Microsoft Thinks These Surface Laptops Can Beat Apple’s M3 MacBook Air

Microsoft Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 are expected to launch with Arm chips in May, as the company continues its push to add new AI features to its operating system for desktop computers and laptops. The firm is said to be confident that its upcoming Surface laptops for consumers — expected to be equipped with Arm processors from Qualcomm, unlike their recently launched Intel counterparts — will be powerful enough to beat Apple’s powerful MacBook that runs on its latest 3nm Apple Silicon processor.

Citing sources familiar with the company’s plans, The Verge reports that Microsoft is planning to show off the capabilities of the Snapdragon X Elite chip that is expected to power the consumer versions of the company’s upcoming Surface laptop models at its upcoming event in May. The company is said to be confident that its laptops with Qualcomm’s Arm processor can beat Apple’s M3-powered MacBook Air in CPU and AI tasks.

In addition to the upcoming laptops’ performance, Microsoft is also said to be quite optimistic about the ability of Windows AI PCs to emulate x64 apps so that they can run on Arm computers. The company reportedly expects its x64 app emulator to offer better performance than Apple’s Rosetta 2 for Mac computers with M1, M2, and M3 series chips.

As per the report, this big gain in performance will also be accompanied by features that will be available on Windows on Arm devices. These laptops and computers will have features like the AI Explorer feature that uses the neural processing unit (NPU) on the Snapdragon chip to view a timeline and retrieve activity done on the computer over a period of time.

Windows on Arm laptops will also get access to other features that will be part of these AI PCs — this also applies to upcoming Arm computers, according to the report. These include the ability to create images using AI models, background blur tools using Windows Studio Effects, and personalised Copilot results based on data from the same computer.

Even streaming videos on Windows on Arm computers could son get better thanks to a new AI-powered feature that is reportedly being developed by Microsoft. We can expect to learn more about these laptops at the company’s next AI-centric event on May 20.