July 03, 2024

Windows Weekly 888: Find the Blue Penguin

2 hours 36 minutes

It's only been one week, but it's really been 14 years, and Paul is calling: Microsoft and Qualcomm have finally made Windows 11 on Arm both viable and desirable. Nothing is perfect, but this platform is pretty incredible. Some notes from the past week:

Mission Accomplished

As a reminder, Paul finally got the Yoga Slim 7x last week and updated on app compatibility, hardware compatibility, gaming, and in-box AI experiences in time for WW - only found one non-working app, Google Drive. Then...

More app and game compatibility testing. Since then, played a lot more DOOM (2016), ran into one issue that's surely WOA-related (note beta graphics driver, though)

Video encoding performance: Snapdragon X vs Snapdragon X vs Core Ultra 9 H-series vs MacBook Air M3

Initial thoughts on battery life and then More thoughts on battery life. The Yoga Slim 9x and Surface Laptop both get about 10 hours of real-world battery life (so far), compared to 15 hours for the MacBook Air 15-inch M3.

Hardware compatibility update: Only one of my devices doesn't work, the Focusrite.

Surface Laptop 7 first impressions and second impressions

HP Elitebook Ultra first impressions

Windows 11

After skipping Week D last Tuesday, Microsoft belatedly delivers a Week D preview update for Windows 11 version 24H2

No new features, so next Patch Tuesday will be light for 24H2

22H2 and 23H2 got a big Week D update last Tuesday, so Patch Tuesday will be meaningful

As of July's Patch Tuesday, 22H2, 23H2, and 24H2 will all provide the same basic feature set

Canary, Dev, Beta (last Friday): nothing exciting, a few small features or changes

AI & Microsoft 365

European Commission "shifts" investigation of Microsoft/OpenAI partnership. Is Ken Starr in charge of this thing?

Microsoft highlights new Copilot features coming to Microsoft 365 in July

Copilot in OneNote can now recognize handwritten text. It's 2002 all over again!

Pixel 9 family will promote unique "Google AI" features

Brave introduces a BYOM plan for its web browser

Thanks to AI, Google Translate now supports 110 new languages

Xbox

Xbox Cloud Gaming Fire Sticks it to Amazon

Another two weeks of Xbox Game Pass

Forza Horizon 4 (from 2018) to be delisted December 15. Why?

Tips and Picks

Tip of the week: Get $10 off Tony Redmond's Office 365 for IT Pros 11th Edition

App pick of the week: Docs in Proton Drive

RunAs Radio this week: NGINX as a Service with Buu Lam

Brown liquor pick of the week: Jack Daniels Old No. 7

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

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Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com

The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin.

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