Microsoft

Nvidia has overtaken AAPL in the market cap stakes, as its valuation exceeded $3T. The company’s rise in value has been truly spectacular, increasing from $2T back in February to more than $3T just four months later.

The company is now challenging Microsoft for the title of most valuable company in the world, and for the same reason …

Microsoft has a target on Apple’s back with its AI-centric Copilot Plus PC models. When the computers were announced, the company repeatedly claimed that they outperformed the latest M3 MacBook Airs. Today a new ad campaign sought to further entice switchers away from the Mac.

It turns out, not every aspect of the Copilot Plus PCs is ready for prime time. The hallmark AI feature Microsoft formerly demoed, Recall, has been exposed by an expert as being a security disaster.

Copilot is a chatbot based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 developed by Microsoft. It has been integrated into many Microsoft products, including Office and Bing. And now, even Telegram users can take advantage of Copilot through a bot that works right from the messaging app.

Two new laptops announced yesterday are being touted as “Microsoft’s MacBook Air,” with the company claiming that they offer similar performance to the M3 MacBook Air, with even greater battery life.

But commentators have been quick to point out that this isn’t a like-for-like comparison. A key feature of the MacBook Air is it achieves its impressive performance without the need for cooling fans, so a fairer comparison would be with the MacBook Pro …

Today Microsoft unveiled a new lineup of PCs centered around AI, complete with advanced AI-driven features like Recall, a tool that keeps track of everything you’ve ever done on your screen so you can easily revisit it later.

Microsoft was especially eager to show how its new ARM-based PCs could outperform Apple’s M3 MacBook Airs, both in sheer performance as well as battery life. The Mac vs. PC fires were very much being stoked in this presentation.

Coordinating teams and in-office days in our new normal of hybrid work is a difficult task, and one that carries a lot of untapped potential for productivity tools. Today Microsoft announced the public preview launch of Places, a new app a couple years in the making that aims to use AI to assist teams in syncing their in-office time.

We learned late last year that a Microsoft iOS app store was in the works, and the company has now announced that this will launch in July.

Initially, it will be limited to Microsoft’s own games, but will later open up to other iPhone game developers, giving them an alternative outlet to Apple’s official App Store …

Microsoft on Tuesday launched a native OneNote app for visionOS, showing the company’s commitment to its customers who use Apple Vision Pro. This comes after the company released Microsoft Office apps for Apple’s mixed reality headset.

While Microsoft pushes Office 365 subscriptions hard, it has so far retained the option of one-off purchases of new editions – and it has confirmed that this will also be available for Office 2024 for Mac.

The other good news is that we’re expecting the price to be unchanged from Office 2021 for Mac …

Redmond, start your photocopiers! After recently innovating Windows with center-aligned, bottom-docked apps, Microsoft is catching up with macOS in a more useful way. Tom Warren at The Verge reports that Windows 11 is gaining the ability to use a phone as a webcam. 

In September, Bloomberg reported that Apple had held exploratory talks with Microsoft about acquiring Bing as recently as 2020. In newly unsealed court filings this week, more details about the acquisition talks between Apple and Microsoft have surfaced.

Apple’s new app store terms have come under fire for what many are describing as ‘malicious compliance’ with the EU’s Digital Markets Act – that is, technically complying with the antitrust law while completely negating its intent.

A new report says that both Meta and Microsoft have now lobbied the EU, asking it to reject Apple’s new terms as “onerous” and “prohibitive” …

Microsoft isn’t thrilled with Apple’s proposed changes to the App Store and the iPhone in the European Union. The company says Apple’s proposed changes are a “step in the wrong direction,” echoing criticism from the likes of Spotify and Epic Games.

A few Windows laptops are already powered by ARM CPUs rather than Intel ones, but we can expect to see a lot more in the future.

A new report says that Microsoft is accelerating efforts to overcome the current limitations of these, so that more PC brands can follow Apple’s example in using ARM chips …

It was confirmed back in September that Apple will need to comply with antitrust requirements relating to app sales, and it seems most likely this will require the company to allow third-party app stores on iPhones. Microsoft has now indicated its intention to run one of these.

One key driver for the plan is likely Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of mobile gaming giant Activision Blizzard …

While Windows laptop users like to think they have their own version of Touch ID, it appears not to offer the same level of security. The Windows Hello fingerprint authentication system on the top three laptops to use it has been put to the test by security researchers – and all three failed.

To be fair, the team was carrying out the penetration tests at the request of Microsoft – but it was a Microsoft Surface product that turned out to be easiest to bypass …

While not exactly our normal beat, it’s hard to ignore the biggest tech news of the day: the OpenAI drama which saw CEO Sam Altman abruptly fired from the ChatGPT developer. This happened without notice, and for reasons we can guess but which were not stated.

Latest updates: Almost all of the company’s 770 staff have now threatened to quit unless the board resigns and reinstates Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, and it appears that their return to the company is now a strong possibility – more at the bottom …

While you can’t run Windows through Boot Camp on Apple Silicon Macs, there are still several ways to run Windows apps on Macs. But you can now also do the same on iPhone and iPad, using a new official Windows app.

Microsoft’s new app – which is currently available in beta form – lets you run a remote Windows PC and stream the output to your Apple device …

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had his day in court today, where he answered for Bing’s inability to compete with Google Search. In his view, Apple’s Google Search deal protects Safari from being killed by Chrome.

Microsoft has announced plans to discontinue Visual Studio for Mac. The latest version of the company’s IDE (integrated development environment) for Mac will continue to be supported by Microsoft through August 2024.