by For the first time in a long time, the battle between Macs and PCs is interesting again.
Apple ( AAPL ) products have been beating Microsoft ( MSFT ) Windows-based PCs for years thanks to their better battery life and performance. But Microsoft says the scales have finally tipped back in its favor.
“We have more powerful silicon. We have rewritten [Windows 11] take advantage of it. And then we have unique experiences that we’ve built on top of that platform,” Microsoft’s chief consumer marketing officer, Yusuf Mehdi, told Yahoo Finance. “So I think we have a distinct advantage for a period of time here.”
Microsoft says it’s achieved this through a new category of AI PCs it’s calling Copilot+ PCs.
You’ve probably already heard of AI PCs, which are computers that include special neural processing units (NPUs) that can run AI apps locally instead of relying on cloud-based services like ChatGPT.
Copilot+ PCs include those same NPUs, but also come with at least 16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and, most importantly, run Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant for Windows 11.
Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs come as the PC industry hopes it is entering a period of sustained sales growth after two years of sharp decline. According to IDC, PC sales grew 1.5% in the first quarter compared to a 28.7% drop in Q1 last year.
“I have no doubt that the demand is here,” Mehdi said. “And this will drive the purchase of personal computers in ways we haven’t before.”
For the first time in decades, Mehdi added, Microsoft feels it has an edge over Apple in terms of performance and because it offers “completely unique things that you can’t do anywhere else.”
Windows gets GPT-4o
Apple is notably behind Microsoft in the AI race, having been on the sidelines until recently – although its hardware is sure to have very AI-ready chips.
Looking to capitalize on Apple being caught on the back foot, Microsoft hopes Copilot+, powered by GPT-4o, will add a seismic productivity boost with the ability to act as a user’s go-to assistant for tasks ranging from dealing with him. common problems such as audio issues with document summarization.
Microsoft also introduced its new Copilot Recall, a feature that makes it easier to search almost everything you’ve done on your computer, including documents, photos and web pages. So, if you were planning a trip to Seattle but lost the site you were using to find things to do, you can type “Seattle” into Recall, which will pull up the site you were at browse.
Microsoft says it does this by taking a snapshot of your screen over time and then using Copilot’s visual search feature to find the content you’re looking for. The company also says that content saved in Recall is only stored on your device and that you can customize which apps use the feature.
Microsoft’s first Copilot+ PCs will hit the market in June starting at $999, which is noticeably the same price as Apple’s MacBook Air.
Performance and battery life
Windows and Mac users may have different priorities, with many embedded in a separate ecosystem and unlikely to change. That is, if fresh and exclusive AI functionality doesn’t attract someone over the fence. But they can still be placed side by side.
Performance benchmarks have become the main talking points, and Apple laptops have been pushing Windows-based PCs in terms of power efficiency ever since the iPhone maker introduced its first M1 chip for MacBooks in 2020.
Those Arm-Based (ARM) chips have made it so that MacBooks can last all day on a single charge and provide exceptional overall performance across a multitude of use cases. But Microsoft says its Windows PCs have a new weapon that puts it back in a leadership position: Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Pro Qualcomm (QCOM) Arm-based chips.
During its announcement on Monday, the company said that Copilot + PC running on a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip will get 20% more battery life, 23% better peak performance, and 58% better sustained multithreading performance than Apple’s MacBook Air with the chip M3.
Additionally, Mehdi said Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs beat Apple’s latest M4 chip in terms of trillion operations per second, or TOPs, a common metric for measuring the performance of a potential AI app.
So far, Microsoft has the edge thanks to an actual AI product. But Apple isn’t taking any of this lying down. The company will host its annual WWDC event on June 10, where it is expected to introduce its own AI apps and services, including some that Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says will run on AI software OpenAI.
And as far as its MacBooks go, Apple will probably still announce its M4 Pro and M4 Max chips, which should offer better performance than its M4 and could be better than Qualcomm chips.
Mark June 10 on your calendar.
Email Daniel Howley at dowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @Daniel Howley.
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