Macs with Apple Silicon have been out for over five years, and PCs have started to follow suit in adopting ARM architecture. Even Nvidia just jumped on the bandwagon, and with the introduction of its new RTX Spark processor, which the company claimed as “the most efficient PC chip ever built,” Apple could face some serious competition, especially with its upcoming higher-end MacBook models.
According to Nvidia, this chip will enable users to “render ultra-large 90GB 3D scenes with OptiX and DLSS, edit 12K 4:2:2 video with the NVIDIA Blackwell decoder, run 120-billion-parameter large language models with 1 million tokens context, and play AAA games at 1440p resolution and over 100 frames per second with ray tracing, DLSS, and Reflex.” This is certainly a chip designed to handle AI models as well as handling super-intensive workloads, and yet, it’s an ARM-based chip. Nvidia has been well known for engineering graphics cards, and even some of the vintage Macs from the 2000s and early 2010s used integrated and discrete GPUs from that company, so it’s been a huge step for the company to make the jump to designing CPUs for PCs.
Speaking of which, this Nvidia chip will soon power Microsoft’s upcoming Surface product yet: the Surface Laptop Ultra. This almighty laptop will bring these killer features:
- 15-inch mini-LED PixelSense Ultra touchscreen (3:2 aspect ratio)
- Precision haptic trackpad that will be the largest ever built into a Surface product
- Wide range of I/O ports: USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, headphone jack, and a full-size SD card reader
With all these features, Microsoft claims this machine will be the company’s most powerful Surface ever engineered, and it will launch this coming fall, which could be the same timeframe that Apple will unleash the all-redesigned MacBook Pro models (it could have the “Ultra” moniker as suggested by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman). Microsoft hasn’t said a word about the pricing, but should Apple be worried?
I could say with confidence that there’s no need to worry. For one, we should expect the redesigned MacBook Ultra models to feature the next-generation M6 Pro and M6 Max chips, which could run circles around Nvidia’s newest chip in terms of either performance or efficiency. Second, those laptops are expected to feature tandem OLED displays, which should produce even higher brightness levels, color accuracies, and contrast ratios (no “halo effect” as the pixels are individually lit). This would be a huge advantage over the mini-LED display on the Surface Laptop Ultra. Even better, we should expect multi-touch on the upcoming MacBook Ultra’s displays. Apple has been well known for its unrivaled optimizations between the hardware and software, so touch input as a secondary input is going to be reimagined such that it will be well optimized for touch, so pro customers are going to love that feature.
All in all, the Mac has been stronger than ever, and unless Microsoft finally gets its act together with the current state Windows is in, there’d be no way that PCs would stand a chance against the Mac ecosystem in terms of the software experience. Even the MacBook Neo has seen several competitors since its launch, but for what it’s worth, Apple has been one of the influential companies in the world, so it’s great to see more competition on the PC side, with each laptop having its own strengths and weaknesses.
