Satya Nadella Says Microsoft's AI-Focused Copilot+ Laptops Will Outperform Apple's MacBooks

"Apple's done a fantastic job of really innovating on the Mac," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the Wall Street Journal in a video interview this week. .Then he said "We are gonna outperform them" with the upcoming Copilot+ laptops from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung that have been completely reengineered for AI - and begin shipping in less than four weeks. Satya Nadella: Qualcomm's got a new [ARM Snapdragon X] processor, which we've optimized Windows for. The battery lab, I've been using it now - I mean, it's 22 hours of continuous video playback... [Apple also uses ARM chips in its MacBooks]. We finally feel we have a very competitive product between Surface Pro and the Surface laptops. We have essentially the best specs when it comes to ARM-based silicon and performance or the NPU performance. WSJ: Microsoft says the Surfaces are 58% faster than the MacBook Air with M3, and has 20% longer battery life. The video includes a demonstration of local live translation powered by "small language models" stored on the device. ("It can translate live video calls or in-person conversations from 44 different languages into English. And it's fast.") And in an accompanying article, the Journal's reporter also tested out the AI-powered image generator coming to Microsoft Paint. As a longtime MS Paint stick-figure and box-house artist, I was delighted by this new tool. I typed in a prompt: "A Windows XP wallpaper with a mountain and sky." Then, as I started drawing, an AI image appeared in a new canvas alongside mine. When I changed a color in my sketch, it changed a color in the generated image. Microsoft says it still sends the prompt to the cloud to ensure content safety. Privacy was also touched on. Discussing the AI-powered "Recall" search functionality, the Journal's reporter notes that users can stop it from taking screenshots of certain web sites or apps, or turn it off entirely... But they point out "There could be this reaction from some people that this is pretty creepy. Microsoft is taking screenshots of everything I do." Nadella reminds them that "it's all being done locally, right...? That's the promise... That's one of the reasons why Recall works as a magical thing: because I can trust it, that it is on my computer." Copilot will be powered by OpenAI's new GPT-4o, the Journal notes - before showing Satya Nadella saying "It's kind of like a new browser effectively." Satya Nadella: So, it's right there. It sees the screen, it sees the world, it hears you. And so, it's kind of like that personal agent that's always there that you want to talk to. You can interrupt it. It can interrupt you. Nadella says though the laptop is optimized for Copilot, that's just the beginning, and "I fully expect Copilot to be everywhere" - along with its innovatively individualized "personal agent" interface. "It's gonna be ambient.... It'll go on the phone, right? I'll use it on WhatsApp. I'll use it on any other messaging platform. It'll be on speakers everywhere." Nadella says combining GPT-40 with Copilot's interface is "the type of magic that we wanna bring - first to Windows and everywhere else... The future I see is a computer that understands me versus a computer that I have to understand. The interview ends when the reporter holds up the result - their own homegrown rendition of Windows XP's default background image "Bliss."

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