Windows Weekly 919: The Supermodel of Apps

Mikah Sarget, Richard, and Paul discuss Patch Tuesday, AI doubters, dev, more quarterly earnings, Xbox, and much more.

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Windows

Patch Tuesday arrives

• Windows 11 23H2/24H2 gets those preview updates we talked about two weeks ago – Taskbar preview improvements, Windows Studio Effects on taskbar, File Explorer improvements, Mouse improvements, Time Zone changes without admin privileges, OneDrive continuity (23H2 only), Windows Share improvements (23H2 only), new keyboard shortcut for Magnifier
• Windows 10 gets the new Outlook, you lucky dogs!

24H2 downloads latest cumulative update (which could be a feature update) during OOBE – noticed this back in June – Businesses will be able to disable that and go back to the old behavior later this year

Windows Insider

• Beta (yesterday) – Beta/Dev window is open, Beta will move to 24H2 soon, this new build was for 23H2, new Paint app
• MIDI IS BACK BABY – MIDI Services 2.0 now in public preview
• Photos app OCR capabilities are back – feature was in testing but disabled in November, supports 160 languages

HoloLens is finally dead: Microsoft partners with tech bro to offload US Army contract

AI/Dev

Microsoft schedules Build 2025 for May 19-22 … and then Google schedules I/O 2025 for May 20-21

Elon Musk and investors supposedly make bid for OpenAI – hilarity ensues

OpenAI is working on its own AI chip because everyone else is

You don’t have to sign in to OpenAI to use ChatGPT Search now

Google Gemini 2.0 family is now (mostly) generally available

GitHub Copilot is getting agentic features this year

Remember the so-called Windows Copilot Runtime? It’s finally happening

• Paul noticed that the Windows App SDK 1.7 Experimental 3 release finally had WCR bits, was quietly released last week
• A look back at the history, what this is, and what features developers will get
• Coding hands-on: Building text rewrite and summarize requires just a few lines of code

More earnings/corporate

Qualcomm – $11.7 billion in revenues, up 17 percent

• It’s over! Arm Holdings drops Qualcomm complaint, will not terminate license

Amazon – $188 billion in revenues, up 9.5 percent – AWS was $29 billion in revenues, up 16 percent

• Biggest news: Amazon to spend $75 billion this fiscal year on AI infrastructure build-out, similar to MSFT, that figure was $28 billion in the previous quarter (!)
• Here comes Conversational Alexa – Amazon devices and services event February 26

Sonos continues its downward spiral – Before earnings, restructuring and layoffs

Xbox

Good news/bad news on Xbox console sales – Better than expected, honestly

Candy Crush Solitaire is first new King game under Xbox – Perfect King/Microsoft mashup

Tips and picks

Tip of the week: A few steps forward (and back) for the 2025 online accounts push

• First steps: Getting my YouTube content out of YouTube
• Understanding Google/YouTube brand accounts – which is more convoluted than it sounds, triggering a third post. Hopefully that will do it.
• Plus, some early thinking about a NAS

Tip of the week #2: Get the Bill Gates book Source Code

First of three autobiographies is better than expected, plus we all need to be reminded of this story.

RunAs Radio this week: Upgrading to Windows Server 2025 with Robert Smit

https://runasradio.com/Shows/Show/971

Brown liquor pick of the week: Mackmyra Brukswhisky

https://www.whiskybase.com/whiskies/whisky/196450/mackmyra-brukswhisky

https://www.mackmyra.se/