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Microsoft Debuts New Copilot+ Windows PCs Designed Around AI
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is killing it. He seems to be not only making up ground from decades of complacency and stagnation, to now bringing multiple new technologies to the forefront. He has been making the rounds with reporters handling tough questions with charm and ease, it's clear Microsoft's CEO has a good handle on things.
On the flip side, Google's CEO Sundar Picha made the rounds with reporters last week and sounded awkward and over his head. Google is a mess at the moment while Google Search is hot garbage and practically unusable. Behind the scenes, there were reports that to retain engagement in Google Search, engineers were told to do what they could to keep visitors on the platform longer, hinting that the solution was to make search worse to keep users engaged and fumbling around on the platform in circles. It is scary and dangerous having one company have so much control of the web and that they can pay billions to Apple to help keep competition at bay while letting complacency take over. We desperately need government intervention with that crazy monopoly where even a massive tech company like Microsoft with deep pockets cannot make a dent. I see Sundar Picha's days as numbered and the future of Google in question if they do dont make a change.
Apple looks like they may be on the ropes again pretty soon too. They live and die on new product performance and have no real bread-and-butter product to sit back and coast on like Microsoft and Google, they need to keep hustling with competition that is always nipping at their heels. And that's what makes the government's preposterous Monopoly claims so absurd. Apple from day one lived and died betting the farm in bringing new products to market unlike the other major tech companies.
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This Recall feature is creepy as hell. Hopefully it’s off by default. This X comment nails it (and it applies to whatever Apple is announcing at WWDC).
Oh, yeah. Giving Apple something to compare to directly will definitely help nudge them to keep ahead. I especially hope the 16 GB base config catches on.
Recall is one of the most useful features I've seen in any tech in the past decade... If it works.
did you miss Web 2.0?
and the crash after...
or the Metaverse and buying "real estate"...
I’m not particularly pleased to see that the timeline I laid out over a year ago is so far slightly accelerated:
Quote:
Three years. That's how long we have. AI chatbot style dialogue with integrated systems will appear on smartphones in 3 years or less. What that means is, you'll be able to take a photo of yourself and say, "Add a bear to the scene. Make it look like it's about to attack me. No, move it to my other side. Make the bear smaller."
And then, wind forward ten years for the computing power and capacity to catch up, until... "Show me this scene again except have the part of Fred be played the way Christopher Walken would play it."
Etc.
This recall feature is something the cutting-edge of the industry has been talking about for over 30 years… for them to pull it off with a relatively intuitive user interface strikes me as exactly the sort of thing Steve Jobs would have done, e.g. the first Time Machine demo at Macworld. “It just works“ and you understand how to use it without having to overthink things.
I hate the way Windows is going with the telemetry and OS ads but this is a genuine breakthrough in personal computing and will be useful for normal people. I’m curious to read how the security is implemented.
Things like this just annoy me more that I can’t spend $200-400 on a version of Windows without any of the BS, because honestly, I would. There is a lucrative market for Microsoft if they ever chase the high-end enthusiasts again, but it’s probably dwarfed by the market as a whole so I doubt they will.
20 year ago Apple would be immediately incorporating this type of functionality into the next MacOS. Today Apple can’t even launch a basic Journal app on a device with a native hardware keyboard, despite being the wealthiest (or close to it) company in the world. Multiple devices? We’ll make you wait a few years. This year iPad might get a calculator though, holy ****!
It’s kind of a joke what they’ve become and Tim Cook should step down for wasting so much money on their car project and launching Vision Pro as the worst retail product from Apple this millennium. Apple needs another product-centric leader as their CEO.
The most puzzling thing about this launch from Microsoft is that they didn’t call it Windows 12, which is supposedly coming this year. I don’t get the marketing choice there because this is a clear enough differentiator IMO.
Shoving LLMs into everything is ridiculous but this is a very good use case for on-device Machine Learning. It’s exactly the narrowly-spec’d type of thing that we should be using NPUs for, across the board. Not generative garbage, but actual useful tools. They did a great job on Recall.
I hope Apple comes out swinging with something pretty great besides “now Siri works” and “xcode has better autocomplete“. I want innovation and this is a great one.
Old fogeys who populate this forum and people myopically stuck on Apple don’t understand what a pain in the ass being a pro user has been. I work in Audio as well as Development and every year almost all of my stuff breaks with each new OS, and there are incremental at best updates. Somehow Microsoft is outpacing Apple by a large margin here and I hope they catch up. Vista had great search and was innovative with caching (not great with anything else though) and it took Apple a year or two to catch up and surpass it but they did.
Apple needs to start doing that type of thing again soon, and not focus so much energy at the cost of existing products on moonshots like Vision Pro that will require advancements that might not even make it out of a lab to be useful to a large amount of people.
I hate the way Windows is going with the telemetry and OS ads but this is a genuine breakthrough in personal computing and will be useful for normal people. I’m curious to read how the security is implemented.
Things like this just annoy me more that I can’t spend $200-400 on a version of Windows without any of the BS, because honestly, I would. There is a lucrative market for Microsoft if they ever chase the high-end enthusiasts again, but it’s probably dwarfed by the market as a whole so I doubt they will.
20 year ago Apple would be immediately incorporating this type of functionality into the next MacOS. Today Apple can’t even launch a basic Journal app on a device with a native hardware keyboard, despite being the wealthiest (or close to it) company in the world. Multiple devices? We’ll make you wait a few years. This year iPad might get a calculator though, holy ****!
It’s kind of a joke what they’ve become and Tim Cook should step down for wasting so much money on their car project and launching Vision Pro as the worst retail product from Apple this millennium. Apple needs another product-centric leader as their CEO.
The most puzzling thing about this launch from Microsoft is that they didn’t call it Windows 12, which is supposedly coming this year. I don’t get the marketing choice there because this is a clear enough differentiator IMO.
Shoving LLMs into everything is ridiculous but this is a very good use case for on-device Machine Learning. It’s exactly the narrowly-spec’d type of thing that we should be using NPUs for, across the board. Not generative garbage, but actual useful tools. They did a great job on Recall.
I hope Apple comes out swinging with something pretty great besides “now Siri works” and “xcode has better autocomplete“. I want innovation and this is a great one.
Old fogeys who populate this forum and people myopically stuck on Apple don’t understand what a pain in the ass being a pro user has been. I work in Audio as well as Development and every year almost all of my stuff breaks with each new OS, and there are incremental at best updates. Somehow Microsoft is outpacing Apple by a large margin here and I hope they catch up. Vista had great search and was innovative with caching (not great with anything else though) and it took Apple a year or two to catch up and surpass it but they did.
Apple needs to start doing that type of thing again soon, and not focus so much energy at the cost of existing products on moonshots like Vision Pro that will require advancements that might not even make it out of a lab to be useful to a large amount of people.
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Yes, I’m really looking forward to AI integrated with responses to customer service and chat requests. I’m sure AI will help the responsiveness of requests for service and troubleshooting…NOT
But it doesn’t work. Check how a Japanese variety show translates into English…. Utter gibberish.
Heck with AI. The new Window 11 killer feature is Microsoft inserting advertisement into the start menu. Even though this feature can be disabled [for now]. This is a new key critical Window’s feature, that kills any prospect of wanting to use Windows. Truly a killer feature.
It's funny reading all the Windows hate posts from those still stuck in the Mac vs PC days. Since those commercials came out Window has gotten better and Mac OS has turned into a dumpster fire that Apple has for all intents and purposes abandoned.
What you’re talking about here is exactly what Generative AI sucks at. GPT4o can’t even make an image of the alphabet reliably and it’s been trained on zillions of parameters and funded by ungodly amounts of power and money. I think your timeline is quite safe and may even be optimistic.I’m not particularly pleased to see that the timeline I laid out over a year ago is so far slightly accelerated:
Quote:
Three years. That's how long we have. AI chatbot style dialogue with integrated systems will appear on smartphones in 3 years or less. What that means is, you'll be able to take a photo of yourself and say, "Add a bear to the scene. Make it look like it's about to attack me. No, move it to my other side. Make the bear smaller."
Chatbot-derived AI will be let loose on internal codebases at tech companies and coders will leverage it by asking it to auto-complete chunks of API, search for bugs, or pose questions like 'is there a way to optimize this?' and 'What changes do I need to make to this to make it run with the new OS?'
And then, wind forward ten years for the computing power and capacity to catch up, until... "Show me this scene again except have the part of Fred be played the way Christopher Walken would play it."
Etc.
GenAI is impressive on the surface, and useful for some specific tasks, but it is not a panacea and probably can’t ever be until and unless specific breakthroughs are made in Computer Science, and so far they haven’t materialized despite everyone throwing all their resources at them.
In some sense the whole industry is being fooled because the language generation is so good it throws off our objectivity because we’re not wired to be critical of things that sound plausible and authoritative.
5-10 years, yeah, probably someone will crack the research. I’ve read easily 1,000+ academic papers around these topics for professional reasons that I can’t elaborate on and am not speaking as someone ignorant of these challenges.
Just spend the $20 and try the latest versions of these tools, and ask it some of those types of questions… you’ll see what I mean. And it’s not something that more parameters can solve.
Edit: I read the rest of your post and the part toward the end where you talk about generating entire crowds / groups and simulating interactions is something that has existed for at least 25-30 years. It‘s not available to the public but it is quite a good facsimile and policy decisions, especially foreign policy decisions, have been and are being made based on descendants of that technology. No LLMs, Transformer models, etc. needed and they would probably increase the error rate dramatically. If you’re interested in that kind of thing do some searches on it and look for public research programs, there’s a lot of really unique stuff there that is wholly different than the “AI” getting all the hype now. The earliest versions date back to the 1970s, if you can believe it.
There’s an absolutely enormous rabbit hole here that is very fun to research if you’re into it, and takes detours into things like Sim City. Seriously. All of my notes are in a vault I can’t access at the moment due to a PC being offline but if I remember I’ll PM you some public links down the road when I get it working again.
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A big interest for me is how the new systems may challenge and illuminate how Apple does things, given the prospect of 'all day battery life,' etc... Here are some questions I have that may be answered going forward.
1.) Apple's system-on-a-chip essentially prevents after-purchase RAM upgrades and locks us into paying what many consider grossly inflated RAM upgrade prices. Will these new Windows computers also lock people in, and will their RAM upgrade prices be severely high?
The issue of whether Apple price gouges on RAM upgrades or SOC RAM is a different animal and costs can't be surmised from regular notebook RAM mass market prices has been contentious in another thread. Might the new Windows systems shed light here?
2.) Apples SSD upgrade prices are also considered by many extremely expensive. What will comparable upgrade prices be on these Windows PCs?
3.) Apple's SOC has also basically committed us to integrated graphics rather than external GPUs (even in MacBook Pros) for the most part, if I understand correctly. Will that also be true of these Windows systems?
If the Windows systems offer all day battery life, equal or superior performance, much better RAM and SSD upgrade prices, and external GPU-augmented performance, coupled with some spec. advantages (a number of upcoming Windows laptops I saw in an article include Wifi 7), then, to paraphrase Ricky Ricardo from the old I Love Lucy sitcom, 'Apple, you got some 'splain'in to do!' But maybe that's not the case?
Not sure what that means. In a few years nearly all customer service calls will be handled by bots. I don't want to spend my time talking to bots. I want a bot that waits in the queue for me and then talks to their bot on my behalf while I can do something fun or productive.
Saving grace for Apple, for now, is iPhone, iPad, wearables, services. But, that's no guarantee either.
So, you basically want ... an answering machine from the 80's.
Seriously, though, your bot only knows what you tell it, and their bot only knows what your bot tells it, and they only know what their bot tells them. So, eliminate two redundant middle"men", and ... you're back to voicemail.
The kernel and compiler in this "new" Windows 11 for ARM are re-architected from the ground up. That's as far as I know
I'll give you that. I'm sick of ads plastered throughout the OS
I believe this is Win 11 ARM that has significantly modified core components and they do not have to support legacy systems. So, it might not be as bloated. I don't know, I am just expecting it to be so.