Unfortunately, while you were clicking on this video, AI achieved super-intelligence and replaced all of us.
This is a simulation you are in a video game. I'm the Master Chief.
This morning, Microsoft and their partners finally unveiled a hefty lineup of laptops
powered by Qualcomm's heavily-hyped 12-core Snapdragon X Elite and 10-core X Plus chips,
based on the ARM architecture rather than x86.
They're meant to usher in a ARM-based revolution for Windows PCs,
just like Apple's M1 did for Macs.
And based on early impressions, it kinda looks like they might?
It's been a long time since I felt excited about Windows laptops.
It feels weird, I don't like it. Microsoft's calling these new Snapdragon X-powered laptops
co-pilot plus PCs, replacing the AI PCs codename.
But jokes on them because I don't want to use either of those phrases.
However, the company said more co-pilot plus PCs will be coming later powered by Intel and AMD chips,
as long as they achieve a minimum of 40 trillion operations per second or
tops, which their current chips cannot, but more on that later.
The other things that make a co-pilot plus PC are
access to the most advanced AI models, to power a suite of new software features,
and all-day battery life, although some manufacturers already claimed to last for
multiple days before the other ones were like, okay, okay, Lenovo.
No, just, just wait, sorry, we don't usually let them talk. All in all, the battery life numbers I've seen are quite impressive.
We're talking 17 to 20 plus hours, depending on the model and the task.
But many of these notebooks reportedly outperform an M3 MacBook Air.
Also, I don't know why I forgot to put this in the script, but Microsoft showed the Snapdragon X Elite in the Surface laptop and Surface Pro,
beating out the M3 MacBook Air in both single and multi-threaded performance.
And why would they lie? The laptop lineup is led by the redesigned Surface Pro and Surface laptop.
I didn't say numbers there, because Microsoft wanted these to be like MacBook so bad,
they copied Apple's horrible tradition of hiding the exact model name,
unless you dig for it in the setting somewhere, where apparently they're listed as the Surface Pro 11th edition
and Surface laptop 7th edition. Not to be confused with the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Pro 6
for business that were launched back in March. Those have Intel processors.
They are bad and dirty, don't think about them.
Instead, Microsoft said these new surfaces perform 80 to 90% faster
than their non-business predecessors, the Surface Pro 9 and Surface laptop 5.
And they've got hardware upgrades, a haptic touchpad and smaller bezels
on both the 13.8 and 15-inch versions of the laptop,
and a new flex keyboard that works wild detached from the Surface Pro,
which also sports a 13-inch OLED display for the first time.
Both machines start at $1,000, which indicates how much confidence Microsoft has in these new chips.
And they're not the only ones. HP is revamping their entire PC lineup, killing its existing branding names
like Spectre, Pavilion, Dragonfly and Envy.
New consumer HP notebooks will be called OmniBooks,
which is sure to steal some of the MacBook crowd. It's Omni. It can do it all.
I mean, they'll get that, right? Meanwhile, their more business-y notebooks will be called EliteBooks,
with, of course, various suffixes. HP announced one of each, powered by a Snapdragon X Elite.
Dell has also gone all in, announcing the first XPS 13,
which is somewhat widely viewed as the MacBook of Windows PCs,
to feature a non-Intel processor. There's also an Inspiron 14 and 14 Plus,
featuring the Snapdragon X Plus and two Latitude models.
From Lenovo, we got a Yoga Slim 7X14 Gen 9
and a ThinkPad T14S Gen 6, you know those models.
ASUS announced a VivoBook S15 Acer,
showed off the Swift 14 AI, and Samsung showed off its Galaxy Book 4 Edge,
which you definitely want. Okay, you guys, you want this.
But just in case you don't, we're gonna throw in a free 50-inch TV,
not really matching the confidence of some of those other laptop makers.
Okay, but what about the new co-pilot-powered AI goodies in Windows?
Well, whether this is a goodie or not, depends on how you feel about privacy.
Co-pilot plus PCs will have access to Recall,
which captures and locally stores a snapshot of everything you do on your PC
every few seconds, which you can ask co-pilot to retrieve later.
Sounds like you have the ability to block Recall from capturing certain things, but no promises.
It's a curious little AI. It might take a little peek anyways, a little scamp.
There's also Super Resolution, which will upscale supported games,
and of course, the co-pilot assistant itself, which can edit files in File Explorer and watch your screen,
giving you pointers on how to do apparently almost anything, even crafting certain items in Minecraft.
That's thanks to the assistant's new support for OpenAI's natively multimodal GPT-40,
as well as multiple state-of-the-art AI models,
including Microsoft's own small language models.
Microsoft says there are now over 40 such models
integrated deeply into Windows 11 on ARM, because remember, Windows on ARM used to suck,
but it's now got a new kernel and compiler, as well as a new ARM 2x86 emulator called Prism.
Microsoft really didn't talk about Prism that much,
which doesn't exactly inspire confidence, but who needs it anyway?
87% of the total app minutes people spend in apps today
have native ARM versions, so whatever.
And it's true, native ARM versions of Adobe Photoshop,
Lightroom, Firefly, and Express will launch with these new notebooks,
with Premiere Pro and Illustrator coming in the summer,
and a handful of AI features and other apps were discussed as well.
But this just leaves me wondering, what about Intel?
Their current chips cannot meet the co-pilot plus PC's tops requirements.
Well, Team Blue actually released a teaser this morning for their upcoming Lunar Lake chips,
which should hit 45 tops on the NPU alone,
and 60 plus with help from the CPU and GPU,
so that right there should stop this ARM revolution dead. You can enjoy ARM day all you want.
Leg day is coming. And we talked about AI PCs for a long time,
so in order to make sure today's editor, Oliver, doesn't murder me,
these are going to be real quick bits. Are you ready, okay?
Does that sound good, Oliver?
He's angry. Open AI is working to pause the use of Sky,
the voice they chose to demo GPT-4O's real-time capabilities,
which many viewers compared to Scarlett Johansson's voice in the movie Her,
even though Scar Joe gave more calmly intrigued,
instead of obvious emotional manipulation.
Wow, so cute. I date me.
Apple has released version 17.5.1 of both iOS and iPadOS,
which the company says should fix that pesky bug from last week
that caused deleted photos, and in some cases, nudes, to reappear in the main photos library.
Apple says the cause was database corruption, and not a harmless mischievous prank by Tim Cook.
Oh, where'd those come from? Ha ha, got you.
Have you bought your mom an iPhone yet? At its IO 2024 conference,
Google talked to Android developers about its Engage SDK,
a feature that offers a software surface from which devs can entice users
to resume interacting with a specific part of their apps,
like promoting a particular shopping deal, or a new music recommendation feature.
It can really enhance the way that it's...
This is ads. Notifications aren't enough. Android is going to have a separate feed or something
where devs can show you ads for their app.
Come back, you didn't check this thing out.
I'm good. And Neuralink has gotten the go-ahead from the FDA
to implant a second person with the company's brain-computer interface.
The first recipient, Noland Arbach, was heartbroken
when around 85% of the threads in his implant came loose,
causing him to lose some functionality.
Neuralink has since stabilized and optimized the remaining threads,
bringing back much of Arbach's cyberkinetic abilities.
But the incident is sure to make any applicants think twice
about signing up to get a computer sewn into their brain.
Let's just hope Neuralink doesn't pull a Tesla, Elon's other company,
which just dropped its year-old support for Steam in the Cybertruck.
The games are too crazy now. We can't do it. Hey, that's not even a fair comparison.
They're completely different companies. Well, you better come back on Wednesday
so you can give me a real piece of your mind. Although, maybe just keep all the pieces of your mind together.
I heard that having them come apart isn't fun.