AI is making Microsoft Vs. Apple interesting again

For the first time in a long time, the battle between Macs and PCs is interesting again.

Apple (AAPL) products have been outperforming Microsoft (MSFT) Windows-based PCs for years thanks to superior battery life and performance. But Microsoft says it has finally tipped the scales in its favor.

“We have more powerful silicon. We rewrite [Windows 11] to take advantage of it. And then we have unique experiences that we build on top of that platform,” Microsoft consumer marketing director Yusuf Mehdi told Yahoo Finance. “So I think we have a distinct advantage for a period of time here.”

Microsoft says it achieved this through a new category of AI PCs it calls Copilot+ PCs.

You’ve probably heard of AI PCs, which are PCs that include special neural processing units (NPUs) that can run AI applications locally, rather than relying on cloud-based services like ChatGPT.

Copilot+ PCs include the same NPUs, but also come with a minimum of 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 to be entering a period of sustained sales growth after two years of sharp declines. According to IDC, PC sales grew 1.5% in the first quarter, compared to a 28.7% drop in the first quarter of last year.

“I have no doubt the demand is there,” Mehdi said. “And this will stimulate PC purchases in a way that we haven’t done before.”

For the first time in decades, Mehdi added, Microsoft feels it has an advantage over Apple both from a performance standpoint and because it offers “completely unique things that you can’t do anywhere else.”

Windows gets GPT-4o

Apple is notoriously behind Microsoft in the AI ​​race, having been sidelined until very recently – even though it has ensured its hardware has lightning-fast AI-ready chips.

Looking to take advantage of the fact that Apple was caught at a disadvantage, Microsoft hopes that Copilot+, which is powered by GPT-4o, will deliver a seismic productivity boost with the ability to serve as a user’s assistant for tasks ranging from deal with common problems such as audio problems for summarizing documents.

Microsoft also introduced its new Copilot Recall, a feature that makes it easier to search virtually everything you’ve done on your PC, including documents, photos, and web pages. So if you were planning a trip to Seattle but lost the site you were using to look for things to do, you can type “Seattle” into Recall, which will open the site you were browsing.

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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 claims 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 US$999, noticeably the same price as Apple’s MacBook Air.

Performance and battery life

Windows and Mac users may have different priorities, many of them rooted in a specific ecosystem and unlikely to change. That is, unless a new and unique AI feature lures someone over the fence. But they can still be confronted.

Performance benchmarks have become hot talking points, and Apple’s Mac laptops have been crushing Windows-based PCs in terms of power efficiency since the iPhone maker launched its first M1 chip for MacBooks in 2020.

These Arm (ARM)-based chips have made MacBooks able to last all day on a single charge while providing 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: Qualcomm’s (QCOM) ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Pro chips.

During its announcement on Monday, the company said that a Copilot+ PC running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip gets 20% more battery life, 23% better peak performance, and 58% better sustained multithreaded performance than the MacBook Apple Air with M3 chip.

What’s more, Mehdi said Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PCs outperformed Apple’s latest M4 chip in terms of trillions of operations per second, or TOPs, a common measure for evaluating the potential performance of AI applications.

For now, Microsoft has the upper hand thanks to a real AI product. But Apple doesn’t accept any of this lying down. The company will hold its annual WWDC event on June 10, where it is expected to launch its own AI applications and services, including some that Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says will run on OpenAI’s AI software.

And when it comes to its MacBooks, Apple will likely still announce its M4 Pro and M4 Max chips, which should offer better performance than the M4 and could outperform Qualcomm’s chips.

Mark June 10th on your calendar.

Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.

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