The MacBook monopoly has just been overthrown

MacBooks have had a good run.

For four years we’ve been circling Intel, AMD, Microsoft and all the laptop makers with their Apple Silicon ARM chips. Until recently, PC sales had also fallen, while Macs remained stable.

But Apple’s grip on the world of thin, portable, powerful and durable laptops is over. With the new Copilot+ devices announced today, the playing field has been leveled and the bar has been raised. After peeking behind the curtain, let’s just say this: things are about to very interesting.

Performance against the M3

Let’s cut to the chase: the new Copilot+ line of PCs really has what it takes to challenge the MacBook Air M3. Qualcomm has spent most of this year making ambitious claims about its new Snapdragon X Elite chips, but it’s been easy to dismiss them. But now it’s real. I have personally seen the real laptops you can buy that verify these claims.

“First, these will be by far the fastest and most capable PCs on the market,” Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft executive vice president, told us, referring to Copilot+ PCs. “Let’s take the fastest and most efficient PC on the market, let’s say it’s a MacBook Air with an M3 processor. These PCs will outperform those in the Cinebench benchmark by 50%.

Within a small group of media outlets, I was able to see these claims in action. There it is: the new 15-inch Surface Laptop running a variety of tests side-by-side with the 15-inch MacBook Air M3.

Since the release of the MacBook Air M1, the industry-leading performance per watt of these chips has sent shockwaves through the PC market. At the time, the M1 did things that seemed impossible in a fanless laptop. Since then, Apple has only increased this performance over the years, making it hard to imagine Windows laptops catching up. But believe me, these Copilot+ PCs are real.

Overall, these new Copilot+ laptops are about 16% faster in multithreaded performance and 46% better in sustained performance compared to the 15-inch MacBook Air M3. This held true in apps like Cinebench R24, Handbrake, Photoshop, and Geekbench 6. For example, in Geekbench 6, the new Surface Laptop scored 14,000 in multi-core, while the MacBook Air 15 M3 sat at about 12,000, or 16%. difference.

Due to Microsoft’s tighter restrictions, the company says there will be less variation in performance between models than in the past. That means you can expect these numbers to hold up whether you opt for a Dell XPS 13, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, or the new Surface Laptop.

To make all of this work, of course, required rebuilding Windows around ARM compatibility, including a new kernel, compiler, and schedulers. The entire system is now aimed at optimizing the CPU performance of ARM chips – whereas before, that was the main problem. These apps themselves also need to work natively, something Microsoft has made great strides on ahead of this launch.

Battery life

If MacBooks ever had a calling card, it’s battery life. This was true before the Apple Silicon era, but it really became a standout with the M1. MacBooks have gone from a few hours longer to more than twice as long. It’s not that MacBooks had better battery life – they were a embarrassment to Windows laptops.

This is no longer true. I haven’t done the testing myself yet, but again I was shown side-by-side results of the new 15-inch Surface Laptop versus the MacBook Air 15. Microsoft claims 16 hours of web browsing , or an hour more. web browsing time than Apple claims. Battery tests are never apples to apples, but Microsoft also claims 20 hours of local video playback. We’re definitely in the range of MacBook numbers and could potentially be even further ahead depending on the individual laptop.

How have the huge advances in battery life been made? Well, the efficiency of ARM has provided Microsoft with many new power management features that simply weren’t there before. Standby power is also a big part of what makes a MacBook feel like it lasts forever – and it’s another area Microsoft has looked into.

“When you’re done and you walk away from your computer, you come back hours, minutes, days, the next day, once you open that lid the machine will be ready for you to connect,” Pavan Davuluri, the manager from the Windows and Devices team, told us. “This forced us to really focus on standby power. We’ve minimized hibernation for the Windows platform itself.

Remarkably, these new Copilot+ devices must manage this incredible battery life while running persistent AI models in the background. This is all thanks to the performance of the chip’s Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which now reaches 40 TOPS. I won’t go into detail here, but suffice it to say that these always-on AI models would pose a huge problem for the battery life of currently available laptops.

The war has only just begun

Of course, to verify all this, many independent tests still need to be carried out. And even with what we’ve seen so far, many questions remain. For example, single-core performance hasn’t been addressed, and that’s an area where the MacBook Air M3 still has the lead. There’s also the MacBook Pro to deal with, which this current line of Copilot+ laptops doesn’t even attempt to solve. The graphics alone set these laptops apart.

It also needs to be said: these Copilot+ laptops are really just the first step. Due to their size and design, not all of them seem to benefit from the efficiency of these chips. Think of it like that first generation of M1 devices, which recycled old Mac chassis, just with a new chip inside. We’ll have to wait until the next generation of MacBook Air in 2022 to get an updated design with a considerably smaller profile. None of these Copilot+ laptops are as thin as the MacBook Air – and none are fanless, either.

Of course, there’s more to a laptop than just performance and battery life. MacBooks have some things that Windows laptops are still fumbling with, like great speakers, fantastic build quality, and near-perfect keyboards and trackpads.

But this is the great strength of the Windows platform. Some laptops will attempt to mimic the quality of the MacBook, others will do something completely experimental or find new ways to add value, and still others will be priced significantly lower.

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