Microsoft’s Next-Gen Surface Laptops Need to Beat MacBooks or Die Trying

Will putting all of its eggs in the AI basket pay off for Microsoft? The company has spent over a year reorganizing everything around its AI assistant Copilot, but . Developers can rebuild their games to run as efficiently as possible on the Snapdragon X Elite, but the chip’s built-in ability to emulate x64 software should allow things to run without tweaks.

Still, the Snapdragon X Elite and whatever changes Microsoft can make to Windows needs to beat years of false promises that Windows on Arm is ready for primetime. As Jon Gruber has noted at Daring Fireball, that’s still far less time for development than Apple spent achieving its chip advantage on its tablets and smartphones, and the company still ended up waiting till 2020 to move to Arm on the Mac.

Not Just Talk, Action

The new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop have a small needle to thread but not an impossible one. Two companies like Microsoft and Qualcomm working together naturally requires more synchronizing to achieve success than Apple doing it all in-house. But the confidence Qualcomm has shown around the Snapdragon X Elite bodes well for Microsoft’s Surface plans and whatever other AI PCs are on the way later this year. Years of on-again-off-again commitment to Windows on Arm have produced little in the way of satisfying results, but if Microsoft is serious this time, the stars certainly seem like they’re aligning for a major change.

Surface needs to beat the Mac, or get comfortable with second place.

And in many ways, they have to. Microsoft deprioritizing interesting hardware post-Panos Panay means software and the performance of PCs that the company sells become all the more important. Microsoft needs to create a perfect storm of powerful computers and interesting software ideas to really put whatever Apple has in store at WWDC 2024 in context. Otherwise, Surfaces will continue to be fine computers, but lag behind how much the experience of using a Mac has improved since Apple adopted Arm. Surface needs to beat the Mac, or get comfortable with second place.