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MacBooks have had a good ride.

It’s been four years of running circles around Intel, AMD, Microsoft and every laptop maker with their Apple Silicon ARM chips. Until recently, PC sales were also declining, while Macs were holding steady.

But Apple’s stranglehold on the world of thin, portable, powerful and durable laptops is over. With the new Copilot+ devices announced today, the playing field has been leveled and the bar raised. Having peeked behind the curtain, let’s just say this: things are about to get done a lot interesting.

Performance vs M3

Getting to the point: The new Copilot+ range of PCs really has what it takes to challenge the MacBook Air M3. Qualcomm spent most of this year making some ambitious claims about its new Snapdragon X Elite chips, but it was easy to write them off. But now it’s real. I have personally seen the actual laptops that you will be able to go and buy that back up these claims.

“First, they’re going to be the fastest and most powerful computers on the market by a very large margin,” Yusuf Mehdi, an executive vice president at Microsoft, told us, referring to the Copilot+ computers. “You take the fastest, most productive computer, let’s say it’s a MacBook Air with an M3 processor. These PCs will beat that by 50% in the Cinebench benchmark.”

Among a small group of media I was able to see these claims in action. Here it is — the new 15-inch Surface Laptop running on various benchmarks side-by-side against the M3 MacBook Air 15-inch.

Ever since the launch 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 has continued to increase this performance more and more over the years, making it hard to imagine that Windows laptops will ever catch up. But trust me, these Copilot+ computers are the real deal.

Overall, these new Copilot+ laptops show that they are about 16% faster in multi-threaded performance and 46% better in sustained performance compared to the 15-inch MacBook Air M3. This remained true in applications such as Cinebench R24, Handbrake, Photoshop and Geekbench 6. For example, in Geekbench 6, the new Surface Laptop scored 14,000 in multi-core, while the MacBook Air 15 M3 was around 12,000, reaching that 16% difference.

Because of the tighter limits provided by Microsoft, the company says there will be less performance differences between models than in the past. That means you can expect those numbers to stick, whether you’re opting for the Dell XPS 13, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, or the new Surface Laptop.

To make this all work, of course, it required a rebuild of Windows around ARM compatibility, including a new kernel, compiler and schedulers. The entire system is now designed to optimize the CPU performance of ARM chips – whereas previously it was the main lag. The apps themselves should also work natively, which Microsoft has made great strides to bring to this launch.

Battery life

If the MacBook ever had a phone card, it’s battery life. This was true before the Apple Silicon era, but it really became a clear distinguishing feature with the M1. MacBooks went from lasting a few hours longer to over twice as long. It’s not that MacBooks had better battery life – they did disturbance to Windows laptops.

This is no longer true. I haven’t run the test myself yet, but again I was shown the side-by-side results of the new 15-inch Surface Laptop versus the MacBook Air 15. Microsoft claims 16 hours of web browsing, which is one more hour of web browsing than Apple claims. Battery testing is never apples to apples, but Microsoft also claims 20 hours of local video playback. We’re definitely on the MacBook numbers chart, and could potentially be even further ahead depending on the individual laptop.

How were the huge advances in battery life achieved? Well, ARM’s efficiency has given Microsoft a lot of new power management capabilities that just weren’t there before. Standby power is also a big part of what makes the MacBook feel like it lasts forever—and it’s another area Microsoft has delved into.

“When you’re done and you walk away from your computer, you go back hours, minutes, days, the next day, once you open that lid, the machine will be ready to go and log in,” Pavan Davuluri, team leader Windows and devices, he told us. “It required us to really focus on standby power. We’ve minimized hibernation on the Windows platform itself.”

Remarkably, these new Copilot+ devices have to manage this incredible battery life while running persistent AI models in the background. This is all thanks to the chip’s Neural Processing Unit (NPU) performance, which is now up to 40 TOPS. I won’t go into it too much here, but suffice it to say that these always-on AI models would be a huge problem for the battery life of currently available laptops.

The war has just begun

To verify all this, of course, many independent tests still need to be done. And even with what we’ve seen so far, many questions remain. For example, single-core performance hasn’t been discussed, and it’s an area where the MacBook Air M3 still has a lead. There’s also the MacBook Pro to contend with, which this current batch of Copilot+ laptops doesn’t even attempt to address. The graphics alone set these laptops apart.

It also has to be said – these Copilot+ laptops are really just the first step. In terms of their size and design, not everyone seems to benefit from the efficiency of these chips. Think of it as the first generation of M1 devices, which recycle an old Mac chassis, just with a new chip inside. It wouldn’t be until the next-generation MacBook Air in 2022, when we got an updated design with a dramatically smaller profile. None of these Copilot+ laptops are as thin as the MacBook Air—none are fanless.

Of course, there’s more to a laptop than performance and battery life. MacBooks have some things that Windows laptops still have going for them, like great speakers, fantastic build quality, and near-perfect keyboards and trackpads.

But this is the great strength of the Windows platform. There will be some laptops that try to emulate the quality of the MacBook, some that do something completely experimental or find new ways to add value, and some that come at a significantly lower price.

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