What to expect at Microsoft's October 7 event

Daniel Rubino (0:13)

Hey, everyone, Daniel Rubino here, joining Zac Bowden for another exciting episode of The Windows Central Podcast. And this week, we got a bunch of stuff to go through, including the Snapdragon Summit summary, what we learned there, some of the announcements that we had, including those new Surface devices. That will segue nicely into this new Signal65 study that came out that looked at Qualcomm, Intel, and AMD processors in very specific laptops. And they did a bunch of benchmarks. And I'll go through those kind of results and put it into context. There was some nuance with it.

Next week is a big week. October 7th in San Francisco is the new Surface event that will be happening. So Zac and I will both be there in attendance, which will be fun since I don't think... Wait, did I see you at CES? I forgot.

Zac Bowden (1:05)

In 2024, yes.

Wow. Is that long ago?

Daniel Rubino (1:09)

Yeah, a long time. It seems like yesterday. So it's been a while since I saw Zac in person, but we'll be there live covering that event. But we'll go through and talk about what we're expecting and all that jazz. Plus, of course, the latest on Windows 11 And then we have some time. I got some bits on the Shure. Mic review I did, Panasonic, and some Gears and New Games coming up this week on Xbox, which are pretty awesome, actually. So let's get to it, Zac. You are back from your poor man's trip to Hawaii.

How, first of all, first trip to Hawaii. Yeah. What do you think?

Zac Bowden (1:53)

It's far away, isn't it?

It's not near the UK. As far as the way it's not near America. I'm mainland America anyway. It's far away from everyone. And so yeah, that was a, I wasn't prepared for how long the journey is. It's roughly 24 hours of travel door to door, which yeah, that was not fun.

But I thought it was a lovely place. It was really like the weather. Actually, the weather is not, it's very hot there, but beautiful, very scenic place at least. So that was fun. It was cool to go out and see some of my peers and people in the industry who I've met and passed and stuff. So that was cool to see. And it was cool to get hands on time with the new surfaces and to talk with Microsoft executives about the hardware and stuff as well. That was really nice. We'll talk more about that in a sec. But yeah, I was happy to go. Would I be happy to go again?

Daniel Rubino (2:43)

I don't know.

Zac Bowden (2:44)

Maybe in a year.

Daniel Rubino (2:46)

So a little background on the Snapdragon Summit. The lore goes that one year they had a bunch of money left over for marketing and PR, and they decided to basically throw a party PR thing. And they chose Hawaii because obviously it's Hawaii, but also because it's kind of like in the middle of the world for everyone.

It's not a short trip if you're in China either, because there's a lot of Asian media that go over, same if you're from Korea, and same for the US. So it's like equidistant for a lot of places to go. And it was a big hit, and people liked it, so they decided to do another one, and they've been doing it ever since. I should say that it was a little bit more fun back when they would hold it in December, because a lot of us were obviously in the double drums of winter, and a trip to Hawaii made more sense in September, because it's nice in Hawaii in December. It's like moderate weather. It's not hot weather. But going in September, yeah, it's a pretty hot experience, and it just doesn't hit as... We're all coming out of summer, so it's not that great. But still, it's a cool thing, and they typically every year... Well, for PC, it's usually every other year we go, because that's usually coinciding with the announcement. So this is an event to announce new processors for mobile, for their watches, auto, as well as VR and headset, and of course PC. And the PC cycle is usually on an every other year kind of thing. But this year, they surprised us for a couple of reasons. First of all, they announced the Snapdragon C chip in June at Taipei.

And then they're announcing now new stuff here in September. So why don't you tell us briefly what happened, what the announcements were and all that stuff.

Zac Bowden (4:41)

So the big focus for the Qualcomm Summit itself was mainly on their AI wearable chips. So they've got some XR-based built chips for upcoming glasses and whatnot. So that wasn't really my focus. My focus was entirely on the PC stuff. And there were two hands of PC stuff at the event. There was the Windows stuff and then there was Google Book stuff. Obviously, I wasn't there for the Google Book stuff, although I did get to try them out. The hardware is really nice. Basically, what it looks like is OEMs are recycling their Windows hardware and putting Android on them, which isn't a surprise. Like the ones I tried out, the HP, for example, it was the Ultrabook. It basically looked just like my HP, Ultrabook running Windows 11, but it's now running Android, Google Book OS, whatever it's called.