Microsoft faces challenges in renewed PC battle against Apple
The News
Microsoft executives are pointedly going after Apple with their first stab at reinventing personal computers around AI, but they face challenges in both perception and reality.
At its annual Build conference this week, Microsoft bragged during a press briefing that hardware on its new Copilot+ PCs was better and faster than the rival M3 chips in the latest MacBooks. At one point, Adobe Photoshop was even compared side by side on a MacBook and Surface laptop to show how much crisper it looked on the Windows device.
But Microsoft’s dominance in operating systems for US desktops has waned over the last 10 years while Apple has gained, with Windows having just over 50% market share and macOS with about one-third, according to StatCounter. That trend is difficult to reverse, along with Apple’s image as a cooler company than Microsoft.
The software giant is trying to change that with its new line of Surface and Surface Pro laptops, which run over 40 AI models locally on devices to power novel features and capabilities it hopes will woo Mac users to switch over to Windows.
A program dubbed Recall, for example, records users’ screens and keeps a log of the websites and apps they’ve visited to help them find specific information even though they might have closed their tabs. In a demo, OpenAI’s GPT-4o chatbot was able to analyze content on a screen to explain how to play Minecraft in real time. Even old apps like Microsoft Paint have been revamped to include a diffusion model that can generate images from text prompts.
Hardware constraints often make it difficult to run AI models locally on devices. To get around these issues, Microsoft collaborated with Qualcomm to design a new chip, known as the NPU, to power its latest OS. Other PC makers, like Asus, Samsung, Dell, and more are also offering their own AI-ready Windows-based laptops that contain the NPU.
Yusuf Mehdi, the company’s Corporate Vice President and Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, said he expected 50 million AI-powered Windows PCs to be sold in the next year. To put that into perspective, a total of 216.2 million Windows PCs were shipped in 2023, market intelligence firm IDC told Semafor.
Katyanna’s view
The way we use our computers is about to change. AI will be the universal interface that people interact with across apps, and they will be switching back and forth constantly, talking to a virtual assistant in the background to get things done.
Nicole Herskowitz, Vice President of Productivity and Collaboration Copilot, told Semafor that she feels less overwhelmed having to keep track of information between different software with an AI companion at hand. Copilot can access her calendar, transcribe meetings, summarize her emails, and automatically generate PowerPoint presentations based on text from Word documents.
Instead of manually clicking around on different apps, people are going to start explaining to an AI assistant what they want to do first. Microsoft wants us to talk to our computers, and envisions AI agents guiding our actions or completing tasks for us as they become more powerful.
That vision spurred by the new class of AI-powered Copilot+ PCs made me nostalgic for the first computer I had at home. Back then, I didn’t really understand what it was capable of and just played Minesweeper or drew bad pictures on Paint.
It made me realize how much more effective I would have been on the computer if I could just talk to it and ask questions. That’s the power of AI assistants like Copilot, they can help people do what they want more quickly and teach them how to use unfamiliar software.
The idea of talking to bots on the computer is still foreign to me, but it’ll be second nature to the next generation of kids growing up alongside these AI-powered PCs. These agents will be a portal to the digital world, and could make people more productive, which hopefully allows them to spend less time glued to their screens.
Room for Disagreement
It’s not clear whether the fancy AI capabilities on Microsoft’s laptops was enough to win people over, despite promises of increased productivity and creativity. I spoke to a few people, who were curious about the new Copilot+ PCs, but reluctant about giving up their MacBooks.
They look and feel pretty similar, but many explained that they had just become too locked into Apple’s iOS system. They have years of personal data stored across their iPhones and MacBooks to suddenly switch over to Windows. Some were also dubious about Microsoft’s new AI capabilities, and felt uneasy that these tools were becoming increasingly surveillant. Recall and the GPT-4o requires access to users’ computer screens and microphones, for example.
Interestingly, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office has asked Microsoft for information about its Recall feature amid privacy concerns, according to the BBC.
Notable
Microsoft wants developers to build their own custom AI agents that can run on their new PCs, with its upcoming Copilot Studio platform
