- This episode of Ask Dan, we're gonna talk about AR and VR.
Is it too late?
Is it too early?
What's the deal with it?
And what's going on with Microsoft To-Do
and all the note-taking apps?
Are they ever gonna merge into one?
All that and more.
Stay tuned.
(electronic music)
Would it be possible to connect an external GPU
to the Surface Go through the USB-C connector?
So we recently reviewed the Surface Go
and I did address this in that review, but still,
I know there's a lot of confusion around Type-C
and Thunderbolt 3 and what you can do with it.
So, no, the Surface Go has a Type-C 3.1 port as display
its power, it's actually a very good port,
but it does not do Thunderbolt 3, so that means
you cannot connect it to an external GPU.
And to be honest, it doesn't really make
that much sense for a device that costs this little,
but there's also hardware limitations here.
This is running an Intel Pentium chip,
and as far as I know, Thunderbolt 3
is not supported on this chip/motherboard,
and that's really the restriction here.
Don't forget, Microsoft's up against a lot here.
They can only do stuff what Intel allows them to do.
So I talk about this and what to expect
in the October 2nd event video,
but it when it comes to things
like PCI-e lanes, there's limitations.
There's only about 12 PCI-e lanes in current boards.
The new Whiskey Lake processors
that are coming up though support up to
16 PCI-e lanes, and that makes all the difference.
That means on devices like the Surface Go in the future,
they put it a more powerful processor.
In theory, yeah, you would be able
to connect an to external GPU, but we have
to wait for this stuff to come along.
It's a little bit expensive.
As much as I'd love to have a Surface Go
with an external GPU, we'll just have to wait
at least until next time to see if it happens.
Is AR or VR already becoming an afterthought
in the tech world and for consumers?
All right, so this is a really
interesting question, 'cause I love the idea
of future computing and the ideas around it.
But yeah, AR/VR is still just not really catching on.
Sure, the Steam Store is creeping along,
HTC Vive is still there,
and even Windows Mixed Reality is chugging along,
it's getting updates, it's getting better,
and I'm still impressed with the fact that Microsoft
created a Windows 10 world that's mixed-reality,
it's actually really impressive.
But yeah, overall, this stuff is still too early,
and it all hinges upon the hardware.
It's still just cumbersome to put on,
it's an experience to get wired up,
you gotta be in your home,
and I really think that's the issue right here.
Even myself, I have multiple of these headsets
and I barely ever use it.
But then when I do use it,
I'm always blown away by how cool it is.
But for your average consumer,
I don't think this makes a ton of sense.
I think a lot of this will depend on that hardware
shrinking down, just becoming easier.
When I think about the new show on Hulu called The First,
there's a scene where Sean Penn puts on
basically sunglasses, and he can watch video
with them and experience different realities.
And to me, that's gotta be the threshold for this stuff,
it's when it's so easy, just put on glasses,
then I think that's gonna be the real turning point.
But we're still far off from that.
It doesn't mean though these companies
should not be investing in it, creating
the technology behind it to make it happen.
You don't wanna wait for the hardware
to show up and then all of a sudden
have to create all the software around it.
So I think Microsoft's doing good here, but yeah,
temper expectations around this technology.
Do you have any news on when or if the Edge browser
will move into the Microsoft Store?
All right, ever since the Edge browser came out
with Windows 10, we've been expecting and hearing rumors
and talk that yeah, the Edge browser will
eventually go to the Store, and therefore
we can get it updated more frequently.
And that has not only not happened,
but the rumors and the expectations around it
from the Edge team themselves
have seemed to be, well, gone away.
And as far as we know, no,
there's really nothing new to report on this topic.
We'll try to find out more at Ignite
in the coming weeks for Microsoft when we talk to them,
and maybe at Build next a year,
but I think some of this may hinge on Polaris,
and the idea of Windows Core OS.
Maybe they can decouple Edge
from the OS experience at that time.
But right now, Edge is tied really deeply
to the OS experience, and it's a big shame,
but I agree 100% with you.
And for everyone who wants this in the Store,
the idea of being able to update Edge
seems to be a better way to compete against Chrome,
which, you know, you can say what you want about Google,
but they do update Chrome a lot,
and that's part of the reason why it's so popular.
They have a very incessant pace about how much
they update this, and Edge needs to really compete.
I'm not sure waiting on quarterly
or bi-yearly releases is really the solution here.
Will Microsoft ever merge its multiple To-Do apps?
All right, so one thing you can
accuse Microsoft Office, having redundancy.
So they have seemingly a lot of apps
where you can take down notes and jot down things.
You have Sticky Notes, you have To-Do, you have Wunderlist,
you have OneNote, and there's definitely overlap
between those, but they also have distinct usages.
Now, while I was in Berlin for IFA 2018,
I was privileged to be able to stop by the Microsoft office,
where they do work on To-Do and OneNote and Sticky Notes
at this place, and it's also the former Wunderlist team.
So if you don't know, Wunderlist was bought by Microsoft
and that team has been folded into a larger one
that's part of OneNote, and they've now created To-Do.
Now, To-Do is actually replacing Wunderlist.
Wunderlist is on hold.
To-Do is getting all the new features,
and we're actually starting to see new features
coming to To-Do that a lot of users have asked for.
It just got Live Tiles and now has
direct inking support in it.
There's a lot more around it that's coming.
So the question is, are they gonna merge all these,
and what's going on with it?
And part of the problem here is we look
at something like Microsoft Launcher for Android,
it has a To-Do widget in it, so you think, Microsoft To-Do?
Well, no, this is a separate To-Do,
this is just a generic To-Do.
And how does something like that happen?
So, when I actually asked the To-Do team about that,
even they were kinda surprised about Launcher having that.
And this goes to show you there's still problems,
I think, in Microsoft with organizations.
Now, they did just go through a reorg,
so a lot of this is being figured out, but yeah,
so long as you have different teams who,
if you're on a Microsoft team and your goal
is to create an awesome product, you wanna do that,
and you don't really care what the other guys
are necessarily doing, you want your product to be the best.
So the Launch team, I think, did their own
little To-Do note-taking thing,
and then now there's this separate To-Do app
which we all know that is on Windows, Android and iOS.
That will be figured out, yeah.
The Launcher will eventually fold in the actual To-Do
into it, and there'll be things like in To-Do,
getting Cortana and Microsoft Launcher support,
as well as other features.
But there is a lotta redundancy.
We see the same thing with Skype and things like GroupMe
as well as Yammer, which is all getting merged
into Skype as well, and the Microsoft Teams.
It all can be very confusing.
Microsoft seems to be figuring it out,
and I do hope, with this latest reorg, they do.
All right, that does it for this episode.
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