Windows Weekly 859: Taste the Darkness!

Leo, Richard, and Paul discuss the last Patch Tuesday of 2023, Windows 11, Windows 10, antitrust, AI, Xbox, and a whole lot more.

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Windows 11

The final Patch Tuesday of 2023 arrives

• Copilot now opens on the display where you clicked its Taskbar icon (or it will, thanks to CFR)
• Copilot now appears in Alt + Tab (but not in Task view/WINKEY + Tab), oddly (Same deal)
• Account notifications in Start and Settings (disable this nonsense in Settings > Privacy & security > General)
• (I updated the Windows 11 Field Guide accordingly)
• For Windows 10 users, Copilot is now available to everyone in preview with the Patch Tuesday update (CFR, need to manually download it). No Windows integration settings yet. A few other changes on Windows 10 too.

Insider Preview

• Canary/Dev (Thursday): Copilot undocked mode, Widgets changes, Windows 365 Boot and Switch changes, Windows Share improvements (WhatsApp integration, curious), character count in Notepad (how cute)
• Beta channel (Friday): Windows Share and Windows Store improvements
• Dev channel (today): Transitioning Windows Speech Recognition (WSR) to voice access because WSR is being deprecated
• Also Canary today: New Windows Protected Print Mode

Clipchamp quietly added four new features recently and you’re never going to believe what happens next

Related: AMD unveils Ryzen 8040 series mobile CPUs with a new NPU on select models

• Intel’s Meteor Lake is coming in hot

Antitrust

UK CMA and US FTC are both investigating Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI

After failing to reach a settlement, Google loses Epic antitrust trial

• Why it has so far done much better against Google than it has against Apple

Apple to be punished for App Store business practices in the EU

Apple likely to open up NFC chipset in iPhone in response to EU concerns

AI

Microsoft reaches agreement with AFL/CIO on AI

Google Releases Gemini Pro to enterprises and developers

Google releases Gemini-powered NotebookLM in the U.S. Keep on steroids, basically

Xbox

An ad-supported Xbox Game Pass offering is likely on the way

Xbox Cloud Gaming is now on Meta Quest 2, Quest 3, and Quest Pro

Balder’s Gate 3 lands on Xbox Series X|S

Microsoft reveals two new games at The Game Awards

E3, which has been dead for years, is now officially dead – But it wasn’t the pandemic that killed it

The next Digital Eclipse interactive documentary looks about as amazing as the first

Tips and picks

Tip of the week: Get your Xbox Year in Review

Xbox gamers: Your Xbox Year in Review is now available! Mine is, um, particularly lackluster: 339 hours, 11 games, 362 new Gamerscore, 26 Achievements, top gameplay was in January. 97 percent shooters. Somehow in the top 15 percent of gamers for hours played, top 40 percent for gamerscore, top 30 for achievements. Most played? Call of Duty. I’m in the top 10 percent for COD gamers. #2 was Halo Infinite (top 15 percent), #3 Quake II.

Random side-tip: Amazon Your Books

App pick of the week: Fences 5

Fences 5 for Windows adds a cool new distract-free Chameleon feature

RunAs Radio this week: SysAdmin Gifts with Joey Snow & Rick Claus

https://runasradio.com/Shows/Show/910

Brown liquor pick of the week: Balvenie Double Wood 12

https://www.thebalvenie.com/our-whisky-collection/cask-finishes/doublewood-12/