After a long time, the battle between Mac and PC is interesting again.
Apple's (AAPL) products have outperformed Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows-based PCs for years thanks to their superior battery life and performance. But Microsoft says the scales have finally tipped in its favor.
“We have stronger silicon. We've rewritten it. [Windows 11] “To take advantage of that. And then build our own experiences on top of that platform,” Microsoft consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi told Yahoo Finance. “So I think we're going to have a distinct advantage here for a while.”
Microsoft says it has accomplished this through a new category of AI PCs it calls Copilot+ PCs.
You've probably already heard about AI PCs. An AI PC is a PC with a specialized neural processing unit (NPU) that can run AI apps locally, rather than relying on cloud-based services like ChatGPT.
The Copilot+ PC includes the same NPU, but also comes with a minimum of 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and crucially, it also runs Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant for Windows 11.
Microsoft's Copilot+ PC arrives as the PC industry looks to enter a period of sustained sales growth after two years of steep sales decline. According to IDC, PC sales increased by 1.5% in the first quarter, compared to a 28.7% decline in the first quarter of last year.
“There is no question that the demand is there,” Mehdi said. “This will drive his PC purchase like never before.”
Mehdi added that for the first time in decades, Microsoft feels it has an advantage over Apple both from a performance standpoint and in that it is offering “something completely unique that no one else can do.”
Windows gets GPT-4o
Apple has notoriously lagged behind Microsoft in the AI race, sitting on the sidelines until recently, but it has confirmed that its hardware includes some seriously fast AI-enabled chips.
Looking to take advantage of Apple's disadvantage, Microsoft hopes that Copilot+, powered by GPT-4o, will act as a user's go-to assistant, delivering significant productivity gains as it handles tasks such as: I hope that it will improve. Common issues such as audio issues and document summarization.
Microsoft also introduced new Copilot Recall, a feature that makes it easy to search for virtually anything you've done on your PC, including documents, photos, web pages, etc. So if you were planning a trip to Seattle but lost the site you used to look for things to do, just type “Seattle” into Recall and the site you were looking at will appear.
Microsoft says this is done by taking snapshots of your screen over time and using Copilot's visual search feature to find the content you're looking for. The company also says that content stored in Recall is only stored on your device, and you can customize which apps use this feature.
Microsoft's first Copilot+ PC will be available in June starting at $999, which is apparently the same price as Apple's MacBook Air.
Performance and battery life
Windows and Mac users may have different priorities, many of which are embedded in specific ecosystems and are unlikely to change. That is, unless perhaps some fresh, proprietary AI functionality tempts someone over the fence. However, there is still a possibility of a confrontation.
Performance benchmarks have been a hot topic, and Apple's Mac laptops have continued to outperform Windows-based PCs in terms of power efficiency ever since the iPhone maker launched its first M1 chip for MacBooks in 2020.
These Arm-based (ARM) chips allow MacBooks to last all day on a single charge while providing superior overall performance for many use cases. But Microsoft says it has a new weapon in its Windows PCs to return it to its leadership position: Qualcomm's (QCOM) Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Pro chips.
In an announcement Monday, the company said Copilot+ PCs powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon said that multi-threaded performance is improved by 58%.
Additionally, Mehdi said the Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PC outperforms Apple's latest M4 chip in terms of trillions of operations per second (TOPs), a common measurement for gauging the performance of potential AI apps.
For now, Microsoft has an advantage thanks to its actual AI products. But Apple isn't keeping quiet about it. The company will hold its annual WWDC event on June 10, where it plans to unveil its own AI apps and services, some of which Bloomberg's Mark Garman says will run on OpenAI's AI software. Also includes things.
And when it comes to MacBooks, Apple is likely to announce the M4 Pro and M4 Max chips. These offer better performance than the M4 and could potentially outperform Qualcomm's chips.
Mark your calendars for June 10th.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com Follow him on Twitter @Daniel Howley.
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