The Mac vs. PC war is back on

Microsoft isn’t launching a new version of Windows next week, but what it’s about to unveil could be just as significant. After nearly four years of falling behind Apple’s MacBooks, sources inside Microsoft tell me that the company is confident it can finally beat Apple’s own chips that power the MacBook Air.

On Monday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will detail the company’s “AI vision across hardware and software” at an event hosted at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Washington. It’s a pivotal moment for Microsoft and Windows because it won’t involve the typical chip partnership with Intel that we’ve seen for decades. Instead, Microsoft will set the stage for a summer of Arm-powered laptops thanks to a close collaboration with Qualcomm.

I’m told Microsoft has full confidence that Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will begin a new era for Windows laptops. Microsoft seems to be betting on this being as big of a moment as when Apple launched its first Arm-based laptop chips in 2020.

Apple’s M1 chip quickly upended our concept of mobile performance, changing the world of laptops overnight. The chip was great at macOS tasks, and it could be packaged into a laptop that ran cooler, quieter, and with twice the battery life in a form factor that was smaller than most Windows laptops.

As I exclusively revealed last month, Microsoft expects its latest Surface devices to now be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks, AI acceleration, and even app emulation. If Microsoft and Qualcomm have actually pulled this off, it’ll be a huge leap forward for Windows on Arm. Qualcomm already thinks it has the benchmarks to prove this.

Windows laptops have fallen behind MacBooks for years now, and Intel hasn’t produced an effective answer that properly balances performance and battery life. That’s why the MacBook Air M3 remains at the top of many laptop recommendation lists, because it really is the jack-of-all-trades. It’s clear Microsoft has grown tired of Intel’s failed attempts at a comeback, so it’s going all in on these latest Qualcomm chips — and bringing its closest PC partners along for the ride.

It’s safe to assume we’re going to see a flurry of Arm-powered devices next week.

Leaks suggest laptop makers are lining up Arm versions of their most popular machines. We’ve already seen leaked marketing material for Lenovo’s upcoming Yoga Slim “Snapdragon Edition” and Dell’s XPS 13 with a Snapdragon X Elite processor. Samsung is also rumored to have a Galaxy Book ready with Qualcomm’s latest chips, and Asus says it’s announcing an “AI PC” on May 20th — the same day as Microsoft’s event.

I’m also expecting to see new Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 devices on Monday that use Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips. In internal documents I’ve seen about these devices, Microsoft is touting a faster CPU than the M3 MacBook Air, faster AI acceleration, longer battery life, and faster app emulation than Rosetta 2 — the application compatibility layer that Apple uses on its Apple Silicon Macs to translate apps to work on its own processors.

Microsoft has tried to transition to Arm — and the battery-life benefits that come along with it — for years without much success. It all started with the Surface RT in 2012. Its performance was far behind Intel-based tablets and laptops, and its desktop mode couldn’t use most traditional Windows apps. That effort quickly failed, but Microsoft returned to try transitioning to Arm again in 2018 with Qualcomm devices and then with the launch of the Surface Pro X a year later. That device was certainly better, but it still had app compatibility issues, performance wasn’t close to a regular laptop, and it was super expensive.

Perhaps the third time’s the charm here, but Microsoft will need to solve performance, app compatibility, and pricing if it’s going to be successful. It certainly feels like something has changed this time around, especially given the confidence levels I’ve heard about. A lot of that could be down to Nuvia, a startup that Qualcomm acquired a few years ago. Founded by former Apple chip engineers, Nuvia’s CPUs are the basis for these new Snapdragon X Elite series of chips.

Qualcomm also has a double whammy of chips this time around to help Windows on Arm be a serious competitor to Apple Silicon. In addition to the X Elite chip at the top of the line, the entry-level X Plus chip, with fewer CPU cores and reduced GPU performance, will allow OEMs to create more affordable Arm-powered laptops. Crucially, this X Plus variant will still deliver a promised 45 TOPS of neural processing unit (NPU) performance, an important part of why Microsoft is calling these “next-gen AI Copilot PCs” internally.

AI is a big part of the story Microsoft plans to tell next week.

The NPU, a dedicated processor designed to accelerate AI tasks, will help unlock features inside Windows that will only be available on devices that have these new and more powerful chips. Microsoft has been secretly working on a range of AI features, including a flagship one codenamed AI Explorer. Described internally as a way to let you “retrieve anything you’ve ever seen or done on your device,” this feature will use AI to capture everything you do and look at on your PC so you can perform “Recall” actions.

This will make everything you do on your PC searchable. The way sources have described this feature to me is that if you saw an image of an elephant a couple of weeks ago but you can’t remember where from, you just ask AI Explorer to bring that memory back to life, and it’ll show you the exact time you saw it and the context. So if you’ve been working with a colleague and discussing a project, you could look at a snapshot of that moment to remember what you were working on and discussing. This idea of recalling memories and snapshots from a period of time is a key part of how AI Explorer works.

It all sounds very similar to the Rewind app on macOS, which logs everything you do on your computer and offers up a timeline of every website you’ve visited or any meetings you’ve been part of. Unlike on macOS, though, this will be baked straight into Windows — giving Microsoft an opportunity to flex its AI work over the MacBook.

Microsoft is also working on improvements to its Windows Studio Effects that let you blur your background in a video call and even a new feature to improve video streaming on these new Arm-powered devices.

Most of these new AI experiences will only work on Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus chips at first, according to leaked code in recent Windows builds. Both AMD and Intel are expected to deliver chips that may support these features later this year. Documentation I’ve seen suggests Microsoft is expecting AMD’s new Strix chips and Intel’s Lunar Lake processors to combine with Qualcomm’s efforts and mean 50 percent of new laptops will ship with more powerful AI chips by the end of 2026.

I’m fully expecting Microsoft to pick something more than just “AI PCs” to market these new Arm-powered devices. Intel is using the “AI PC” term on its existing Core Ultra laptops, but the NPU performance on these devices is far below what Qualcomm is about to deliver. Inside Microsoft, the company has been calling these new Arm-powered devices “next-gen AI Copilot PCs,” suggesting it may use its Copilot branding here. It’ll need to differentiate these further from the round of laptops that started shipping with a Copilot key earlier this year, though.

These new laptops are rumored to ship in June, and given Microsoft’s MacBook Air-beating confidence, we might even see the return of the type of ads where Microsoft or other OEMs go directly after Apple’s laptops. Intel tried to revive the Mac vs. PC war a few years ago by putting Apple’s “I’m a Mac” guy into ads praising its PCs, but it didn’t work because Apple’s chips were just way ahead in performance per watt.

I doubt we’ll see the side-by-side Surface and MacBook attack ads we’ve seen in the past, but I don’t think Microsoft will hold back on letting the world know it’s ready to battle Apple once again.

Monday’s Windows announcements will set the stage for a busy week of news for Microsoft. On Tuesday, Nadella will hold the opening keynote of Microsoft’s Build conference, which will be full of even more AI announcements and hopefully more details on Monday’s Windows news.

Build kicks off in the shadow of Google’s I/O announcements and OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model. Both Google and OpenAI are working on multimodal AI assistants that you can hold conversations with, but they can also see what you’re seeing through your device’s camera. OpenAI’s GPT-4o model is already impressive thanks to its improvements across text, vision, and audio. It’s also free for all ChatGPT users, dramatically improving the experience and cost of using OpenAI’s latest model.

OpenAI is also rumored to be working on an AI search engine to rival Google, which is reportedly partly powered by Bing. So it’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft and OpenAI have any joint announcements ready for next week and whether Microsoft is ready with its own multimodal AI assistant. Every time OpenAI demonstrated ChatGPT’s updated Her-inspired voice mode, I couldn’t help but think it sounded just like Cortana. Voiced by Jen Taylor, Cortana was supposed to be Microsoft’s Siri killer, but then we all know how Windows Phone worked out.

What’s clear from OpenAI’s and Google’s announcements this week is that we’re moving toward AI being more personalized. Whether that’s through voice modes or AI agents that run errands for you, it feels like we’re moving beyond the chatbot era. I think that’s a theme we’ll see Microsoft follow next week, too.

Get ready for a busy period of Microsoft news, and don’t be surprised if you hear from me a couple of times next week to help explain everything that gets announced.

Thanks for reading to the very end of the first edition of Notepad. In future editions, I’ll be taking reader questions, so please write in with any questions you have for me or about Microsoft and I’ll try to answer as many as I can. You can reach me via email at notepad@theverge.com. If you’ve heard about a certain tech company heading to Seattle for Build or any secret project Microsoft is working on, you can reach me confidentially on Signal. I’m tomwarren.01 there.