Protesters take over Microsoft's Building 34, objecting to the company's technology being allegedly used by Israel. Is it more than simply cybersecurity usage, and how is Microsoft handling employee activism? In other news, Gemini suddenly vaults to the front of AI image editing capability, and the OG Gears of War has been remastered at least twice (but now it's cross-platform).
Windows 11
- Resume from your (Android) phone in testing in Dev and Beta channels
- Copilot app gets semantic search and new home page across all Insider channels
- 25H2 feature focus: Administrator Protection probably works but it's more disruptive than even UAC was
- Windows 11 gets a nice Bluetooth quality update
- Parallels Desktop 26 for Mac is out, but it's a minor update for individuals
Microsoft 365
- Microsoft to fix one of the biggest issues with Word
- Reminder: OneNote for Windows 10 hits EOL in October
AI
- Apple's AI floundering continues as it considers a Perplexity or Mistral acquisition
- And tests a Gemini AI model for Siri in-house
- Perplexity offers a $5 per month Comet Plus subscription that pays content makers
- Anthropic sort of brings Claude extension to Chrome
- NotebookLM audio and video overviews are now available in over 80 languages
- And AI Mode is now available in Search in over 180 countries
- Norton's AI web browser gets off to a rough start
- Proton Lumo gets a big update
- Rant: The real problem with the Windows 2030 talk, and why everyone (on both sides) is wrong about AI
Dev
- Microsoft lets Visual Studio devs tune-down GitHub Copilot, finally
- Microsoft makes some progress with improving Windows App SDK, supposedly
Xbox and gaming
- Xbox Cloud Gaming expands to Xbox Game Pass Core Standard, adds PC games for the first time
- Steam and other stores come to Xbox app on PC
- Activision says it will reverse some of the stupidity it introduced in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
- Nintendo invented the 30 percent fee that's still common today in digital app/game stores, but when it did so, the fee actually made sense... and it still does today, but only for the videogame industry
Tips & Picks
- Tip of the week: Edit images with Gemini
- Tip of the week: Subscribe to Chris's new newsletter, The Windows ReadMe
- App pick of the week: Gears of War
- App pick of the week: NVIDIA Broadcast app
Hosts: Leo Laporte and Paul Thurrott
Guest: Chris Hoffman
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