Windows Weekly 914 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell are here. First show of 2025. And, of course, how does 2025 begin? Just like every year, with CES, lots of new PCs, announcements from Intel, amd and Qualcomm. We'll talk about all of those, plus a new segment Paul's going to call this Week in 24H2 Problems that, and a bunch of AI All coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love. From people you trust this is Twit.00:41 This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, Episode 914, recorded Wednesday, January 8th 2025. Something weird from the closet. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Microsoft. Brand new year, brand new show, exactly like the old one. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Paul Theriot in McCungie, Pennsylvania, where the Arctic cold is creeping down from the 51st state. How are you?
2025 Kickoff
01:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, welcome to the country, richard, you and Greenland, we're happy to have you both. We're all very excited. Denmark was not amused. But you know, screw those guys. What are they going to do? Yes, fight us, put up a strongly worded letter. Uh, hello, paul. How was your holiday it was? It was fantastic. I wish it could just keep going. That's the problem. I slow down, I yeah. I just want it to never speed up again. It's addictive food, hey that's Richard Campbell of Run as Radio. He's no stranger because he was here for the Twit holiday show and last Sunday's this Week in Tech, and we really appreciate it. We had a lot of fun On this show. We don't have a whole lot of time to talk about things besides Microsoft, but you are just a savant in so many areas. It was really good. Yeah, yeah, I really appreciate it. Well, I always can tell a story, that's for sure run as radiocom. how was your holiday. Ah fantastic, said, did the christmas in the city with the girls and then the new years with our friends up on the coast. Uh, nobody died of hypothermia, which is a good sign. Yeah, you know. What more do you want, is it? Is it a little chilly? No, it's pretty mild here. Yeah you get to see. It's funny, it's, it's. It's warmer there in the great white north than it is for paul, and uh, but it's, it's big on gray, it's pretty isn't that great though that's a picture. Yeah, that's my window and a half we're not likely to see snow. Well, it'll be cool Ever, really All winter. Yeah, maybe one snowfall in the morning, but it'll rain that afternoon. Well, now that we've had the weather report, there you go. I'm glad to know that this will be 2025 will be the year of the windows 11 pc refresh. that just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it, paul it's more likely to be the year of the linux desktop you know um. I guess we'll see we can only hope. Yeah, look, that's me being biased and bigoted against, uh, against the world's most popular operating system. You mean Windows 10, which is kind of the problem for Windows 11. Yeah, it is. Yeah, so this is the data such as it is. I realize this isn't the most trustworthy source, but stat counter. Whatever, 63% of PCs out in the world are running Windows 10. And we're about, about what are we nine months away from it going? End of life right. End of service so 63 of the people using pcs today will be out of luck or sol or eol you know, the number is probably higher, because that probably doesn't take into account certain corporate pcs. Well, only that which can be counted, yeah, so let's just go with that. It's okay. By comparison, Windows 7 at this point right before you know, nine months away from its expiration only had 25% usage here, and it was second to Windows 10 at the time. So this is the challenge for Microsoft the time. So this is the challenge for microsoft, and the big debate here is one we've had, which is you know, will microsoft extend support, as it did for xp and seven? right well, and it already bumped out 11 once. Remember it was supposed to be april this year. Now it's october, okay, yeah so I, I don't have an opinion on that. I, you know. Obviously they have the paid program in place. They're actually offering it for consumers for the first time ever, for I think in that case for one year of extended support. I don't know. I, I, we've all been out in the world. I've been to dentists, doctor offices uh, obviously, subways, transportation, whatever and seen out of support windows versions all the time. I see this all the time and what. So I think most isn running windows XP. Yeah, the ones that are still running those two maybe I don't know. But, uh, hopefully not, but I don't know. I don't know what to say to this. So I'm astonished that they would say that. You know, I just did the sysadmin show for the beginning of the year and one of the things they said was if I'm making a five-year bet on hardware right now this is a terrible year it is. Everything is changing so fast right now, yeah and um, you know, just, I mean, we talked a lot about intel last year, especially the second half of the year, and this notion that, um, lunar lake was this kind of one-off that they had to do to meet the co-pilot plus pc requirements. And then this past week, this week at ces, they announced the other core ultra series, two chips which were all what they call arrow Lake chips, which are the real successor to meteor Lake. We'll talk about this a little while. They don't have co-pilot plus PC capable MPOs. None of them, not a one of them, no. So it's kind of a crazy. You know the the side conversation I've had with folks that are in the space is like they are so ripe for a pe reorganization which really means it is dismantling, like they're primed for that. Yep, which means I mean one hand, if tsmc started making their chips, the chips would be better. But that's two years away. If they move quickly, right, like it's just not that fast to retool to make those chips in a different way, get out of intel fabs. So again, if you, my problem was, if I'm making a five-year bet on hardware not that I think it won't, it'll be unsupported if I bought machines today, they, they'll take care of them, but what'll? What'll be terrible is two years from now there'll be a dramatically better version of of the intel chips or they'll just be gone. No, um, no, I'm seems unlikely, but not out of realms like the only machine I would recommend buying right now from a, from a system in perspective, a five-year commit perspective, amd yeah I, I understand, and windows 11 obviously. Well, you really don't have it and yeah, and we're talking businesses that want to stick with x86 for all the usual reasons. Yeah, how do you bet on Snapdragon when it's still not fully in management? On an enterprise scale, it just isn't. I imagine it will be sometime in 25, I hope, but at this moment it isn't and that's not a good bet. What's missing? SNMP in tune. What's missing? Yeah, it's more they update. How can I do the manage update cycle the same way like, unless you're on the very latest update mechanisms, which lots of people aren't inside of? Uh, you know, all of that's in twitch for for microsoft as well, like wsus is out update for businesses. You know, on its last legs. It's just we don't know how this is going to land what I mean I update plan is qualcomm was coming from behind after several years of defeats and was trying to hit the part of the market that's kind of the volume part where they could make a difference and, you know, did so we'll. We'll see what happens there. I mean, as far as the rest of it. They're going to make a, a enterprise product which is like a Dell Latitude a conservative, reliable, long-term maintenance machine. I don't know how you do that on a first-gen chipset. That's crazy. This just in. We don't call them Latitudes anymore. Yeah, do you mind? We could just say Max? or Pro Okay, so we'll get to that. Let's say jump ahead. Save that, that's for the big ces segment yeah, so, yeah, so, uh, ces is this week. I, when I started looking at the notes, of course we've spent a few weeks since we've been back. So I was thinking you know how do, how do we handle that? You know, there's a couple of weeks worth of news that has occurred. It's it is slow over the holidays, obviously, but things have happened. And then this week there's been a lot of news and then, after kind of moving them around a little bit, I was like you know what, let's not worry about that too too much, but the you know, in other words, we can just go topic by topic like we do normally, and and some of the stuff will be a week or two old and some of it will be as new as today. Um, but you know, if it's new to you, it's, it's, it's, it's gonna, yeah, it's gonna be new. A lot of this will be new to everybody. So, um, the year of the windows 11 PC refresh is something we've been promised for a couple of years now. Um, microsoft is saying it explicitly, which I think is a little interesting. Intel said the same thing, and their announcement for all of their what I? This is a pretend count, but 117 different cpus. They announced cpu models. Um, and amd did the same thing, by the way. And then you know qualcomm's cute, they, they had one. So you know slightly different companies, uh, but it's interesting that they all they, the two of them anyway microsoft and intel are basically citing the same factors. Uh, intel called it a trifecta which is pretty funny of things that are happening this year that will trigger this supposedly End of life is obviously the big one for Windows 10. The advent of these AI PCs, I think, is even more debatable, honestly. And then the lingering security fears from CrowdStrike, which Intel named and Microsoft did not, because Microsoft pretends that didn't happen. But they do talk about the enhanced security in Windows 11 as a reason to upgrade, and I will say Copilot plus PC class PCs, and increasingly just all PCs now have this Windows Hello, ess, for example, and the Microsoft Pluton chip stuff, and so there's some good stuff going on there. But, um, I I think the problem for the PC industry is that there's not any enthusiasm there. This is a, you know, for people, individuals who are not businesses, um, it's a tool that they used for work as little as possible. And when you go to them and say hey, what do you think about spending like a thousand bucks on a new computer that does exactly the same thing as what you're already using your eight-year-old computer for? They're like, yeah, I don't think so. And then businesses have always moved very slowly, so we'll see it's going to be an interesting second half of 2025 in that regard.
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