When Microsoft announced the Copilot+ PC and related “AI PC” branding it was a “holy crap, circle the wagons!” moment in marketing. I led a cross-functional team and we came up with “Mac is the best AI PC” as a sub-campaign of “Mac does that.” It was good marketing work! We changed the tone of the conversation from “only intel and Qualcomm are shipping AI capable chips” to “Apple is a leader in AI silicon.” It really felt like Microsoft was leaning hard into on-device AI but in the end shipped really lame features like live captions and some image generation stuff. Apple did much the same with Apple Intelligence, only now shipping modest AI features for AI prompting just in time for those features to be obsolete in the agentic era. The saving grace for Apple is Unified Memory, which was made for saving resources on low-memory iPhones, and almost accidentally came to Mac. Although Apple’s first party AI software isn’t exciting, it turned out to be the perfect architecture for AI developers and AI enthusiasts. I’m still surprised the 128GB M5 Max MacBook Pro doesn’t get as much love from Apple or the press. It’s an amazing machine for developers of all kinds AND can run all sorts of on-device AI AND it’s generally available. Even at the new price of $7,000+ it’s a bargain for what it delivers. Anyway, RIP Copilot+ PC.