5 Reasons Why Apple Can Beat Copilot+ With Apple Intelligence

Apple has a particular mission during every keynote — to make their devices, like the best Macs, look even better. They somehow manage to achieve this without fail every year, and a lot of the credit goes to their clever marketing. However, in 2024’s WWDC, flashy ads and marketing were not the main focus. This time around, the features and updates speak for themselves.

The star of the show is Apple Intelligence, a suite of AI features that promises to improve the experience on the best iPhones, iPads, and Macs. It’s utterly impressive, and in the wake of Microsoft’s recent privacy nightmare with Recall, it’s shaping up to be more pragmatic and useful than Copilot+.

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5 Apple Silicon’s proven track record

Looking beyond the performance benchmarks

In 2023, Apple completed its Mac transition from Intel to Apple Silicon. Every recent Mac from the last four years or so is now running an M-series chip, and the platform has matured a lot. We now have MacBooks with incredible battery life, fantastic performance on compact machines like the Mac Mini, and a growing ecosystem of professional applications optimized for Apple Silicon.

On the other hand, you have these new Copilot+ PCs launching alongside the hyped-up Snapdragon X Series chips. We ran the benchmarks on Snapdragon X Elite, and the initial results look very promising in terms of performance. However, numbers rarely tell you the full story.

What’s battery life going to look like? Will Microsoft’s Prism emulator hold up in x86 emulation compared to Apple’s Rosetta? Are the new Copilot+ features going to be useful? These are all questions we don’t have the answers to right now.

I’ll be fair here though, the jury is still out on how useful or seamless Apple Intelligence is going to be. However, considering that Apple Silicon is now a mature platform, we can expect Apple devices to still be efficient and powerful even with all these on-device AI features. We’re yet to see if this will be the case with Copilot+ PCs.

4 You don’t need new hardware for Apple Intelligence

Apple Intelligence is slightly more accessible (for now)

Source: Apple

Microsoft’s Copilot+ promises a lot of great new features and a smarter Windows experience, but it also demands new hardware. To run Copilot+, OEMs need to have an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) capable of 40 TOPs (trillion operations per second). For now, the Snapdragon X platform is the only one that supports this requirement. Intel and AMD are also readying up x86 processors with capable NPUs for Copilot+, but Microsoft won’t be supporting Intel or AMD at launch.

Apple’s hardware limitations are a bit less strict, at least for now. Apple Intelligence will run on any Mac that has 8 gigs of RAM and an M1 chip (or later). Any iPhone with an A17 Pro chip is also supported, but that only includes the 15 Pro and Pro Max for now. Don’t get me wrong, the limitations are still there, but at least Apple Intelligence will run on your M1 MacBook Air — a four-year-old laptop.

Our very own João Carrasqueira wrote a great piece on PCs that won’t support Copilot+, and the list is long. The worst part is that if you recently bought a laptop or Windows PC anytime before June 18th (The release date for Copilot+ PCs), it won’t support Microsoft’s new AI suite.

You also have to consider that Apple is supporting more form factors sooner. The list includes iPads, iPhones, MacBooks, compact desktops (Mac Studio and Mac Mini), and bigger desktops (iMac and Mac Pro).

3 Apple Intelligence has more features

And they’re much more interesting

Apple had a lot of ground to cover at this year’s WWDC, and it felt like they were quickly speeding through all the new updates. It was one big feature after another, and this whirlwind of announcements was nothing short of surprising. Microsoft has been marketing Copilot+ for a long time now, and Apple came in out of nowhere and stole all their thunder.

With Apple Intelligence, you’ll be able to use ChatGPT on-device without an account, proofread and rewrite text with writing tools, use personal context with Siri, and plan your day by pulling information from your calendar. Here’s a full breakdown of Apple Intelligence and what it has to offer.

It’s not just about the features though, it’s about how deeply they are integrated with the ecosystem. For example, the AI writing tools will work the same way in almost every program, regardless if it’s a native Apple app or a third-party one. Siri will also have deep integration with all your apps and devices, meaning it can move information across them seamlessly.

That’s not to say that Copilot+ doesn’t have its fair share of interesting features. I think features such as Live Captions, Auto Super Resolution, and Adaptive Dimming will be very useful. Unfortunately, the best feature, Recallhas been recalled.

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2 A more mature ecosystem

The walled garden has its perks

The Apple ecosystem is well known for its tight-knight collection of products and features. Apple has been riding the “it just works” philosophy since forever, and it always pays off. Feature parity has always been a highlight with Apple products, and services like iMessage, FaceTime, and AirDrop are proof of that. The walled garden is the perfect way of trapping you into their ecosystem, but it does have its benefits.

These perks are even more obvious now that we have Apple Intelligence. I already mentioned how the AI suite is coming to Macs, iPhones, and iPads, and Microsoft is going to have a hard time competing with how well these devices work together.

Here’s an example of how Apple Intelligence shines thanks to the ecosystem. Imagine you’re researching a topic on your iPhone using Safari. Thanks to Apple Intelligence, you can use the new smart Summarize feature to generate a concise summary of the highlighted text. With Handoffyou can seamlessly move this summarized text and the original article to your Mac to dive deeper.

There’s no such feature parity with Copilot+ on Windows, partly because Microsoft doesn’t have an OS for phones anymore. It’s bad enough that you need an entirely new laptop just to use Copilot+, but it’s worse that your other devices aren’t even a part of the conversation.

1 Privacy, security, and trust

Avoiding Microsoft’s pitfalls

For an AI assistant to be genuinely helpful, it needs access to a broad range of personal data. This includes contacts, photos, documents, and other files. The Recall feature in Copilot+ will have access to all this data, but Microsoft’s lackluster security measures have led to concerns and criticism of how this data is being handled. Recall works by taking a screenshot of your entire desktop every time it wants to remember something, and it saves this data in plain-text logs.

Unfortunately, it turns out those plain-text logs leave Recall open to remote hackers. Microsoft has since walked back on the feature, and it’s not available in Copilot+ at launch. Apple promises you that won’t be the case with Apple Intelligence, as any on-device processing is protected by industry-leading security measures.

In addition to on-device processing, Apple is also taking a calculated risk by processing more complex requests on the cloud. These requests in the cloud are handled by Private Cloud Compute — a cloud intelligence system built on Apple Silicon. It takes advantage of pre-existing Apple security technologies like Secure Boot and Secure Enclave. Apple published a lengthy blog post on how it works, and you can read a full breakdown of Private Cloud Compute here.

There’s also the fact that people are more likely to trust Apple with their data rather than Microsoft. In reality, both companies have their fair share of privacy and security risks. It’s just that Microsoft doesn’t have the trust of its users the way Apple does. By comparing the privacy and security track records of each company, you can tell that Apple is far ahead in this area.

Beating Microsoft at their own game

Time will tell whether Apple Intelligence has what it takes to take on Copilot+, but the odds are certainly in their favor. The proactive stance on privacy, the mature ecosystem, and the host of new features make it more than a worthy competitor. We can’t count out anyone yet, and with Windows on ARM finally getting better, the year is only going to get more interesting.

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