The Microsoft Day: Pitting Surface Devices against the Macbook Air and Arm-powered Surface Prototypes Earlier in the New Millennium
Microsoft is confident that it finally nailed the transition to Arm chips — so confident that, this time around, the company spent an entire day pitting its new hardware against the MacBook Air.
Microsoft reps set out new Surface devices that had the same specifications as Apples laptops at the company’s headquarters in Redmond on a recent morning. I witnessed an hour of demos and benchmarks that started with Geekbench and Cinebench comparisons, then moved on to apps and compatibility.
I won’t be fully convinced until I’ve spent enough time with one of these new Copilot Plus PCs, but everything Microsoft showed me around performance and battery life looks lightyears ahead of the Arm-powered Windows laptops that existed before today.
The executive vice president of consumer and chief marketing officer at Microsoft said that the most powerful PC ever will be available. It is going to be over 50 percent better on sustained performance than a MacBook Air with an M3 processor.
You get the opportunity to work on something special when the technology is changing and you are on the verge of discovering something, says Mehdi. “I think we might have one of those moments.”
The Impact of Microsoft AI on Windows and Developers: from Web Browsers to Windows Phones, Tablets and Laptops to the Surface M3 and ARM
I am not expecting huge leaps as Microsoft is vague about its promises, but I think that it should result in efficiency gains. Emulation only goes so far anyway. Apple had a success with the M1 because of the quick way in which developers port apps to be native. Windows needs that same level of support from its developer community.
In the last couple of years, Microsoft has had two major shifts. It has been discovered that many of the biggest app’s are native apps for Arm chips. Second, Google and many other browser makers are moving to ARM64. A native version of Chrome launched recently, followed by Opera just last week. Firefox, Vivaldi, Brave, and Microsoft Edge are all also ARM64 native, so you won’t lose performance in any browser. A lot of apps are web based and we spend a lot of time in a browser.
87 percent of the total app minutes spent on these Copilot Plus PCs will be in native apps according to Microsoft. It’s still working on closing that other 13 percent, but the Prism emulator will help in the meantime.
Microsoft ran a similar test for video playback, which saw the Surface Copilot Plus PC hit more than 20 hours in a test, with the MacBook Air M3 reaching 17 hours, 45 minutes. That is also nearly eight hours longer than the Surface Laptop 5, which lasted 30 minutes. If those battery gains extend beyond basic web browsing and video playback, this will be a significant improvement for Windows laptops.
Microsoft is enabling new experiences inside Windows and for app developers by using more than forty AI models in Windows on Arm. Around 10 of these are small language models that will run in the background. These models will allow developers to bring AI experiences directly into their apps, and Microsoft’s battery life measurements include them running continuously on the NPU.
New possibilities for artificial intelligence experience are opening, says Davuluri. “NPUs give us the magic of the ability to run fairly high performance workloads.” Microsoft demonstrated its new Recall feature onstage today, which essentially allows you to time travel back to something you saw on your PC or were working on. Thanks to these models running in the background and cataloging everything you are working on, there is an explorable timelines.
Live translations of any video with the help of Artificial Intelligence is part of the feature of Windows 11. Microsoft is also adding Auto Super Resolution to Windows 11, which automatically upscales games to improve frame rates and graphics resolution.
Surface Laptop is the 7th Edition without the Numeric naming structure: Surface Laptop 5 (aka Surface Laptop 6) was the 6th Edition
The numerical naming structure no longer applies to the new Surface Laptop. It is called the Surface Laptop 5 and instead of being called the Surface Laptop 6, Microsoft is going with the Surface Laptop 6 Edition. So this Surface Laptop is the 7th Edition.