WW 926: You're Ugly When You Cry - Altair BASIC, Switch 2's pricing, Wintoys

Bill Gates celebrates the 50th anniversary of Microsoft with the release of the source code for Altair BASIC 1.0. Plus, Paul celebrates with 99 cent books: The Windows 10 Field Guide, Windows 11 Field Guide, and Windows Everywhere are all 99 cents for 24 hours! Also available: Eternal Spring: Our Guide to Mexico City in preview!

Windows

• The plot thickens. Paul writes epic take on future of Windows 11, describes Dev channel-only features and when/if they were ever released - in other words, an extensive but partial Windows 11 feature roadmap for 2025
• Two days later, Microsoft announces a Windows 11 feature road map - one that is woefully incomplete, pathetic, and sad
• Microsoft announces when (sort of) new on-device AI features will come to all Copilot+ PCs, meaning Intel and AMD, too - "not a glimpse at the future of the PC, but the future of the PC."
• Live captions with live language translations, Cocreator in Paint, Restyle image and Image creator in Photos, plus Voice access with flexible natural language (Snapdragon X only)
• But not Recall or Click to Do in preview, go figure
• As expected, March 2024 Preview update for 24H2 arrives, a few days late - with AI-powered search experience enabled
• Dev and Beta builds - Friday - Quick Machine Recovery (Beta only?), Speech recap in Narrator, Blue screen to get less blue, WinKey + C shortcut for Copilot returns, Spanish and French Text actions in Click to Do, Edit images in Share, AI-powered search (Dev only?)
• Then, Microsoft more fully describes Windows Quick Recovery
• Beta (23H2) - Monday - A lot of familiar 24H2 features - Narrator improvements, Copilot WinKey + C, Share with Image edit, plus System -- About FAQ for some freaking reason
• Proton Drive is now native on Windows 11 on Arm, everyone gets new features
• Proton VPN is now built into Vivaldi desktop browser
• Intel's new CEO appears in public, vows to spin off non-core businesses. Everything but x86 chip design and Foundry, then

Microsoft 365

• Windows 365 Link is now available
• The Office apps on Windows already launch instantaneously but apparently that's not invasive enough - we need fewer auto-start items, not more of them
• Microsoft Excel to call out rich data cells with value tokens

AI & Dev

• NYT copyright infringement lawsuit against Open AI and Microsoft can move forward, judge rules
• And now Tim O'Reilly says Open AI stole his company's paywalled book content too. Book piracy is sadly the easiest thing in the world
• Open AI raised more money than any private firm in history, now worth $300B
• ChatGPT releases awesome new image generation feature for ChatGPT
• And now it's available for free to everyone
• Google's Gemini Pro 2.5 is now available to everyone too
• Amazon launches Alexa+ in early access, US only
• Some thoughts about vibe coding, which isn't what you think it is
• AMD pays $4.9 billion to take on Nvidia in cloud AI
• Apple Intelligence + Apple Health is the future of something something

Xbox & Games

• Nintendo announces Switch 2. Looks awesome, coming earlier than expected. But that price! And no Xbox/COD news at the launch??
• Luna's not dead! Amazon announces multi-year EA partnership, expands Luna to more EU countries
• Microsoft announces a new Xbox Backbone controller for smartphones
• New titles for Xbox Game Pass across PC,

Ti

These show notes have been truncated due to length. For the full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/926

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