Ask Paul: March 27 ⭐️

Happy Friday! The RAM/component shortage has everyone down, but at least the MacBook Neo is still terrible. Let’s kick off the weekend with a bit of angst and dream of a better tomorrow.

“iOS 26.4 adds new Apple Music features and emoji”

All the essentials!

∞ It will never end

NickTech asks:

Paul, what are your thoughts on the continuing price hikes for SSDs and RAM? Do you think PC makers will just continue to hike prices, or do you see a point where they try to do some sort of “budget” PC tier to try and lock in a lower price? It would be great to have a Snapdragon equivalent of the Macbook Neo for those of us who want to try an ARM based Windows system.

That existed before the MacBook Neo was a gleam in Craig Federighi’s eye: In May 2025, HP announced the OmniBook 5 series powered by base-level Snapdragon X chips in both 14- and 16-inch versions. At that time, before the RAM/component prices kicked in, the list prices started at $799, but this is HP, so the real-world prices were starting at about $500. I knew I’d get a 16-inch version as soon as I could, and I did that in July, paying just $579. The 14-inch version was less expensive than that, though I don’t recall the price.

There is no such thing as a good $500 laptop, and the MacBook Neo achieves its low price by cutting corners everywhere. The OmniBook starts with 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage because it’s a Copilot+ PC, and it has all kinds of things the Neo does not, including keyboard backlighting standard, higher resolution displays with multitouch options, consistent USB port capabilities, Windows Hello ESS facial recognition, and whatever else. It’s weird to me that this laptop didn’t get the press the Neo has as it’s superior in every way imagineable. Still is.

Of course, the prices noted above were pre-component shortage. If you look at the 14-inch OmniBook 5 today, you’ll see that prices have soared astronomically, to $1049 and up. That’s a 50 percent price increase, putting this once affordable laptop into what I would have said a year ago was the premium pricing category. As before, I strongly recommend waiting on sales, which are frequent, and paying attention to refurbished stores (HP and Lenovo both have good ones). But yeah, this is a real problem.

As to what I think will happen, no one wants a Surface Laptop SE-type laptop or its equivalent, and PCs (and Macs) with 8 GB of RAM are toys. So there’s no version of Lenovo, HP, or Dell, or any other mainstream PC maker, duplicating the mix of features that Apple put together for the Neo. That’s not completely their fault: Apple is a monoculture and the PC market relies on partners, and they’re beholden to chipset makers like Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm (and, soon, others).

Tied to this, it’s weird to me how critical everyone was of Qualcomm following up the Snapdragon X Elite with a series of ever more low-end chips–the Snapdragon X Plus, 8-core Plus, and then just the X–as it now appears they were onto something. But that something wasn’t a crystal ball, it was PC makers telling them that that’s what they really needed. This component crisis was understood inside this industry before it became obvious to the rest of us.

So what I think, I guess, is that prices will be higher permanently. We may eventually get some relief, but they are never going down to pre-crisis levels. The MacBook Neo is an oddball because it hits a price point but it’s useless for most mainstream users, basically the netbook that Steve Jobs said Apple would never make. And so the real starting price on the Mac side is still on the high side, looking at the MacBook Air. The PC industry already has POS PCs for education, plus low-end Chromebooks, that are even less desirable. My bigger worry was that we had just moved to 16 GB as a correct starting point for most people, and now this crisis is screwing with that. We’re going to see some crap out of the PC market as a result. As always.

So here’s what I really think. This crisis will accelerate the move away from traditional PCs and to more device-like computers like iPads and Android/whatever laptops and laptop equivalents. Most people do not need a full-featured PC. Those that do, and businesses stuck in the past, will simply pay more and use those devices for longer. The world was already moving on, and if this crisis has a silver lining, it is that it may loosen our reliance on overly complex platforms from the past.

“Anthropic’s Claude AI can now control your computer to perform tasks”

And by “your computer” we mean the 9 percent of the world using Macs

? Big Tech is having its Big Tobacco moment

justme asks:

What do you make of the recent Meta/Google decision? While the fines levied are a pittance given the relative worth of both companies and the decision will undoubtedly be appealed, the decision of lawyers to go after both companies for their relative mechanisms and methods vice actual content seems to have struck a chord. Do you think this will spark changes anywhere else within Big Tech?

No, Big Tech will always be dragged kicking and screaming to behavioral change because they are rich enough to drag out these cases with appeals for as long as possible, all while collecting their junk fees, bombarding us with privacy-violating advertising and tracking, and doing whatever else constitutes their enshittified businesses these days.

Big Tech is literally Big Tobacco, something that is knowingly bad for the world and its people but is making a lot of money off its victims and not caring in the slightest. The only thing that speaks to these companies is really big sums of money. And as the cost of AI and the complete lack of payoff finally intersect, as shareholders and Wall Street react by driving stock prices lower as new businesses and business models appear that threaten their existence, they will react to that. But not to a small fine from the courts. And not even to regulators and antitrust courts in some cases, as with Apple. They will just keep pushing back against the governments that are, in so many ways, less powerful and rich than they are.

Big Tech is a cancer. We can’t fight it to hurt them, but we can say no to save ourselves. And then we just have to be OK with that. Every time you think you’ve seen the worst there is of humanity, another Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk comes along and you realize there is no bottom to this barrel.

“Windows boss promises to heal the operating system’s self-inflicted wounds”

Fair

? The Mac has issues, but it’s not enshittified

dremy1011 asks:

I was listening to the latest Windows Weekly episode and you were reviewing your Windows enshirtification list and if Microsoft had addressed them with their latest promise of an overhaul. I thought it may make for an interesting breakdown of how MacOS compares to this list.

Speaking of Windows Weekly, I was a little surprised a month or so ago when we were talking about enshittification and Leo said that he felt the Mac was also enshittified and that this somehow justified his embrace of Linux or whatever. I didn’t think that debating that was relevant at the time, but I did think that the Mac is in no way enshittified. And it’s not. There are subjective issues as always–“I don’t like Liquid Glass” or whatever–and the quirks and differences I mentioned in Switcher 2026: The Mac is for People, Not Businesses ⭐️, but those aren’t tied to the objectively customer-malicious behaviors that constitute enshittification.

What Microsoft just announced was a series of improvements that mostly do not touch on the enshittification problems in Windows 11. Instead, they touch on largely pet peeve issues raised by some enthusiast minority and then some lower-level reliability issues that have impacted the enterprise. And so Microsoft is fixing those, which gives it a high profile win, or sorts, assuming they pull it off. But it has studiously ignored what I think are the objectively real problems with Windows 11, mostly.

There’s probably a word for this, and I know Steven Sinofsky discusses this sort of thing in his book about Microsoft, where you add a feature or fix a problem solely to shut up the complainers while knowing that virtually no one is going to use it anyway. It’s like a bullet point feature so you can see it on a slide, point to it, and tell complainers to move on to the next thing. That’s what moving a Taskbar to other screen sides is. Nothing. For the 17 people who love that, great. For the broader world, no one is even looking for that.

Anyway. To your question, no, the Mac doesn’t meet a single item on my Windows 11 Enshittification Checklist. There are real problems with the Mac, definitely, blockers and differences that those coming from Windows PCs will find off-putting or whatever. But Apple doesn’t care about that these days. What it cares about is getting people in its ecosystem–those with just an iPhone, maybe–further into its ecosystem.

The MacBook Neo is a loss leader so that it can hook customers on a high-end Apple One subscription and then multiple devices, each with Apple Care. It’s a play for the future, where customers hovering right outside its sphere of influence but curious can step in further without paying too much up front. A bullet point on a slide, in other words. The real action is elsewhere. I am sad but also impressed that Apple still holds this sway over people who should know better but always fall for the marketing. I often fall for it, too. They are good at that.

“Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 may offer faster 45W charging”

You never know!

? All good things must end

spacecamel asks:

With Epic doing layoffs, what do you make of the reports that the Battle Royal games losing play time? Do you think this is the end or just a blip?

It’s difficult to say if this is tied to the style of gameplay in Fortnite specifically or if this is just what we’re seeing everywhere in the industry. We’re fond of statistics like the videogame industry making more each year than Hollywood, but there are some interesting parallels there. For example, we can consume this kind of content–and other content that is perhaps taking our time away–in so many different ways now.

I’m reminded of growing up with a handful of stations on UHF and VHF, the rise of cable TV and its hundreds of channels, and then the Internet wave and streaming services and an endless choice of content, and how that warps things. We used to joke about having 1,000 channels but there’s nothing to watch. Now there are a million and it’s the same problem, but worse. There are so many fewer shared experiences now than there were when I was a kid.

Anyway, what we’re seeing in videogames is perhaps natural and inevitable. The whole Xbox Play Anywhere thing speaks to these broader changes, this need to meet gamers where they are, wherever and whenever that may be. Forcing someone to be in one room in one home to play the one game they bought for their one console is outdated, just like Bill Gates’ dream of a computer in every home, and then on every desk. That was visionary once, but now it’s just a limitation. We have computers everywhere now. We can play games everywhere now. We can get whatever entertainment we want everywhere now. So there’s more competition, not just within an industry, but for our time in general.

I still play a lot of Call of Duty multiplayer, and that style of gameplay dates back to DOOM, I guess. I suspect that Battle Royale-type games will have a similar run and aren’t really going anywhere. But again, both these things don’t exist in a vacuum. DOOM multiplayer was a cultural phenomenon, and so was/is Fortnite. But maybe there’s something else coming in this space, too. Or something from outside that space. It’s difficult imagining how much more fragmented this is going to get, given what’s already happened.

“Google tests AI-generated headline replacements in search results”

Just shut up and be happy they’re still linking to original content

? Do not pass Go, do not collect $200

Charles V asks:

Paul – small simplistic Q. I thought I heard you mention a recent windows update, allows one to change the assigned user default folder name. I know sounds minor, but would like to change it from say user\lastname to say user\firstname. In past when I to do in file manger it seemed to ‘confuse’ things. Can you elaborate how to change with new feature? /thanks

So, the new feature only applies to Windows Setup, when you’re first setting up a new PC or have reset an existing PC. There’s no interface for changing the user folder name after it’s been created. I have not seen this interface yet, but I’m curious how or if it applies to existing installs where maybe you want to add a new user: Will that option be presented then as well? I’m guessing not, not in the first iteration, but this seems like an obvious next step.

And then there’s the issue you have, which is admittedly rare, where you’re already using the PC and have whatever folder name for your user account and want to change that after the fact. That’s not officially supported, and just renaming the folder seems like a potentially dangerous move.

“Microsoft is finally ditching annoying CAPTCHAs for Teams meetings”

The other annoyances in Teams are annoying enough

? There are pros, but there are also cons

brisonharvey asks:

Paul, in your Switcher series you talk a lot about how every platform is really just a different set of tradeoffs. With Apple using its vertical integration to deliver more budget friendly options, and Microsoft now saying 2026 is about improving performance, reliability, and overall polish (which the Mac usually boasts that it does best), do you think Windows can actually close that gap? Or is that inconsistency just part of what Windows is (between software, chipmaker, and hardware partners)?

It is interesting to me that Apple and Microsoft both separately came to the same conclusion that they needed to press the brake pedal a bit and circle back to close some reliability issues with their platforms. Both have done this publicly before, Apple with Snow Leopard and Microsoft with Windows XP SP2. And both are doing it again.

But both platforms, which are really two different ways of approaching the same problem, so to speak, have their pros and cons. And the Windows/Mac relationship, like the Android/iOS relationship, will always be worlds apart. Apple is a monoculture and these other companies exist in partner-centric worlds with a variety of chipset vendors, hardware makers, and whatever else going to market with devices using their platforms.

Meaning, no, Microsoft will never close the reliability/quality gap with Apple (in this case on the Mac) because its business model precludes that. But Apple, likewise, will never close the gap on all the choices we get in the PC market. And Neo notwithstanding, it will never close the price gap either, though a good Apple MacBook Air is the same price, essentially, as a good premium PC laptop.

I do think that Microsoft will make Windows better this year. But I also think that it will not address all the enshittification issues that I and others have raised. And that Pavan Davuluri, like his predecessors, still has to adhere to the broader Microsoft strategies inflicted on him by his superiors. Things can only get better, to some degree. But we’ll never see the highly curated experience that people get with the Mac.

It’s important to remember that these forces impact Apple and its products, too. The iPad was held back for many years, functionally, specifically to prevent it from cannibalizing sales of the Mac, for example. Apple’s overall strategy is to sell customers as many devices as possible as often as possible and, now, to get them on the hook for subscription services every month. This strategy informs product decisions it makes, just as Microsoft’s do for Windows and whatever else.

All we can do as consumers is be aware of these realities, compare what each side is offering, and decide for ourselves.

“The ‘AI slop’ backlash kills Sora”

I’m pretty sure it was killed by OpenAI’s need to actually make money

? I can’t recall

Ruvger asks:

Hi Paul, I recently got a new Surface laptop with a Snapdragon processor, and I’m really happy with it. No compatibility problems at all. It has Recall which got me thinking… Do you use Recall or did you turn it off?

When Microsoft first announced Recall, I had two immediate thoughts: This company clearly had no idea how little people trusted it, and it should have been much more upfront about all the security work it had done to protect user data, and some people were really going to love this feature. I was not one of those people, but when I described it to my wife, she wanted it immediately.

The way I view this is that everyone does things differently.

I’ve spent (wasted) a lot of time over the years organizing my data in very specific ways because that’s how my brain works. If something isn’t where I expect to find it, I lose my mind. I literally often think, whether it’s a physical item–like keys or a wallet–or something digital–photos, files, whatever–“now where would I have put that?” And more often than not, I find something in the place where I would have put it, had I just remembered that place.

Others are more visual, or rely on search, or whatever else. And I think people like that–people like my wife–learn about something like Recall and the lightbulb goes off, and they want to use that thing. That’s how their brains work.

This is part of the issue with the pushback to Recall in mid-2024: The people complaining about Recall were never going to use it in the first place, they’re ADHD-riddled technical idiots like me. The safety concerns they raised were completely invented to justify their opinions, as evidenced by the epic lack of technical change that Microsoft actually implemented later. And then they just moved on to the next outrage because their attention spans are nonexistent. No one is complaining about Recall now because Recall is not a problem and has suffered no security issues. And none of the Recall haters even have the self awareness to pop up now, two years later, and just admit they were wrong.

But no, I do not use Recall. Not because of invented security or privacy issues, and not because of (incorrect) worries about disk space or anything else. I’ve tried to use it multiple times. I just don’t work that way. And so Recall is not for me. It’s just not how I think to find things.

“Microsoft and NVIDIA are solving the one bottleneck standing between us and AGI”

Human beings?