Technology Ramblings

At the MS Ignite conference this week MS announced the availability of Office 2019 scheduled for release late in 2018. This perpetual release vs the click-to-run model of Office365 is the traditional Office that users have been purchasing and deploying for the last 20 years.   Along with Office 2019 there will be updates to the associated back end services - So Exchange, SharePoint and Skype For Business (now being transitioned to MS Teams). A couple of years ago I made the statement - "Will there be an Exchange 2019 - Absolutely - will you actually deploy it - probably not".   In the early days of Office365 - there were many restrictions around things like SharePoint apps or certain Exchange Mailboxes or 3rd party integrations that either required an on-prem install or potentially some sort of hybrid install.  There were also some very visible outages that had many questioning moving something like Exchange to the cloud.   But those restrict...

On Sep 28, MS release Windows 10 build 17004 to members of the Skip Ahead group.  With the new numbering starting in the 17000 range this indicates to me that this is the first true Redstone 4 build. While not called out specifically - 17004 starts from one of the recent RS3 Release builds (most likely 16296) and then adds some new capabilities based on the Fluent Design framework to the start menu, some color wheel changes and some more Edge fixes.    One surprising add to this build was an Edge shortcut added to the default desktop.  MS is doing everything it can to promote the use of Edge - but as I've stated in earlier posts MS is loosing the browser war and I never even look at it. One fix that was directly affecting me was addressed and that was a Green Screen crash caused by a System Service Exception error in win32kfull.sys.  I had experienced it several times in the last 2 weeks running 16362. What was not really answered that well @...

On Sep 27, MS Released Windows 10 Build 16299 to Fast Ring Insiders and 16294 to Slow Ring. As with several of the recent releases this build contains just a handful of fixes - but still contains the evaluation watermark - so still not the Production release build. I was travelling during the release and noticed when I returned that 1 of my devices was automatically updating and performed a manual update against the second.  End-to-End times were about the same as previous updates. I wasn't experiencing any of the issues listed - so no comment on the fix effectiveness. As with many insiders - we are just marking time until release.  Outside of the impact to Surface Pro 3 users caused by 16291 - I've felt the release has been ready for a while.  The hope is we'll see production release very soon.  Typically Insiders get the Production release about 2 weeks prior to the public.

I write quite a bit about Windows 10.  As a Fast Ring Insider since the program inception nearly 3 years ago now - I've effectively run every build leading up to the initial release in July of 2015 to today.   As a long time tech guy - I've also run every version of Windows that has ever existed and watched as MS became the dominant PC operating system on the planet. As we approach the 5th major release of Windows 10 - The Fall Creators Update scheduled for Oct 17 - the question is the impact Windows 10 is having on the PC OS and hardware market. So while Windows itself in all versions is still the absolute dominant PC operating system out there with a 90.7% market share over MacOS's 5.94% and Linux's 3.37% - Windows 10 seems to be peaking. Today - the nearly 8 year old Windows 7 still holds the largest portion of the overall OS market at 48.43%.  And that has actually increased marginally since the beginning of the year when it was at 47.20% Now remember - Ma...

Late in the day on Sept 22 - MS released the 3rd Windows 10 Build this week with 16296 to Fast Ring Insiders.  Again no release to Skip Ahead. With only 3 fixes and a .0 extension to the build and with the Ignite conference next week - I was originally thinking that 16296 would be the Production Release.   But with the return of the evaluation watermark - the answer is no.   Which to me is a little surprising since with the entire Insider team being in Orlando next week for Ignite I would have guessed that 16296 would have marked the RS3 Milestone and Release. I updated three machines - my NUC took about 30 min, my old HP Desktop about an hour and my trusty Dell Venue 8 Pro almost 90 minutes. Nothing to really report on the fixes themselves as they were niched towards hyper-v, foreign language and gaming.   So unless we get a surprise this weekend - this kind of blows up my prediction of a sub 16300 build for Production release as I assume there will b...

Late in the day on Sept 20 MS released Windows 10 Build 16294 to Fast Ring Insiders on the rs3.release branch. While this release did contain some fixes - it was really 1 fix around Surface Pro 3 boot issues that this build was all about.  The 16288 build hurt a lot of Surface Pro testers and 16291 only partially fixed it.  Ergo the 16294 release yesterday. Like with 16291 released a day earlier - the build has no watermarks and a 1709 version ID. Also like 16291 - the install on my test machines went smoothly and somewhat quickly with my NUC completing in 32m and my Venue 8 Pro in about 60m. As several observers have noted - we are very very close to production release. This latest issue around SP3 devices may push us into next week for final release for Insiders.  The public will see the release on Oct 17. On a side note - we have not seen a "Skip Ahead" build now since 9-13 and personally I think the whole skip ahead effort has been a waste of time for both M...

Back on Aug 21, Intel announced their 8th generation Core line of CPUs.  The initial offerings are based on the Kaby Lake lithography (14nm) and are in fact what folks are calling the Kaby Lake refresh release.  The initial release is limited to two CPUs based on the U configuration for laptops and tablets and in fact are already showing up in OEM devices. The big change is the additional core and thread capabilities.  For example a Core i7-7567U used in the top of the line NUC available today is a 2 Core 4 Thread CPU capable of 4Ghz speed with 4M Cache. The new Core i7-8550U is a 4 Core, 8 Thread CPU also capable of 4.0Ghz speed and has 8M of Cache.  It also used less energy being a 15W TDP vs 28W for the i7-7567U. Even the new Core i5 now offers 4 cores and 6 threads vs the 2 Cores / 4 Threads of the current 7th gen offerings. The end result is upwards of a 40% performance improvement claimed by Intel and with double the cores and threads.   The new 8t...

On Sept 19, Apple released iOS 11 to the masses.  And I mean masses.  One of the unique things that Apple does is do a mass release to their supported products.   For iOS 11 this means all of these devices: iPhone X, iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone SE, iPhone 5s 12.9-inch iPad Pro, 10.5-inch iPad Pro, 9.7-inch iPad Pro, iPad (fifth-generation), iPad Air 2, iPad Air, iPad mini 4, iPad mini 3, iPad mini 2 iPod touch (sixth-generation) So my older Apple TV and iPads were our of luck as Apple has moved to 64 Bit only.  But my wife's 3 year old iPhone 6 updated fine. Versus what you experience with Android it's kind of nice.  With Android you are so much at the whim of the OEMs / Carriers since they often develop custom shells and/or launchers, etc and often are very slow to market.   I've written in the past with my disappointment with Samsung for example who ...

On Sep 18, MS released Windows 10 Build 16291 to Fast Ring Insiders on the rs3.release track. The second of the true release builds - like 16288 - 16291 does not contain a watermark and it's version is listed as 1709. The update overall speed was improved.  My Intel NUC performed end to end in about 32 min.  My Venue 8 Pro clocked in - in a little over 65 min. This was a small update - with only 6 listed fixes and an update to Cortana for Phone to PC Resume feature.  So the assumption here is that we are very close to Production release to Insiders - potentially as early as this week. The previous update (16288) hurt a lot of folks running Surface Pro 3 devices and MS placed a link to repair those devices which involved creating a bootable USB and the performing a wpeutil reboot command.  There were additional post reboot steps to them permanently correct the issue. Obviously anytime MS can't get Windows 10 right for it's own devices it's a little worrisome...

As I expressed back in my post on Cord Cutting back in January - the number of choices you will have in terms of streaming live TV would expand.  And that is coming to fruition. Since that post two new players have entered the fray.  YouTube announced their YouTube-TV offering and Hulu announced Hulu-Live. YouTube TV offers 40+ channels, 6 accounts unlimited DVR and support across PCs, iOS and Android devices as well as Apple AirPlay and Chromecast.  YouTube TV will also be supported on Android TV devices from Sony, Sharp, nVidia & Razer.  The service is $35 and you have some add-on choices like Showtime. When you compare it to DirecTV Now for example - there are fewer channels - but you can have 6 folks streaming simultaneously vs just 2 for DirecTV.  You also have unlimited DVR - which DirecTV Now just doesn't offer.   Hulu Live offers 60+ channels including a lot of sports channels for $40 / month as well as add-ons like HBO, Cinemax and Show...

In what has become a September ritual - Apple announced their new iPhone line-up on Sept 12. This year - we got 3 new iPhones, the 8, 8 Plus and the 10 year anniversary edition known as X (read as 10 according to Apple).   Here's my take on the good the bad and the ugly of these new devices.. The Good... As Apple has been doing for years now - we see the continued evolution of their CPU - this year called the A11 Bionic.  So continued processing power and efficiency gains.   We also saw Apple's first foray into GPU which is incorporated into the A11 and not the lego model using Imagination Technologies GPU of iPhones past. We also see continued improvements with Screens & Cameras with dual cameras available on the 8Plus & X. And finally after 5 years the addition of Qi wireless charging. The Bad... Only some minimal updates to the iOS UI.  Specifically in the Control Center. And sure there are other new features like Apple Pay for friends, new f...

On Sept 13 MS released Redstone 4 branch build 16362 of Windows 10 to members of the Skip Ahead group. This build included many of the same "fixes" as the rs3.release build 16288 that was distributed on Sept 12 as well as an "Improved Boot experience" and some updates to Windows Narrator. As with the 16288 rs3.release build - the update process was slow.  When you consider that for most enthusiasts - we are running multi-core, machines with SSD - it is simply amazing that it can take well over an hour to perform an update when it take less than 30 minutes booting from an USB.  And the download piece is not the laggard. So one thing I noticed immediately after booting was that traditional lock screen clear keys like Space Bar and Enter weren't working.  Only a left mouse click cleared the screen to present Login.   This only seemed to occur with first boot - after reboot it worked fine. Otherwise for the most part it's like running 16288 except with t...

On Sept 12, MS released Windows 10 Build 16288 to Fast Ring Insiders.  It was both an important and painful update. The build itself like all the recent builds was full of bug fixes - this time to the Shell, Input Methods, Edge, Gaming and Devices along with a few odds and ends. The build also removed the rs3.release watermark and is identified as a 1709 Version of Windows 10 - so a true Fall Creators Update build.  MS was quick to call out that this is NOT the release build and that there is still work to do.  But it is certainly close.. Unfortunately there was also some pain with this release.  While it downloaded and installed fine on my lowly Dell Venue 8 Pro it would not install on my new Intel NUC.   As many Insiders experienced - Windows Update would "find" the new build - but almost immediately fail stating " An update is being prepared for your device, but it's not quite ready yet. We'll keep trying or you can try again now " and then displa...

On September 1 - MS released Build 16281 of Windows 10 to Fast Ring Insiders on the RS3 Release path. As discussed in earlier posts - MS had stated that they were going to increase the pace of RS3.Release builds as they approached production release which was announced to be October 17. The build itself only contained a handful of fixes - which seems to be the approach that MS is taking lately. The good news is that this update downloaded and installed much quicker than the previous 1627X builds.   I was able to update both my NUC and Dell Tablet is about an hour.   This also indicates to me that MS is close to release. Also it is entirely possible that even though the "official" release date is October 17, that MS will actually provide the production release in early September.   The reason is that with a slew of new Intel 8th Gen Core CPU products also scheduled to be available to support MS's big Mixed Reality (MR) push - that those OEMS will need the release b...

I'm a little late in commenting about the worldwide smartphone market share as IDC published their numbers about a month ago.. The overall market in Q2 of 2017 took a slight hit @ 341.6M units sold vs 346.1M in 2016 - about a 1.5% drop.    Still consider however that this number is nearly 6 times larger than PC sales for the same period with came in around 60M units. Samsung and Apple are still #1 and #2 respectively.  Samsung still sells nearly double the volume that Apple does at 79.8M units (23.3%) vs 41M (12%) The big news is that Huawei is now the solid 3rd place OEM with 38.5M units sold and a 11.3% market share - which is a 19.6% growth over last year. The number 4 & 5 OEMs are also Chinese - in Oppo and Xaiomi respectively.   And as I had predicted over a year ago those three firms combined have now surpassed Samsung with 87.5M units sold or a 25.6% market share.   And the growth numbers these vendors are seeing is pretty remarkable. ...

MS announced today that the Redstone 3 branch of Windows 10 called the Fall Creators Update will be available to the public on Oct 17. Back on Aug 23, I speculated that it may be late September or even early October for the release as MS is coordinating not only Windows 10 readiness, but also a new version of Office, new hardware platforms from key vendors running the new 8th Gen Core CPUs as well as a group of new Mixed Reality (MR) headsets from HP, Dell, Asus and others.   So this is a bit later than I expected.  In my testing RS3 has been stable for quite some time and MS has been focusing pretty heavily on bug fixes - with a recent increased pace of builds coming out with 10 - 20 fixes per build.   With that said - we are still 6+ weeks away from production release.  As with most branches I expect the actual "production" build to be available to Fast Ring folks 1 - 2 week prior and that may blow up my guess that the production build number would be under 1...