back after the fact and ended up finishing single player sort of out of boredom. There were some years when I played older COD games, etc. This is all sort of a blur.

Today, I couldn’t care less about the single player campaigns. I love history, so the original WWII-era COD games were very interesting to me. The latter ones are more tired. The original MW series was really gritty and fun to play. So, too, were the early three or four Black Ops titles. And then they lost the script, so to speak. They lost me, for sure.

So, Black Ops 6. Is there a single player campaign? I honestly don’t know for sure. I will never even look at it regardless. But it does make me vaguely worried that this is my problem, that it’s my inability to focus or have the attention span, or whatever, to enjoy something that I may have loved, say, 20 years ago. Or, it could just be the games. It certainly was, in some cases. The stories were just not interesting. I don’t know.

Even something like the latest Doom game, or really all three of the most recent titles, are kind of a vague “meh” experience. They remind me of many recent Netflix movies and shows in that they are well-made, obviously big budget, and are not in any way compelling. Doom is a throwback of sorts, of course, but these games are just “go from point A to point B and kill things along the way” experiences. They look great. They bore me.

Getting back to that trailer, it looks great. It’s not at all boring, of course. But it is yet another “the world is ending” experience, like the Hollywood disaster movies that were so big in the 1990s and early 2000s, before  superhero movies took over somehow. I can’t say I feel invested in whatever the story is. The clear callback to some character I don’t know, but is someone BF diehard fans do know (I assume), is an odd moment.

But multiplayer? Yes. I’m waiting to see that.

? From a different point of view

Anlong08 asks:

Like many of us using an iPad as a full computer And tablet is pretty appealing. So to compare feature for feature as close as possible I priced out an equivalent MacBook Air 13” with an iPad Pro 13”. Holy crap. The iPad is $850 more expensive.(1Tb storage, standard glass, keyboard, Wi-Fi only). I’m guessing that most people would need an iPad Pro to get the horsepower be able to replace a laptop. Not much of a question but would the price difference make this thing less appealing to you as a laptop replacement if you were a normal user?

There are a few things going on here.

One is just Apple and the curious way it does things. Storage/RAM upgrades are always unreasonably expensive, and the delineation between different models is sometimes fuzzy because of overlapping capabilities and escalating costs. And then in this case, we have two very different products that are suddenly much closer to each other in specific ways, and for certain audiences, and so we’re directly comparing them in cost and in capabilities. And it feels off.

The other is that a direct cost-to-cost comparison of an iPad and a MacBook Air may be missing the point. It’s unlikely that many people would approach this decision with some fixed amount of money, see what they could get for that amount from either product, and then decide that way. It’s more likely that most would have whatever preference–MacBook Air or iPad–and then decide what to buy from there, and it costs what it costs. (Or, they can afford what they can afford.) Apple’s pricing scheme is designed specifically to accommodate the resulting indecision, where you go in thinking you’re getting a base iPad and walk out with a more expensive iPad Air (or whatever).

So, in your case, you can see that the iPad is suddenly compelling as what I’d call a personal computer. That is, while most will likely use it as the tablet that it fundamentally is, those who want to can also use it–or exclusively use it–as a sort of laptop now, and it really does work well. (I’ll be doing a short write-up about my experience using my iPad Air this way during this trip in whatever “What I Use” post that comes out of this.)

In comparing it to a MacBook Air by price, you can see that the iPad–specifically, the iPad Pro–is more expensive. But these two devices aren’t actually directly comparable once you get past the basics. The iPad is inherently touch-first and the laptop use case is secondary. The MacBook Air is inherently a thin and light laptop in which keyboard and touchpad are the only interface (not the primary interface). The iPad is more versatile in some ways, but also more limited in some ways. Which you get really depends on what you want or need. Not on how much it costs compared to the other thing.

There are different iPad models and lots of overlap. There are different MacBooks, also with some overlap. In each case, a lower-end model can have weird advantages over higher-end models (like the cheaper MacBook Air being silent and much thinner than the Pro models). But there is no natural transition from iPad to MacBook. You don’t get an iPad because you can’t afford a Mac. It’s not the cheaper computer. It’s a different thing that overlaps in some ways.

You’re also comparing the most expensive iPad to the least expensive Mac. You could get a 13-inch iPad Air for less money than the equivalent iPad Pro, of course. It’s limited in some ways–the Touch ID thing is a problem, for starters–and it’s thicker and heavier. But that would likely line up better, price-wise, to whatever MacBook Air. But there are always going to be trade-offs in both directions.

The iPad Pro never made sense to me because the limitations in iPadOS made it impossible to create truly Pro-level apps, especially creator-type apps like video editors that need to do things in the background. But now that that’s changed, the iPad Pro is starting to make more sense and can address a broader set of use cases. But it’s still expensive. So you could make an argument that between the base iPad, iPad Air, and iPad Pro, there is a sort of three tier system where the first device is good for those who only occasionally need the computer features, the third is for those who only occasionally need the tablet/consumption features, and the Air is a sort of middle ground. A high-end Toyota as opposed to a similar Lexus, if you’re into cars.

If you configure whatever iPad with the Apple keyboard case that works with it, you have this range of choices and price points. A base iPad with a Magic Keyboard Folio starts at $600, which is cheaper than any decent Windows PC (and a full $400 cheaper than any MacBook Air, which might explain the A-series MacBook rumors). An iPad Air with a Magic Keyboard starts at $870, still reasonable, or $1070 if you want the 13-inch version, which is getting into uncomfortable territory. And the iPad Pro is extravagant: An 11-inch model with a Magic Keyboard starts at $1300, and the 13-inch version starts at $1600 (!). One could spend over $3000 on an iPad Air if you maxed out the storage to 2 TB, got an Apple Pencil, and chose the nano-texture screen option. And are a special kind of idiot with too much money to spend, in my opinion.

I struggle to understand the market for the iPad Pro, but I feel like anyone who really wants that type of device will comparison shop it against other types of iPads. And that the reason the iPad Air exists today–it was different when it first appeared–is to give customers who want a Pro an out, a way to save money, make some compromises, but get basically what they want. And still spent a lot more than they would if they got a base iPad instead.

The MacBook family makes a bit more sense to me, I guess. It’s simpler. But I very much prefer the Air’s thin and light form factor, love that it has no fans, have never felt that it was throttling and undermining the experience, and have never needed more performance. And so the Pros are a non-starter for me. Heavy, expensive, and unnecessary. But those who need whatever advantages they have at least have that choice.

Anyway, to your final question. Thanks to the tiered nature of the iPad lineup, there are affordable laptop-like iPads if you’re OK with 11-inch displays, and a $1000-ish version if you need 13 inches. With the MacBook Air, you have 13- and 15-inch versions, but the pricing starts at $1000. So you either need something one product has that the other does not. Or maybe you need both, I don’t know.

Personally, I prefer a laptop to a tablet. And I prefer big screens, in part because I’m getting older and struggle with smaller displays. A 15-inch or bigger iPad with a keyboard would be interesting to me, and I suspect others, but if that does happen, it will be Pro first, then maybe an Air. But we’ll never see a big-screen base iPad. It would be too compelling and would cannibalize sales of the other, more lucrative (to Apple) versions.

$1000 for a modern iPad with a big screen seems semi-reasonable to me, though I have reservations about some of the artificial limitations (no Face ID, etc). I happen to have an 11-inch iPad Air, so I won’t be upgrading. But I can’t see myself ever paying $1600 or more for an iPad Pro 13-inch. Once you get into that pricing category, the MacBook Air (or whatever premium Windows PC) makes more sense (to me).

Regarding performance, I think you’d be surprised. I suspect that even a base iPad is excellent in that regard, especially compared to similarly priced PCs. The iPad Air, M2 or M3, is terrific.

Finally, I want to point out what I think is the biggest advantage of an iPad over any computer. It’s not touch or the form factor, it’s the simplicity of the system itself. There are people out there who are upset that Apple is adding all these new multitasking features to iPadOS because they feel it usurps the simplicity of the device, the point of the device. This is a difficult thing to do, but Apple is supporting both modes correctly. If you want to keep it the way it always was, you can. If you want floating windows and whatever else, you can have that. So it crosses the line pretty elegantly. Apple tried this in reverse with the Mac, via features like LaunchPad and Stage Manager, and pretty much failed. But on the iPad side, the transition works really well.

An iPad with floating windows, efficient multitasking, and background processes is a terrific tradeoff in which we lose the complexities of any computer while gaining the key features that keep us using computers today. It’s the rare example of a hybrid device–one thing that can replace two other things–actually working. And not just working to some degree. Working well. Too often, simpler is also dumber, more limited, and/or unacceptable. Apple has pulled off something truly magical here. And I think it transcends price in the sense that you want this–the form factor, the simplicity, but also the power and capability–and not something else. So comparing it head to head with a laptop on price is perhaps beside the point. Like comparing the cost of a refrigerator to a washing machine (sort of). They’re both expensive, they’re both appliances, but they both focus on different things too.

? Living in China

ianceicys asks:

Hey Paul—curious as you read Apple in China. What were your three biggest “wait… what?!” moments from the book?

For me, the hits just kept coming:

Apple left a mile-long trail of ruined suppliers — entire businesses crushed and destroyed due to Apple’s terms.

The DAP (Divorce Avoidance Program) was real. Because overwork led to so many divorces, factory managers had to rotate home visits.

Apple employee deaths were so frequent, even Jobs himself believed his immune system broke down in 1997 because of the toxic environment.

Then there were the psychological tactics – ex. Foxconn refusing to install A/C unless the equipment needed it, and Apple freezing or overheating hotel rooms during 72-hour contract “negotiations” until suppliers caved and signed anything.

Sorry, I am working on a review that will be disappointing now because I’ve taken too long too just finish it. But I bookmarked many passages as I read this book and was astonished by Apple’s capitulation to China in the name of profits again and again.

As with the concluding chapter in Careless People, the book about Facebook/Meta, I feel that the key takeaway is that this company has likely engaged in what I would call treason. Apple–and other U.S. companies–have handed the enemy the technology and know-how it needs to defeat us. We can see that defeat in small ways now, through electronics and manufacturing (thanks, Apple!), electric vehicles (thanks, Tesla!), and so on. But that it will only get worse. This is more damaging to our country than most realize yet. It is the start of our eventual defeat on the world stage, and the start of an era that is and will be dominated by China. Apple didn’t “cause” this, but it did accelerate it.

I’ll try to get my review, with more specifics, up soon. Not sure why I keep not finishing that. It’s not particularly long. It’s just extremely troubling.

Reading all that got me thinking about Copilot+ PCs. Given what Apple in China reveals about asymmetric power dynamics, how lopsided do you think the Microsoft–Qualcomm contract was for Snapdragon exclusivity? Any parallels to the 12-month unlimited warranty Apple forced on Foxconn for iPhones?

With the understanding that many of its details are private, I don’t see the Microsoft/Qualcomm partnership as lopsided. If there’s a parallel there with Apple, it’s to that company’s agreement to make the original iPhone exclusive to AT&T (Cingular, originally). And the reason is that it only went to AT&T after the bigger U.S. carriers at the time, Verizon and Sprint, said no to Apple’s demands. Microsoft originally had several hardware partners interested in making Arm-based chips for PCs, but after Windows RT failed and it had to start over, no one was interested in that anymore.

Except for Qualcomm.

Yes, the first several generations of Qualcomm chips for PCs were terrible. But we have to put that in context. Where Windows RT did not offer x86 emulation, Windows 10 on Arm had to, and so it took a while to improve the hardware and software platforms to get them to the point where an Arm-based PC could make sense. Except that never happened, as it turns out. Qualcomm’s PC chips were based on its phone chips, and adapting them to the needs of PCs was never successful. Qualcomm had to buy a company that was making Arm-based chips for datacenters, chips that had a PC use case possibility, to get there. That was extremely expensive. And then it was starting over from scratch, so it took years to come to fruition. But they got there. It’s kind of a miracle.

What other company would have taken that much time trying to make it work? What other company would have spent that much money on an acquisition just to appease one partner, a partner that could only promise that even if this was the most successful PC project of all time, the market would still be tiny compared to that for phones? I can’t believe this happened at all. And so it’s understandable that Qualcomm might, on its end, require some exclusivity arrangements. It put in the time, it put in the work, it paid the bills. It should get something in return. Especially given how spectacularly successful the outcome was in the end.

Apple quickly crapped all over AT&T, blaming them for the bandwidth and connectivity issues that the first iPhone had when that in fact was Apple’s fault. And then it moved to other carriers in the U.S. and then the world as quickly as it could. Let’s hope that Microsoft never treats Qualcomm that way. But let’s also hope that their success has inspired other chip designers and makers–Intel and AMD, primarily–to adopt Arm and do the right thing for the PC too.

In the short term, trying to transform their x86 designs into something Arm-like is an understandable goal. But I also feel that it’s impossible. I’m happy to be wrong if that’s not the case. We need better processors. We need what Apple has. Qualcomm is the only company doing that right now. But maybe Mediatek. Maybe Nvidia. We’ll see.

Related to that bit …

? An Arm and a leg

gg1 asks:

Have you read the reports that NVIDIA has delayed their ARM processors? Ultimately they’re just rumors and could or could not be true, but it got me thinking: how come we still don’t have any Qualcomm ARM processors for desktop machines or servers, or that work with GPUs? (among other weird limitations). It seems like we had a great start and then lost all momentum in the year+ since the original announcement.

There are so many things going on here, it’s difficult to know what’s really happening.

Nvidia is rumored to be working on Arm chips for PCs. By itself. In partnership with Mediatek. Or perhaps with some other company. Or not. Who knows?

There are no Arm chips of any kind that work with dedicated graphics. On the one hand, this feels like a limitation. But on the other, the integrated approach works well. I don’t doubt that Apple Silicon chips have terrific graphics performance. But I also know from experience that the integrated graphics in modern AMD (especially) and Intel chips for PCs are terrific for gaming and all but the most high-end scenarios. In other words, they’re fine for 90 percent of the market. Which means they’re fine.

The loss of momentum you perceive is maybe tied more to the stupid world we live in, where there is a new electronics release every day, and publications that cover this stuff just move on to the next big thing every day. Mobile OSes and desktop OSes are updated every year, except that they’re really updated every month and even more. The major chip makers create new generations of silicon every year, or every six months. So the Snapdragon X feels slow by comparison.

It’s not. Snapdragon X is two things. It was created specifically for a certain market, premium business-class laptops. And it does things wonderfully that x86 still cannot, despite one to two generations of updates on that side from Intel and AMD. Since its first release, Qualcomm answered the needs of PC makers by creating lower-cost versions of the Snapdragon X chips, via the X Plus and X in various tiers. And so we’ve seen two delivery milestones, in September last year and January this year, in which Snapdragon has expanded to new classes of devices.

(This vaguely reminds me of Steve Jobs ripping on Microsoft for taking too long to deliver Longhorn and bragging about all the Mac OS X releases that Apple had shipped. But Microsoft shipped more Windows updates in that period, including two or three major versions of the Media Center and Tablet PC editions, and XP SP2, which was really a major new release of Windows. Sorry, I’m all over the map today.)

When you think about Qualcomm moving upmarket, the most obvious thing that needs to improve is graphics. Not because Snapdragon X graphics are lacking for what I’d call the usual productivity tasks most use a PC for, but because upmarket workloads are things like engineering and gaming that demand better graphics. And gaming is the one area where emulation isn’t going to cut it. This is a small but lucrative market. And it requires help on the software side. So far, we’ve seen things like AutoSR that can help Arm chips run x86 games at lower resolutions while displaying them in a way the user can’t tell the difference, which is nice in isolation. But more needs to be done, and I think a big chunk of the Xbox/Windows merger is about forcing developers to make Arm compatibility part of the process in gaming.

Did I mention how terrible x86 is?

Here in Mexico, I have two older laptops, one running a 13th Gen Intel Core processor, and the other running the previous gen AMD Ryzen. And I am reviewing two current-gen laptops, with an Intel Core Ultra (Lunar Lake) and AMD Ryzen Zen-5 whatever chip. The older laptops are just as good, just as fast, just as reliable (unreliable) as the new ones for what I do. In fact, the new ones have all kinds of problems. Bad problems. I’ll review them soon. But the Snapdragon X-based Surface Laptop I bought a year ago runs rings around all of them. And it is much more reliable. Much more.

From Qualcomm’s perspective, it’s understandable that it spends more time/effort/money on its more lucrative mobile chips that sell at much higher volumes and always will. But it also took that Snapdragon X core from the PC chips and used that for the basis for its latest mobile chips, and that requires time, effort, and cross-company collaboration. Hopefully, we see this virtuous cycle effect across mobile and PC going forward, as is the case with Apple. But these things don’t just happen overnight.

I’m excited to see what Qualcomm does with the next gen Snapdragon X. Improved graphics are a lock, obviously. But the bigger questions are pretty much on the software side. Which means Microsoft. Which is distracted by AI now and doesn’t have its A-team working on most things related to Windows. So we’ll see.

You usually have insights that put things into a different, more informed perspective for me. What are your thoughts regarding ARM in Windows at this stage?

Windows on Arm isn’t just in great shape right now, it’s superior to x86 Windows in almost every way that matters for most PC use cases. With one obvious exception–gaming–there is no logical reason for any normal human being to buy an x86 computer right now. What skews that is inertia and history. Intel spent decades paying off PC makers to harm the competition, and that worked. And these companies have worked together for so long that change is difficult. Qualcomm had to adapt to all that.

But the point of Arm wasn’t to lower prices or add another silicon vendor. It was to transform the PC into something that retains all the productivity advantages of the platform while giving it the reliability and efficiency that it never had (and still doesn’t on x86). These things also take time.

In the short term, AMD and Intel will retain their advantages with gamers, though much of that relies on discrete graphics, and that means Nvidia and AMD. In the short term, long-time partnerships will help ensure we see more x86 than should be the case in a truly competitive open market. But thanks to Intel’s stumbles and AMD’s new focus on AI, the payoffs are over. And now there is an obviously better choice. Soon, maybe more choices, if MediaTek, Nvidia, or whatever other companies ever jump in. I can’t imagine a future in which AMD doesn’t transition to Arm. I have trouble now imagining a future in which Intel even exists. That’s how far it’s behind, how far x86 is behind.

There will always be exceptions. Some will reject anything new, have weird, out of date hardware or software needs, and/or have trouble seeing that they’re outliers who don’t represent the mainstream, volume customer base. These are the people who imagine that Microsoft or anyone else can somehow get at Recall data despite its promises and the literal security controls, who think iPads are toys, who think that we “need” Intel and actually root for it to survive. But the world has already moved on, and only the PC market is stuck in the past. Not because it’s “better” on x86, but because of corruption, illegal business agreements, and history/tradition. It can’t last. It won’t last.

When we were in Mexico on the previous trip, my wife mentioned that her PC was getting slow and problematic, and so I replaced it when we got home. I had many choices, but in the end, I selected for her a random Snapdragon-based laptop that was thin and light. I paved it over, handed it to her, and let her just use it without discussing anything about Windows 11 on Arm, or Snapdragon, or whatever else. Today, it’s over two months later, she’s used it every single day, traveled with it, connected it to every manner of hardware, from docks to keyboards, mice, displays, printer/scanners, microphones, and whatever else, installed the software she needs, and … yeah. Guess what? Not a peep. It just works fine. More than fine. She opens the lid, and it comes on instantly, unlike the Intel-based PC she was using. The camera recognizes her immediately and she signs in seamlessly. Her only comment about this PC was that it was silent, and that surprised her given the fan noise she was used to. OK, I guess there was a peep.

This is the experience. This is what happens when you say goodbye to the x86 boat anchor that is holding back our industry. And this is a year-old laptop, not the latest Intel or AMD silicon. Thank God for that. Because it just works, unlike those chips. Which, yes, have certain niceties and even advantages. But they are weighed down by the problems inherent in that platform. Which I see every single day, all day long, as I use and review different laptops.

I don’t know that I have particular insight on this. But what I do have is a mountain of experience with more laptops in any given year than most will ever use in a lifetime. And that experience is why I believe x86 can’t be fixed. Why I think it has to die. And why Arm isn’t just the future, it’s unavoidable and can be the present right now if we would just collectively give up our biases and skewed understanding of where these things are.

I am looking forward to the next Snapdragon Summit in late September.

? This is what enshittification looks like

OldITPro2000 asks:

I signed in to OWA last weekend and noticed a Copilot icon in the Ribbon. I don’t have a Copilot license and generally turn it off wherever I see it. I go into Settings and disable it. A few days later I’m back in OWA, the Copilot icon is back and the toggle in Settings is back on. I turn it off again, wait an hour, head back to OWA and it’s on AGAIN. It took a few days for it to listen and stay off.

This story gives me PTSD thanks to my problems with Windows 11 enabling OneDrive Folder backup after asking me for permission and me saying no. But it’s everything, really. The other day, I rebooted to install whatever update and when it came back up, I signed in, launched Microsoft Edge, and was confronted by this cute little F.U. to the customer.

This is enshittification. I made explicit configuration choices that are optimal for me. But they’re not optimal for Microsoft, and so it hounds me to switch using dark patterns that make it seem like those changes are good for me. There is no “Never show me this again” option.

And it never ends because enshittification is like cancer. Consider these little notifications that I’ve just started seeing. Is this enshittification?

The answer is … not really.

Whether these notifications are useful or not is maybe dependent on the individual, but we need to give Microsoft the latitude to promote functionality that users might not ever discover otherwise. The notification system in Windows is borderline user-hostile, as I wrote previously, if not pointless. But that’s the system, and so it’s up to each app to handle these things. With the Edge notification shown above, there is no way to turn that off. Edge will keep harassing me. But with Copilot, as it turns out, there is an option to turn this off.

And that makes it OK. It’s not ideal, maybe. But this is all I can ask: Let me turn it off. And so I can live with this.

I mention this because I’m not sure whether OWA has an option to permanently disable that Copilot button. I hope there is. But these things seem to be implemented randomly, so it’s difficult to say for sure. I feel like Microsoft’s corporate customers have the clout to demand that it be configurable. And so if it’s not already, it probably will be in time. Fingers crossed.

I sat there just thinking “what has happened to these guys?” and contemplated where Microsoft is at these days. I think at this point there really isn’t anything for a tech enthusiast to be excited about regarding Microsoft. Sure, there are interesting things happening in the enterprise space, but I feel like the old SuperSite for Windows audience is left with crumbs.

Yeah. I feel the same way.

To be fair to Microsoft, it followed the money. This was the responsible thing to do in the sense that it is a publicly held company with shareholders. Its executives have whatever roles, but the high level generalization is to improve value for those shareholders. It pushed into the enterprise, and then into cloud computing, was lucrative to the degree that Microsoft has been one of the world’s three or four most valuable companies for all of the past several years. It is spectacularly successful.

This is obvious, I know. But you could look at this from a different angle and describe this success as occurring specifically because it no longer tries to please the SuperSite (enthusiast) audience. Once truly consumer-centric companies arrived in the market, Microsoft was seen as old-fashioned, slow, and boring. They make products for work. And so on. And so its focus was inarguably correct. Thus, its ignoring of you and me is likewise correct, from a business perspective.

Maybe.

A few days later I finally had some time to watch the Acquired interview with Steve Ballmer. It’s long but because Ballmer is animated and engaging it goes quickly. It reinforced my earlier thoughts about how Microsoft is an enterprise company now with all the good and bad that comes with it and over the course of decades has deliberately moved away from the consumer and tech enthusiast space. Did you have a chance to watch this interview yet? If so, what did you think? If not, are you planning to do so?

I have watched this interview three times so far, and I will watch it more because it is endlessly fascinating. I know I’ve written about this somewhere, maybe in comments, and probably more than once. But one of the many things Ballmer discusses in this interview that I found to be incredible was about Microsoft’s shift in the late 1990s and early 2000s from focusing on individuals to focusing on businesses. (This is a core topic in Steven Sinofsky’s Hardcore Software as well.)

As noted, Microsoft was correct to make these transitions (including to the cloud). The history is clear. But Ballmer makes the case that Microsoft could have done both. And he tried to make that happen. He wanted Microsoft to have consumer and business focuses. He regrets this didn’t happen. I think this is literally his biggest regret as CEO of Microsoft.

I hear that. I think we all sort of wanted that, or still want it. But the reality is that it was never going to happen. Those other companies that came up in this time, like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, were exclusively consumer focused. That means they were literally focused, and also that they ignored businesses.

But Microsoft did try to do both, we forget this. It was pushing increasingly pointless consumer products during all of the 2000s and even 2010, to the point that one of the last vestiges of that, the movies and TV shows in the Microsoft Store, was only just this week finally canceled. (I have a list of such things in In Little Tech (Premium), just from 2005 alone.) But where it experienced unending success with businesses, it saw only defeats with consumers. So here we are.

And “here” is a world in which we, as individuals, don’t matter to Microsoft. (Just as Microsoft does not matter to most individuals, to be fair.) This is perhaps skewed by the fact that even in a volume market like PCs, we’re not really Microsoft’s customers. The PC makers are, and we are their customers. The enshittification in Windows is tied to that dynamic, when you think about it. These things–ads, upsells to Microsoft 365, OneDrive storage, Clipchamp plans, and whatever else; crapware sponsorships, etc.–are an attempt by Microsoft to turn us into a more direct customer relationship. But few are interested.

Over time, Microsoft’s strategies have become more aggressive. Again, this is enshittification. And now we don’t have a good relationship with Microsoft as individuals.

? Close enough for hand grenades

JHawkZZ asks:

As a software engineer, I often use AI to try and get answers to various questions around design patterns and specific APIs / SDKs. I find that at best, the answers it gives and the code it generates are 90% accurate, and at worst it hallucinates. It’s generally enough of an answer to where I can build off of it and go find what I need, but do you see a day that it gets better than this, or is the fundamental design of LLMs going to keep us limited to this?

Since I don’t understand how LLMs work, I will pivot and claim that this is almost a workflow question.

Kidding. Sort of. But bear with me.

You have a specific need that I can relate to. And the way you get answers to questions has changed over time. The quality of the answers you find, respectively, may have changed too (you’re arguing that it’s changed for the worst or is at least not perfect). But so has the volume of the answers you can find. And that’s both good and bad because it requires you (or, more recently, an AI) to figure out which answer is correct.

I will be more specific in a moment. But thinking back to before I started writing books, I assumed that the author of any book I read–about personal technology, whether it was developer related or a general how-to or whatever–was a subject matter expert. And that their expertise is what landed them the book deal. When I became an author, I learned that things can happen differently. Sometimes, one becomes an expert in the course of writing a book. The writing of the book requires them to become an expert, sometimes through trial and error.

I spent much of the 1990s and 2000s, and maybe into the 2010s, reading books to learn more about technical topics. Over this time, everything changed. The web arrived. Blogs and bloggers. YouTube and video content creators. And now AI, and everything in-between. I used to walk up to a  bookshelf, scan the spines for the title (or titles) I needed to reference, take out that book, and check the index or flip through it to find something. If I didn’t have the book, I’d buy it. First, by getting in the car and driving to Borders, Barnes & Noble, or whatever other store. And then via Amazon. And then electronically via Kindle.

Now, we have instant access to all the information in the world. But we still have to figure out what’s correct and what’s wrong (or, less nefariously, maybe just out of date). And you’ve definitely done that thing I do all the time: Bring up Search, almost certainly Google, ask a very specific question–lately, mine are mostly about WinUI 3 and data binding–scan the results, Ctrl + click the ones that look most promising into new tabs, usually from Stack Overflow (and, in my case, Microsoft Learn), and then spend a lot more time than I am comfortable admitting reading, trying out bits of code, and hopefully finding the answer.

The promise of AI is that it will do the  busywork for you. You can ask a chatbot that same question. You can keep using Search, as it has AI overviews now. You can use an integrated tool like GitHub Copilot, which can make it easier to ask even more specific questions against your literal code base. Whatever. But the goal is that you ask and you get the answer. No more hunting and pecking.

That’s not exactly the experience today. Sometimes AI nails it and gets the answer on the first try. Sometimes you have to keep prompting it and it gets there. I’ve failed to get answers sometimes. I have gotten a block of code that looked great to me, plugged it in, and watched it fail again and again until I debugged it and realized its mistake. Like you, I assume, I feel like I’ve seen it all.

But even this is better than all the old ways of getting answers. It’s not perfect, but it is improving rapidly and will only get better. And there is incredible competition in this space. In a nice twist, there’s no stickiness to AI, really: If another AI is better, just use that. I like that aspect of it.

With regard to accuracy, if a book was wrong back in the 1980s or 90s, if some code listing was off, you were on your own, literally. With Search, you can spend an afternoon trying things, reading, and hopefully finding an answer. With AI, you can work right in your editor of choice and interact with the thing in real-time. And yeah, it’s not perfect. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse than whatever single source. But the process is better overall by a wide margin. The time savings are real.

Some of our reaction to AI is human nature, I bet.

Two weeks before we came to Mexico, I threw out my back. This is something I’ve done here and there over the years, and the recovery time varies. But this was one of the worst ever, and I have no idea why. It was still all messed up when we flew here, and my mobility wasn’t great. I would wake up repeatedly each night because I move, and I would wrench my back, sending shooting pain up my body, and jolting me out of sleep. Sometimes, I would just forget, bend over to pick something up, and almost pass out from the sudden pain. It was horrible.

The other day, I was making coffee, and I suddenly realized that I hadn’t had any back pain in a week or maybe even two weeks. I was fine. The pain had started suddenly and lingered. But when it disappeared, I didn’t even notice. I can’t explain this other than to say it’s familiar. I was cursing my back for weeks, almost a month, every single day. But when things got better, I didn’t notice or appreciate it. How stupid, right?

But this is what we do. Anyone who has ever dealt with customer service will tell you that complaints are common, but praise is rare. And I feel like maybe–not definitely, I’m kind of spit-balling here–that’s where you are at, where we’re all at, with AI right now. The process and capabilities are better than they’ve ever been. It’s better than what we were doing. But we still complain when it doesn’t get it right. We all do this, I think.

And then there’s this.

It also makes me worry–if it’s 90% accurate for code, what about medical industries that use it to research new drugs?

I can’t speak to what that industry requires, but I recently read an interview with Peter Thiel, who’s as controversial a character as there is. He’s all over the place, but he did make an interesting comment that grabbed my imagination. I was lucky to even catch it, given that it was in the middle of an ongoing conversation about stagnation, one of his many weird affectations. But he said:

We should take a lot more risk. We should be doing a lot more. I can go through all these different verticals. If we look at biotech, something like dementia, Alzheimer’s — we’ve made zero progress in 40 to 50 years. People are completely stuck on beta amyloids. It’s obviously not working. It’s just some kind of a stupid racket where the people are just reinforcing themselves. So, yes, we need to take way more risk in that department.

This resonates with me because I always push back at things that are habits or traditions, things we just do without thinking, and can never explain why. If we just keep doing the same thing, we don’t advance, and we don’t solve problems.

With AI, we already have examples where it put some research over the top. It’s translated text on stone tablets that no human could translate. It’s being used to create new drugs and treatments. I feel like some combination of AI and quantum computing is perhaps how we cure cancer or whatever else. And the thing is, this can’t happen if we don’t at least try. If a company uses AI to create a new drug, it’s not about going from that to the market, the same processes we had before still apply. There will be animal trials, human trials, however that works. But maybe AI gets us there quicker. Not maybe. It will.

Look, I’m not a naive, bright-eyed idiot (I think). But I do feel that AI is a major advance and it will get there. It’s kind there now. We still need experts. Individually, we still need to think for ourselves. If you’re coding and using AI, it is on you to evaluate the code it writes, or the changes it wants to make. But this is still better than what we used to do. We just need to understand the dynamic and work with it.

?️ Landfill

lindhartsen asks:

As we move through a cycle of hardware becoming obsolete with Windows 10 support ending curious if you have any thoughts on what a reasonable expectation is for someone buying a decently equipped computer today to expect the device to last. While hardware may be well built unless you go quite cheap, there’s still the mix of increased demands and eventual end of support that’ll make buying something new necessary.

When I think about Windows 10 end of life and the Windows 11 hardware requirements, which felt (and were) artificial at launch, I always find myself doing math. It’s 2025. Windows 11 arrived in 2021. It required at least an 8th generation Intel Core processor (or equivalent), which you may recall was notable for being the version where Intel basically doubled the core count across the board without any meaningful downsides. But you may also recall that these chips first appeared in 2017, which is eight years ago. And you may know that x86 chips, despite all the flaws I’ve harped on here and elsewhere, have improved dramatically since then.

8 years is a long time in personal computing.

Looking just at Intel chips, the oldest and lamest 8th Gen Core processor, the Core i5-8350U, was built on a 14 nm (!) manufacturing process. It was a 15-watt part with four processor cores and, thanks to Hyperthreading, 8 threads. It had a base frequency of 1.7 GHz and a peak turbo frequency of 3.6 GHz, supported a maximum of 32 GB of DDR4-4000 RAM, and came with Intel UHD Graphics 620 integrated on the die. This seemed fine at the time.

The most common Intel chips I see today are of the Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) variety, and they couldn’t be more different from that old 8th Gen Core chip. These chips support up to 24 processor cores, with up to 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores. They can run to a maximum turbo frequency of 5.7 GHz. They have powerful integrated graphics and NPUs. They support DDR5-8500 RAM. Up to 20 PCIe 5.0 lanes. The latest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth standards. Thunderbolt 4 and USB4. The Intel Core Ultra 7 258V in the laptop I’m writing this with has 8 cores and a TDP that can scale between 8 watts and 37 watts. It’s an almost completely new architecture compared to that 8th Gen Core chip.

Is 8 years a long enough life cycle for a personal computing or consumer electronics product? I guess it depends. But the PCs that we buy today are much more sustainable than they were 8 years ago. They’re made of more recycled and sustainable parts, are themselves more easily recycled, and they’re repairable in ways that weren’t the case 8 years ago (I’m assuming laptop form factors here). Hundreds of millions of Windows 10 PCs potentially heading to landfills is a problem in part because of their unsustainable nature, especially with the older products. But keeping them around is untenable, too, especially with the older products.

Sonos has been in the news for the past year for all the wrong reasons. But before the Sonosgate flareup, this company had weathered other controversies. One of the bigger being its 2020 decision to obsolete its oldest products. In this case, I actually think that Sonos, a small company with limited resources, did the right thing. The products it was obsoleting were 15 years old in some cases and the processors, RAM, and other internal components couldn’t keep up with the capabilities Sonos was building. But fans complained, and it reversed course, choosing instead to continue with bug and security fixes for legacy products and splitting its system in two, with separate networks for older and newer products. Sonos later architected new products to be more sustainable, key changes including adding Bluetooth support across the board, which would help them always work as standalone speakers, and adding USB-C support.

One of the lessons here was that 15 years was too short a lifecycle for a speaker. I said that 8 years was a long time in this market, and 15 years is almost double that. What’s the right life cycle for a phone? Or a tablet or a PC?

It’s difficult to say. But I could not use an 8th Gen Intel Core-based PC today, that’s easy to say. I celebrated when 16 GB of RAM finally became a de facto standard in the PC market, but I consider 32 GB to be my new baseline. The chips we have today, as noted, are much better in many ways, and even better still if you choose Arm. What do we do with all those old PCs and other devices? This will vary by person. And by use case.

This makes your question difficult to answer. I tend to move from PC to PC for review reasons, but I noted above that I have a 13th Gen Intel Core-based laptops that works as well as a new laptop for my needs. That should be qualified with the fact that the battery is no longer great and probably never was, compared to new PCs. But it’s usable. I don’t ever complain about performance. Those chips are just 3 years old. They’re not much different from 11th and 12th Gen chips, so I can perhaps eyeball this and say 5 years makes sense if you are actively using the thing every day for work. More if it’s only occasional. But specifics are hard. And future advances may change the math.

And that’s just laptops.

Most decent Android phones and all iPhones are supported for several years. That’s pretty good, but I wouldn’t personally want to use a phone that was older than two or three years. Others beat them into the ground and use them past the point that makes sense. Sustainability and repairability are tougher in this space, and upgrading is almost unheard of. That’s a problem, for sure.

To generalize, it’s odd to me that larger managed businesses, which many would complain are slow-moving and working actively against new technologies in some ways, may have always been on to something. The PC upgrade lifecycle has lengthened out to several years and probably roughly matches what these companies have been doing for the past few decades. We have, in a sense, caught up with them in the PC space, though we went through the same issues with phones, tablets, and other devices.

In short, I have no good answers. Sorry.

? Streaming services

jrzoomer asks:

Paul what music streaming services do you subscribe to? Are you consolidated to one? Or if you subscribe to more than one what is your thought process? I feel there’s a ton of redundancy in this space.

The big issues, to me, are the proliferation of services and the escalating prices. The silver lining is that the inherent advantage of these services over things like cable TV or whatever is that you can come and go as you wish.

This means you can switch from Apple Music to Spotify, as an example, if the latter finally adds that high-res tier they’ve promised for years.

This means that you could theoretically just subscribe to a different video service each month (or whatever), catch up on whatever shows and other content, and then move on to the next.

This means that you can subscribe to a TV service like YouTube TV or a sports service like MLB.com for the duration of the season of the only sport you care about, and not for a full year.

And so on.

I have this dream that I will some day do at least some of that. But it hasn’t yet. Part of the problem is that I have kids who are sort-of adults but also sort-of dependent on us in some ways. But whatever. Right now, we subscribe to:

• Netflix, which is still the best of the bunch
• YouTube Premium, which I get with YouTube Music Premium and is the video service my wife and I use the most often
• Amazon Prime Video, which I now don’t use, but we pay for Amazon Prime and it’s a perk
• Apple TV+, which is solid, but also part of the Apple One subscription I use that my kids take advantage of too, and that has perks like storage and so on
• Hulu Plus, which we watch occasionally and might be the first to go

We also use Plex because a friend has a Plex server full of content. We have Apple Music (part of Apple One), Spotify Family (kids, wife), and YouTube Music (me). There are shows on random networks I want to see, which complicates matters. So we sometimes subscribe for a month and then move on to see those things.

God, I hope that’s everything. I would like it to be less. I feel vaguely trapped. And in the interests of my sanity, I’m trying not to do the math.

? The wizard that was Oz

anderb asks:

Favourite Ozzy album?

I respect and love that Ozzy was able to perform one final time recently, just weeks before his passing. It’s such a wonderful gift for fans, but it must have also been wonderful for him. That it included Black Sabbath and his solo material is likewise wonderful. As is the fact that it was all done for charity and it set a record in raising $190 million. The whole thing was incredibly inspiring. Most musicians don’t get this opportunity. My favorite band, Van Halen, didn’t and that whole thing sucks.

Anyway, I came of age in the 1980s, and so Ozzy was always a solo act for me, and it wasn’t until later that I “discovered” Black Sabbath. So my favorite Ozzy albums are obvious enough: Blizzard of Oz (Crazy Train, Mr. Crowley) and Diary of a Madman (Flying High Again, You Can’t Kill Rock and Roll). Which perhaps not coincidentally are the first two and the only Ozzy albums with Randy Rhodes.

But I like a lot of Ozzy music. Bark at the Moon, Shot in the Dark, Close My Eyes Forever (with Lita Forward), No More Tears, Mama, I’m Coming Home, and many others will always have a special place for me.

What a voice. What a presence. Ozzy was a true icon.

Stephen Rose made a great Ozzy playlist on Spotify if anyone is interested in listening.

? I don’t like crowds, but I do like crowdfunding

digiguy asks:

I read that Gamefound bought Indiegogo today. I don’t know Gamefound so I don’t know what this implies for Indiegogo, other that all the positive things they put in the announcement, but more generally have you used or do you use crowdfounding to buy things? I have in the past, but after a couple of bad experiences (companies running away with the money without a single word and not delivering anything) I stopped using Indiegogo and Kickstarter. Which is a shame since the idea seems good, but the fact that these platforms seem to do nothing in case of fraud for me is a deal breaker.

Kickstarter is obviously the biggest player in this area, but Indiegogo is pretty close, so this is big news.

And like you, I’ve always liked crowdfunding in theory, or in general. I have backed a few Kickstarters and other things over the years, perhaps most notably Brian Bagnall’s Commodore/Amiga history books, Commodore: The Amiga Years and Commodore: The Final Years. I have a hard time remembering all of them, but I think the most recent I backed was a World War II-era Call of Duty-style videogame called Battalion 1944, which ran into problems and refunded backers in 2023.

These things are a bit tough. I like to support good work. But I’m not a gambler, so I haven’t done too much of this. But I guess it’s about investing in something you believe in and being able to walk away clean if the money you gave just disappears. In a very small way, the publish-as-you-go capabilities that Leanpub provides to authors is a bit like this in that you can charge for a book before it’s done (or even before it’s written). But they do offer buyers their money back when requested, at least. That does feel like a crucial piece of the puzzle.