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It’s not going to be fanless and it’s probably going to consume more power. I’m always for competition but I’m struggling to see what about this is meant to be impressive.
 
Not everything is about being “faster” or whatever. It wasn’t to me when Apple used to highlight how much faster this year’s iPhone is compared to last year’s. Now, Apple “prefers” comparing this year’s iPhone to the iPhone that came out three years ago as performance improvements year over year are often not worth highlighting compared to what we got in the past.
 
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How does anyone know it will have a fan? Probably does, as they have an Intel version, but then again the new Intel Core U chips are 9w, and that means no fan. But they may include the H version at 28W, which is considerable more powerful and will make for a noisy fan (I'm using that chip myself, so I know: 155H)

We shall see. I'd bet on a fanless version, but who knows. Anyways, Windows for ARM on Parallels runs well, but there are driver issues. Lots of things don't work. Also, I see no mad rush to port Arm versions of popular Windows apps.
 
So they will be demonstrating a proof of concept/prototype that's not ready for release yet against the base M3 chip which has been out for a while now? Don't they know Apple will be on M4 at least and maybe even M5 before they are commercially available? And these things will drain your battery like crazy. Good luck with that!!!
 
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It seems "the writing is on the wall" for Intel as more and more MFG's move to ARM based systems

If Intel is on the right track they are focusing on becoming a outsource partner like TSMC. That way they can produce whatever microprocessor / SOC etc that become dominate.
 
Well done Microsoft. I’m happy off the shelf chips can make your poota run without heating the house.
 
Competition is good for the consumer. It drives innovation which I think we can all appreciate...
Competition generally only drives innovation when one company is losing something they value, be that profit, mindshare, or opportunity, to another company.

Apple’s product development teams aren’t looking at Intel or Microsoft and making decisions to do or not do certain things because of some competitive need. They have 3-5 year goals and objectives for chip performance and efficiency that has ZERO to do with whatever work their competitors are doing currently. I can only imagine the chuckles the Apple chip team has had in talking about what they could do with a 75w+ chipset, if power efficiency wasn’t part of their development mandate.
 
Lipstick on a pig.
Still Microsoft Windows, which plays the "my way or the highway" game.
Not that others don't but Microsoft is getting very crafty at forcing Edge browser.
They've been doing it since Internet Explorer versus Netscape.
I just read where some apps installed on a Windows 11 machine prevent updates.
What we need is an MBA that doesn't start off at $999.
Could get at least 2 Dell laptops, wipe Windows clean and run Linux.
I just need to improve those skills with Linux.

Microsoft is very much a "my way or the highway" company. I'd say almost as much as Apple is these days. They both push their own browsers but on iOS you can only use Safari. Sure you can download apps that look like other browsers but the reality is that its really just a skin on Safari that enables you to sync your bookmarks.
I'm with you though on the idea of an ultra efficient laptop running a good Linux distro. When the OS isn't all for profit there is less incentive to push your users.
 
Back in the days of the Surface RT I wouldn't have said that speed was the issue - It was Windows RT and the lack of compatibility with existing software was the problem. You couldn't use it for anything much more than MS Office and web browsing.
 
So they will be demonstrating a proof of concept/prototype that's not ready for release yet
They will be demonstrating an actual working SoC in actual Surface products that will be sold for the consumer / mainstream market. This SoC will also be available for purchase by other hardware OEM's. It is not a prototype.
 
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The benefits of Apple Silicon are performance combined with energy efficiency. It's not impressive to just beat Apple in the performance metric, you have to also do it in the performance efficiency metric. Otherwise, who cares?

Some of us have Apple Macs that are powered by AC mains. My Mac Mini has no battery. So I don't care at all about efficiency.

I care more about performance per dollar than performance per Watt.

Apple uses the chip design they do because they are repurposing an iPhone chip. If they were designing a computer chip from scratch, they might think differently
 
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And it supports three external 4K displays.

Apple put so much focus on M3 ray tracing, they didn’t leave enough silicon for CPU performance.
An M3 Air (base model) could in theory drive four 4k displays comfortably based on pixel count.

Snapdragon: 24.9 million pixels
M3 Air: 35.9 million pixels

I'm hoping that this will make developers take Windows Arm far more seriously. I'm pretty blown away with with how fast Windows Arm runs on VMware, but unfortunately it's severely lacking in support for software and drivers.
 
Windows 10/11 is already superior to MacOS. It would be great if the processing power can catch up as well.
True words.
Microsoft worked hard to improve their Os and Apple’s OS is falling apart, the gap shrank very quickly in the last decade.

Apple knows too, long gone are the days where they were calling macOS “the most advanced operating system in the world”.
Now they just try to avoid being laughed at.
 
That seems like a very large "fall" from being the main business who designs and builds the chips everyone wants to just being a shop that builds other people's designs.

Well, to be fair TSMC is just a shop that builds other peoples designs and they are considered irreplaceable. State of the art microchip production is likely the most difficult and intensive endeavor that humans are capable of at this point. While there are a lot of companies who design their own microchips (AMD, Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Intel, Broadcom, Qualcom just to name a few) there are only one or two companies on the face of the planet actually have the manufacturing capability, capital and esoteric knowledge to manufacture those designs. Only TSMC can produce the best of the best and although Samsung is getting close that still leaves this closer to a one horse race. If Intel can close the gap they will make more money than ever before. Think about how the chip shorage affected the auto industry. Now think that if TSMC were to shut down how much that would disrupt everything on the plannet. No, a major silicone manufacture is most definitly not just some shop.
 
They will be demonstrating an actual working SoC in actual Surface products that will be sold for the consumer / mainstream market. This SoC will also be available for purchase by other hardware OEM's. It is not a prototype.
So it's the year 2020 Microsoft style?

True words.
Microsoft worked hard to improve their Os and Apple’s OS is falling apart, the gap shrank very quickly in the last decade.

Apple knows too, long gone are the days where they were calling macOS “the most advanced operating system in the world”.
Now they just try to avoid being laughed at.
How is MacOS falling apart? I am using it right now and... darn it, the battery icon just fell off... Nah, just kidding, it is rock solid and has been rock solid since birth.

MS on the other hand, has been a security nightmare for decades. I have had viruses on my old windows machines, I have had a virus on my NAS (QNAP) but never ever on my Mac, and have never needed to install malware protection.
 
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It’s not hardware the problem microsoft has, it’s software, their OS gets in the middle of my homework, edge went from being a great browser to a crappy one. No integration enough with other devices as phones, tablets, their ecosystem sucks and their store is a cesspool of crappy software with some notable exceptions. I love Windows at my workplace for my domain, network, and users pc, but for my personal and home OS, I hate it with passion. I tried several times to integrate a surface pro into my Apple ecosystem or find a viable alternative but failed miserably, so the surface lies on my bookshelf without any use. Great hardware, but useless for me.
 
True words.
Microsoft worked hard to improve their Os and Apple’s OS is falling apart, the gap shrank very quickly in the last decade.

Apple knows too, long gone are the days where they were calling macOS “the most advanced operating system in the world”.
Now they just try to avoid being laughed at.
So the same Windows 11 works on multiple platforms? Thats news. I thought it was just supported with AMD/Intel x86 Architecture processors? Windows for ARM64 is specific to that platform only which is this particular topic. :p
 
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