Microsoft thinks these Surface laptops can beat Apple’s M3 MacBook Air

Microsoft’s Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 are expected to launch in May with Arm chips, as the company continues its efforts to add new artificial intelligence capabilities to its desktop and laptop operating systems. The company is said to be confident that its upcoming consumer-focused Surface laptops (which are expected to feature Qualcomm’s Arm processors rather than their recently launched Intel counterparts) will be powerful enough to beat Apple’s powerful MacBooks (running the latest 3nm Apple Silicon processor).

The Verge cited sources familiar with the company’s plans. Report Microsoft plans to showcase the capabilities of the Snapdragon X Elite chip, which is expected to power consumer versions of the company’s upcoming Surface Laptop models, at an upcoming event in May. The company is said to be confident that its laptops equipped with Qualcomm Arm processors can beat Apple’s M3-powered MacBook Air in CPU and artificial intelligence tasks.

In addition to the performance of the upcoming laptops, Microsoft is said to be quite optimistic about Windows AI PC’s ability to emulate x64 applications to run on Arm computers. The company reportedly expects its x64 application emulator to provide better performance than Apple Rosetta 2 for Mac computers equipped with M1, M2 and M3 series chips.

According to the report, a significant performance boost will also come with features available on Windows on Arm devices. These laptops and computers will have features like AI Explorer, which uses the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) on the Snapdragon chip to view a timeline and retrieve activities completed on the computer over time.

Windows on Arm laptops will also get additional features from these AI PCs, which will also apply to upcoming Arm computers, the report said. These include the ability to create images using AI models, background blur tools using Windows Studio Effects, and personalized Copilot results based on data from the same computer.

Even streaming video on Windows on Arm computers might get better thanks to a new artificial intelligence feature Microsoft is reportedly working on. We’re expected to learn more about these laptops at the company’s next AI-focused event on May 20.