Microsoft hasn't been cool in decades. They might have had a week back when Windows 7 came out, and another when Win10 arrived, but that's about it. Apple gets a lot more leeway because they've been effective at presenting themselves as the cool choice for years. It's a pretty impressive feat, since I'd expect an entire generation would associate them with "the crappy computer lab your school district couldn't afford to upgrade, but could lock down to make it even less fun."

As you said, they can do some incredible stuff. I can't debate that VSCode is a spectacular product, and it's winning because it's being politely presented as an option. But when they start every interaction with 'we're going to cram this down your throat until you stop clicking "maybe later"' -- people are not going to be too eager for your products.

What‘s more amazing is the chronic anti-Apple stance of many Android/Windows fanboys and fangirls. It‘s like the Steve Ballmer iPhone-release-interview all over again.

Apple and Microsoft are just two very different companies as they always have been. One is a software company that regularly fails with its hardware products and has now turned towards using its users to harvest data at a nightmarish privacy scale, massively investing in a „fuck copyrights“-AI company.

The other is a company that has perfected a hardware-software ecosystem and is more and more creating huge turnovers with services that complement said ecosystem. What you‘ve missed to mention is Apple‘s SoC that still leave the competition in panic mode because of power and power efficiency. MS has tried to establish ARM as a hardware basis more than once and is failing miserably again and again, while Apple has eased everyone into a promising ARM future. This is also the reason for the MS-Intel-Copilot partnership. Two failing companies (in certain areas, for MS) don‘t make a success.

Why can‘t both companies be successful in very different ways?

I would expect them to rebound by building incredibly efficient ai optimized chips and embedding those into their future devices.

On a macro level apple has disappointed recently. I think the apple car was my biggest disappointment.

AI integrated into your PC, means cooperating with an AI to use your PC. this also restricts your[sic] AI.

your AI should go with you and saddle into task specific hardware, be that a home automation bus, LAN dock, automobile, or roomba-iod R2 like unit.

your AI should be your wingman and have your back. but being an agent capable of deciding without your input, there should be a way of training acceptable bounds into your AI. [yes that is looking like a mobile]

likewise there should be physical restraint when it gets a "bad idea"

Forget about "useful AI people will pay for"; the limitations of these NPUs and the immaturity of the software stacks necessary to target them means it's hard to get anything running well enough to be a cool tech demo. Good enough that people would use it for free is still a ways off, and good enough to be worth paying extra for may not even be possible on the NPU hardware Intel and AMD are currently shipping.