If you are a subscriber to the Wall Street Journal or you use Apple News, you should be able to watch this interview with Nadella. Watching this interview will help put WWDC into a broader and helpful context. That is why I am sharing this video. The idea of a new design for the PC, an AI PC or an AI Mac if you will, is intriguing.
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Thanks for reminding me that I need to use my News+ sub more! Love Joanna’s work.
I’m impressed that MS is running many of these features privately and on-device. I’m sure that’s what Apple will tout at WWDC and it’ll be interesting to see how the on-device feature set compares.
Also, the base model Surface laptop comes with 16gb RAM and 256gb SSD for $999 just like the Air should.
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Non pay walled version:
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This would almost make me want to buy a Surface Pro, almost. 
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+1
Google showed off new features & services last week and Microsoft is doing the same today. So now everyone is wondering what Apple will bring to the party.
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This is an interesting complementary article: Satya Nadella transformed Microsoft’s culture by turning everyone into ‘learn-it-alls’ instead of 'know-it-alls’
Has Apple become a “Know-it-all” company? Proverbs warns us that “Pride comes before a fall.” Has Apple become too prideful?
I’m NOT suggesting that Apple has nor that Apple is about to “fall”; I’m asking an honest question. We cannot answer it fully because we don’t have inside experience, but Apple can certainly “appear” to have fallen into such a state. And, Apple, like any company, can make its share of mistakes because of pride. What immediately comes to mind is Steve Ballmer’s dismissal of the iPhone.
What immediately comes to my mind is this:
Steve Jobs reportedly hated focus groups. His famous quote …
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
— Steve Jobs
Apple has been this way for quite some time. It has served them rather well.
Can’t argue with that!
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Maybe, they are definitely a “Our way or the highway” company. That has brought them great success in the past but now they are facing a time when they may need to bend before they break.
When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014 its mission was “Windows Everywhere”, and he realized that things needed to change. He saw the need to concentrate on mobile and cloud and for the company to “obsess about our customers”. He changed the culture of Microsoft and grew it from a $300 billion dollar company to a $3 trillion dollar company.
Sometimes change is good, sometimes it is necessary.
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Amen on 16gb minimum on the Air (and the base MacBook Pro, for heaven’s sake!), and it really should be 512 on the storage.
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I just watched the MS presentation. They said the Surface Laptop allows you to use 3 4K monitors and the built in screen at the same time.
Microsoft and Google are offering many of the same AI features. MS is taking advantage of their new computers, Google is building it into their phones.
I am really hesitant to get excited about this. Windows 11 is a strong OS, I really like most parts of it, but MS is becoming really pushy with nagging you about features, MSN type links to “news” stories, and ads. I haven’t found anything AI related added to Windows/Edge to be at all compelling so far. To the point I started shutting down any mention of it where I could. I stopped using Edge completely because it has become so bloated with “features” I will never use. So what MS is showing today looks great, but I generally don’t like the direction they are going in.
I don’t trust them, and want to see real hands ons reports. I went to YouTube see if there were any videos of the new Surfaces. Only YouTubers they sent it too are basically the PR talking heads like Dave2D. If they wanted to show this off, I would have thought they would have flooded YT, but they haven’t. Not even a Marquees Brownlee video, who is usually very positive about most products he reviews.
Edit to add: Usually the tech press goes crazy with the “Macbook Killer!!” articles whenever some company release a new laptop. This time, all of them are much more reserved with their headlines. Did the tech press finally learn?
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I still like to keep up with all kinds of technology. “Iron sharpens iron”, everyone wins when companies compete. If Microsoft really has laptops that can compete with the M series MacBook Air then Apple won’t be able to rest on their laurels. Neither have to be the fastest or have the most battery capacity, they just need to stay in the race.
The same is true of Google and Microsoft. The majority of businesses run on MS365 or Google Workspace so both need competitive AI offerings.
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Agreed, and I genuinely like MS’s products. PCs having a good ARM chip is a win for all of us.
I don’t think they would lie on the benchmarks and for the most part they didn’t do the Apple thing of saying “our computer is 250% faster than a PC” on a graph with next to no info to back it up. So I believe they are competing in that area. My big question is compatibly. How well Prism (their version of Rosetta) works, and if they can get support from 3rd party developers is what I am worried about.
The last Surface I owned was great, if I only used MS products. 3rd party developers didn’t support the pen or touchscreen for the most part which severely limited it.
Also a bit concerned the AI thing is just a gimmick with little to no real world use. I was interested when they added CoPilot to Office 365, but everything I have read said it is basically useless with a few exceptions.
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It definitely needs some work. I’ve been assigned a Copilot for Business license at work to determine if it’s something we should deploy to end users. The coolest feature I’ve seen from it is that it can generate summaries of long email threads in Outlook. The Excel integration is fairly limited, the data needs to be in a table and Copilot won’t go into making Pivot tables or using lookups. We have an Employee Directory in Power BI and I asked Copilot who reported to my boss. It returned two correct people, one wrong person, and left off three people.
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All I ask of Copilot is that it figure out what the heck I’m trying to do with the two dozen nested parentheses in my Excel formulas and just fix them for me already.
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Someone must think it’s real. Microsoft had a market cap of $2.3 Trillion when they launched Co-Pilot, it’s now at $3.19 Trillion.
From my understanding when I read up on it when it was released, CoPilot in Excel can’t do that. Of course the browser version can, and is great for stuff like that. It’s kind of typical MS, getting a feature out there, but it’s half baked and they don’t follow up on it. (CoPilot in Excel may have improved, but none of the Excel stuff I follow online ever seems to mention it anymore.)
Look at Bitcoin and and NFTs, they are pointless and yet every company under the sun invested in them. Some of the AI stuff is very cool, but I am not sure it’s ready for normal people. But who knows, maybe Siri will be awesome next fall because of it.
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I am a little creeped out by those announcements.
You would think AI would be able to scrub passwords and important info from the history.
It does seem kind of cool though. There is a Mac app that is working on doing the same thing. Not sure I have a use for it though.