The Mac vs. PC war just took an unexpected turn

By Willow Roberts Published June 3, 2024

Justin Long sits with a MacBook and drinks tea. — Willow Roberts / Digital Trends

He’s still thought of as the “I’m a Mac” guy by many, but Justin Long has been working with everyone but Apple in recent years — Huawei, Intel, and now Qualcomm. In a surprise 30-second video shown during Qualcomm’s Computex keynote, Long was caught searching for a Snapdragon-powered PC to replace his MacBook.

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In the original Apple TV commercials broadcast almost two decades ago, Long’s “Mac guy” character teased John Hodgman’s “PC guy” character about everything Macs could do better than PCs. The saga continued when Apple got Hodgman back to talk about the M1 chips in 2020, and Intel responded by hiring Long to mock Apple’s Touch Bar in 2021.

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In this new skit, the “Mac guy” spots us watching him search “Where can I find a snapdragon powered PC?” — and all he has to say is, “What? Things change.”

It’s a nice line, announcing that it’s now the PC guy’s turn to win the war. Long’s return is a fun and unexpected sight, and the perfect way to show that the Mac-PC war is 100% back on.

During the video, Long swipes at annoying macOS notifications warning him about app incompatibility and battery — implying that the new Snapdragon-powered Windows on Arm PCs expect to outdo the competition in these areas. And indeed, Microsoft has released plenty of claims and benchmarks for the new Copilot+ PCs in recent weeks.

In terms of app compatibility, a lot of big names have already recompiled their apps for ARM, including Zoom, Adobe Lightroom, and Google Chrome. Overall, Microsoft says it expects 90% of all user time to be spent on native apps. As for the rest, Microsoft is confident that its emulator app, Prism, is just as efficient as Apple’s Rosetta 2.

As for battery life, Microsoft showed the new Surface Copilot+ PC survive 16 hours and 56 minutes of web browsing, doubling the attempt of one of its Intel-based predecessors.

June 18th is the release date for a number of the new Copilot+ PCs, including the new Surface laptop, so we only have to wait a little longer to find out whether this war is truly about to get interesting again.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Willow Roberts has been a Computing Writer at Digital Trends for a year and has been writing for about a decade. She has a…

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