Ask Paul: May 16 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Well, this has been another curiously busy week and then I'm off to Seattle for Build on Sunday. But first, another epic installment of Ask Paul!
? It feels faster
wright_is asks:

Given the new Microsoft Copilot+ PC ad, saying that their latest PCs are faster than a previous generation MacBook Air, are we going to see a new period of John Hodgman ads from Apple? ?

Windows users will be suffering from PTSD from those ads for the rest of our lives.

Seriously, comparing their high-end laptops against the entry level MacBook Air seems a little ridiculous, although the MBA is probably the best selling Mac, so at least it isn't totally absurd.

So, I'm not going to defend this per se. But the positioning does make sense if we limit the discussion to Snapdragon X. The Snapdragon X Elite seems to align well with the M3 used by the MacBook Air and the first generation Copilot+ PCs are clearly a response to that product specifically. This is the market Qualcomm and Microsoft were addressing: A sort of "low-end premium" thin and light laptop in the PC space. Or in the Apple world, the MacBook Air. This was the messaging at the Copilot+ PC launch, which is why I made a video about Microsoft being obsessed with the MacBook Air M3 at the time.

But they are taking high end Snapdragon Elite and AMD Ryzen AI 9 and Lunar Lake processors and comparing them to the M3 and claiming that they are 58% faster than a Mac... If they had compared it to the M4 Max or M3 Ultra, I'd be impressed, or if they were comparing a Core i3 to the M3. This is just silly marketing.

Again, not defending this.

All marketing is silly to some degree. Or most marketing, I guess it can sometimes be both effective and honest. But usually not. To turn this on its head, Apple used to really push how much faster its PowerPC-based Macs were than the PCs of the day, and of course it cherry-picked the few areas where those machines did do better on benchmarks than Intel-based PCs. (Like floating point and how important this was to apps like Photoshop that matter to its audience.)

But that's what marketing is about. Seize the weakness and exploit it. The 58 percent thing ... without even worrying about what that even refers to, you can just asterisk the hell out of the message and point to the one area where this thing you're selling is better. Let's say it's NPU horsepower, which it probably is, this is the big selling point. And yeah. It's better. Is it necessary or even desirable for most people? No, I don't think so. The big deal about Copilot+ PCs, especially those based on Snapdragon X, is that it puts Windows PCs of this class in the ballpark. The battery life and efficiency are great, and so is the performance and compatibility. They did it. So I can forgive the marketing. You can only sell what you have.

A few caveats here.

The AMD- and Intel-based Copilot+ PCs don't have the same battery life and efficiency as do the Snapdragon X-based PCs...