SIRI vs.
CORTANA
In the battle of voice assistants,
the obvious winner is Apple’s
Siri, right? After all, voice
control is most commonly used
on mobile devices and last year
Microsoft actually ditched its
Cortana app for Apple iOS and
Google Android devices. Cortana
was also nixed on the Xbox
console back in 2019.
Around the same time,
Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella,
made it clear that Cortana was
no longer going to compete
directly with Siri or, indeed,
Google Assistant and Amazon
Alexa in the AI assistant market.
Instead, Nadella saw Cortana
becoming a more specialized
service that integrated withhroughout the years, for better
and for worse, the PC has
remained faithful to the x86 line of
central processing units. Indeed, an
x86 CPU is central to the definition
of what it is to be a PC. Meanwhile,
the Mac has been architecturally
more mercurial.
The original Macs ran Motorola
68000 series CISC chips, with the
first major shift in CPU architecture
coming in 1994 and the move to
PowerPC RISC processors. That
generation of Macs lasted another
12 years until Apple famously made
the jump in 2006 to Intel x86 CPUs,
ensuring the Mac was on a par with
the PC in terms of performance and
platform features.
In November 2020, Apple made
what could be its final transition
to processors designed in-house,
known collectively as Apple silicon.
We’ll dig into the performance
comparison in the next section, but
suffice to say that Apple silicon is
a huge leap forward over the Intel
chips it replaced.
Of course, CPUs are just one
aspect of the hardware comparison.
For many users, build quality,
features, and form matter just as
much, maybe more. Historically,
Apple computers tend to be better
built and offer certain specific
features or functionality that can’t
be had in other machines, while the
PC counters with more choice and a
wider range of forms and features.
That’s pretty much how things
are today. Few, if any, PCs can
compete with the sheer physical
quality of Apple’s current desktop
and laptop computers. Numerous
PC manufacturers, for instance,
have mimicked Apple’s unibody
laptop engineering, in which the
main chassis is machined out of
a single piece of alloy, typically
aluminum. But none have created
laptop PCs with the same rigidity
and sense of hewn-from-solid-rock
integrity as Apple’s MacBooks.
Apple’s latest MacBook Pro
14-inch and 16-inch systems also
offer displays powered by mini-LED
backlights with insane 1,600-nit
peak brightness and exceptional
image quality. They also have
better speakers than any PC laptop.
Likewise, the Mac Mini is one of the
slickest mini desktop computersac computers are often
criticized for their punitive
pricing. When you consider that a
current Mac Pro starts at $6,000,
it’s not hard to see why. That’s for a
machine running an ancient eight-
core Intel Xeon chip from 2019. But
it’s a workstation-class system and
soon to be replaced. Compared
with high-end workstations
from the biggest PC brands,
some Mac Pro configurations have
been competitive and may be again
when they move to Apple silicon
later this year.
Apple’s MacBook systems can
offer decent value, depending on
how you configure them, but that
configurability is the problem.
Macs offer few options and Apple
charges prohibitively for ones that
are available. Want to upgrade a
MacBook Air from 256GB of storage
to 512GB? That will cost $200. What
about system memory or RAM? Add
another $200 on the MacBook Air
for the jump from 8GB to 16GB and
what looks like a decent deal for the
base $999 MacBook Air becomes
$1399. Meanwhile, even an 8GB to
16GB upgrade for a PC like a Dell
XPS 13 laptop costs around $100.
Adding 8GB to a user-upgradeable
laptop PC will cost less than $40.HARDWARE VALUE
on the market and if
there’s a full-sized
desktop PC that
matches the sheer
material quality of
the current Mac
Pro, we haven’t
seen it.
L i ke w i s e ,
because Apple has full control of
the specifications of its computers,
it can maintain certain standards.
High DPI ‘retina’ displays and the
visual clarity that comes with that
are a good example. It’s not that you
can’t have high DPI on the PC. But
with a Mac, it’s now standard where
a display is included and therefore
something you don’t have to worry
about or understand in detail. On
the PC, it’s far more hit and miss.
Yet, Apple’s systems can’t come
close to matching the breadth of
features and capabilities of the
PC. One example is touchscreen
functionality. Apple has decided
that it knows best and so the Mac
doesn’t do touch. You simply can’t
have a MacBook with a touchscreen.
You also can’t have a Mac with an
OLED panel, a detachable screen,
pen input, in tablet form, with
RGB lighting, and until the recent
update, even basic items like HDMI
ports and card readers weren’t in
the Apple MacBook mix. As for the
desktop market, the current Mac
Pro is one of the last remaining
Intel-powered Apple computers
and is, therefore, due to be replaced
imminently. It’s a nicely engineered
box and fairly configurable by
Apple standards. But compared
to the breadth of forms and the
choice of components available
for desktop PCs, it simply doesn’t
compare. Take graphics cards as
one example. Currently, you can’t
have Nvidia GPUs in an Apple Mac.
Which is a sentiment that prevails
generally. Apple’s computers are
fine machines. But if Apple doesn’t
sell the size or type of computer
you’re after, with the features and
functionality you want, then you’re
clean out of luck. Meanwhile, PCs
of pretty much any size, shape, and
specification you can imagine are
available. It’s you, the customer,
that gets to dictate the shape and
spec of your machine. With Macs,
Apple knows best.WINNER
Apple Macs
are more
consistently
high quality,
but the PC has
so much more
choice in terms
of systems,
form factors,
components and
capabilities.T
Intel’s new 12th
Generation
Alder Lake CPUs
are exclusive
to the PC.M
PC vs Mac
50 MAXIMU MPC APR 2022