Ask Paul: July 24

Happy Friday! This is an incredible grab bag of reader questions and the ideal way to kick off the weekend a bit early so I can get in a little Halo: Campaign Evolved. 🙂

“Samsung made it way easier to open up its Galaxy Z Fold 8 foldables”

“Way” easier? No way!

🌩️ It’s fine, everything’s fine

justme asks

You’ve recently written about the EU fining Google 890 Million euros for favouring its own services in search results and for the way it restricts app developers, with potential additional fines should Google refuse to comply with EU rules. To most corporate entities not in Big Tech, thats a ton of money. Google, of course, may appeal the decision, if only to get the amount reduced. But this is a company that made a net profit of $28 billion on revenues of something like $112 billion…in a quarter. 890 million euros is approximately $1 billion USD. They could pay the fine without so much as the blink of an eye. If the goal of the fines is to punish bad behavior and encourage compliance with the law, is this level of fine enough given the eye-watering sums of money Big Tech has? Is there ANY level of fine or legislation that would be effective at curbing the behavior of Big Tech? More consequential may be the follow-on – come into compliance or face a periodic penalty of up to 5% of worldwide turnover (per Euuronews) Yet even this applies only to the EU, which Google could leave if they so chose. So what do we do?

I’m a little surprised how much attention this event received. It’s just one of several fines the EU has assessed Google in the past year, and this particular compliance concern is early in the process, so to speak. Plus, Google can still appeal, and why wouldn’t it? I didn’t put this in my article, but the Commission also noted a couple of things suggesting that this won’t escalate. Google did make some changes tied to search shopping, hotels, and flights, for example, and to shopping ads and content-related services as a result of dialog between the Commission and the company. So it’s clear that Google is working to address issues. Not sure what happened with Search/Play Store, but they clearly didn’t meet whatever bar there.

Anyway, any time there’s a big fine like this, there’s some conversation around why the company doesn’t just abandon the market. But that’s never going to happen. Big Tech is tripping over itself to expand in China and other places that are far more problematic, and the EU’s laws are reasonable and not unlike most of the world. It’s a big market, and it’s not just revenues to lose but also the death spiral that could happen to their stock price. (And it’s worse right now because Google is in the middle of a massive AI buildout and it can’t afford that kind of problem.) So you work within whatever the confines are to you as the abusive business. Which we should remember is the real problem here, not whatever government or laws.

The language around worldwide turnover is standard. I first saw it during the Microsoft antitrust era decades ago too, but I’m not aware of any instance in which the EU ever fined a single company any percentage of its worldwide revenues even once. Certainly not a Big Tech company. But the point of this language is that one fine of €1 billion or whatever sum is basically pocket change for these companies, so you threaten to make it a regular thing because then it becomes real and will add up.

The big issue with any EU regulation and attempted enforcement is how slow everything is. If Google somehow doesn’t just meet the EU’s needs, which seems unlikely, it will be years before it has to actually pay a fine, and it would have to try to get into a situation in which the EU is fining it each month or whatever. This is just legal brinksmanship, the abuser wants to drag out the process as long as possible, which is a sound strategy. That works everywhere, but it’s particularly easy with the EU: The recent €4.1 billion fine that was upheld by the EU Court of Justice is from a case dating back to 2018. That’s a lifetime in the tech industry.

“Sony’s decision to ditch discs was practically inevitable, data shows”

This is not the outrage your readers demand

🏰 Hot or not

martinusv2 asks:

Read somewhere that someone got locked from his Microsoft account and lost everything. This got me thinking to research into researching in some alternatives to Microsoft services and remember that you used or still use Proton services. When I compare on services and prices, seems Microsoft 365 Home, is still a good deal compared to Proton. Is Proton still a better choice compared to Microsoft 365?

This is a tough thing to assess because the only real answer is, it depends. Each side–and other options like Google Workspace or Google One–have their respective strengths and weaknesses. But it depends on what it is you’re using and how important different pieces are.

If this was just about cloud storage, for example, there are much better solutions than Proton (or Microsoft) because some other services, like those from Google, offer more storage at whatever price levels. I’m using Google Drive now because of my NAS issue, and it’s been a good reminder of how astonishingly well this works in Windows. The sync speed and reliability are excellent.

Proton started with email, so that should be its most mature product. But I feel like its best products are those that don’t impact the Microsoft vs. Proton debate, Proton Pass (password/passkey manager), Proton Authenticator, and Proton VPN. And those are the three I use regularly, go figure.

But once you get into Mail, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, and Meet, Proton will lose any head-to-head comparison if it’s just about breadth and depth of the feature sets. It may win depending on what you need, though, and the reason one even considers this is likely tied more to privacy and trust than to the cost. For most people with typical office productivity needs, this is mostly about Microsoft and Google, I think.

Losing an account is terrible. This almost happened to me with my business YouTube account a year and a half ago and it was debilitating. And the reason that was so traumatic is that that account is an unusual example (for me) of a big chunk of data spanning years that isn’t replicated or backed up anywhere else. Which is just dumb and a self-inflicted mistake.

If I were locked out of my Microsoft account, that would be terrible. But I don’t have any data in there that isn’t somewhere else too. (The bigger issue would be things like my Xbox access.) But that kind of thing is rare. You always hear about it, like a shark attack or a lightning strike that kills someone, but it’s the unusual nature of the event that makes it newsworthy. We need to be smart about online accounts, protect them properly, and make sure that anything critical tied to them is available somewhere else too. Whatever that means for email, contacts, data storage, or whatever.

Anyway, there are almost too many ways to make this comparison. It’s all tied up in what you get out of whatever ecosystem you’re using, whether the alternatives even meet your needs, and so on. My experience with the Microsoft 365 side of the fence has devolved to it just being about storage, and I could live without it. My experience with Google is mostly about email, calendar, and storage from a work-related perspective. (I also use Google Photos, YouTube, YouTube Music, and whatever else on the consumer side.) I use the Proton apps noted above and am still evaluating Proton Mail with the ongoing worry that transitioning something that important would be daunting and feels like a non-starter. Not because of any failing with Proton, just the worries about everything that could go wrong.

If it’s about cost, and this is a personal account but maybe you’re using the email, calendar, and whatever other work-related apps and services, the comparison is pretty easy. A Proton Unlimited plan is $120 per year and supports custom email addresses but you only get 500 GB of storage. A Microsoft 365 Personal account is $100 a year, doesn’t support custom email addresses, and has 1 TB of storage. And a Google One Premium plan is $100 per year, doesn’t support custom email addresses, and has 2 TB of storage.

Google and Microsoft have a pricing advantage because of scale. Proton has a privacy advantage, which may or may not matter to you.

I’ve been reevaluating subscription services lately, and one of the ideas that keeps popping into my head is this notion of, “if I had to choose just one, which one would it be?” For music subscriptions, I would probably pick YouTube Music, for example. But for the productivity stuff, which is apps and storage and access on all the devices I use, if I had to choose between the Microsoft, Google, and Proton ecosystems, I would pick Google. I would drop Microsoft entirely first. And the Proton products I use don’t overlap with either.

But everyone’s needs are different. What is it that you use on the Microsoft side and which Microsoft 365 plan do you have?

“Is Microsoft down? Outages reported for 365, Teams, Outlook, XBox Live”

What’s worse than a headline that’s a question? A headline that’s a question and the answer to that question

☠️ AI dooming

anoldamigauser asks:

What is your take on the OpenAI/Hugging Face episode?

I am not exactly an AI doomsday conspiracy theorist. But this event troubled me greatly, and it is the first real-world example of some AI worst-case scenario actually happening. It reads like a Daniel Suarez novel come to life. And the first place my mind went was, this will happen more and more, and it will happen with services far more important to people than Hugging Face. Like banks. Investment accounts. Credit cards. Whatever other personal data. AI could crack all these things wide open right now, I bet. And what about governments and their militaries? It escalates pretty quickly if you just start thinking about it. And these are legitimate concerns, not fanciful science fiction.

It seems to me that these OpenAI is beyond being careless people, to borrow a title about Meta. That they were testing on a network connected to the internet shows a lack of care that is frightening. I really worry that they do not understand how dangerous the work they are doing is, not because they have bad intentions, but because they are rushing in where angels fear to tread.

25 years ago, Microsoft entered its antitrust era, and it was mind-boggling to learn about the horrible behavior at the company and all the terrible things it did. This seemed monumental at the time, but it’s sobering to remember that Microsoft’s potential impact on the world was measured in the hundreds of millions. Today, companies like Google, especially, and now OpenAI and other Big AI companies, have infinite reach, almost literally the entire planet, so several billion people.

One of my pet peeves in life is people who make their problems my problem. I don’t mind what people do in the privacy of their own homes, but I don’t want it in my face. For example, a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses showing up at my front door is unwelcome. But that just impacts one person at a time. If you’re driving recklessly, you may kill yourself, which is bad, or you may damage some property, but you may also kill others, and that’s what makes it wrong on a whole new level. The sheer scale of the damage a company like OpenAI can cause is unfathomable. It’s infinite.

There is a “fake it ”til you make it” approach that is reckless in any scenario but worse here because of the scale. Elizabeth Holmes doing this with blood testing was bad, really bad, but with all the money at stake in AI right now and how this could tank our economy, the problems are exponentially worse. And then there is the terrible reality that virtually everyone in leadership positions in Big Tech and Big AI are terrible, amoral people. This is a perfect storm of potential bad outcomes. If this was some little startup, its ability to do harm would be inconsequential. This is not some little startup.

The law will never move quickly enough to stop these companies here in the U.S. or anywhere else. We are going to see more of this kind of thing, whether it’s a mistake like this event or a malicious actor going after governmental, military, or financial systems. It is going to happen. And we are not ready.

“Samsung’s new silicon-carbon batteries in Galaxy Z Fold 8 won’t last as long”

How long did its silicon-carbon batteries last before?

🎈 It can only go up

helix2301 asks:

Paul what do you think about Apple upping price on Apple one I can understand AppleCare prices needing to go up because of cost of repair is going up because of the component price but Apple one needing to go up is Apple News or Apple Music costing Apple more?

The stated reason was content licensing costs, which I guess I believe. And in a general sense, the costs of any subscription service will only go up over time. The trick here is whether the price is commensurate with the value. That will vary by person, of course, but I will at least say that the Apple price increases, whether it’s AppleCare or Apple One, are not examples of enshittification. They haven’t reached the absurdity we see with Netflix, Spotify, YouTube TV, or whatever else. And that’s tied to two things. How often the price goes up and how much it goes up each time.

I was just looking at this because I have used AppleCare on and off (I still pay for this with my MacBook Air) and we do have the most expensive Apple One subscription. But in both cases, the price increases are minor and I feel like they don’t change the value equation. For example, Apple One Premier is going from $37.95 per month to $39.95 per month, which is just $2. And the AppleCare price hikes come out to just 50 cents more each month. No one will notice those changes, really.

And when was the last time Apple increased the prices of these services, and how often does this happen? It’s been a while. That Apple One Premier plan was $29.95 per month when it launched in 2020. There were price increases in 2022 ($32.95) and 2023 ($37.95), and now this year ($39.95). If you’re a glass half full type, this was the smallest increase and the longest time since the previous increase. If you’re a glass half empty type, the price has gone up roughly 25 percent in 6 years and that’s how they get you: Start cheap and escalate.

I think the biggest issue, really, is the timing. We’re in the midst of a component crisis that’s causing big price increases everywhere. And we’re in an era of escalating subscription costs all around. I can see where some feel that Apple should just suck up the costs where it can to help its customers, but Apple is a for-profit company and delivering slower growth or lower profits isn’t compatible with that. Collectively, all the price hikes suck. Looking specifically at these, I’m OK with it.

My wife and I are going to Salem Massachusetts this week do you recommend anything there to see or do?

This is an oddity of geography, but growing up just south or southwest of Boston (the south shore, as we call it), the places north and northwest of Boston (the north shore) were as mysterious and unknown to me as any place in another country. My experiences in Salem are the normal touristy places, and it’s a weird coincidence that we have friends in Pennsylvania who visit Salem regularly and have spent far more time there than us. But the Peabody Essex Museum is excellent.

My other more general advice, without knowing how much time you have and where you’re coming from, is to see more of the surrounding area, not just Boston, obviously, but places like Nahant, Revere Beach, and Marblehead, that are all interesting in different ways. If you’re into seafood, you can look forward to spending a car payment on lobster this summer, but Woodman’s in Essex (somewhat nearby) is the inventor of the fried clam and is near the water, and is worth dining at.

This isn’t much to go on, sorry.

On a side note, the Apple TV series Widow’s Bay was filmed all over this area, in Gloucester in particular. It’s worth watching for a lot of reasons, one of which being the fun way it captures the unique oddness of these water-side communities and islands in Massachusetts. It’s almost like a documentary about Martha’s Vineyard, but with zombies. Jaws captures this well, too. (My wife grew up across the street from the water in Swansea, MA, which is so far south it’s not even south shore, it south coast.)

“Google reduced Chrome for Android scroll jank by 48%”

Jank is not a real word, but at least you’re using it incorrectly

💻 Armed and loaded

Alex Strickland asks:

I recently picked up a Lenovo Chromebook with the MediaTek Kompanio 540 chip set (almost 50% off MSRP). I have only had it a few days and enjoy it so far. I am using this laptop to further my knowledge with AWS Cloud services while I work. I try to keep my personal and work equipment separate. I am trying to embrace the ARM chip set more by picking up this laptop and last year getting a laptop with the Snapdragon Plus chip set that runs Windows 11. My question is with all the different processors available now do you have a preference now? I understand you review a lot of equipment but just wanted to ask.

Well, right now, the only option on Windows PCs is Snapdragon X/X2, and those chips are obviously fantastic. We will have Nvidia in there soon, too, but those will start off being very high-end and expensive. MediaTek always had the same vibe to me that AMD did in the early 1990s, a low-cost offering that maybe lands in the lower and mid-tiers. But MediaTek released a Copilot+ PC-class processor, the Kompanio Ultra, in April 2025, and that’s when this company started getting interesting in the PC/laptop space (at least to me). And to further the above comparison, started feeling more like the AMD of today too.

But my experience with MediaTek has been limited, and only with non-PC devices so far. The TCL NXTPAPER 14 tablet I’m about to review has a mid-tier MediaTek Helio G99 processor, for example, and I can’t say it’s notable in any way. But I also can’t say it’s lacking in any way. The performance is … fine. (My Pixels lag more than this does.) The processor in your Chromebook is likely much better.

Anyway, I’m with you on Arm. I very much prefer Arm on whatever laptops, and the modern MacBooks, Windows 11 on Arm laptops, and Chromebook Plus devices are all great examples of why this architecture is so excellent. I’m looking forward to the coming Nvidia-based laptops and we’ll see how that shifts things in the PC space. But it is notable to me that even the lowest-end Snapdragon X and X2 Plus chips are absolutely incredible for day-to-day use. There’s something special happening there.

One other question, I have about a dozen of the Surface adhesive pen loops if you are interested in them? Only joking. Thank you for the great work, reading all the Premium content while waiting for my partner to get through chemotherapy treatments help make the time go quicker. I cannot thank you enough.

LOL, nice. This past week, I retagged several hundred reviews in WordPress so that I could have device, games, and book reviews separated out an accessible in the site menu. I did this because of a forum post that correctly pointed out the need, and you can see those menu items under Home, Paul, and for games reviews, under Games. But it is a funny coincidence that I literally thought about my Ode to Surface Loop while doing this, for the first time in more years than I an remember.

Thank you. And I hope everything goes well with your partner and their treatment.

“I ran Geekbench 7 on the Galaxy Z Fold8, and the score was surprisingly low”

It takes a while to optimize hardware for new benchmark tests

🌟 You cannot overstate the influence

train_wreck asks:

This is a Dvorak-related question, feel free to disregard it if you feel it’s not appropriate: First off rest in peace Mr. Dvorak. I’m someone who used to listen to him quite a bit, first on TechTV then TWiT. I tried listening to No Agenda but soured on the politics around 2016. Did you ever give No Agenda a try, and did Dvorak’s politics affect how you listened and potentially admired him? Do you have any thoughts on the fallout between him and Leo? Thanks and understand if there’s no response to this.

John C. Dvorak is one of just a few key influences on me, my understanding of the tech industry, and my writing, alongside Perry Pournelle and Woody Leonard. The three were unique in many ways, but each wrote in an approachable, personal way I really admired and liked. Dvorak was probably the least technical of the three, but like Pournelle, his industry connections were key to his success. And I loved his Inside Track column in the back of PC Magazine, both for its style and contents, and it was an inspiration for Short Takes. Which is why I have the headline riffs between the answers in Ask Paul now. So there’s a tiny example of his influence on me living on.

Like anyone technical, Dvorak had big opinions and I can’t say I agreed with all of them, whether it was industry-related or politics or whatever else. I feel like some of this was grandstanding in the sense that a lot of his popularity was tied to how extreme he could seem and that kind of feeds on itself. This was the strategy for a lot of things that came out of the 1990s, like the Jerry Springer-style tabloid TV shows. Robert X. Cringley (Infoworld) was like that as well. (Coincidentally, I just reread Cringley’s Accidental Empires again and a terrific read, an excellent combination of insider knowledge and humor. Love it.) This is a weird comparison, maybe, but I feel like there was Dvorak the personality and Dvorak the person, like there was Kiss in makeup on stage and then four guys no one would look at twice on the street.

The Leo thing is unfortunate.

I write about tech, but I also write about personal things, like the recent health columns, and that can be off-putting to some. This is an industry so stratified that I still get negative feedback when I write about some non-Microsoft product because some will question what a Windows guy could possibly know about whatever topic and I should just stay in my lane. Basically, I don’t fault Dvorak for opining on any topic, whether I agree or not. He was a smart guy, he had strong opinions, whatever. But the events that led to the Leo/Dvorak split, which Dvorak wrote about at the time, are curious to me, and I think there was more going on between the two than is obvious. Not agreeing on a topic like Net Neutrality feels bush league to me; Leo and I can disagree on something like AI and “information wanting to be free,” but that doesn’t derail my very positive opinions of the man or the fact that he is perhaps the most well-rounded, intellectually honest, and knowledgeable person I know. So something happened there. And it wasn’t a single tweet, even if it felt a bit personal.

There’s another weird dynamic in my industry that’s related to this. As a so-called Microsoft guy, many have assumed over the years that my deep connections with this company somehow lead to some form of bias, but that was never the case. And the problem with this kind of relationship, whether that bias is real or imagined, is that it can bite you in the ass. John Gruber absolutely had a real Apple bias, but he bit the hand that fed him by being too honest about the company once and there was a fallout. I used to respect that Microsoft handled criticism like an adult until Steven Sinofsky came along and literally tried to undermine my career, as did later and lesser hacks like Panos Panay, the most underqualified person to ever run Windows.

Dvorak had this problem at scale. He was always going to bite the hands that fed him because that was literally his schtick, how we got to his place in our industry. You know what you’re getting there. So him calling out Leo in a tweet while being paid by Leo for show appearances was 100 percent on point for him and entirely predictable. Leo taking that so hard was, again, clearly about more than that one tweet. It was some escalation of bad feelings over time that many probably never even noticed. And Dvorak may literally have tweeted at Leo because of whatever those issues were. It was between the two of them. I don’t know. I hate to see friends fall out like that.

One other thing that’s true of highly smart and technical people is the need to be right all the time. We all do this to some degree, but Dvorak was an apex predator, and one who seemed to take the devil’s advocate stance many times just to rile up the other person in whatever one-on-one situation. He would take things to extremes that would make most others uncomfortable, like the comedian Anthony Jeselnik, who, by the way, is a genius. There’s some respect for that, but on the other side, sometimes it’s best to keep it to yourself. It’s a fine line, maybe.

We’re all human and we’re all flawed. One of the worst things about all the connectivity and information availability we have today is that we know too much about what other people think, and it’s galling. We were literally better off knowing less and now we can’t tolerate anything even slightly disagreeable. I have friends and family on every extreme, whether it’s politics, religion, or any other topic no one wants to discuss. Loving someone despite their flaws perhaps a skill, and it’s not always possible. But nothing Dvorak said or did undermines his legacy, at least for me. He was an icon and deservedly so. He was flawed because we all are. He was smart and outspoken because that’s the way he was, and that was both a gift and a curse. There is no person on earth who would agree (or disagree) with everything he believed. But the true measure of this man is some combination of the public persona we all knew and the private person few knew. It’s easy to judge, but I think his public record speaks for itself. I already miss him.

“Microsoft is cracking down on Windows 11 bloatware ads, forces LG to pull McAfee”

Only Microsoft gets to put bloatware ads in Windows, guys