Microsoft paywalling AI features in Notepad and Paint | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft paywalling AI features in Notepad and Paint

pcworld.com

Long ago I loved Windows, it wasn't pretty, but it was utilitarian and it worked and I could strip it down to what I needed and I was good to go.

I still fondly remember the old windows 95 start me up commercials https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRdl1BjTG7c, wonderful time.

Then they started introducing all sorts of incomplete UI and UX, then the updates kept undoing my explicit settings, now Windows just seems like an ad-supported Operating System ...

I ran to Apple and haven't looked back. All I see are reasons to stay away if at all possible.

Me coming from Amiga, I didn't love Windows (starting around 95-98 versions). It should have been more modern and quick, but in many aspects it wasn't. I learned to tolerate it, and I became good at working with it. After years I tried hackintosh (OsX Lion, 2011), and I was amazed at the difference. Even hackintosh was completely stable (unlike windows) on my hardware and I loved all the features and polished things. I still kept a windows machine or two somewhere around to deal with work, etc. and from what I've seen, it went downhill so much since the XP era. Although I think even macos goes downhill, but it's night and day difference to Windows. YMMV of course.

Still amazes me what one could do with 1mb RAM at the time.

> the old windows 95 start me up commercials

Yes, so do I. I worked as editor for a computer magazine and as such was invited to the launch event and was flabbergasted by them selecting a song which' next line was "you make a grown men cry". It sure did, in many ways but not as they intended.

Maybe I should add that I was and am more of a Linux person? Windows 95 was a house of cards built on quicksand, it out-guru-meditationed the Amiga, it was OS/1.13 to OS/2 2.x but boy did it sell well.

I also remember a sales droid showing me the "security" offered by the policy manager, "look you can restrict which programs your users can run". Sure, I thought, let's see how deep that goes and opened a document in Windows Write, added an embedded (OLE) document for the program he just removed from the user's start menu through the policy manager and double-clicked the resulting icon in the Write document. The "forbidden" program started, the sales droid looked surprised, the hypothesis was proven.

https://www.apple.com/in/apple-intelligence/

I don’t know what that is supposed to mean.

A good example, in the Apple ecosystem these features are free.

Id say that's because apple runs locally and Microsoft farms it off to openai?

macOS (OS X for those old enough to remember when it exuded quality) is no picnic either. Apple's software is arguably buggier than Microsoft/Windows these days. I haven't seen a real Blue Screen of Death in years, but my M4 Pro Mac Mini with 64GB RAM routinely hard-locks on a black screen when simply trying to reboot it, or starts beachballing with some process called 'audiomxd' eating my CPU.

Sounds anecdotal tbh. As a datapoint I have been running OSX/macOS since 2002 and have had probably 3 grey screen of death and usually in the early years.

I've seen bugs but never seen a hard locked black screen.

That does sound like something is amiss and not the common experience of Mac ownership in the Apple Silicon Era!

I ran to Linux(pop os is legit pretty good)

When I do need windows I run a version called Ghost Spectre which is a slimmed down version that removes a ton of annoying Microsoft shit.

Maybe I'm overly cautious but I would never use these special modified versions of Windows made by some guy. Seems like a huge security risk.

I'd say it's less of a security risk than running vanilla windows 11 in 2025.

All ghost Spectre does is remove a ton of intrusive spyware and annoyances from windows. It also adds some great stuff that isn't enabled/available by default cuz windows has become garbage.

> All ghost Spectre does is ...

How can you know this? Not a rhetorical question, I am interested to know if this can be, or has been verified.

Sure, microsoft isn’t going to foot the openai bill for every idiot with a pirated windows installation. I’m sure nobody is really surprised to hear that.

The fact that somebody at Microsoft saw fit to add AI integration for notepad.exe in the first place is … interesting. I guess it’s been a very dull time for the notepad product manager during the past 30 years so now they finally get their revenge on the world.

You're right about them not wanting to give away requests for free, but in fact they don't rely on OpenAI directly - thanks to the agreement Microsoft has with OpenAI they get model weights for all OpenAI models before OpenAI "achieves AGI", and Microsoft hosts all of these on their own Azure cloud [1].

Oh, and as a counterpoint, o3 mini is completely free and relatively unlimited (I don't know, probably there are actual usage limits) in Microsoft Copilot in chat. See the original announcement [2] and in the tweet [3] they mention that they "updated it" to o3 mini (high)

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/o...

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/blog/2025/...

[3] https://x.com/yusuf_i_mehdi/status/1897783236354515420

"Features" that a large number of users would gladly not pay for anyway. MS has really burned a lot of the reputation and trust they've built in the early days.

The new Win11 notepad is repulsively modern, a good example of how far software has fallen. I don't want tabs, more whitespace, nor more sluggishness or AI "enhancements" in a simple text editor.

What's wrong with tabs in notepad?

I personally find them super useful.

The article lists the features that require a subscription and it's just the generative AI. It also (shame on PCWorld) leads the article by listing the newer, actually useful features including spell checking and tabs, which is confusing for explicitly ragebaiting reasons.

When I open the notepad I want a clean blank slate, not an accumulation of all the previous files I've opened with it.

There's already a taskbar... which they also managed to screw up in Win11, so maybe the tabs are supposed to be a compensation? It's a stupid design either way.

Did you know you could uninstall Notepad (Win11 Ai version) from Settings -> Installed Apps to restore notepad to the version we know and love (without tabs, AI)?

One of the first things I did was revert that.

It goes on the ever-increasing list of things that must be done whenever I'm forced to use Windows. The very first item on that list is "show file extensions and hidden files."

Jeez, it makes me want to buy windows start bar ads for Notepad++ and Paint.net just to raise awareness that there's free options a bazillion times better.

During the first era where notepad.exe really sucked (non-standard key commands and such) I switched to the very lightweight notepad replacement metapad.exe by Alexander Davidson and never looked back.

That said, after over 25 years primarily on Windows, I am planning my exit to Linux. Windows has diverged from my expectations.

I think Linux, at least if you have an AMD graphics card, has gotten a lot better as a desktop OS in the last decade or so.

For a long time you'd have issues with graphics drivers and wifi drivers and X crashing and PulseAudio just deciding to not work, but nowadays that really hasn't been an issue for me. AMD drivers are built into the kernel, Wayland is generally stable, Pipewire with Pulse works ok, and most Wifi seems to work out of the box for me. Hell, I have a network card in a desktop computer from the infamous Broadcom, and even that worked out of the box in Linux now.

I'm sure it's more difficult if you're a FOSS purist, but I'm not. I allow the unfree stuff in NixOS, and things have generally been pretty good, at least in my current laptop (ThinkPad P16s Gen 2 AMD).

Yeah I've been using an HP laptop with AMD chip and integrated graphics loaded with Pop!OS for an internet machine + some really minimal steam gaming (older 2D titles) and it's been effortless. The only shortcoming I've run into is DRM-equipped sites like prime video refusing to play nice.

Yeah, the DRM stuff has been irritating for me as well. I've spent more time than I should trying to get a SteamOS box to replace an Nvidia Shield TV, but no matter how many variables I tweaked I couldn't get any of the big streaming services to do better than 720p, and a crappy version of 720p at that.

But if you can forgive that, I think desktop Linux has come a long way. I'm admittedly a software person, so it might be a bit easier for me than average, but if someone could convince Microsoft to port over MS Office to Linux (which I don't think is likely), I think I could even convince my parents to use something like Ubuntu or OpenSUSE.

Haven't personally had issues with WiFi drivers since 2010 on any of my many Linux computers, graphics cards as long as you avoid NVIDIA work flawlessly, even with NVIDIA as long as you don't need their closed source driver. Pulse Audio though an abomination I hate with the burning heat of a thousands suns.

Since I started using Pipewire, audio has mostly been "just fine" for me.

I actually have gotten Nvidia cards working with the closed driver on NixOS, but it took an entire weekend of whack-a-mole. It works mostly fine now, but man it was a huge pain in the ass. I should have bought an AMD card, but when I bought the Nvidia card it was specifically for Stable Diffusion and most of the documentation I could find at the time for that wanted CUDA.

Not trying to self-promote too much, but I wrote a blog post explaining how to get it working if anyone needs help: https://blog.tombert.com/posts/2025-03-09-egpu/ (There are no ads or anything, I don't make any money from this, FWIW).

Last time I had NVIDIA on my daily driver the proprietary driver would work fine until the next kernel update then would boot blackscreen. The only way to fix it was to boot into single user mode purge the driver all of its configuration file, and the NVIDIA configuration utility install the open source driver reboot then reinstall the proprietary driver then it would work fine until the next time either the driver or the kernel updated at which point I would have to do it all over again.

I was really cynical about this for the longest time as I had used Linux on and off since 2001/2002 and was used to just debugging shit to get it to work. I found it fun but I could never recommend it to anyone.

I built a PC last May thinking "fuck it I'll install Linux and see how long I can ride this out until I can't stand it anymore" and I'm totally sold. It supports my weird 5120x1440 monitor at 240hz with HDR. Most of my games work just fine without tweaking (namely CS2, Baldur's Gate 3, Hunt Showdown). The non-gaming stuff is all in a browser or works better on Linux anyway.

If you're annoyed by Windows it's honestly worth poking at Linux again.

(I'm running Bazzite with KDE.)

Yeah, it's hard to overstate how good Valve Proton has gotten. I almost never bother checking compatibility anymore, most Windows games, that I try to play just work right out of the box...sometimes even better than their native Linux versions.

Granted, I don't generally play the new AAA games, so I might not be the best litmus test for this, but between Wine and Proton, I haven't had a ton of problems with compatibility. I also don't do professional video editing, or photo editing, or music editing, so it's possible I'd have different opinions if I did.

I've been running NixOS for awhile, and I'm at the "I'm annoyed this isn't the default for everything" stage for it now. I have no plans on going back if I have any choice in the matter.

i keep coming back to windows. For some reason linux on my laptop is horrible. extremely short battery life, continuous heating, broken sleep state.

I know it's not linux fault that the driver is shitty, but as an end user i just want a machine that work.

Until the past 2 months, I was an avid Windows user. Up until 2 years ago, I had 7 machines with legitimate copies of Windows installed, several functioning in a server capacity.

Unfortunately, the path Windows continues down does not align with me for most of the same reasons as everyone else.

Accordingly, I have fully embraced Unix via FreeBSD and EndeavourOS. To a lesser extent, I use Debian and Ubuntu in specific circumstances.

Surprisingly, I don't miss Windows all that much. If I need it for something, I just spin it up in a VM. Life is great on the other side, so to speak!

As someone that dual booted since 1995 to 2009, these nuisances are mostly bareable versus dealing with having 100% of everything working on laptops.

If OEMs actually supported Linux for consumers, outside Android and ChromeOS.

Instead Linux OEMs are companies relying on reversed engineered drivers and even them can hardly help when things go wrong.

I had to look, thinking "What, I can't save a file anymore without a subscription?" Sounds like a microsoft thing to do.

But no, it was just goddamn access to AI. In notepad. Oh, that's a thing, and one I should pay for?

/me goes back to using Linux chuckling at the poor bastards that use windoze only every day

At least there'll be no confusion about Microsoft suddenly changing the default option to "enable" at a later date and suddenly all your Notepad/paint data is getting processed by an Azure box somewhere.

Unless Microsoft decides to make those features free and enable them for all to increase adoption...

I had the same reaction to the article. I'm not so quick to laugh at the poor bastards though. Even if we are unshackled ourselves, we still have to live in a society that largely is--and there are costs to that.

Pro tip: find and copy mspaint and notepad from a previous Win OS version. Also the old calculator ;)

I am not saying that I have done so, but let's say that I keep copies of some older .exe files 'because'. Now that I read this I laughed a bit because those will come in handy.

Also I always suggest that you find WindowsFirewallControl v4.9.x.x and install it, and set it on "Medium Filtering" and "Display Notifications". They block all the garbage MS bloatware apps that want to 'speak to the internet' and trust me when I tell you, 99% of the apps in your PC don't need to have 24/7/365 access. You want to update your VLC? Good! Allow it for 5mins, update, block it again. Same for the myriad other Microsoft .exe files that do not serve OUR purpose.

I've kept every version of Windows and major releases of popular Linux distros, but didn't know exactly what to do with them other than test certain things when I'm teaching someone an ecosystem.

Add binary storage and versioning to the list of reasons I keep my NAS going.

They can have my MS Word and Excel 2010 install binaries when they pry them from my cold, dead hard drive. I've been using them for 15 years and so far have no need to pay a penny more for what is essentially the same thing, only with more bloat and less control.

Same, except it's Word and Excel 97. I run them in an NT4 VM and the whole thing still starts faster than newer versions.

Is there a 2010-era feature you're relying on that LibreOffice doesn't have yet?

When was the last security update for MS Office 2010? Wikipedia reckons sometime in late 2020. It might be worth looking at alternatives if you ever open potentially untrusted documents - maybe ones that appear to have been sent by people you know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office#Support_polic...

I'm not relying on anything in particular my current versions of Excel and Word. I'm just sticking with them through sheer inertia.

By default they don't allow macros (or editing/saving) documents downloaded from the Internet, which means I have to enable editing on documents I download. The few times a year I get a document from an untrusted source and don't want to open it on my computer, I open it with Google Docs.

If I'm ever forced to upgrade, I'll likely go with LibreOffice. But so far it ain't broke.

Microsoft's LLM obsession is getting out of hand. I use Firefox for 95% of my browsing but load up Edge for anything finance related. When I opened it today, I was greeted with a full page of information about all the new AI features they had crammed in to watch everything I do in the browser. I found the settings that say they turn this off but some of it was rather ambiguous. Given how often the screw up OS updates these days, I don't trust them to keep private whatever data they're scaping from Edge. The company seems to be converging from many directions on a massive data breach that will put to shame any other past data breaches.

Leadership wants more AI. And every product team at Microsoft scrambles to find applications for it

The pay-walled features: AI

But let's not let facts ruin a good Windows 11 outrage story.

I don’t think they will keep it at that though.

The news is that they're pushing more code onto your machines that has hooks back to Microsoft's data centers. It doesn't matter how much they pinky promise that they won't use this without your consent, they're not trustworthy or competent enough for any such promise to be believable. It's better if the code simply isn't there at all.

They've had stuff in the OS to hook into Microsoft's data centers in Windows since Active Desktop, MSN Messenger, Microsoft Passport, Hearts Network, and more.

Putting paywall on notepad and paint features, wether it's ai ones is still disrespectful to their user.

You pay for the operating system, in exchange you get a system that will track on everything you do, show you advertisement everywhere and now will nag you about buying a subscription to unlock all features.

It's more or less what used to be the scammy software 10 or 15 years ago you could download on sketchy website.

Although one difference is that they would also silently change your default search engine to Yahoo.

This isn't very new though, I still remember how Windows 98 was pushing you to use features that only work when you're connected to the internet (e.g. a weather widget on your live desktop). I expect that if they had less competition, and weren't hit with the antitrust case, they would have tried to monetize features a lot earlier.

So people still use notepad and paint? One of the first things I do with a fresh install is install notepad++ and paint.net.

I've been using Pinta, but I find it slow to open (Paint is also slow). Is paint.net quick to open? I'm talking 1-3 seconds; Pinta & Paint take 6-10 seconds. Granted, this is on a work machine with a bunch of AV and other things slowing it down.

Paint has gotten some surprisingly decent updates in the past few years, same with notepad (tab support etc.), so of course Microsoft had to sabotage themselves before people realized.

My windows machine has been basically delegated to a Steam launcher.

And no, before anyone else tries to sell me on Proton, it's not there yet. It doesn't have Dolby Atmos, DualSense support, advanced gpu features, the peripheral support, half of the games don't work properly, and of course there's performance loss.

My feeling is that they're paywalling features that are arguably better left out of these tools anyway.

When I'm reaching for Notepad, I want something that is very minimal with very low "interpretive" functionality. If I'm on Windows, I want to expect that it is there if I'm working in an unfamiliar environment and I don't want to hide the raw text as much as possible. Same with Paint. In both cases, if I want more, I'll reach for a more capable tool which excels at having the advanced features I'm looking for.

It does seem like they should have left these bits out rather than take a known product and turn it into Spirit Airlines of an app. Even if it is an actual bonus feature, nobody likes this kinda vibe.

It’s a pretty strange choice by Microsoft, which historically hasn’t been afraid to have multiple products that are similar to one another, often to the point of confusion.

Just today, I finished migrating all my local services from my Windows desktop to a new machine running Ubuntu 24.10. I can now shut down the entire Windows machine and boot it up without Internet access as needed. Seems like as good a time as any to run Linux on the desktop.

I feel sad for Windows users here on Linux. KDE Desktop has KolourPaint (basic image editor) and KWrite/Kate text editors, all miles ahead of their Windows counterparts and completely free. It's criminal that Open Source software isn't used more.

As a recovering Windows user now on Linux for a couple months now, I agree about feeling sad for Windows users. Occasionally I think "maybe Windows wasn't as bad as I thought", and then I hear or read something about it that makes me go, "Ohhhhh THAT'S why I got the hell away from that trash heap."

Also, personally I prefer VSCodium. I love Kate more frankly, but unfortunately for some reason it doesn't support the standard Unix "Ctrl-Shift-U" Unicode hex input method, and as someone who likes to write in their free time, that's a dealbreaker for me.

> Occasionally I think "maybe Windows wasn't as bad as I thought", and then I hear or read something about it that makes me go, "Ohhhhh THAT'S why I got the hell away from that trash heap."

Same, but there’s a special type of rage for their dark patterns tricking or even directly coercing their own users. I have to help family members who don’t know better to fix their broken experience because windows update replaced their default browser, among many similar slimy things. It makes me upset they prey on the technically ”less able” in order to squeeze unsuspecting people for pennies. Their guidelines on malware would put their own software in either PUA (potentially unwanted applications) or malware, if they didn’t create exceptions for themselves.

Kwrite and Kate are too modern and fiddly to replace notepad.exe. 99.9% of the time I just want to open a text file. That's it, just open it and show it on the screen.

If you want a notepad that's just a damn notepad, get 'mousepad'. It doesn't do anything, it's the platonic ideal of a text editor.

I assume that the venn diagram of people using notepad and people using AI stuff would be two distinct circles. Same with paint.

I don't use windows and I know nothing about how people use it.

Am I totally off the mark with this loosely held opinion/confusion?

I remember using MS Paint and a USB flash drive to bypass the Best Buy system deployed on PCs back in the early 2000s. Paint still has some great functionality as a complement to PowerPoint and Word in an office workflow.

Why in the hell does Notepad need AI? I can't roll my eyes any harder than I am at this idea. Jesus.

Edit: I challenge those who downvote this to steelman the inclusion of AI in what is ostensibly supposed to be a very barebones, simplistic, no frills notepad.

I'd say it's similar to spellcheck. We don't spell very well anymore, and soon we won't get any better at writing.

Word taught me how to spell back in the 90s.

Oh yeah? +1UP with WordPerfect for DOS 5.1 in text mode with reveal codes, graphics mode print preview, and arbitrary font sizes using raster 600 dpi laser printing that took 2 minutes to send over ECP. That's the only way I could cram 12 pages of text and equations onto a 3x5" card allowed for AP Physics final... I had way better eyesight then.

This should be in “not the onion”.

Really? Charging people money to use AI features that are expensive to provide is counterintuitive?

My complaint is about the features being added to these apps at all, not that they're paid or "useful."

Make a new app, "notepad AI" or whatever, and let the rubes use it after coughing up some pocket change.

I don't use either application, and haven't for decades. Weird choice.

Let's just see if it's going to be nagware or not.

Doesn't look like they are paywalling existing feature, just some new AI back functionality. Considering how much is costs to run those sorts of features I can understand.

Plus, there are lots of alternative app that are free and easy to download and install.

Genuinely assumed this was parody.

People complain when the AI crap is forced on them and people complain when it isn't.

Likely they are different people, very little overlap, if any.

Even if this is the case, it's still probably a very ungrateful role to be the product manager for a widely used app like this.

The problem is that such a simple tool doesn’t need a product manager.

If it has a product manager then they will inevitably need to justify their role by finding things to do.

It “just” needs some minimal maintenance to ensure the same simple functionality and UI is maintained as the OS develops.

Right, it's not about hypocrisy, just that we collectively have to hear complaining no matter what.

Notepad is crap in Windows 11. I wanted a stupid simple way to put crap into a scratchpad (often times) and now it tries to outsmart me with multiple windows/tabs, maintaining state, spellchecking. I’ve disabled everything I can in it. It’s merely tolerable now.

They should have kept Wordpad and added all the crap into that.

at first I was like “pardon?” but it’s just the AI shit, not like ur gonna get charged by the word or by the stroke or anything

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