The Real Problem with Recall (Premium)

For months, we’ve endured the tortured warnings of the Recall Chicken Littles, but now that this feature is finally available, we can finally see for ourselves that there are, in fact, very real problems. No, not with security. If anything, Recall is locked down too well.

No, the problem with Recall is tied to the several small language models (SLMs) that it requires. Each of them is humongous. Recall won’t work unless you have the latest version of each. And downloading and installing these SLMs is a chore, more manual process than seamless.

It is here, ironically or hypocritically–you decide–that I will admit that this criticism is perhaps as unfair as the nonsense we heard about Recall back in May and June. That is, my issue could maybe be obviated by the fact that I’m using Recall on a PC that is enrolled in the Windows Insider Dev channel, the only way to use Recall at the moment, and thus the experience I’m seeing may not represent the real-world experience that others will have once it is released in stable.

With that caveat in mind, here’s what it’s like to try and get Recall working.

About two weeks ago, Microsoft issued its first public preview of Recall as part of Windows 11 Dev Channel build 26120.2415. Having been told about this milestone earlier that week, I enrolled my Surface Laptop 7 into the Dev channel the night before that release, and then updated to the Recall-enabled build when the Microsoft announcement went live. (Unexpectedly, it appeared right on schedule.)

My initial write-up about this experience hints at the problem I’m still seeing. Onboarding Recall is awkward at best and convoluted at worst, and my initial attempt to run this app failed because I had to install “updates for Re call” via Windows Update before it would work. Recall didn’t just install these updates, nor did it provide any way for me to do so myself. It just told me I needed to go to Windows Update.

Which I did. Checking for updates, I was given a single update, called Image Extraction, which downloaded slowly but installed very quickly. Nice, so I went back to Recall. Nope. You still need to install updates.

So I went back to Windows Update and clicked “Check for updates.” Yep, there was another update, this one called Image Search. Same experience. Slow download, quick install. Whatever. Back to Recall. Nope. Come on.

So I went back to Windows Update. Clicked “Check for updates,” again. And sure enough, there was a third update. This one was called Semantic Analysis. Fine. Same thing: Slow to download, quick to install. Surely, that was everything. Or not. I clicked “Check for updates,” again, suspicious. This time it was clear. That was everything.

So I went back to Recall. And this time, it came up. It was done updating and I could actually use this reviled tool and see for myself what all the fuss was about.

Spoiler alert: I still don’t know what all the fuss was about. I will never understand the fuss, or the mentality of the people who continue to believe that this thing was a security and/or privacy nightmare when, in fact, its real faults were far more serious: This was going to be an opt-out preview experience enabled on stable PCs without any formal private testing period. And then two weeks went by. Recall hasn’t caused any problems. And it hasn’t changed my life, though it was interesting that it arrived with a Click to Do feature, also in preview, that Microsoft didn’t even reveal until a few months ago.

Two weeks. Nothing to report. For all the concerns about storage, for example, it’s only using up 1.6 GB of disk space, of the 150 GB I allotted it. (Not counting the SLMs, this is just the snapshots.)

Yesterday, Microsoft issued a new Dev channel build of Windows 11, and this one is notable for two reasons. It brings the Recall (and Click to Do) preview to AMD- and Intel-powered Copilot+ PCs for the first time. And it expands Click to Do outside of Recall; in this build, you can hold down the Windows key on your keyboard and click on-screen items to fire up Click to Do–with a cool pink and purple edge animation that’s very much like the new Siri in iOS 18.x–and analyze the item. If it’s text, you get the following options.

If it’s an image, it will look for text in that image. Click to Do seems to be about text.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. For all that’s interesting here, I … well, I forgot to even install the update. I was so busy yesterday that I worked up until it was time for my wife and I to head out to dinner. I just zoned on it. And so this morning, when I open up my Surface Laptop–smiling, once again, as it just came on instantly and reliably–I could see the Windows Update prompt in the system tray: I had to reboot the PC to install an update. That new Dev build.

Ah yes. Right.

I shut down whatever apps were running and triggered the update. As with the previous build, this went pretty quickly–just a few minutes, and nothing like the old Feature Update-style full OS upgrade–and I was back on the Desktop. Looking at a new error message-like icon in the system tray. This one for Recall. Mousing-over the sad broken icon, I got a pop-up explaining the problem. It read: “Recall: Updated models required, no snapshots are being saved.”

So I opened Windows Update, saw that a new version of Image Extraction was ready for download. I clicked “Download & install all” to make that happen. Slow download, quick install.

But Recall still wouldn’t run. Oh, right. This again. So I clicked “Check for updates” and was offered a new version of Image Search. That downloaded slowly and installed quickly. Not my first rodeo: I clicked “Check for updates” again and, as expected, I was offered a new version of Semantic Analysis. And as expected, it was a slow download but installed quickly.

Alrighty then, we’re done. Back to Recall. And … Nope. Hm.

So I went back to Windows Update and clicked “Check for updates” again. There was more: This time, it also downloaded Phi Silica, the SLM that Microsoft talked up as part of its new Dev channel build yesterday. (It also posted a more technical explanation of this SLM.) This one was a very slow download, it took about 5 minutes, but it installed pretty quickly. And then, suddenly, magically, Recall worked again.

Do we seriously need to manually download four different SLMs in turn every single time there’s a Recall update? Is this really the experience? Why wouldn’t it just download these things in the background and then rarely if ever stop working, if only briefly, so that it could get up-to-date? Why is it this terrible?

Maybe it’s because it’s just in preview. Maybe these SLMs will mature and not get updates that frequently. So many maybes. But between this and the heavy-handed Windows Hello ESS authentication requirements, Recall has been transformed. And not in a good way if you care about the user experience. Which I do.

But man. Click to Do is really cool. Terrible name. But really cool.