For the Love of God, Microsoft (Premium)

As if Windows 11 wasn’t chaotic and confusing enough, the act of updating the several AI models that Recall uses isn’t just old-fashioned, it’s a slap to the face of common sense and modernity. And the Windows Hello ESS security model is so tight, this thing is painful to use.

Here’s an idea, Microsoft. It’s called “it just works.” This used to matter to you, remember?

? Memories, I have a few

When I think back on the initial Recall announcement at Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC event last May, I can only laugh. So much drama and it was so avoidable: As Yusuf Mehdi began discussing Recall in vague terms–by “making it possible to access virtually anything you have ever seen on your PC”–I started to get vaguely queasy, and I hoped they would drive home why this would be both safe and reliable. And as the first demos unfolded, the queasiness increased. Not because of what Microsoft was doing–it was clear to me this would be incredibly useful for so many people–but rather because of the obvious knee-jerk reactions it would get from tech enthusiasts and other who blindly distrust both AI and Microsoft’s ability or desire to protect customer privacy.

The reaction was even worse than I expected. Security “researchers” tore Recall from pre-release builds of Windows 11, hacked it onto normal PCs that didn’t have any of the advanced security protections required by the Copilot+ PCs that this feature would be exclusive to, and then declared that it was insecure. This was patently absurd, and almost all of you fell for it. And you fell for it for the simplest and silliest reason of all. It confirmed the biases you had going into this conversation.

It’s not all your fault. We’re not just swimming in misinformation now, we’ve also all built up years or decades of experiences dealing with Microsoft. And let’s face it, a lot of those experiences are negative. On the face of things, the idea that Microsoft would ever secure Recall’s data store effectively seemed impossible. And so we argued. Microsoft pretended to make material changes to Recall to appease the complainers. But all it really did was two things: Delay the preview release of Recall by several months while implementing improvements it would have made anyway, and it responded to the only legitimate complaint about this feature by making it opt-in. That was the only real win to come out of this silliness.

? First impressions

When I finally got to test Recall–by enrolling my Snapdragon X-based Surface Laptop 7 into the Dev channel of the Windows Insider Preview Program in late November 2024–I was struck by three things immediately. One, the innocuous nature of this feature really drove home how pointless that drama was. Two, a new feature called Click to Do was, in fact, more impressive than Recall, and it would prove more impressive still when Microsoft later exorcised it from Recall, making it available (in preview, for now) across Windows 11. And three, installing the small language models (SLMs) that Recall required was a pain in the ass.

No. It’s worse than that.

We just passed the 10-year anniversary of Microsoft announcing Windows as a Service (WaaS), the scheme by which it would update Windows, this legacy desktop platform, as if it were an online service. That idea was also patently absurd, and, one might argue, impossible. But the software giant spent years expanding the ways in which it can update Windows at every level, and improving the quality of those updates, and it inexplicably arrived at a point where the dream became reality. In fact, WaaS was so successful that we now live in a world of chaos in which Windows is updated literally continuously. Which explains its more recent name, continuous innovation.

Getting past my negativity about WaaS required me to overcome my own biases, and that only happened through time and experience. I’m still negative about this scheme overall because Windows doesn’t need to be updated this frequently. But it’s impossible to argue against the reliable nature of these updates. Microsoft really did get good at this. You may not like it–I certainly don’t–but we can’t really debate it. It works.

Until now. Recall and the other AI features coming to Windows 11–at least on Copilot+ PCs, which use on-device AI models–has finally broken WaaS. Or continuous innovation. Or whatever the frick it’s called now.

In my initial hands-on write-up about Recall, I explained how this works the first time you try to use this feature. You run the Recall app. It tells you that it needs you to install some components from Windows Update. So you open Settings, navigate to Windows Update, and check for updates. It finds one update, for something called Image Extraction. It installs this update, very slowly, and then installs it. Cool. You run Recall again. Nope, it tells you that it needs you to install some components from Windows Update. Again.

So you check Windows Update for updates a second time. Again, it finds one update, for something called Image Search. OK, fine. This downloads and installs slowly, too, but it finally finishes. So you run Recall again. Nope. Once again, there are still more components to install. So you check Windows Update a third time. And now you have to install Semantic Analysis. Slowly, again. Surely, this is it. Nope. There is more to install. Back to Windows Update. Ah, there we go, Phi Silica, the fourth update. Slow as ever, but it installs. So you run Recall again.

This time, it works.

“Do we seriously need to manually download four different SLMs in turn every single time there’s a Recall update?” I wrote at the time. “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?”

Why indeed. At the time, I chalked this up to it being in preview, indeed, it being the very first time anyone outside Microsoft really used this thing. Surely, it would get better.

?️ What comes around goes around

It did not get better.

In the three months since this first experience, I’ve used Recall routinely. Sorry, I’ve allowed Recall to run in the background continually. I can’t say I’ve ever used it, not once, not really. The issue there is that Recall doesn’t really solve a problem I have. I don’t mean this condescendingly, but I feel like Recall is something that many people will find useful, maybe even be a lifesaver. But not for me. At least not yet.

Recall is the least controversial feature in Windows if you define controversial as a ratio of invented drama to the reality of real-world use.

Everything that people complained about at launch is nonsense and there has not been a single example, not one, of a hacker or a security researcher, or whatever, breaking into the Recall data store and stealing someone’s private data.

When Recall actually launched in preview, the complainers turned to new complaints. Like storage. On my 1 TB SSD, Recall is configured to use as much as 150 GB of storage, and the Chicken Littles moved from security and privacy to disk space. Won’t anyone think about the disk space??

I’ve been running this system for over three months. I use this PC all day long, every day. And Recall is running 24/7. Surely, it must be just eating up all that disk space, right?

Nope. Recall snapshots are using just 1.63 GB of space on my Surface Laptop 7. Wa-waa-waaah. Sorry, haters. (No, this isn’t three months of snapshots, it’s closer to two or three weeks. Recall was updated last month and so the original snapshot store was deleted. But it’s never been bigger than several GB.)

But there are two real issues with Recall we can complain about. To know about these issues, you’d have to actually use Recall, which neatly lops all the complainers out of the pool of potential users. Because Recall does have two problems, two usability problems. And both make zero sense.

1️⃣ Problema numero uno

The first is keeping Recall up-to-date and is tied to the WaaS discussion above.

Four times since that initial Recall install, I’ve woken up, opened the lid of my Surface Laptop, smiled every time it came on immediately, and gotten to work. But then I noticed an oddity in the system tray. The Recall icon, which is normally a weird little icon compromised of a star and two arrows, had a line through it, indicating an error of some kind. When I clicked it, I was told that Recall was paused because it needed updated components. And so I went to Windows Update and …

You know the drill. I had to update four “AI components,” the same four noted above. One at a time. Slowly. And then, and only then, would Recall work again.

I did this in December. I did it in January. Then I did it in February. Not tied to Patch Tuesday. Not automatically. One. At. A. Time. Manually. Stupid.

Microsoft has this incredible updating infrastructure. A decade of experience during which it got it right. And … it’s not doing any of that with Recall.

For the love of God, Microsoft.

This is a terrible, time consuming, old-fashioned, and pointless user experience. And I had expected it to ease up over time. It has not.

? Problème numéro deux

The second user experience issue with Recall is tied to its use of Windows Hello ESS authentication, which is much more secure than normal Windows Hello. Every time you interact with Recall, you have to deal with a Windows Hello ESS authentication window. This is more seamless with facial recognition, as per my Surface Laptop, because you just have to look at the screen. But where normal Windows Hello authentication is literally seamless, meaning it happens and you move on, Windows Hello ESS is not. It’s not seamless at all. (It’s just more seamless than fingerprint recognition or entering a PIN.)

Here’s why. When you open Recall, you are prompted to authentication. The Windows Hello (ESS) dialog appears, the little eyeball looks left and right, finds you, identifies you, and … then does nothing. The dialog remains on screen. You have to click the OK button to make it go away. You have to do this every single time you interact with Recall. It is monotonous. And no, you cannot configure it to behave differently. Windows Hello ESS is incredibly secure. But like any technology that’s incredibly secure, it is also inconvenient. That’s the trade-off, always, and Recall can’t escape from that trap.

? Final thoughts

So we’re stuck. We have this tool that would benefit what I call “normal” users, the non-technical masses, most of all. And its user experience is borderline broken, in part because the security you were all so worried about is real. And in part because Microsoft, which figured out how to keep PCs up-to-date, did not apply that learning to Recall. A product that really needs to be friendlier to gain acceptance with those same masses.

The good news, such as it is, is that Recall is still very much in preview, and still very much limited to some tiny slice of users who have a brand new Copilot+ PC and are stupid enough to put it in the Insider Program. So the damage, for now, is minimal. But make no mistake, these issues need to be fixed. Otherwise, no one will ever use this feature.

And then we’ll really wonder what all the drama was about. If we remember it at all.