Apple Is Finally Acknowledging That Other PCs Exist

Its ‘Let Loose’ event finally calls them out as competition

15-inch MacBook Air next to 16-inch MacBook Pro

Key Takeaways

Apple is changing its approach by comparing its M4 chip to AI PCs, showcasing a shift in brand identity.
The company is strategically highlighting AI features and using buzzwords to dispel any perception of falling behind.
Apple wants consumers to see Macs and AI PCs as equals, a departure from its usual insular marketing strategy.

Part of Apple’s brand identity is that it sees its products as better than market competitors, and the company has a history of refusing to even acknowledge them as a result. However, that’s starting to change, and we saw a perfect example of this shift when Apple unveiled the new M4 system-on-a-chip at its “Let Loose” event today. The keynote was mostly about iPads, as Apple refreshed the iPad Air and iPad Pro for the first time in more than a year. But since this is the first time we’ve seen the M4 chip, it also has big future implications for the best Macs. To give us a gauge of how well the M4 chipset performs, we didn’t just get comparisons to other Macs and past M-series chips — Apple brought up AI PCs and NPUs.

Apple usually lives in its own bubble, completely unbothered by the rest of the computing market. I noticed this beginning to change based on the company’s handling of the M3 MacBook Air launch in March of this year, but who knows, that could’ve been a fluke. Well, Apple used the exact same kind of approach with the launch of M4, and it’s safe to say a pattern is developing. The company is clearly worried about consumers thinking Apple is behind the curve when it comes to AI, and that’s why we’re seeing the company make more comparisons to non-Apple products, using popular buzzwords, and highlighting AI features more directly.

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Apple’s M4 launch is riddled with industry-wide comparisons

Apple name-drops buzzwords like AI PC for the first time

Before we get to the M4 launch, we have to take a step back and look at Apple’s newsroom post for the new M3 MacBook Air. In that press release, the company called the MacBook Air the world’s most popular laptop, and made a few comparisons to the laptop market as a whole. Here’s exactly what Apple had to say about the MacBook Air and the M3 chip:

With the transition to Apple Silicon, every Mac is a great platform for AI. M3 includes a faster and more efficient 16-core Neural Engine, along with accelerators in the CPU and GPU to boost on-device machine learning, making MacBook Air the world’s best consumer laptop for AI.

This kind of statement would be routine for any other company in the tech space, but not Apple. MacBooks aren’t laptopsthey’re MacBooks — just like iPhones aren’t smartphonesthey’re iPhones. Of course, we know those statements are factually true. But to Apple, products like the Mac or iPhone are so far ahead of the competition that calling them a PC or smartphone broadly would be a disservice. There’s so much brand value in Apple products as a result of the percieved separation between them and the competition. Years ago, we would never see Apple call a brand-new MacBook a “consumer laptop.”

I wasn’t certain this was intentional and deliberate when the M3 MacBook Air came out, but the same type of adjustment in terms of language and market comparisons can be viewed in Apple’s announcement of the M4 chipset. In the “Let Loose” keynote, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus felt the need to explain verbally that the Neural Engine on Apple Silicon is comparable to a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) on a PC. It’s the first time in the history of the Neural Engine that Apple has ever referred to it as an NPU.

That isn’t the only comparison Apple makes to PCs, either. Talking about the Neural Engine in the M4 SoC, Apple unsurprisingly said it’s “Apple’s most powerful Neural Engine ever” and cited its ability to handle 38 TOPS. The surprising part came next:

The Neural Engine in M4 is Apple’s most capable yet, and is more powerful than any neural processing unit in any AI PC today.

Of course, the term “AI PC” is essentially a buzzword that has been coined by Microsoft, Intel, and others to identify computers with an NPU. It’s more of a marketing term for Windows OEMs than anything else right now, and yet it appeared in an official Apple press release. This is yet another example of Apple putting Macs on the same playing field as PCs in rare choices of wording.

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Apple is coming out and saying itself what many tech enthusiasts and reporters have said independently: MacBooks are laptops, Neural Engines are NPUs, and Macs are AI PCs. It’s nothing we didn’t already know, but it’s still a massive deviation from what we’d typically see from Apple.

This isn’t how Apple behaves

Lines like ‘this is the best iPhone we’ve ever made’ live in infamy

Remember, this is the same Apple that has been mocked for ages for getting on an event stage, year in and year out, calling the newest iPhone “the best iPhone we’ve ever made.” Apple lives in its own world, and usually only compares new products to its own older ones. Obviously, the new MacBook is going to be better than the old one, but that’s the entire shtick. In the rare case that Apple does make a comparison to other products, it’s usually not on a fair playing field.

A quick example of this trend, and how it dictates Apple’s public-facing approach to third-party devices, is the image of an Android phone the company uses on its trade-in page:

The Android phone trade-in page. — Source: Apple

This is what Apple thinks an Android phone looks like, according to its trade-in page.

Apple knows that this isn’t what the best Android phones look like, but it doesn’t matter. The company wants to make its products seem inherently superior to others, and it’s the little things like image usage and word choice that slowly affect public perception.

Is Apple worried about losing the AI race?

That’s unclear, but Apple is obviously done working in the shadows

Apple is clearly changing the way it refers to its own products and competitors’ products in marketing, and that’s shown in the M3 MacBook Air and M4 iPad Pro launches. It wants prospective users to know that Macs and AI PCs are on the same level, but why? There’s only one answer that makes sense: it’s because AI PCs are winning. If nothing else, PCs and Android phones have won the marketing battle when it comes to artificial intelligence. Apple shipped devices with Neural Engines far before AI PC became a buzzword, and features that have used AI and ML for years. But before, this was all happening behind the scenes. The average iPhone user or MacBook owner didn’t need to know their favorite feature was backed by AI.

Now, they do, and it’s because the average consumer has probably heard AI a million times in relation to PCs. Apple is desperately trying to remind users that it’s working on AI, too. To do that effectively, it would seem Apple has to acknowledge Windows PCs exist in a competitive way for the first time in years.