On this episode, Paul Thurrott, Leo Laporte, and Richard Campbell explore the Windows KB5052086 update, the new Linux kernel drama, quantum computing, and more. Microsoft has announced the very first QPU, powered by topological qubits! Can the hosts possibly comprehend how this works? Later, Paul strongly emphasizes how AI can save users lots of time. Finally, Richard features a whisky that was recently brought to his 30th wedding anniversary!

Windows

• Dev channel: "Important" update because of the coming change to Recall soon, so here's an update that will wipe out all your data. One guess about what that means. Plus, a nice change to the Recall pop-up
• Release Preview (24H2): A preview of the preview that we'll preview next time
• Release Preview (23H2): Basically the same features as above, keeping the two aligned
• Microsoft deprecates location history in Windows 11 - depreciation junction, what's your function?
• Microsoft Edge gets more WebUI 2-based performance improvements
• Clipchamp just keeps getting better

Microsoft 365

• Microsoft: Just kidding about that MSA and Entra ID sign-in experience change
• Outlook mobile is getting a new font picker, a recall email feature (finally), and a minimize email message feature.
• ExpressVPN (TWiT sponsor) rewrote its VPN protocol in Rust

AI

• Microsoft announces a Quantum computing breakthrough, first quantum processor
• Flareup in Linux kernel management maps directly to what we see with AI - Two extremes but a clear middle ground
• Long story short, AI is all about saving you time - this is the "many small things, not one big thing" argument
• Copilot gets new voice capabilities
• In case you were worried, OpenAI formally rejects buyout offer
• OpenAI will also simplify its model offerings
• Google Gemini now remembers what you said, unlike your husband
• xAI launches Grok3 model but only for X Premium subscribers

Xbox

• Avowed launches, with many other Game Pass titles coming through the end of February
• Microsoft announced a generative AI model for video games
• Sony just had its best-ever PS5 sales quarter

Tips and Picks

• Tip of the week: Find your AI "ah-ha" moment
• App pick of the week: Notion. And iA Writer 2 for Windows is here
• RunAs Radio this week: Managed DevOps Pools with Eliza Tarasila
• Brown liquor pick of the week: Signal Hill

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly

Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com

The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin.

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Patch Tuesday has arrived and 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. While Windows 10 gets the new Outlook, you lucky dogs!

Windows

• 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
• 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
• 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. 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
• Tip of the week #2: Get the Bill Gates book Source Code
• App pick of the week: Notion is nearly perfect
• RunAs Radio this week: Upgrading to Windows Server 2025 with Robert Smit
• Brown liquor pick of the week: Mackmyra Brukswhisky

Hosts: Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell, and Mikah Sargent

Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly

Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com

The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin.

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Microsoft reported that it earned a net income of $24.1 billion on revenues of $69.6 billion in the quarter ending December 31, the second quarter of its fiscal 2025. Those figures represent gains of 10 percent and 12 percent year-over-year (YOY), respectively.

Microsoft Earnings Overview

• Not much going on with client-side products and services, so a focus on AI
• Productivity and Business Processes: $29.4 billion in revenues, up 14 percent YOY. This was 42.2 percent of Microsoft's earnings
• Intelligent Cloud: $25.5 billion in revenues, up 19 percent YOY. This was 36.6 percent of Microsoft's earnings
• More Personal Computing: $14.7 billion, unchanged from the year-ago quarter. (Literally flat YOY.) This was 21.1 percent of Microsoft's earnings

Windows

• Microsoft testing AI-powered search in Windows 11 Dev
• New Canary build- Windows Midi Services preview, OneDrive resume, File Explorer folder resume
• Microsoft is experimenting with new Windows 11 UIs
• Microsoft Edge text rendering comes to all Chromium web browsers on Windows - That only took a few years
• Microsoft explains deprecation after using the term for decades

AI

• Week 2 of submitting to our new Chinese overlords
• Gemini catapults into the lead for a few days as Gemini 2.0 becomes broadly available
• Inspired by DeepSeek, OpenAI releases reasoning model to free ChatGPT
• This comes after Microsoft added it to Copilot
• Reasoning vs. traditional models
• Also, DeepSeek R1 is on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub
• Sam Altman discusses DeepSeek, more
• OpenAI offers up an AI research assistant

More Earnings (Lightning Round)

• Intel - $14.3 billion in revenues, down 7 percent
• AMD: Revenues up 24 percent, market share gains on Intel
• Apple - Record $124.2 billion in revenues, up 4 percent
• Alphabet/Google: Revenues at $96.47 billion, up 12 percent - CapEx expenditures closing in on MSFT
• Samsung - Revenues up 12 percent to $52.2 billion
• Spotify is profitable for full year for the first time

Microsoft 365

• Designer makes its way to Photos (Windows) and Microsoft 365 Copilot app (mobile)
• Microsoft is removing the VPN from Microsoft 365 Family and Personal
• Outlook for Mac to get email recall feature

Xbox

• Starfield is coming to Game Pass Standard this month, more Game Pass titles
• Forza Horizon 5 is coming to PS5
• Two Age of Empires titles are coming to PS5
• Remember that Microsoft partnership with Start.gg? Me neither
• Nintendo revenues, Switch sales fall more than expected, will no longer beat DS this fiscal year

Tips and Picks

• Tip of the week: It's time for an online account audit
• App pick of the week: Another week of big browser update
• RunAs Radio this week: Entra ID Protection with Corissa Koopmans
• Margarita of the week: 2 oz white tequila, 1.5 oz Triple Sec, 1 oz fresh lime juice.

Hosts: Leo Laporte and Paul Thurrott

Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly

Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com

The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin.

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Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell go over the latest batch of preview updates for January 2025, including KB5050094! The big story of the week revolves around DeepSeek and its noticeable effects on the modern AI world. Sinofsky even wrote a big piece on the latest AI assistant!

Windows 11

• Preview updates for Windows 11, 10 arrive ahead of February Patch Tuesday
• Windows 11 - Taskbar preview improvements, Windows Studio Effects in the system tray, many File Explorer fixes, more
• Windows 10 - New Outlook replaces Mail, Calendar, People
• New Dev and Beta channel builds - Overdue battery icon updates in Dev, Snap Layout experiments in Beta
• New Canary build today with new File Explorer home view tab
• Microsoft to remove Dev Home from Windows - This never made sense, so that's fine, but its most important features will live on
• Microsoft Edge for Windows now has a Scareware blocker in preview

AI

• DeepSeek explodes out of the gate, sends Big Tech/AI stock reeling and opening up questions about how much money these companies are spending on AI
• Nadella, Altman, Nvidia all react to this change in interesting ways
• Steve Sinofsky - This was inevitable, disruption always comes from outside
• Ahead of this blockbuster development, a look at how the Microsoft/OpenAI relationship is changing - and now we need another look
• OpenAI announces Operator agent for ChatGPT in preview
• Google is bringing new Gemini features to Android and Pixel
• Google is also bringing NotebookLM to almost every Workspace tier, including the cheap one I (Paul) use, NotebookLM Plus to WS Standard and better

Microsoft

• Microsoft preps smaller Surface Pro and Laptop models with Snapdragon chips for some reason
• Microsoft is closing its UK-based "experience center"

Xbox

• Thanks to Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is the biggest game publisher in the world
• Phil Spencer: Xbox Series S a "real advantage" for coming portable gaming product
• Phil Spencer says hardware still "critical" to Xbox. More like "critical condition," am I right?
• No surprises at Xbox Developer_Direct, but a solid collection of games, including the new DOOM

Tips and Picks

• Tip of the week: It's time to start watching Dave's Garage
• App pick of the week: PowerToys, now with Zoomit
• RunAs Radio this week: Querying for Breaches with Mark Morowcyznski
• Brown liquor pick of the week: Blair Athol 12 Floral & Fauna

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly

Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com

The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin.

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OpenAI, Stargate Project, 24H2 Preview

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

For full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/916

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The first Patch Tuesday of 2025 brings temporary but sweet relief. There were no preview updates last month, so this month is just security/bug fixes. Plus, will Microsoft back down from its Windows 10 EOL line in the sand? It appears not. Finally, got New Year's resolutions? Paul's got a better idea. Maybe...

Windows

• New Canary build with nothing in it
• Microsoft will not support Office on Windows 10 after October EOL date
• Microsoft is auto-installing the new Outlook in Windows 10 too - Don't let the door hit you on the way out
• Parallels Desktop for Mac now supports running x86 Windows VMs. Very slowly

AI, Microsoft 365

• New business models for AI emerge in 2025. Pay as you go vs. pay or no pay
• Microsoft has shifted its business model strategy over two years
• 15 months of Copilot in Windows: Madness
• Microsoft announces pay-as-you-go AI agents
• Google has a different (better) take with "the best of Google AI" in Workspace
• What to expect: Price hikes on subscription services to pay for this AI
• Massive reorg of Microsoft's engineering groups is all about AI - There are PM-level layoffs happening now all over Microsoft
• OpenAI adds tasks in beta to ChatGPT
• Microsoft Excel in Windows will soon support dark mode. Wait, what?

Hardware

• Surface teases a big announcement on January 30
• AMD surges on incredible new x86 chips and Intel's epic fail
• Former Surface design lead Ralf Groene joins Panos at Amazon. Why?
• Arm Holdings plans massive licensing price hikes. Everyone needs to settle the F down
• There's a 16 GB Raspberry Pi 5 now. But at this price, a low-end NUC is the better choice for most

Dev

• .NET 9.0.1 arrives - and with it, the fix for the app-crashing WPF/Windows 11 theming bug
• Paul tried GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio. It is MAGIC

Xbox

• Microsoft is clearly planning something big for gaming handhelds. Windows or Xbox? Or both?
• Happy New Year, Xbox fans! Microsoft to bring more Xbox exclusives to PS, Switch
• Xbox to host a Developer Direct event next week
• Microsoft introduces new Xbox repair options
• The Nintendo Switch 2 is leaking all over the place, and there were prototypes at CES

Tips and Picks

• Tip of the week: Think about making micro changes each month or quarter instead of huge, sweeping changes once a year
• App pick of the week: Start11 v2.5
• RunAs Radio this week: DevOpsDocs with Mattias Karlsson
• Brown liquor pick of the week: Buchanan's Deluxe 12
  

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly

Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit

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The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin.

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We heard you missed us. We're back.

Windows

• Microsoft declares 2025 the "year of the Windows 11 PC refresh."
• As likely as "year of the Linux desktop"
• The theory: Windows 10 EOL, AI PCs, lingering security fears from CrowdStrike
• The issue: Windows 10 has 63 usage share right now. At this point in time, Windows 7 had only 25 percent usage share (and was in second place, not first)
• Intel joins in on this fever dream but we've stopped listening
• More interesting: AMD is kicking ass and taking names. And we thought the existing chips were good (they are). Related to this, PC makers are embracing AMD like never before. Check out HP's workstations (including laptops)
• Microsoft is blocking the 24H2 update on PCs with Auto HDR enabled
• New Canary and Beta builds ring in the New Year
• Not that it matters, but Windows 11 almost had Vista Ultimate Extras-like dynamic wallpapers
• Dell kills XPS and all its other PC brands because Dell is stupid and doesn't know what it had

Arm & PCs

• Qualcomm defeated Arm Holdings in licensing dispute court case. And, yes, it won big time, contrary to Arm's nonsense
• Qualcomm announces an even lower-end Snapdragon X chip for $600 PCs, so ASUS announces an $1100 laptop that uses it
• Snapdragon Dev Kit update
• Part 2 of Paul's history of Windows on Arm is up
• New Arm PCs announced, including desktops. Ahead of CES, Geekom jumped the gun and said it was coming out with a Snapdragon X-based NUC. Lenovo has a NUC/SFF
• NVIDIA and MediaTek confirm partnership on Arm chips for PCs

Microsoft 365

• First, GitHub Copilot, but now Microsoft 365 Copilot will allegedly stop using OpenAI exclusively
• Microsoft reveals (confirms) it will spend $80 billion on AI infrastructure in FY 2025 as it suckles up to Trump like the rest of the tech industry
• Microsoft and OpenAI allegedly tied AGI milestone to profits, not intelligence

Xbox & Gaming

• Microsoft discusses a console-like experience for Windows handheld gaming. Tied to that, a new generation of handheld gaming PCs is on the way
• Xbox Game Pass says Happy New Year with a full slate of Activision Blizzard titles. Just kidding
• NVIDIA announces new graphics cards for PCs
• No one wants this, but Xbox is coming to LG smart TVs
• Xbox Rewards shuffles the deck chairs, hopes no one notices it's worse now

Tips & Picks

• Tip of the week: Spend a little, upgrade to Windows 11
• App pick of the week: Microsoft PowerToys
• RunAs Radio this week: Least Privilege in 2025 with Bailey Bercik
• Brown liquor pick of the week: Kilbeggan Irish Whiskey

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly

Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit

Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com

The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin.

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Windows Weekly wishes all viewers and listeners a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Here's a look back at Microsoft's 2024!

• NYT sues OpenAI and Microsoft
• Copilot Pro announced
• Copilot GPT Builder Impressions
• XZ Utils Backdoor Found by Microsoft Hero
• Copilot+ PC & Recall Announced
• Recall Drama Prompts Opt-in Changes
• Thurrant: WSJ Hit Piece on Qualcomm?
• Lenovo's nutty ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid
• 3 Mile Island Revival
• Halo Studios & Unreal Engine 5
• Snapdragon Dev Kit Unboxed
• Coffee and Nespresso tangent!
• Steve Gibson's Worry About "Connected Experiences"
• Intel's CEO "retires"
• Clonakilty Whiskey in studio!

Host: Leo Laporte

Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly

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The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin.

Real-time translation, AI steak video, The Great Circle

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

For full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/912

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Recall impressions, Copilot Vision preview, x86's future

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

For full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/911

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