It’s Computex week, and that means there is a lot of PC news to take in right now.
Nvidia has announced RTX Spark, its Apple silicon competitor for notebooks and small desktops. This puts Nvidia in the same market as Qualcomm building Arm chips for PCs. Here’s Sean Hollister:
“This is the most efficient PC chip ever built,” says Nvidia senior director of product management Mark Aevermann — without sharing so much as a single statistic or chart to back that up.
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Like Apple and Qualcomm’s chips, this Nvidia chip is Arm-based silicon, meaning legacy Windows software made for Intel and AMD’s x86 processors needs to run through an emulation layer to work. That can mean lower performance. But Microsoft has now spent years getting Windows and its Prism emulator ready for Qualcomm and now Nvidia chips, and Nvidia claims its own graphics and AI chops will take the idea further than ever before.
Microsoft, Asus, Dell, HP, MSI, and Lenovo have all committed to building RTX Spark notebooks, but have been light on details. I think most of these will take on the likes of the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. They’ll come with the same trade-offs as Apple silicon Macs: basically no upgradability, but great battery life, assuming Windows has its act together.
The Windows world is also taking aim at Apple at the low-end, with several OEMs shipping would-be MacBook Neo killers. One such machine is the Dell XPS 13, as covered by Antonio G. Di Benedetto:
Dell is making good on its tease from CES and finally announcing a new XPS 13. The XPS 13 returns as a budget-friendly option, launching in July at a promotional student price of $599 — though that introductory deal only runs until September for back-to-school shopping; it’ll start at $699 for everyone else. The $599 promo exactly matches up with the MacBook Neo’s starting price, but students can actually get Apple’s budget laptop for $100 less. That means Dell has its work cut out proving that the XPS 13 is worth the extra money.
LTT has a roundup of a bunch of these machines, some of which are getting around current RAM pricing by including an empty RAM slot for users to populate themselves, such as the Lenovo Ideapad Slim 5i.
(RIP folks running Windows 11 on 8 GB RAM.)
Much of this coverage misses the biggest point in my mind — the operating system. If I had three $599 laptops in front of me: a Chromebook, a PC, and a MacBook Neo, I’d choose the Neo because I want to run macOS.
If Apple can continue to educate the public about how tightly integrated the Mac is with the iPhone, and why macOS is a superior choice over Windows, the MacBook Neo will continue to be just fine.