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Microsoft’s controversial Windows Recall has now been generally released, and it poses as much of a risk to your privacy as it could be a boon to your productivity. Recall is just one of several new features that either have or will be arriving on Copilot+ PC, Microsoft said Friday. Recall, Windows’ improved semantic search, Live Captions, Cocreator, and Restyle Image and Image Creator within Photos are now all available for Copilot+ PCs that include Qualcomm Snapdragon CPUs as well as PCs with qualifying processors from AMD and Intel. A few features — Click to Do, Live Captions, and Voice Access — are available for Copilot+ PCs running on Snapdragon, but support for AMD and Intel chips isn’t quite available. For Microsoft, the release of these AI-powered features are cause for celebration, finally delivering on promises of an AI-powered world that the company first made a year ago. But in the weeks and months since Microsoft first announced Recall, a darker side of its potential has emerged. Now, Recall and its saved snapshots provide a record of information that could be used against you. Fortunately, Microsoft hasn’t shied away from allowing you to remove Recall altogether, deleting these saved records entirely. It’s also important to put Recall in perspective. Now, by default, Recall is opt-in, which means that you’ll have to explicitly enable it. But even if you want to use Recall, it’s only available to Copilot+ PCs, which are a tiny subset of the available PCs on the market. Just because Recall is available doesn’t mean that your PC will necessarily receive it. Even the most “modern” PCs, such as Intel’s Core Ultra 200 series (Arrow Lake) don’t have the necessary NPU power to run Recall. Windows Recall’s taskbar icon.Mark Hachman / IDG What is Windows Recall? Microsoft first announced Recall at a May 2024 event at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash., where the company debuted several upcoming Windows features to complement its newly announced Copilot+ PCs. Recall was designed as a sort of search assistant: As you went about your day-to-day business, Recall would periodically take and store “snapshots” of your PC, which its optical-character recognition AI could “read.” (At the time, Recall wasn’t designed to be opt-in.) Essentially, Recall could search your PC for a piece of information without knowing the app in which it was captured, or when it was stored. In concept, Recall’s premise appealed to me. Windows Recall allows you to search for a keyword or specific data, and it returns a list of snapshots or screenshots.Mark Hachman / IDG Privacy experts disagreed, big time. Instead of serving as a useful tool, Recall could store snapshots of information that weren’t necessarily secure, opening them up to hackers and whoever else gained access to your PC. Meanwhile, others were concerned with the vast amounts of storage needed to store all of that information. Cowed, Microsoft pulled Recall from the original Copilot+ launch and promised to perform more testing. Recall would debut in October, Microsoft said then. In September, Microsoft began making the changes that users had asked for: making Recall opt-in, and even uninstallable after a user had decided to enable it. But it was delayed yet again. I went hands-on with Recall in early December, but by then my stance had changed — I found Recall to be a useful tool, but by then government attitudes toward privacy and free speech had begun changing. Also at that time, Microsoft opened up Recall to Copilot+ PCs using AMD and Intel processors, paving the way for a final test run before releasing it. Recall’s risks outweigh its benefits Recall will be shipped as a feature of new Copilot+ PCs, though you should be able to opt in during the original setup process. When I tested Recall, I had to manually download a new Windows builds and then manually launch the Recall app, which then stepped me through its setup process. Finally, I had to specifically choose to enable Recall and store snapshots. Even after doing so, the Windows 11 Settings menu included a toggle switch that allowed me to turn off the ability to save Recall snapshots entirely, or exclude specific applications. (It still does.) Windows uses optical character recognition to search out the relevant snapshot, but also to extract text stored within it.Mark Hachman / IDG Related: What are Copilot+ PCs? Explained Even with all of these safeguards, I don’t trust Recall. That’s not to say I distrust Microsoft’s implementation of it — Recall is protected by Windows Hello, which is both a secure and convenient way of locking down information on your PC. It’s the convenience of Hello that worries me. I can imagine a scenario in which I’m directed to unlock my PC via Windows Hello, which would give someone access to my documents and email — even as a journalist, whose legal protections should safeguard that correspondence. I have major concerns about Hello also unlocking a searchable database of everything I’ve done on that PC for the last few months using Windows Hello. No, I don’t have anything to hide, but I also don’t want anyone poring through anything I consider private. You shouldn’t, either. It’s my recommendation, then, that you don’t let Recall on to your system. How to remove Recall If your PC is managed by a corporation or school, Microsoft says that Recall won’t be on it. Otherwise, Recall “is available by default,” Microsoft says on its Recall support page. (“An IT admin can’t, on their own, enable saving snapshots on devices that are managed by an organization or school,” Microsoft says. “IT admins can only give you the option to enable snapshots.”) Recall can be turned on and off via the optional Windows features. To access them, type “Turn Windows features on or off” within the Windows search bar. That will bring up a list of optional features that can be turned off or on depending on whether the appropriate box is checked. To remove Recall, you’ll need to search for “Turn Windows features on and off,” then uncheck the Recall box.Mark Hachman / IDG Microsoft shouldn’t enable Recall without telling you, as per my earlier test. But if you’re simply not sure, you can double check by running down the list of optional features and seeing if Recall is installed. (If it is, the box marked “Recall” will be checked.) To uninstall Recall, you can simply uncheck the “Recall” box. Recall will be uninstalled and your PC will be rebooted, so be careful to save your work. As Microsoft removes Recall, it will delete your stored snapshots, too. You can re-enable Recall by checking the box at a future time, though doing so won’t restore the deleted snapshots. Recall is an optional feature; the other new AI features arriving on your Copilot PC are not. On the other hand, something like Photos’ new Restyle Image doesn’t offer anywhere near the privacy concerns that the other applications do. If you’ve followed our coverage, you’ll know that I was in favor of Recall from the beginning. But upon further reflection and changing world events I’ve become uncomfortable with the threat that Recall poses to our privacy. Remove it immediately. Read...

PCWorld isn’t a site about cars or trucks, so I thank my editor and you for indulging me in this story. To be clear, I’m a Texan who’s been raging at gigantic 20-foot-long F-150 pavement princesses for a more than a decade now—and yet, my desktop PC-building heart is going thump-thump-thump for the Slate electric pickup truck. Slate is an American electric vehicle (EV) startup, and it’s far from the only one. We’ve seen almost every company that tried to follow in the footsteps of Tesla stumble and fall, dealing with the realities of a hugely competitive market that’s very difficult to break into. But Slate has the eye of the car-buying press because it’s shooting for a small, low-cost pickup truck, something that American buyers have been desperately missing for a long time. It probably doesn’t hurt that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is a high-profile investor—that’ll get you some headlines. The Slate pickup, with a name the same as the company, is aiming low. And I mean really low. The base model is expected to debut at $27,500 or so when it hits the streets in 2026, which would make it $20,000 if the US federal EV tax credit holds. (That seems pretty optimistic at this point.) But even without the credit, it would be cheaper than the Ford Maverick, the least expensive pickup truck on the US market right now. (Miss me with the “it’s not a truck” arguments. Again, the site is called PCWorld.) And it would be the cheapest electric pickup by far, with the F-150 Lightning starting at around $50,000. How does Slate plan to do this? Well, again, it’s a very small pickup truck. By length it’s shorter than the Maverick, only a little longer than the 2-door Jeep Wrangler. This is the kind of teeny pickup Americans haven’t seen since the 80s, and enthusiasts have even taken to importing teeny-tiny “Kei trucks” to get their fix when all they can buy at dealers are giant gas guzzlers. Slate is well aware of this hole in the market and leaning into it, combining it with electric guts for maximum appeal to small truck fans, tech nerds, and those who just want something affordable. But Slate is more than just a name. It’s a philosophy. See, the Slate is kind of like the truck version of an ATX desktop or a Framework laptop. When you buy the base model, it is indeed a base model. It has manual, wind-up, wind-down windows. It has no interior entertainment system and no speakers. It only has a tiny LCD screen for the speedometer and instrument cluster. It does have a phone holder, because it expects you to navigate and get your tunes from the phone in your pocket. This thing doesn’t even have paint—it only comes in slate gray (ha) and will wrap its big, flat external panels if you want something else. The Slate’s interior comes with a phone charger and not much else, not even power windows. You can add in all the electronics yourself, from Slate or your own gear.Slate There’s the rub. Slate is both rejecting the car trend of upselling you tons and tons of extras, and embracing customization options at the same time. You can configure the Slate in near-endless ways. You can add a rear roof and an extra row of seats to make it an SUV. You can order a lift kit to make it more capable off-road (though sadly there’s no AWD or 4×4 option at launch). You can add extra range with a bigger battery. You can add in all the extra little creature comforts in the exterior that’ll bring it up to modern standards, including speakers and power windows. And here’s the crucial thing that gets me excited: you can add all of these elements to the truck yourself. Slate will sell the parts directly to you and give you videos on how to install them. While this was generally an option for modern cars, it’s far from easy, and plenty of installations require some advanced knowledge or tools. Slate plans to make it easy for anyone with a basic home tool box and access to YouTube, and it’s calling the instructional videos “Slate University.” Slate While Slate will be happy to sell you all these customizations pre-installed, you can also buy them and install them yourself at any time, even swapping them out to reconfigure the truck for specific purposes. Suddenly got a new family member and need an extra row of seats? Just order the SUV kit and break out the ratchet set. And since it’s all designed to be as accessible as possible, even for non-greasemonkeys, I imagine that the aftermarket parts makers (especially those that are already selling gear for pickup trucks and Jeeps) are going to have a feeding frenzy. Again, the variability and invitation to tinker remind me of the wide-open possibilities when building a desktop PC. And this “customize it however you want” approach is pretty much exactly what Framework is doing with its excellent laptops, right down to the modular USB-C ports that can be swapped almost instantly. Granted, shifting a bog-standard Slate pickup to a full SUV would take a lot more time and effort. But it wouldn’t take a trip to the dealership, and that’s the appeal for me. Slate Slate is currently taking reservations for its initial deliveries, planned for late 2026. A refundable $50 deposit saves your spot, and in the meantime you can use Slate’s very fun customization tool to tweak your little dream electric truck to your heart’s desire. There’s a lot that can happen in the next year and change—just ask anyone who’s trying to run a US-based PC business right now. I wouldn’t bet more than fifty bucks on Slate making that timeline in the current chaos, or keeping to that low starting price. But for the first time in a long time, a new car has me genuinely excited. Just get me that AWD option before too long, please, because a rear-wheel drive pickup is not going to get up a gravel driveway in five inches of snow. Read...

Google has a monopoly, and that’s the official line of the US federal government. In fact, it has two of them, losing two separate antitrust cases that threaten to cripple the tech giant. The Department of Justice has proposed forcing Google to sell or otherwise divest itself of the Chrome browser as its first and preferred remedy. But who would buy it? Unsurprisingly, there are beaucoup business beaus lining up around the block for this browser bachelorette. We’ve already heard that ChatGPT maker OpenAI is very interested, as testified in court by an executive. And another notable name in the AI space, search engine Perplexity, told a judge much the same thing. Bloomberg reports that Yahoo, which almost feels like legacy media at this point, would also be interested if Chrome becomes available. That’s three potential new homes for the world’s most popular browser. But it’s important to note that federal judge Amit Mehta hasn’t yet made a determination on how Google will be punished for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. Just because prosecutors suggest breaking off Chrome doesn’t mean that he’ll agree it’s an appropriate end. And whatever happens, Google will certainly exhaust its legal options with enough money to make Solomon blush. Google losing control of Chrome is not a foregone conclusion, even if it feels that way from recent reports. But let’s proceed under the assumption that Google does have to sell off Chrome, along with the open-source Chromium project that underpins it. Who’s actually capable of buying it? Well, that first depends on the price. The value of Chrome—a free download for all desktop and mobile platforms—is hard to pin down to a dollar amount. I’m no business guru, but if you’d asked me a year ago, I would have guessed somewhere between 50 and 100 billion dollars. But that’s the value of Chrome to Google, incorporated with its search, advertising, and mobile properties, to say nothing of the entire Chromebook market segment, ancillary products like Google Maps and YouTube, etc. Divorced from all that, Chrome still has tons of value as the most popular browser on the planet (and the Chromium guts of many others, including Edge), but it’s undeniably less. For the sake of simplicity, let’s cut my conservative estimate in half and call it $25 billion USD. IDG / Ashley Biancuzzo Who could afford that? OpenAI could probably manage it, though it would be taking on a lot of debt to do so. The leading “AI” product maker is valued at over $150 billion, but that’s based on various investment rounds. The company has yet to turn a profit and doesn’t expect to for years (though that’s not necessarily a mark of shame in the tech world—just look at Amazon). And it’s undeniable that gaining billions of browser users would give ChatGPT an even bigger audience… and a massive treasure trove of data to train on. Perplexity is the newest player in this equation, officially releasing its large language model-powered search less than three years ago and using OpenAI’s GPT system. The latest valuation of Perplexity puts it at under $10 billion USD… which wouldn’t be enough to buy Chrome without huge debt. It would be more like Perplexity shifting its entire business model to browser-first instead of search. Not impossible, but considering that Perplexity has also made some overtures towards buying TikTok, it strikes me as a startup desperate for a new angle or identity. And Yahoo. Poor, poor Yahoo. Some of you reading this might not be able to remember when Yahoo was the dominant search engine before Google came along—it’s been that long since Yahoo was truly relevant. These days, Yahoo is more of a media amalgamation after being tossed around between several parent companies, and was most recently bought for $5 billion. Its most notable remaining products are probably sports news and fantasy sports platforms. The company still owns tech site Engadget and what remains of the AOL brand, but it sold the finance-focused TechCrunch to private equity firm Regent last month. (Full disclosure: Regent also bought PCWorld parent company Foundry the day before. Hi, business daddy!) Anyway, I don’t doubt Yahoo would love to get its hands on Chrome, if only to claw its way back into relevancy for a massive amount of internet users. But I simply don’t think it has the money, not when OpenAI is splashing around investor cash like it’s puttin’ on the Ritz. Microsoft makes the most sense to me as a new home for Chrome, as it’s been trying to regain browser dominance ever since Internet Explorer lost it two decades ago. The company has been so insistent that people switch to Edge that it’s been willing to engage in some, ahem, questionable activities to get them off Chrome. If Chrome was shifted into the “official” Windows browser—to say nothing of its dominance on other platforms—Microsoft would be pleased as punch. But Microsoft is no stranger to browser controversy or run-ins with monopoly regulation. That might be enough of an issue to keep the company at a safe distance from the proceedings, especially if it’s clear that the Department of Justice under a Trump administration isn’t afraid to swing a big stick against monopolies. Read...

How are Intel’s customers weathering tariffs and a possible recession? By buying Intel’s older products, and not its latest chips. Intel chief financial officer David Zinsner told analysts on Thursday that Intel sold more volume in its Raptor Lake chips than Lunar Lake, suggesting that customers preferred the higher-performance Raptor Lake chips that debuted in 2023 versus the latest Lunar Lake chip that launched last September. Meanwhile, Zinsner suggested that Intel’s future is extremely uncertain, due to the Trump administration’s varying economic policy. “The very fluid trade policies in the U.S. and beyond, as well as regulatory risks, have increased the chance of an economic slowdown with the probability of a recession growing,” Zinsner said. “This makes it more difficult to forecast how we will perform for the quarter and for the year, even as the underlying fundamentals supporting growth I discussed earlier remain intact.” Zinsner also gave an enormous range for the company’s spending plans of between $8 billion and $11 billion, because Intel doesn’t know what the future of the CHIPS Act might be. Older, cheaper, higher-performance Intel CPUs are the favorite The surprise, however, was how Intel’s customers are dealing with tariffs — simply buying older products instead. Intel executives said that the Intel 7 process — the foundation of the Raptor Lake chips — was constrained, and so was production of the chip itself. That’s because customers are snapping up older Intel CPUs that compete with or even beat Intel’s latest parts. Intel didn’t specify whether it was desktop PC customers or laptop customers who preferred Intel’s older parts.Intel Michelle Johnston Holthaus, who returned to her role as head of Intel Products after serving as the company’s co-CEO for the period after former chief executive Pat Gelsinger stepped down, explained that customers were preferring “N-1” products, or the new code for older parts. “What we’re really seeing is much greater demand from our customers for N-1 and N-2 products so that they can continue to deliver system price points that consumers are really demanding,” Holthaus said. “As we’ve all talked about, the macroeconomic concerns and tariffs have everybody kind of hedging their bets in what they need to have from an inventory perspective. And Raptor Lake is a great part. “Meteor Lake and Lunar lake are great as well, but come with a much higher cost structure, not only for us, but at the system price points for our OEMs as well,” Holthaus added. “And so as you think about an OEM perspective, they’ve also, you know, ridden those cost curves down from a Raptor Lake perspective, and it allows them to offer that product at a better price point. So I really just think it’s, you know, macroeconomics, the overall economy, and how they’re hedging their bets.” That’s not that surprising. The relatively anemic performance of Intel’s latest Core Ultra 200-series parts was matched by an equally anemic reception. As our Arrow Lake desktop review showed, Intel’s 15th-generation Arrow Lake desktop parts basically offered the performance of Intel’s Raptor Lake generation. Intel’s Arrow Lake didn’t offer impressive performance.Adam Patrick Murray & Will Smith / PCWorld What does this mean for Panther Lake? Meanwhile, Intel is readying the launch of Panther Lake and its 18A technology for later this year. Lip-Bu Tan, in his first earnings call as Intel’s chief executive, said that Panther Lake would be available before the end of the year, but Zinsner said that the bulk of shipments would be in 2026. So will customers buy Panther Lake, if they skipped over the previous two chips, Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon asked. “The Panther Lake launch matches exactly what we did on both Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake in regards to timing,” Holthaus said, effectively refuting that the launch would be delayed. “So it’s very aligned with how customers like to take products to market. Intel’s Holthaus holds up a “Panther Lake” sample.Mark Hachman / IDG “Panther Lake is a great product, both from a performance and price perspective for customers,” Holthaus added. “So I think you’ll see a strong uptake of that product, right? We still see very strong commercial demand for AI PCs as [customers are] deploying their fleets, as they’re doing their upgrades, they want to future-proof their products and have that AI capability. So I don’t think you’re going to see that change in commercial. And if you look at our traditional ramps for these types of products, we tend to go faster in commercial first, and then consumers come on board. And so we’ll have to balance, where is the economy at the end of the year, but I feel very bullish about the Panther Lake product and our customer feedback.” Holthaus said that Intel’s goal is to bring 70 percent of all the silicon used in Panther Lake in-house, or manufactured at Intel’s fabs. With Nova Lake, Intel 2026 processor architecture, Intel will try to move even more onto Intel foundries. “When you look at the aggregate of Nova Lake, we will build more wafers on Intel process than we are on Panther Lake,” Holthaus said. Essentially, Intel’s priorities are to build trust in Intel’s own manufacturing technologies, then extend that trust to winning more customers for Intel’s foundry business, Tan said. When asked how long this would all take, Tan demurred. “There is no quick fix,” he said. In a note shared publicly, Tan said that Intel will “remove organizational complexity” by removing layers of management, and requiring employees to work at the office four days a week or more. Intel reported a GAAP loss of $800 million on revenue that was flat with a year ago, at $12.7 billion. Intel’s Client Computing Group recorded $7.6 billion in revenue, down 8 percent from a year ago. Read...

Remember when Microsoft promised that the Copilot key would be the next big thing? Since then Microsoft has begun backing away from its Copilot app, and this week the company is promising that Copilot won’t even launch when you tap the key — just a subset of the app will. This “new experience” for Copilot won’t feature the full-fledged Copilot app. Instead, Microsoft is promising that the Copilot key — or, in future, the WIN+C shortcut — will launch Copilot Chat, a small chat box that won’t take up as much screen space as before. Cool, right? But even this new experience isn’t free from Microsoft’s fragmentation problems, which puts separate features on separate tracks. Microsoft has two Copilot experiences: the “consumer” version of Copilot, and the more professional Copilot experience as Microsoft 365 Copilot. This week, Microsoft began reworking that latter version of Copilot to bring it more in line with the consumer application, which allows for image creation. Microsoft 365 Copilot is adding project-based Notebooks and other features, such as improved AI search and an “agent store” for sending out AI to do more specific tasks. It’s Microsoft 365 Copilot that’s receiving the less obtrusive interface. In May, Microsoft said it will launch “an updated Copilot key experience,” which will launch a “prompt box” using Copilot Chat. While the app can be expanded into the full Copilot app, it’s designed to offer a minimal interface at launch. Microsoft 365 Chat within Windows.Microsoft If you have a Windows 11 Pro or Enterprise PC with a Copilot key, and the Copilot key is mapped to the full Microsoft 365 Copilot app, you’ll see this behavior change, too, as part of a Windows update. Put another way, you’ll have to launch the Copilot Chat app, then launch the full-screen app if that’s the way you work. (If you’ve already mapped the Copilot key to some other app or function, that won’t change.) It’s not clear what will happen to the Alt+Space shortcut. Microsoft’s blog post says that the key changes are being pushed to “organizations,” implying that business customers may be the first group to receive the change. But it wouldn’t be surprising if it migrated into the consumer space, too. Windows Copilot for consumer PCs is a much more obtrusive interface. Microsoft has waffled between making Copilot a web app, and then a native one; and the Copilot key can now be remapped to other functions on consumer PCs, too. Microsoft probably correctly feels that businesses don’t want an omnipresent Copilot app taking over their screen when they tap the Copilot key. But there’s sure to be a set of consumers who feel the same way, too. Read...

Herne Bay’s Frame Workshop & Gallery made it through Covid with a new owner, and now she plans for bigger things. Read...