a16z Podcast - Steven Sinofsky on Apple at 50, Microsoft, and the Future of Computing

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

Theo Jaffee speaks with Steven Sinofsky about Apple’s 50th anniversary and the evolution of personal computing over the last four decades. Drawing on his experience helping lead Microsoft through the Windows era, Sinofsky reflects on the cultural differences between Apple and Microsoft, the rise of the Mac, the history of Windows, and how product design, hardware integration, and software platforms shaped the modern technology industry. They also discuss the Apple Vision Pro, the new MacBook Neo, gaming, operating systems, and why some technology cycles seem to repeat themselves. Along the way, Sinofsky shares lessons from Windows, Surface, and Microsoft’s battles with Apple, offering a firsthand perspective on some of the most consequential product decisions in computing history.   Resources: Find Steven on X: https://x.com/stevesi Find Theo on X: https://x.com/theojaffee Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Having lived through like a half dozen component shortage things, you just sort of weight them out. And you don't let some local Macs or local men determine the future. This will all correct itself in short order. This world where you're all gated on dollars per token is a thing that's going to move to your own device. Which is exactly what happened with all of computing. Anytime there's a resource constraint that you have to pay for, it moves to your device and becomes free. AI introduces yet another opportunity to change that dynamic for the PC to have it be forward-looking, not backward-looking. And I think this is incredibly important opportunity for Microsoft and for the industry as a whole.

Few people have had a front row seat to the personal computing revolution, quite like Steven Sinovsky. Over nearly three decades at Microsoft, he helped shape products that defined the PC era, including Windows, Office, and surface. Along the way, he also witnessed one of the technology industry's longest running rivalries, Microsoft and Apple. As Apple celebrates its 50th anniversary, questions about product design, platforms, hardware, software, and the future of computing remain as relevant as ever. Theo Jaffe speaks with Steven Sinovsky about Apple, Microsoft, and the evolution of personal computing. I'm in the situation room with Steven Sinovsky, who might have been like the first, first ever guest on MTS back when we were still doing test streams, I think. He was the first person I interviewed on a test stream. He was the president of the Windows Division at Microsoft. He created the Surface program at Microsoft, which we have some very interesting news about today. We're thrilled to have you on. Stephen, welcome to MDS. Welcome back.

Well, thanks so much. Good to see you. Hi, everyone. Yeah, hi. First question would be Nvidia and Microsoft and Arm and a few other companies just announced something very interesting at Computex. What exactly did they announce? And what does it matter?

Sure, well, just so folks know, because it doesn't get in there as much, but Computex is this big giant trade show in Taiwan. And it's the weirdest show, because it's like this total inside. baseball, you know, Syracan supply chain show. And normally, you never

hear about it. Like, in fact, I never went to it even. I wanted to. Well, it actually turns out it was always right around the same time as a big Microsoft sales meeting. So I never went. But you can think of it as the ecosystem show for everything it

takes to build a computing device of any kind. Totally well, but Jensen in his keynote last night, did this incredible slide where he walked up and down the whole length of the stage pointing to partners that he was very excited to be there. And I would bet anyone that anyone watching

would have no idea of the companies he was pointing at. Like these are, some of them, half of the ones he pointed to as kind of being entertaining were just names of companies in traditional Chinese. And so you didn't even, like, you don't even know what they are. But it's an incredible show. it's just wild because it's such inside baseball about components and peripherals and chipsets

and assembly lines and cut and it's deals and deals and stuff. And every 10 years or so, it jumps into the mainstream, but never like the past 24 hours. Just you never see that. And actually, it was a lot like, I think it was two years ago, Jensen keynoted CES.

And I've been to 40 CESs and I'd never seen one. with such a broad media reach. Yeah, it's like Taylor Swift of the tech industry. It's so true, yeah. It's an incredible level of, it just speaks to the awareness of tech and then the awareness of AI and what Nvidia has done.

Because, I mean, like, you know, it was bigger than, like, CES Xbox was like a side show compared to this. Wow. And he's huge in China, too. Well, the show is always huge in Asia broadly Because most of the companies are there Whether they're in mainland or in Taiwan

Or in Vietnam or Singapore And that's sort of the origin of the show Like this show was like Go there and speak in Asian language forever So fascinating So the big announce though I mean look there's a zillion things going on But the one that rose to the top

Was in VINIA announcing what they called the RTX Spark Super Chip, which is a mouthful. Before the show, it was broadly called N1X, and like that's sort of the, what it is, it's a arm CPU made it with in video parallel processing graphics,

basically into one system on a chip that has a whole new memory architecture relative to the historic way that PCs had been built. And the target for it are the PC makers. So it's very, very exciting. And if you, the mainstream press, the stock market press, the CNBC going on behind me, like they all looked at this as like,

Nvidia entering the PC business, which is what's called the mainstream chip business, which is so weird because, you know, long before in the Stone Ages, which is now we're talking about 2011, we actually announced invuliumoking PCs and making the surface computer, the very first one. And it was a Competext, Google announcement, and it was a CES announcement, and it was, you know, I remember very vividly the partner slide had Nvidia and Qualcomm and Texas instruments and all the chip makers and PC makers.

So it has a ring of familiarity at, I would imagine, like, 1,100 the scale. All right, I sent you guys, you could throw it up there. I sent you the tech meme role from that day when we announced the stuff. And it was a pretty significant role. So you'll be able to throw it up at some later date. Yeah.

So in what way is this laptop more like AI-Native? So the big thing that's really changed is that the compute burden has shifted from the CPU to the graphics processor and then the associated neural processors, TPUs and those chips. And that's the thing that really changed. It's not unlike 15 years ago what had changed

was the bulk of the interesting processing had moved from the CPU to the GPU just for rendering. And where we are today is just an extension of all of that. And the difference, it's just insanely important because now that's the compute that we think everybody wants to do. Now, a lot of people will look at this and go, well, I use chat GPT, I do it on my MacBook Air, my Chromebook, my phone,

I don't really need like another thing. The problem is, and this might be aware you guys have used or heard before, but the problem is tokens. And so the problem is that everybody is gated by the concern of tokens, which cost money, where you can't get them if you're trying to use them for free. And so the interesting thing about this device is how much of compute can it move to your local device

where you basically have infinitely free tokens. And that is incredibly interesting and super important. Now, of course, you've all seen this run-up to where we are today with the stacks of Mac minis. And everybody running, their agents on minis. So why did they do that? Well, there's a whole bunch of stuff about privacy and sandboxing them, but the primary thing was if you just want to let something roll for three days while it figures out your best travel itinerary, you really don't want to end up with a

$10,000 bill. So instead, you buy, you know, three minis and let it crank away with like each mini putting something in isolation or whatever. And so, but if you just fast forward, you know, six or nine months, it's abundantly clear. And I say that as a predictor of the future, not like as a, it's obviously intellectually clear, but like, it just seems to me that this world where you're

all gated on dollars per token is a thing that's going to move to your own device. Which is exactly what happened with all of computing. Anytime there's a resource constraint that you have to pay for, it moves to your device and becomes free.

And that it just, it has, I just don't imagine I don't know how it can't happen. Sure. So for someone who wants a more AI-native device in like a year when all of these products have shipped, do you think they're going to want like an Nvidia Spark laptop or do you think they're going to want to stick with like MacBook Pro

or the rumor MacBook Ultra, which is supposed to come out later this year, early next year? Well, this is just, I mean, this is the huge thing. And the way that I think this can play out is, well, of course, you can play it out in like essentially status quo, which is, you know, the Fortune 500, 80, 20, 70, 30 rule will be able just fall to Windows devices running Intel

or maybe Spark devices running arm, but running with a Windows operating system. And then, you know, the cool people, the bosses, the elites, or whatever you call it, running their MacBook pros, pros with Chrome or Safari, just connecting things, and phones. But there's another, path where it becomes incredibly important to run highly optimized

AI stack of software on your device. And whatever that stack is is going to get optimized for a particular hardware base. And that's a thing we've seen over and over again. Now, where we are right now is just so interesting because we don't have enough information to know where things are heading. At the announcement last night,

and the press releases and the commentary, Microsoft made it clear, much to my surprise, which we could go into, that the Nvidia stack of Kuda will be available and supported and part of this spark. Now, there are a lot of ways for that to become true. It could be a download that just runs. It could be a thing that's pre-installed on a spark device.

It could be a thing that's part of the OS and updated with, Windows update and administrative permissions and all of this other stuff, it could be a whole range of things. And I still, nobody knows yet in terms of public announcing how they're going to do that. The same thing holds for Apple. And, you know, today you're on a Mac, you can run all the models locally and stuff like that. You can't really do that on a phone.

And so an interesting question is going to be, what is Apple going to do at WWDC with respect to the CUDA APIs. Like, are they going to be native? Are they going to be a thunking layer? Lots of stuff could happen there. Are they distributed? Is it an App Store app? Is it an OS component?

Nobody has any idea. Now, for both companies, the past is very interesting. And most people didn't live through this. But, Invidia has always been an outsider to the personal computer industry. It's always been an app. add on. So on the PC, if you ever wanted to use an

Nvidia graphics card, you bought the card and you downloaded drivers from Nvidia, or before that, they came on a CD or a floppy disc that came with your graphics card. And so for 30 years, this whole thing was like, do you have the latest in video drivers? Where do you get them? And we went from, you know, getting a new CD to getting a new DVD to FTP to downloading them from the web. It was whole cycle. But it was never, a first class part of Windows

until we fix that in Windows 7 and got them on Windows Update and all this other stuff. And the APIs on a PC to do graphics, you could always just download the InVdia library and call them. But the official Windows APIs

were DirectX. And they just did the same kind of thing just completely differently. That the X is Xbox. And so Microsoft was all in on the DirectX APIs. They were a huge part of Windows release called Windows Vista,

when they first got integrated, and then Windows 7 forward. Then there were the Invidia APIs, which at first were just the Invidia APIs, then they became Kruda. Then for graphics, Nvidia embraced this open thing called OpenGL. And then Apple went through the same exact thing.

On the Mac, you could download drivers, you could install an Nvidia card. But the APIs, and then they, supported OpenGL for a while, but they always wanted you to use their own stuff. And the phone did away with all of that, and Marable did away with all that, and it was all in on Apple.

Now, the good news for Apple was the native graphics were just outstanding, and they've always been great. On the PC side, Intel was so far behind that it just kept pulling both Nvidia and ATI-A-M-D to be what you used, if you used Photoshop, or made movies, or we're just graphic intensive. And so in the next few weeks, we'll know what Apple is going to do for these APIs

and more importantly, the models themselves and the runtime. I mean, Nvidia has an enormous investment in the open-source models and tuning them through their hardware. And the ecosystem has done a great job, as evidenced by the Mac minis, of tuning those APIs for the Mac. But that has nothing to do with the phone. and so that's an operating system difference.

And the number of phone people is large, and as we know, the hardware is the same. Now, it's not quite the same, blah, blah, blah, blah, amount of memory, all that stuff. But it's very interesting to see the details of Microsoft and then what Apple chooses to do. Right.

So, like, obviously we are seeing like a memory shortage, right? And like, so what do you expect the cost to a consumer of this kind of like, you know, very AI-native computing device to cost? Well, certainly for the, having lived through like a half dozen component shortage things, you just sort of weight them out. And you don't let some local Macs or local men determine the future. This will all correct itself in short order, the history of it, whether it's been, DRAM or hard drives or processor shortage, all of these things. We've had them come and go,

or even smaller components. So I'm not worried about it at all. I mean, obviously, you know, if you're thinking that you need, you know, 96 or 128 gig for a standard consumer device versus, so, the 8 on a MacBook Neo, there's a huge difference. But also that would change in the models, too.

Like right now, the models themselves are all tuned to, run in hyperscale data centers. And every month, it seems like there's a new paper that says, oh, we cleave this giant thing off of the inference pipeline. So now we don't need nearly as much for our own. So that all will get fixed. Not even an inkling of concern I have for that problem.

So another thing that was just announced yesterday was last time we talked, you were very, very excited about the MacBook Neo for Apple as like a category. defining product. Dell just came out with the new XPS 13 that is they say slightly better specs on slightly better specs on the MacCook Neo

and it's like $100 more expensive so the Neo is like what is it? It's 400 for students, 500 for everyone else. It's $599699. 599. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. This one... Yeah, the XPS 13 is 599699.9. Yeah, yeah. MacCwick Neo is 499 and 599. Yeah. So what are your takes on this? Well, first, you know, kudos to Dell.

Like, Dell is just an incredible role. And Michael Dell is just a legendary CEO. And read his book, his second book that came out during the pandemic, I think, right after or right before. It's fantastic. But the XPS 13 for a very long time was sort of my go-to laptop when friends and family and whatever would ask for one. It is like the best laptop.

And then it took a little bit of a dip and in a funky way on design. And it is actually back with a vengeance now. And so XPS 13 is the laptop to get. Now, this latest one is an attempt to build on that same chassis using Intel 30 years I can't keep track of the names

Panther Lake Python Lake something Crystal Lake I don't know what it is at some lake that's Intel names are always places I've never been and Panther Lake

Panther Lake it's the Intel there's a lot of excitement about it it does integrate some of the AI compute stuff into it but it's not going to be the target machine that

the PC ecosystem wants to sell, and its capabilities are going to be different from the ones that they do want to sell, which is different than the Neo, which has the capabilities that need to be targeted. So the Apple hardware line has a lot of homogeneity in it in terms of capability. The PCs can become really hit or miss,

and that's always been the difficulty in the PC ecosystem, is even when there's a winning machine, it's not the one that when you walk into Best Buy and say, I need to buy a computer, help me, Mr. or Mrs. Salesman, and then they just direct you to something based on Spiff and darn ads or whatever. So we'll see.

I'm sure it's a quality machine. You have the tech people on X talking about, you know, taking sides. It's either the Neo-Killer because it has an HTML port or whatever or it's like embarrassing to the PC ecosystem because regardless it still runs Windows. Those extremes are stupid. Both the Neo and this machine are targeted

at just people who need a computer. I think in five years, people who need a computer will also need a computer that runs agents. But the hardware software world will be unimaginably different in five years So this conversation has no relevance to the product lines

that will be available in five years. So wow, it goes up to 32 gigs of RAM and a terabyte of storage. It starts at 8 gigs of RAM, which is like not great, I guess. That's not a good number for a PC. Yeah. The Macs would do 8.

The PC is, you know, like I hate saying it and I truly had a bunch of these over the past month, six months or so. But I spent a lot of energy with our team on getting the memory down to two and four gigs at the time. But eight is going to be hard. Now Windows is

doing a lot of work right now on that. So we'll see where that goes. But right now, if you ask me about what PC to buy I would send you to a 16 gig PC. It takes work. It takes like techie work.

to get it down to be 8 gig reasonable. Like uninstalling a bunch of stuff, bang around, stuff that you wouldn't, you shouldn't tell anyone to do. Like, which PC would you recommend? Like a specific laptop, Dell XPS 13? I would get a Dell XPS 13. What do you think about the surface lineup right now?

Well, here, okay, look, I'm obviously not objective about the surface lineup. I think that the PC, when we design Surface, and I wrote like 80 million words on this, which everybody could go see on hardcore software, I'm not going to replay them here about what we did wrong and right, but originally, Surface was envisioned

to be those platform discontinuity in PCs. It was going to be the move to mobile chips, arm, and mobile firm factors like a tablet. We shipped it as a convertible tablet, but as a tablet. We actually did an Intel X86-based surface,

and at the time, we called it an objection handler. And it was to handle the objection of things you didn't like about the arm-based surface. You know, like that, it didn't run existing software,

it wasn't compatible with old software, or whatever. And so my heart and the strategy for Arm was always to introduce this discontinuity where, look, the world is different now. The hardware world is different now. The usage scenarios are different now, and portability is different. People want better battery life. They don't want fans. They don't want viruses and all that other

stuff. Didn't Nick? I moved down to San Francisco area to attack the founders and stuff. And what Microsoft did was sort of basically abandoned Arm for the next eight-year or so, and focus on the objection handler side of things. So all the surfaces that followed were, in my mind, a niche product because they were just like different Intel PCs that weren't super important to me. I mean, I had brought each one of them, but they weren't important to me. AI introduces yet another opportunity to change that dynamic for the PC to have it be forward-looking

not backward looking. And I think this is incredibly important opportunity for Microsoft and for the industry as a whole. But the wire, it's different like it was in 2011 in that it's mobile chips and the scenarios different. Even more so, 80% of the typical PC buyers are just running browser-based compute, and they just want the keyboard,

the Ford Factor, And they like Macs because they don't wear down over time. They have all their battery life for real. They have the viruses in malware or a whole different game. It's sort of this sealed case that we used to call it. PCs that did move to Arm also thwarted all of the Windows APIs, which was the thing we chose not to do. So now the new PCs running Arm are just the old PCs with the same

viruses, the same problems with fans, the same lack of quality over time. Like, you know, the classic Windows thing is, or you could just go edit the registry. Well, if you have an RMP, you can still go edit the registry, and you could still hork your PC totally, and then you're screwed. And so, I just don't think that backward-looking is the thing,

which brings us to Rast Knight and all the X comments on the Spark laptops. and everybody immediately jumping to two things. First, Nvidia announced that they're all going to run all existing Windows programs, which of course just follows from Microsoft strategy of wording Lynn32 to ARM,

which wasn't hard. We'd already done it. It was just opening up the dev tools and the ability to load the apps and things, which we've disabled for ARM because we wanted to move the ecosystem forward to a new OS API. But then the other,

the other part of this is is just how how you spin the whole thing in terms of backward compatibility and then they said oh it runs every single app of all time it's like yeah but you don't want to do that

and more importantly the second thing is you don't need it anymore but all of the enthusiasts are going nuts because they see it as Intel being replaced by by Nvidia, which is conceptually true,

except not really, it's just an alternative. And what you're going to see in the marketplace is just sort of this price comparison. And Intel and Nvidia are just going to drive the prices to each other, and only one of them can really afford the battle. But that doesn't change the value proposition for consumers, which is what they really want

is to not have that backward compatibility. They just don't know it. If they got a PC, without a fan that you couldn't edit their industry, you couldn't break it, you couldn't just go into the system folder and delete stuff,

all of these things that you don't even think about on a Mac anymore, and you don't even think about, you can't even think about it on a phone. You don't want them on the PC. And so it's tough for me to see Microsoft sort of embracing this because I mean,

I understand, like if you want to sell the enterprise, you have to run that VB app from 2003, but that's not, you don't, don't need to do that. You could just put it on a server and remote, remote into it. You could put it in a VM on an X-86 machine. There's a million ways to do that. You just don't need to run it on the machine that you want to run your agents on. And in the short term, everybody is going to be running terminal anyway. And these agents in today's agents are all headless anyway. That will change

too. But right now, that's the big, we get this fork in the road. And Microsoft has already said the direction that they want to take it, which is they just want Nvidia chips to do all the things that Windows has always done, which always tests wear with customers until you say the customers are like, yeah, but those registry editors and admin

scripts and stuff, really screwed us up. And like, we know, we know this. So it's tough for me to see. Yeah. Well, we're really excited for the Nvidia Spark laptops to come out later this year. We'll see if it can replace my MacBook. Yeah. I'm not sure.

We'll do a tech review on stream. I have the, I mean, you can see what it's going to be like if you just have the spark that you can get from Dell today. That's the mini device. I have one of those, and it's incredible. I mean, it's just, it's, and there's a tower as well. All right, well, we'll take a look at that. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us.

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