Ask Paul: June 14 (Updated) (Premium)

UPDATE: Embarrassingly, I missed some questions, sorry. I added those at the end. --Paul

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Happy Friday! This was another huge week, and we have another huge installment of Ask Paul to usher in our weekend a bit early. May we live in interesting times.
'Twas the night before Snapdragon X, and all through the house…
madpapist asks:

Do you think that the introduction of performant Snapdragon+/Elite ARM processors and Copilot+ enabled hardware will result in the previously unfathamable prospect of Mac users switching over/back to Windows? 

No, but this is still important in addressing the advantages that the Apple Silicon-based Macs have over PCs, and if it goes well–it's feeling like a bit of a long shot, suddenly, thanks to Microsoft's bad PR theatrics around Recall–it could prevent future customers from considering moving to the PC. And/or just keep more customers on Windows and the PC vs. moving to whatever other platforms.

The thing we kind of lose sight of here is that, despite the very real advantages of these Macs, Apple's desktop platform is still very low usage compared to Windows. Apple had just 8.7 percent of the PC market in 2023, flat with the year before. It was 7.8 percent in both of the previous two years, and that's the entire lifetime of Apple Silicon in a nutshell. So you might argue that what Apple Silicon really accomplished was preventing the collapse of the Mac. There's a big reality/perception divide there.

Having straddled the fence on this myself, I'll wait for your hardware reviews to put at least 1 into the "switched back" column 😀

I will say, I had this weird moment about three weeks into using the Mac where I found myself using it more and more and almost had to force myself to spend time on PCs. And the reasons were all about the "it just works" stuff, not about the respective OSes. I really do prefer Windows. But I got a few terrific review laptops in, and that was a healthy reminder that there are two sides to any story, and in this story, I want to use Windows. Which is why Snapdragon X and all the work evolving Windows on Arm matters so much to me: I want the reliability, efficiency, etc. of the MacBook Air ... but on a Windows laptop. The AI stuff, to me, is a bit of a side show: This will evolve quickly, the first-gen Copilot+ PCs will quickly feel as out-of-date (from an AI perspective) as do the Meteor Lake PCs now, and as time goes on, this just becomes basic capabilities everywhere. The distinction will disappear. Recall, whatever. I just want to open a laptop lid and have the damn thing come on every single time.

wright_is adds:

The availability of Snapdragon Elite devices won't help de-enshitify Windows, that is the main problem.

Yes. I think I babbled through this in the last Ask Paul or the one before, but this effort wasn't about "fixing" the platform so much as it was about just getting it working properly. But that said, any architectural shift like th...