With M4, Apple is about to deliver a death blow. Are you ready?

Do you remember when you were a child, how the days slowed down before birthdays, Thanksgiving, and other big events?

Well, I imagine that may be what people deep in the Mac laboratories at Apple feel a little like right now.

Because they’re probably getting ready to squish Qualcomm’s Snapdragon as M4 chips appear in Macs. Just in time for the buying season.

Who is the Elite?

Now there’s been a lot of talk that claims Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips give Apple Silicon a run for its money. In truth, both ARM-based processors are great, delivering performance beyond other architectures but Apple is at the bleeding edge, and we ain’t seen nothing yet.

You see, up until now comparisons between Apple’s M4 processor and the best performing chips inside Snapdragon Elite systems have been based on performance achieved on the iPad Pro, as that’s the only device running the chip.

In the main, those comparisons show the iPad Pro as the superior system in most metrics, except possibly concerning some multithread tests. To be fair that’s not a terrible surprise, given comparisons between the M3 Macs and Elite systems are neck and neck.

What’s missing in those comparisons is that the iPad is built as a highly portable system in a highly compact form factor. That compact size means that even though the chips inside iPad Pro are indeed doing a terribly good job, there’s even more performance to come out of M4 systems once you put them inside different computer designs.

Apple hasn’t shown us the whole picture yet

Bear that in mind as you consider that the M4 inside iPad Pro is currently 23% faster than the top end Elite – that’s quite possibly going to become an even bigger gap in the AI-ready flotilla of M4 Macs we’re expecting to see introduced this fall, along with Apple Intelligence.

(That’s plenty powerful enough to run some of Apple’s AI features on the device, no cloud required).

Not only do M-series chips perform, but they do so on much lower power requirements, which makes the Macs cheaper to run. They also work at up to 4.4GHz and have lots of other advantages.

This report lists a lot of them and concludes: “The Snapdragon X Elite is the closest contender and rivals the M3, but it’s still behind the M4 by a wide margin.”

It’s also behind on process technology, Snapdragon is a 4nm chip to Apple M4’s 3nm. Further out, Apple’s expected to get to a 2nm chip as soon as 2025/26 – so still has physics on its side.

The last battles of the PC wars

Now I’m not really getting into an Apple versus Snapdragon comparison here. This isn’t really about that, what this is about is the coming war of AI PCs, and this is what’s going to happen:

• Apple in Fall will I think introduce Macs running M4 chips.
• These will be far ahead of the best available Windows chip (Snapdragon X Elite).
• Apple will also talk about privacy and AI, and the built in AI power inherent to Apple Silicon.

The company may point out that even when a Windows system says it runs a Snapdragon chip, it isn’t necessarily running the best Elite X versions. That’s confusing for most people – I’m a tech writer and I get immensely turned off with the names and specifications of PCs. It’s a lot less confusing to be able to choose between the basic M-series chips, and the Pro, Max and Ultra versions of those chips.

So, let’s get to cost.

Take a look and you’ll see that the Snapdragon chips that compare best with the M-series are found in systems that cost more, or about the same, as most current Mac notebooks. And that’s before we’ve even heard head nor tail of any M4 Max chips in MacBook Pros. Which will deliver even greater performance.

The future in the front view mirror

Can you see which way this is going?

When Apple introduces new M4 series Macs this fall it will be introducing the world’s most computationally capable PCs, fully equipped for AI, and delivering more performance at lower energy costs than competitors provide. Not only that, but some of the systems (hello Mac Mini) will be considerably cheaper than Snapdragon, too.

And, of course, the other big thing? Apple’s OS is designed to run optimally on all of those computers and on the processors, while the Windows running Snapdragon products suffer from the compromises required to run an OS on a huge variety of different builds.

That combination of fragmentation and consumer confusion is going to give Apple a hefty advantage as it moves into the next buying season, and I am in no doubt whatsoever that this year, more than any other, Apple intends using it.

Why would it not?

It reads similar analyst reports to the ones I do, and must surely recognize the next 12-months or so will define the next 5-10 years of computing, as AI drives PC sales. With all of this in mind, there’s never been a better time to buy a Mac. And you can help me do just that with a small donation here 😉

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