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I took a great nap watching this episode (not due to the content!) but I heard Jason Snell mention people commented his green screen background and I felt vindicated
I’m sure I’ll have more to say on Windows Weekly, the enterprise show but my work (traditionally a Windows / Microsoft stronghold ) fins,lg allowed people to start requesting MacBooks as their next laptop! I’m now using a 15” MacBook Air M3 for work and it’s my first 15” MacBook. It’s really nice having my work machine be on par quality wise with the type of machine I would buy for myself.
My work mac is the midnight blue colour and everyone was right: gosh this thing looks sick but will get disgustingly dirty!! I am shocked they didn’t give me (and presumably everyone) silver Macs…. my previous work HP laptop was silver and it also looks dsigusting, I can only imagine how gross this mac is going to get when it has a layer of chalk on it
I have a lot of feelings about Outlook for Mac (it’s bad compared to Windows. But I suppose the “new” outlook is fine in terms of parity) but I miss Outlook Legacy for Windows.
Leo keeps buying and wearing these wearable AI pins but taken them off when they get bought by s big company. These products exist to get acquired. Crystal ball: Apple acquires a small company, shuts them down, but rolls the tolls into an Apple Watch update
Costco is the only retailer where I use my Interac (debit) via Apple Pay. I don’t have a MasterCard, only 1 VISA. I’m thinking of changing my credit card to get a mastercard with cash back, though.
I bought that Apple book the moment they described it as a coffee table book. I love those. I want more.
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A couple of Mac users at work have asked about having a Mac, but they are “too complicated” for most of our users - macOS itself is excellent, I use a MacBook Air and work and a Pro at home - but we are a Windows company and the macOS integration with Windows infrastructure is, well, complex.
Our Windows PCs get the network drives assigned at login by group policies. On the Mac, you need to open Finder, hit Command+K (or Go to Server) and then enter: smb:server.domain.local/Sharename. For most users that would be a step too far, when they call and say that their “W” isn’t working, you ask them what “W” is (it is different for each department/site) and they just say, “you know, W!” They don’t understand servers and shares, they just know the drive letter… If we add a new resource, the user lands in a new group and the policy for that group attaches the drive to the relevant drive letter, if the move to a different department, the next time they log in, all the old drive letters are removed and they get the new ones for their new department.
We could probably do something similar with a bash script at logon, but that won’t be pushed from the authentication server, like the Windows PCs. We have a single MacBook, which is in the IT and is now mine, which my predecessor bought to help get iPhones into the MDM, it turned out, we didn’t need it and it sat in a cupboard for 18 months, until my Windows laptop died and I used the MacBook Air as an interim, but the new Intel chips have been so disappointing that I have stuck with it, and replaced it with an M4 version this year.
Outlook on the Mac is a joke, compared to the Windows version, oh, it looks much nicer, but so much functionality is missing or just doesn’t work or doesn’t work properly, that it is a real pain. Our VOIP software is also a pain, it auto-starts when the Mac is turned on, but, until it is brought into the foreground, it doesn’t sign into the VOIP server! It is also the last piece of legacy Intel software on my Mac. I’ve gone over to mostly using the VOIP client on my iPhone.
I heard a lot about how the iPhone (and smartphones in general) is threatened by AI first devices, which will be audio based, like the pins @Leo wears. Mike Elgen on TWiT was saying this at the weekend. I just don’t see it, 95% of the time I need information, I am in a situation where I can’t talk and I certainly don’t want an AI device talking back to me, the other 5%, 4% I would be too embarrassed to talkt o the device, I feel funny walking into the bedroom and asking Siri to turn on the light, for heck’s sake! Having audio as an option is fine, but for many situations, having the information visualized is much better, you can scan the information and spring to the bit you need, with audio, you have to listen to everything or keep telling it to skip, until you get to the relevant bit. I find, I have to go back and re-read and re-listen to things as I didn’t understand them the first time, or something later references earlier information, that is, again much easier with written words, you just scan back a sentence or paragraph, but in an audio word-babble, it is much harder to “scroll” back to the relevant point.
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That’s what I’m gonna have to do…. I’m gonna have to add back the “G” drive. I’ve never been great with samba and whatnot but I’m sure I can figure it out before asking for help. I’m better at SSHing directly into the server and going where I need to go haha.
Word/Excel are both fully featured on Mac, I’m just very disappointed in Outlook. I didn’t realize I was an outlook power user until my features were taken away from me.
My work doesn’t allow us to add applications to the Applications folder so I have to run my programs from my own folder. It’ll be interesting overtime to see if I miss the Windows machine. I kind of got used to Windows for work. even though before working for my current job, I was always a linux/mac guy
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I love it when Alex uses the name Janet to refer to Siri. I think of the scene from The Rocky Horror Picture Show where Rick proposes to his beloved by singing the famous words, "Dammit, Janet!” To those unfamiliar with that musical interlude, here’s a time warp back to that song from the movie: https://youtu.be/MZtavHAsQCM?si=0BkUYbaTCbv0SW3a
I visualize Alex saying, “Dammit, Janet! What’s the weather like for the next two hours?” Occasionally, Alex would profess his love to Janet; it would reply, “Brad, I’m mad for you too!” Back in the day, it’s difficult to overstate the glee created by this flick. Does anyone else think of Rocky Horror every time Alex mentions “Janet”? 
@big_D I understand the hill Windows users have to climb to be comfortable on a Mac. I just had the opposite: I ripped an audio CD – an audiobook from the library – on a [library] windows PC and uploaded it to the cloud. Who would have guessed that holding down the STOP button in Windows Media Player would have done that? Not me! Thank goodness for the AIs to hold my hand doing that operation.
The interesting thing to me is the number of EU companies and government agencies that are ditching Windows for Linux, Mac or whatever. The October Win10 Apocalypse will take another healthy chunk of users away. Windows kinda reminds me of Empire on Apple’s version of Foundation. While both have a very long tail, they are both in significant decline.
i’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years and it’s worked very well for me
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It isn’t getting Windows users comfortable on Mac, it is people who use a Mac at home that want to use one at work, but using it with a Windows domain is not so easy and getting automatic assignments for network shares etc. set-up, or they have to do it themselves, that is the problem.
The problem is the US Government insisting that international cloud services, that aren’t hosted in the USA are actually hosted on US soil (i.e. if a US company has a datacenter in Germany, the datacenter is actually in the USA, for US legal purposes). That is untenable for a government, whether it be at the national level or the local level.
If the US Government says the servers are on “US soil” for legal purposes, then it is illegal for those European Governments to use those servers for anything, as legally, all servers and services must be hosted in the EU. Likewise, Windows still phones home, but exactly what it sends isn’t documented, so government departments are again advised to not use Windows, because the information isn’t sent to EU servers, it is sent to Microsoft servers in the USA.
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This reads exactly like the Sharepoint site that my workplace setup for the new Macs users. It’s for people who use a Mac at home and love things like AirDrop, Continuity, etc. Those are all disabled on the work machines. The work Macs aren’t the same as using a Mac for personal use at all. I will admit even I’m a bit uneasy sometimes in the transition. I don’t know what will happen if I need to change my “Windows password” for example, because we use that login a lot of places. They use something called Kerberos Single Sign-on to work with AD authentication. It’ll
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My Mac was in the domain, when I accidentally typed my password in a Teams message (I was in the middle of logging into a server as Teams started and switched the focus from the window I was typing into), I had to change my Windows password, then I had to change my password on the Mac to match - but that doesn’t change the boot password, so when the Mac started, I had to always enter my old password, wait for it to decrypt the disk, then enter my new password.
I spent a while trying to work that one out, but eventually gave up and just lived with having to enter 2 different passwords to boot and log into my Mac.
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The same here, I’ve used DDG as my main search engine since around 2016, although the last year or so, I have been using Brave search.
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Yeah… Right now my Mac password and Windows passwords are not the same. I actually did that on purpose because I didn’t want to start thinking “okay my mac uses the same account info as my global “Windows” password”. but I am also noticing the Mac saves passwords a lot easier than Windows. so I’m worried if I’m not deligent, I might start to forget my passwords (which is good, but bad the moment you have to go back to using them!). IO have them written down of course.
I used to be forced to change my Windows password every 90 days, which was a huuuuuge pain. I’m glad those days are behind us. Out “global windows account” is actually our work M365 account since they moved us to “cloud managed desktops”. I use that account enough where I don’t think I would forget the password. But the password was much more assured in my head when I had to login to my Windows PC with it everyday
They should be untenable for anyone! What data does Microsoft require be stored in the cloud? TTBOMK, Apple has no requirements for any data to be stored in the cloud. Linux certainly does not.
This sounds like an excellent reason to move off of Windows. What are the compelling reasons for a new European company to rely on Microsoft these days?
Just to be clear, he is asking Siri to connect him to Janet, which is his code name for ChatGPT.
It isn’t Microsoft’s data, it is their customer’s data (Microsoft 365 and Azure machines, for example). All Microsoft 365 tenants fall under US jurisdiction under the CLOUD Act, regardless of where it is hosted.
The biggest problem is, according to EU law, the data owner (in this case a company or a government department) has a legal responsibility to keep personally identifiable information (PII) securely and not hand it over to third parties without the express consent of the persons identified in the information, unless they receive a valid EU warrant to do so. On the other hand, Microsoft, who hosts the data, has to hand it over to the US Government legal entities when shown a US warrant, even if that data isn’t held within US jurisdiction, which automatically makes their customers liable to fines of $25M or 4% of global turnover. When the US combines the CLOUD Act with the Patriot Act and FISA Court National Security Letters, Microsoft isn’t even allowed to inform the customer that they have made them legally liable to fines under GDPR, because they would be in contempt of the US court if they did so.
That is a huge problem.
It doesn’t just affect Microsoft or Big Tech, it affects every company that has a legal presence in the USA, even if it is just a sales office. So essentially, any company that does business with the USA automatically exempts itself from government contracts in Europe and businesses have to think twice about the associated risks, before doing business with those companies.
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If it makes you feel any better it’s been a steaming pile of 
since it was called Entourage.
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Then don’t use them! Dump Windows, dump Office 365, dump Microsoft cloud. Dump ‘em all. If it’s really problematic to use software under US jurisdiction, then there’s an easy way to avoid it. Cut over to Linux and the Office alternatives. Or use Apple without its cloud services. Or both.
That is the point of the earlier comments in this thread, many governments are dropping it for this exact reason.
It is a shame, the cloud services were just beginning to gain acceptance, but now the US Government has sabotaged the countries fastest growing sectors (cloud and AI). Although for multi-nationals with a foot in the USA, the point is moot, as they fall under the CLOUD Act as well, but for national and local governments, it isn’t just illegal in many cases, it would be dumb to use a service provider with ties to the USA…
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Or you know, offer the user the option to choose which cloud host/location they would like to use, potentially at different costs depending. Or even let them bring their own (at a corporate level). There seems little harm in offering and then honouring an end user choice… the AWS standard of block file storage is well known and many of their competitors offer a version too, so it shouldn’t be rocket science to generalize it.
That is the problem, as long as the datacenter is run by a company with a US presence, government departments simply can’t use it. It is irrelevant, where the datacenter is located, the only factor that dictates, whether the server is “on USA soil” is whether the company that runs the servers has a single employee or building in the USA…
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I guess as usual I find myself as the outlier agreeing with Alex. I think Google search is actually very very good. It bring in the AI summary when needed and is usually all I need to answer what I’m looking for, the info block at the top when searching for a business is EXACTLY what I need on mobile, google a business and get an one-tap call button. I guess I don’t know what Leo and Jason are wanting from google. But compared to perplexity I like the AI summary then normal results right underneath to dig deeper
After the whole glue on pizza incident Gemini is kind of a sleeper AI, it’s very good.
One thing Google does that nobody else seems to be able to do, is speed. Hit search and BAM it’s right there, DDG, perplexity all take some amount of time to process, VS google is virtually instant.