Windows Central Podcast 108: Surface reviews, Cortana updates, Snapdragon 850, and more

By Zac Bowden
last updated

This week on the Windows Central Podcast: 1809 pulled, Project xCloud announced, another foldable Surface, changes to Cortana, and a whole lot more.

We're back with another exciting episode of the Windows Central Podcast, and this week Daniel Rubino and Zac Bowden have the most recent news from Microsoft, including Windows 10 preview build 18262 and a major UI facelift for Cortana in a beta that's available to Android and iOS users.

There's plenty more to say about Surface Pro 6 and Surface Laptop 2. Additionally, Samsung has released the ARM-powered Galaxy Book 2. Be sure to check out the latest Dan Rant! This time, he explains why most people don't need Windows 10 Pro — and it's good that Microsoft is no longer charging the "Pro" tax to everyone who buys one of their new devices.

This episode of the Windows Central Podcast was recorded on October 19 2018.

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Zac Bowden
Zac Bowden
Senior Editor

Zac Bowden is a Senior Editor at Windows Central. Bringing you exclusive coverage into the world of Windows on PCs, tablets, phones, and more. Also an avid collector of rare Microsoft prototype devices! Keep in touch on Twitter: @zacbowden.

6 Comments
  • No Andromeda news? Lol. I try😏
  • At least for me groove was always a mp3 player first, and I still use it exclusively for that purpose. And in fact I hope they never actually disable it on my android as well. Groove's big strength is the ability to stream music you have purchased from one drive.
  • Completely agree and it's great at that. I use it frequently for the same purpose. I don't want to rent my music, I want to own it!
  • I asked before on Microsoft launcher beta G+ page if it was possible to integrate it into Microsoft launcher instead of completely killing it off, and typically got no response. I love using Groove and prefer it over anything else...
  • Sad to see Groove go, but MS as a corporation is way better off forcing its consumer fanbase to move all their music to Google drive to stream from the Google Play app. Consumer focus is just a money pit. Less data sitting out on MS servers just means less of a needless expense for them. Let Google take the loss. MS needs to ditch its profit-sapping consumer side entirely, or better yet just keep doing what they're doing... pacifying its consumer faithful with the minimum of service, and go all in on where the big money is at... big corporations... selling them Azure and O365. In fact that is what Nadella is doing. And hey its working. Stock prices are through the roof!
  • You guys really went off the rails with the whole "pro" rant. Now for openers, I don't necessarily disagree with the core point that shipping home and offering a cheaper entry point for the i5 is a good overall thing. That said, Rubino in particular started ranting that "if you're a real pro, you probably would use book instead of surface pro anyway". Err umm, real pro software developer here .Let me offer this: "No not necessarily". Surface Pro (I use 5th gen) is way more than capable for any software development you can imagine that you would do on the Windows platform (and Linux too thanks to WSFL). So yes, real pros use surface pro for professional tasks and yes they do expect it will be capable in that use case. That said, what makes your point is more that you can indeed buy that pro license and be back at the same price you were at least year.