Why Apple senior vice president Craig Federighi made fun of Microsoft’s ‘biggest’ announcement of 2024

While the entire PC industry is embracing the new era of AI PCs, Apple‘s senior vice president couldn’t help but laugh it off. “It’s funny with the AI PC,” said Craig Federighi, the senior vice president of software at Apple, during John Grubber’s The Talk Show, post Apple’s developers conference –WWDC2024. “It’s like someone just discovered the idea of a neural engine this year,” seemingly taking a jab at Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and Microsoft – the companies just partnered to put the new Snapdragon X Elite chips on what they call Windows AI PCs.
He ‘laughed’ at the marketing push from the Microsoft and Windows PC makers, who appear to be betting big on AI PCs, stating, “I guess we missed the boat to name it an AI PC because we’ve been making great ones this whole time. That’s not the point. They’re great Macs.”
Apple first put the neural engine or as everybody else calls it “neural processing unit” in the A11 chip for iPhone X in 2017. Then, it debuted its own line of Arm chips for Macs, the M series, which also has a neural engine. Meanwhile, Qualcomm and AMD caught up with Apple this year by introducing processors with a dedicated neural processing unit, while Intel had a little bit of a headstart when it released the Core Ultra lineup of processors with an NPU last year.
Joswiak, Apple’s Senior Vice President for Marketing, also took a shot at Windows’ Recall feature, a new AI feature in Microsoft’s newly announced Copilot+ PCs, which records all activity on a user’s computer. The feature faced a significant privacy backlash, leading Microsoft to delay it indefinitely for further testing
When asked if he was frustrated by the failings of Apple’s competitors, Joswiak simply replied, “The answer is no,” to laughs from the audience.
Apple executives didn’t stop pulling Microsoft’s leg just at AI PCs. While addressing the suggestion that future iPads should have a dual-booting capability for macOS and iPads, Craig again poked fun at Microsoft, saying “We are not trying to create a Windows 8 PC or whatever.”
He explained that Apple is not interested in creating a hybrid device, saying, “When you use your iPad Pro right now, it’s the best iPad experience you can ever imagine, and that’s worth a lot, to a lot of people.”