TOP STORIES #53

MWC is now done, and we are now back to a more normal news week.......

Last Week's TOP STORIES #52 can be found here.

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Hardware

Is ARM with Microsoft catching up with Apple?

With the new Snapdragon X benchmarks appearing online, it looks like Apple is in for some more competition - but not anytime soon as the problem is developers need to make sure their apps will run on the ARM version of Windows. You can read more about the challenges here.

Microsoft launching AI PC's in March

Microsoft is going to be releasing Surface 10 and Laptop 6 this month and will be the first from Microsoft with the new AI silicone from Intel and Qualcomm. Microsoft is also likely to demonstrate the new features expected to roll out in Windows 11 24H2. You can read more here.

More news on Arrow Lake

Intel is going to be releasing more details on what we can expect from Meteor-Lake's successor, Arrow Lake, at Computex in June, though we can only expect it in volume in 2025, just as we start getting our hands on Meteor Lake Core Ultra CPUs (see Microsoft announcement above). Because of the accelerated release cycle, it is very important not to lock yourself into buying computers with a specific generation of CPU for anything longer than a year.

After Arrow Lake is Lunar Lake and then there is AMD

It looks like though Intel is on track (Note the embedded MLID YouTube video) for us to see Lunar Lake in 2025 which will bring major performance improvements over anything we see today, AMD is likely to take the lead from Intel very soon as well. It is very important going forward to consider Intel and AMD equally in your choice of new hardware; however, if you are using vPro from Intel, that could limit your choice.

Microsoft

CoPilot can now read your files

This is a good thing! Microsoft is rolling out this feature that gives it the ability to "read" your files on your PC allowing you to interrogate it on matters relating to contents of the documents. You can read more about this here.

Android App support on Windows 11 is no more

Though this has taken everybody by surprise, it seems the project was doomed to fail because Amazon and Microsoft could not get enough apps to run from the store. Google walking away from the venture sealed it's fate. You can read more here.

Cloud & AI

Anthropic surpasses GPT-4 and Gemini

The AI wars continue with Anthropic announcing Claude 3 that surpasses the capabilities of it's competitors. You can expect a lot of this to happen every couple of months. You can read more here.

Maybe you do NOT need a plan for AI?

Here is a very interesting article to ponder posted by a columnist from InfoWorld. I think he has point, AI is moving too fast for you "bake" plans that take a long time (like 6 months) to show results. You need to be adaptable, and most importantly start small and stay agile constantly open to new ideas. It is worth reading to help formulate your approach to seeing how you can get value out of AI in your business.

Weirdness of prompting AI's

In line with not having a fixed plan to deploy AI, here is a very interesting article written by Ethan Mollick explaining that prompting an AI to do a task is not as obvious as you may think, and encouraging people to experiment is very important indeed to get the best results. It is also important to recognise that GPT-4 is already beating most humans when it comes to creative thinking, so it is very important to start going down this rabbit hole with AI in your business especially encouraging people to be creative in how the prompt an AI for help and even asking the AI to help develop better prompts!

You can read more here about how you get better responses from AI's when you trick them into thinking they are something else.

Microsoft is really killing Outlook

Please refer to what I published in TOP STORIES #52 (warning about the "New Outlook"). Microsoft has just released more information confirming that the "Old Outlook" is really on it's way out, with "good news" that the Old version will still be supported up to 2029. You can read more about this updated roadmap here. For all users who are already using the online version of Outlook, they are actually already "migrated", but for everybody else who has been using the "Old Outlook", things are going to change dramatically. Redmondmag has published more details and commentary on these plans here, which I recommend you read.