As the AI race heats up, Microsoft plans to introduce new laptops at an event in Seattle next month. According to people familiar with the matter (via The Verge), the Redmond, Washington company thinks its next-generation Arm-powered laptops will beat Apple’s M3 MacBook Air in CPU performance and AI-accelerated tasks.
According to the publication, it seems the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will “finally offer the performance it has been looking for to push Windows on Arm much more aggressively.” In addition, Microsoft plans to bring several demos to the event to showcase how this new generation of chips is better than Apple’s M3 chips.
Internal documents seen by The Verge even show that these Windows AI PCs will have “faster app-emulation than Rosetta 2.” Interestingly enough, it’s unclear if the MacBook Pro with the M3 chip could be faster since it has a cooling system, while the MacBook Air doesn’t. Also, this chip is unlikely to beat the already-announced M3 Pro and M3 Max processors.
That said, it seems Microsoft really wants to promote its next generation of Surface laptops as AI PCs. Since Apple claims the M3 MacBook Air is the best AI laptop, it will be interesting to see how they compare, mainly because Microsoft has applied different kinds of artificial intelligence features. At the same time, Apple hasn’t promoted anything significant.
The publication says these new PCs will have an AI Explorer app to help you “retrieve anything you’ve ever seen or done on your device,” besides all the other already-announced features.
For Apple’s AI efforts, we’ll have to wait until WWDC 2024 to get a glimpse of what the future looks like for macOS 15 and iOS 18, which are expected to feature AI innovations. Still, I wouldn’t get too excited about them. Rumors suggest Apple won’t introduce a chatbot and will instead rely on ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or another third-party provider for some AI tasks.
BGR will let you know once these laptops are available and how they compare with the M3 MacBook Air.