After a long time, the battle between Mac and PC is interesting again.
Apple's (AAPL) products have long outperformed Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows-based PCs thanks to their superior battery life and performance, but Microsoft says the scales are finally tipping in its favor.
“We have more powerful silicon. Rewritten [Windows 11] to take advantage of it. And we're building our own experiences on top of that platform,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's consumer chief marketing officer, told Yahoo Finance. “So I think we have a clear advantage here for a while.”
Microsoft says it has accomplished this through a new category of AI PCs it calls Copilot+ PCs.
You may have already heard about AI PCs. An AI PC is a PC equipped with a specialized neural processing unit (NPU) that allows you to run AI apps locally without relying on cloud-based services like ChatGPT.
The Copilot+ PC includes the same NPU, but also has a minimum of 16 GB of RAM, 256 GB of storage, and importantly, 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 significant sales declines. 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's no question the demand is here,” 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
While Apple has notoriously lagged behind Microsoft in the AI race and remained on the sidelines until recently, it has confirmed that its hardware is equipped with blazingly fast AI-enabled chips. I am.
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 the new Copilot Recall. This is a feature that makes it easy to search for documents, photos, web pages, and virtually anything you do on your PC. So if you were planning a trip to Seattle but lost the site you were using to find things to do, just type “Seattle” into Recall and it'll show you the site you were browsing.
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 went on sale in June, starting at $999, 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 rooted in specific ecosystems and unlikely to change. That is, unless some new and exclusive AI feature tempts someone. However, it is possible to pit the two against each other head-on.
Performance benchmarks have been a hot topic, and Apple's Mac laptops have continued to crush 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 that will return it to its leadership position: Qualcomm's (QCOM) Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Pro chips.
In its announcement on Monday, the company said the Copilot+ PC, powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chip, will deliver 20 percent longer battery life, 23 percent better peak performance and 58 percent better sustained multi-threaded performance compared to Apple's MacBook Air with the M3 chip.
Additionally, Mehdi said the Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PC outperformed Apple's latest M4 chip in trillion operations per second (TOP), a common metric that measures the potential performance of AI apps. Ta.
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 still likely to announce M4 Pro and M4 Max chips, which will offer better performance than the M4 and 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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