For the first time in a long time, the battle between Mac and Windows PC has become interesting.
For many years, Apple's products have been suppressing Microsoft's Windows based personal computers, thanks to its excellent battery life and performance. However, Microsoft said that it eventually tilted the balance in its favor.
"We have more powerful chips. We have rewritten Windows 11 to take advantage of it. Then, we built a unique experience on this platform," said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's chief marketing officer for consumers. So I think we have obvious advantages in this respect for a period of time. "
Microsoft said that it achieved this goal through a new type of artificial intelligence personal computer called Copilot+PC.
You may have heard of AI personal computers, which include special neural processing units (NPUs) and can run AI applications locally instead of relying on cloud based services such as ChatGPT.
The Copilot+PC includes the same NPU, but is also equipped with at least 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage space. Importantly, it also runs Microsoft's Copilot artificial intelligence assistant Windows 11.
When Microsoft launched Copilot+PC, the personal computer industry was hoping to enter a period of sustained growth in sales after two years of sharp decline. According to IDC, the sales of personal computers in the first quarter increased by 1.5%, while the sales in the first quarter of last year decreased by 28.7%.
"In my opinion, there is no doubt about the demand," Mehdi said. "This will stimulate the purchase of personal computers in an unprecedented way."
Mahdi added that for the first time in decades, Microsoft felt that it had an advantage over Apple in terms of performance because it provided "something completely unique that cannot be done elsewhere".
As we all know, Apple lags behind Microsoft in the AI contest and only recently became a participant - although it has ensured that its hardware has extremely fast AI chips.
In order to take advantage of Apple's backwardness, Microsoft hopes that the Copilot+driven by GPT - 4o can significantly improve productivity, become a user's assistant, and handle various tasks from audio problems and other common problems to document summary.
Microsoft also introduced a new Copilot Recall function, which makes it easier to search almost everything you have done on your computer, including documents, photos and web pages. Therefore, if you plan to travel to Seattle, but cannot find the website you use to find things to do, you can enter "Seattle" in "Memory", and it will call up the website you are browsing.
Microsoft said that its approach is to take a snapshot of your screen over time, and then use the visual search function of Copilot to find the content you are looking for. The company also said that the content saved in the "recall" will only be stored on your device, and you can customize which applications use this function.
Microsoft's first Copilot+PC will be launched in June, starting at $999, which is equivalent to the price of Apple's MacBook Air.
Performance and battery life
Windows and Mac users may have different priorities, many of which are deeply rooted in a specific ecosystem and are unlikely to change. In other words, unless the new and unique AI function can attract players (otherwise they will not easily change the lineup). But they can still face to face.
Performance benchmarks have become the main topic. Since Apple launched the first M1 chip for Macbook in 2020, Apple's Mac laptops have been beating Wndows based PCs in terms of energy efficiency.
These ARM based chips enable Macbooks to continue to use for a whole day after a single charge, while providing excellent overall performance in a variety of use environments. However, Microsoft said that its Windows PC has a new weapon that can enable it to regain its leading position: Qualcomm's Arm based Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Pro chips.
In a statement on Monday, the company said that compared with the Apple MacBook Air with M3 chip, the battery life of the Copilot+PC with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip was 20% longer, the peak performance was 23% higher, and the continuous multithreading performance was 58% higher.
In addition, Mehdi said that the Snapdragon driven Copilot+pc beat Apple's latest M4 chip in terms of trillions of operations per second (TOPs), which are commonly used indicators to measure the performance of potential AI applications.
At present, due to a real AI product, Microsoft has the advantage. But Apple didn't stop there. The company will hold the annual World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 10, at which it is expected to launch its own AI applications and services, including those that Mark Gurman said will run on OpenAI AI software.
As for Macbook, Apple is still likely to release its M4 Pro and M4 Max chips, which should have better performance than M4 and may surpass Qualcomm's chips.
Mark June 10th on the calendar.
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