All computer manufacturers swear: 2024 will be the year of laptops boosted by artificial intelligence. Apple already boasts of offering “the best consumer laptop for AI”, with the MacBook Air M3. Is that the case ? What is, concretely, today, the best laptop to benefit from artificial intelligence on a daily basis?
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On my left, one of the new Windows PCs from Samsung, the Galaxy Book 4 360, convertible into a tablet, starting at €1,799. On my right, one of the first Chromebook Plus from Asus, the CX3402 at €449. And in the center, the MacBook Air M3 starting at €1,299.
To pretend to do AI on a laptop, locally, without connection to a Cloud, you first need power: a lot of power and specific power. The capabilities for AI depend on the processor and the presence – or not – of what is called a “neural engine”, a kind of brain in the chip.
MacBook Air M3: a neural engine for AI at a reasonable price
On this level, advantage, indeed to the MacBook Air M3. Macs come with what Apple calls a Neural Engine for three and a half years. And this third generation would be 60% more powerful than the first, according to the manufacturer.
We can say that the range is ready to handle the AI-based processing needs which are expected to increase exponentially this year. Unsurprisingly, on the Asus Chromebook Plus, the Intel Core i3 chip is sufficient to run Chrome OS, Google’s operating system, and applications that need an Internet connection – that’s the principle of Chromebooks – but little more.
Between the two, we find the Galaxy Book 4 360, with its latest generation Intel Core 7 processor (the 14th), but without a component dedicated to AI that the basic Intel graphics processor manages as best it can. In our comparison, however, it is the most expensive of the three laptops, in particular because of its touch screen which can be flipped over to transform the PC into a tablet, and which the MacBook Air does not have.
The power of the Samsung PC, applied to artificial intelligence, is just capable of blurring the background for a video conference or automatically refocusing you in the image. To do high-dose AI, and in particular image generation, locally, it will be necessary to aim for the Ultra model which embeds a real neural processing unit (NPU, acronym for Neural Processing Unit) and an NVIDIA graphics card, the benchmark for AI, but it is twice as expensive: €3,499 minimum.
Windows 11 and Microsoft ahead of Apple and macOS
Let’s come to the second requirement for doing AI, locally, on a laptop: operating systems and applications. On this point, advantage, in this mid-April 2024 in any case, to Samsung’s Galaxy Book 4 360. It is based on Windows 11 in which Microsoft, partner of OpenAI and chatGPT, has integrated its Copilot AI, as well as in Office, its office suite, before new announcements, scheduled for May 21.
On Chromebook Plus, no miracle, even if Google praises the capacities and the power of these laptops, multiplied by two for AI according to the promoter of the Chromebook Plus concept, with new announcements probable during the Google I/O conference which will start on May 14.
And on the MacBook Air M3, artificial intelligence is present, but still relatively discreetly, pending June 10, and highly anticipated announcements at the opening of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC24).
In the end, my advice would above all be to wait: for the start of the school year for PCs to discover, without doubt, the first real AI laptops based on the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor that everyone is talking about; the end of the year for Macs, with undoubtedly the first Apple computers to feature the future M4 processor, which is said to have been greatly redesigned for artificial intelligence.