Does the future of computers mean less cloud?

If you’re going to be using Artificial Intelligence more, you might need a different type of computer.

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Will this new generation of AI change the way that we use computers? If you look at what Microsoft are doing and what Apple are doing, I think it will. So the background, before I explain what these Copilot Plus PCs are, the background is that for as long as I can remember in my career, which is about almost 20 years, so early 2000s, organizations have shifted away from power in the local machine computer towards the cloud.

So you would have heard of cloud computing, but came from that software as a service, platform as a service, and many other things. So it feels like for the 2000s and 2010s, so about 20 years, organizations are moving as much as they can into the cloud. Now, there seems to be the opportunity for that to change. And this is what it's important, I think, for us to be prepared for in the business technology space, because Increasingly, we've got our laptops and our desktops and our mobiles, and they rely.

Sure, there's applications on there, but they rely so heavily on the cloud. And I thought it was going to just keep going in that trajectory. That was an assumption that I made, that you never have that much power on your local machine as much as you would have in huge data centers.

But Microsoft are kind of putting their card forward because Apple always has this idea that we make really good hardware and they want to do as much processing on the hardware as possible. And that comes packaged up with benefits such as they're not scanning your data and what you're searching for or what you're trying to get AI to do and things like that. It can all happen on device. And Microsoft, I would have thought, would think, no, Apple, you do that. We're going to use Microsoft Azure and we're going to do cloud-based stuff. And yeah, we've got our Windows operating system and we've got some hardware and we've got all of these OEM, all these manufacturers using our operating system. But Microsoft have also decided to go against that model. Apple do that from the beginning, by the way. You know, they're very hardware focused. Apple don't do very good in the cloud, actually.

This is a significant criticism I have of Apple. They do very good with apps, and yeah, the apps synchronize with each other. But if you compare to your Googles and your Microsoft, who make really good cloud applications, I don't think Apple do very well over here. And it seems to be intentional.

It seems to me that on the AI space, they might do very, very well because their MacBooks and their iPhones and so on have a certain amount of power to be able to do local processing with what they call Apple intelligence. But the bit that's missing, if you see that that's going on. The bit that's missing is Microsoft are trying to do the same thing. So Microsoft announced this idea of a co-pilot plus PC. So as I look at this, I just scroll down and show you that the devices that are here, the key thing that's common between all of them is the Snapdragon X Elite processor.

So this seems to have some power that is competing with your Microsoft silicon chips, I think, in terms of what they can do. so so sorry apple silicon chips so Microsoft are doing the same thing and you can see there's Lenovo, Microsoft devices Samsung they all have this Snapdragon X Elite chips and yeah they're all snapdragon i'm looking at those just carefully on the on the website and fundamentally what is their key selling point so powerful processors more multitasking all-day battery turbocharged um I'm not sure what NPU is yet, actually. I guess it's a sort of chip to do with artificial intelligence.

If you know, leave me a comment. is specialized for AI. And this will support certain things like recall, which is this ability to look through your history of what you've been doing on Windows. Not just on the history of your browsing, but everything you've been doing on the operating system, which is kind of interesting.

At this moment, I'm not sure I would use that, but... The idea is interesting. Co-create or co-creator. So, you know, you can sketch something out and then it would improve upon that. Live captions, Windows Studio effects, and then recall. So, you know, Apple are doing similar sorts of things. Microsoft are doing some similar things.

But the point I want to finish on is to make this key point, which is that both Microsoft and Apple are bringing more power to local devices. I think this will mean a few things one is those devices will probably be more expensive than the other devices which rely on the cloud so you think about your Chromebook competitors and Microsoft's tried to do this um i think it was called the windows s machines they tried to make these relatively cheap sort of couple of hundred pound type machines to compete with the Google Chromebooks um apple hasn't gone down that road really I mean you can maybe say the iPad is kind of in there the air the the iPad Air maybe but it still does quite a lot on the device I also think it's going to be interesting.

You see, in some companies, it's true with my employer, you have decided that you've got the developers and then you've got everybody else. So everybody else uses Excel or browsers and so on. And the developers use, you know, they create local instances where they're doing coding and things like that and that's kind of just how it operates in technology companies the developers get the more powerful machines and everybody else gets a more standard bog standard sort of Lenovo type you know that's what i've seen mostly but looking at this Lenovo also will make those more powerful machines i think this will create this will create a third section potentially which is like it's more than your standard that it's not as powerful as developer, but somewhere in the middle, some sort of device, which as people start to find more tasks where they use Copilot or artificial intelligence, and the work is done on the local device.

I think that the one piece of advice I'd like to give you to take away is will your work go down this road? Will you use artificial intelligence in the cloud? If so, you'll get by with a MacBook Air or a basic Windows device. But if your work starts to rely more heavily on artificial intelligence, then maybe you need to start talking to your employer about Copilot Plus PCs or MacBook Pros.

I look forward to knowing how you get on your journey in this new generation of AI. And does it mean that these new machines like Copilot Plus PCs will empower you to do more than what you can currently do today? Do let me know.