Microsoft’s new Copilot+ PCs are faster and longer lasting than the MacBook Air.
MacBooks have had a good ride.
It’s been four years of running circles around Intel, AMD, Microsoft, and every laptop manufacturer with their Apple Silicon ARM chips. Until very recently, PC sales had been tanking too, all while Macs were holding steady.
But Apple’s grip on the world of thin, portable, powerful, and long-lasting laptops is over. With the new Copilot+ devices announced today, the playing field has been leveled and the bar has been raised. Having gotten a peek behind the curtain, let’s just say this: things are about to get very interesting.Performance against the M3
Let’s cut to the chase: The new range of Copilot+ PCs really do have what it takes to challenge the MacBook Air M3. Qualcomm has spent the better part of this year making some ambitious claims about its new Snapdragon X Elite chips, but it’s been easy to write those off. Now, though, it’s real. I’ve seen in person the real laptops that you’ll be able to go and buy and that verify those claims.
“Number one, they will be the fastest, most performant PCs on the market by a very large margin,” Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president at Microsoft, told us, referring to Copilot+ PCs. “You take the fastest, most performing PC out there, let’s say it’s a MacBook Air with an M3 processor. These PCs will outperform that by 50% on the Cinebench benchmark.”
Among a small group of media, I got to see those claims in action. There it was — the new 15-inch Surface Laptop running a variety of benchmarks side by side against the M3 MacBook Air 15-inch.
Ever since the release of the M1 MacBook Air, the industry-leading performance per watt of these chips has sent shockwaves through the PC market. At the time, the M1 was doing things in a fanless laptop that seemed impossible. Since then, Apple’s only continued to crank up that performance more and more over the years, making it hard to imagine Windows laptops ever catching up. But trust me — these Copilot+ PCs are the real thing.
Across the board, these new Copilot+ laptops are shown to be around 16% faster in multithreaded performance and 46% better in sustained performance over the 15-inch MacBook Air M3.
