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...