Microsoft really wants us to know it's ready to take on the MacBook Air

Daniel John
·3 min read
Microsoft Surface and MacBook Air.
Microsoft Surface and MacBook Air.

Microsoft has been busy this week, announcing a slew of new AI tools as well as new Surface Laptops decked out with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips. And the company is making no secret of its direct competitor here. Yep, Microsoft really (really) wants to take the MacBook Air's crown.

Indeed, the company spent a whole day this week pitting the new Surface Pro models with ARM chips against M3 MacBook Air, with the results suggesting they beat Apple's offering in several areas including speed, chip performance and battery life. (For the lowdown on the latest MacBook Air, check out our M3 MacBook Air review.)

"Copilot+ PCs are the fastest, most intelligent Windows PCs ever built," the company shares on its website. "With powerful new silicon capable of an incredible 40+ TOPS (trillion operations per second), all–day battery life and access to the most advanced AI models, Copilot+ PCs will enable you to do things you can’t on any other PC. Easily find and remember what you have seen in your PC with Recall, generate and refine AI images in near real-time directly on the device using Cocreator, and bridge language barriers with Live Captions, translating audio from 40+ languages into English."

Microsoft surface
Microsoft surface

In benchmarking tests seen by The Verge, the Surface Copilot Plus PC beat the MacBook Air's battery life while web browsing by over 1.5 hours. Meanwhile, Microsoft promised to offer “it’s going to outperform any device out there, including a MacBook Air with an M3 processor, by over 50 percent on sustained performance.”

While it's not unusual to hear brands declare their products superior to their competitors, Microsoft's confidence here is curious, since Apple's shift to its own M-series silicon chips has so far blown away the competition. Microsoft has fallen behind, but the company announced this week, "It’s something we haven’t had in over two decades, we’ve not had the high ground on having the most performant device. We’re going to have that."

But as our sister site TechRadar points out, the comparison might not be entirely fair. "Microsoft says its new laptops come with fans, which the MacBook Air does not. That means Microsoft has a distinct advantage in terms of cooling, which will always help a chip eke out extra performance. The MacBook Air can achieve its remarkable performance while remaining completely silent, and while the Surface’s performance is undoubtedly incredibly impressive, equipping it with a set of fans means it’s always likely to pull ahead of Apple’s fanless laptops."

While we'll have to wait until we get our hands on Microsoft's new offerings to test out their claims in the real world, it's certainly interesting to see the Mac/PC wars hotting up once again. Apple silicon is great for creatives, but nothing's better than more choice. In the meantime, take a look at today's best M3 MacBook Air deals below.