No, the New MacBook Air is Not Faster Than 98% of PC Laptops (pcworld.com) 249
Gordon Mah Ung, writing at PC World: Let me just say it outloud, OK? Apple is full of it. I'm referring to Apple's claim that its fanless, Arm-based MacBook Air is "faster than 98 percent of PC laptops." Yes, you read that correctly: Apple officials literally claimed that the new MacBook Air using Apple's custom M1 chip is faster than 98 percent of all PC laptops sold this year. Typically, when a company makes such a claim, it publishes a benchmark, a performance test or actual details on what it's basing that marketing claim on. This to prevent lawyers from launching out of missile silos across the world. Apple's website restates the claim by stating: "M1 is faster than the chips in 98 percent of PC laptops sold in the past year." The site also includes a detail note that states: "Testing conducted by Apple in October 2020 using preproduction 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with Apple M1 chip and 16GB of RAM. Performance measured using select industry-standard benchmarks. PC configurations from publicly available sales data over the last 12 months. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect approximate performance of MacBook Pro."
So, not only does Apple not say what tests it's basing its claims on, it doesn't even say where it sources the comparable laptops. Does that mean the new fanless MacBook Air is faster than, say, Asus' stupidly fast Ryzen 4000 based, GeForce RTX 2060-based Zephyrus G14? Does it mean the MacBook Air is faster than Alienware's updated Area 51M? The answer, I'm going to guess is "no." Not at all. Is it faster than the miniLED-based MSI Creator 17? Probably not, either. And what is that "performance" claim hinged on? CPU performance? GPU performance? Performance running Windows? Is it using the same application running on both platforms? Is it experiential? Is this running Red Dead Redemption II or Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War? Is it running CyberLink's PowerDirector? Is it running Fortnite? While I have absolutely no idea what Apple is basing its claims on, I can tell you that I am 98 percent sure that any of the above laptops listed will wreck the MacBook Air doing any of the tasks I just named.
When Apple makes its claims, my guess is they are comparing the new M1 to Intel-based processors ranging from Atom to Celeron N to Core i3 and up, all with integrated graphics. But by not defining the word "performance," all this becomes just pure marketing spin. And is it really fair to compare a $999 MacBook to one that costs $150? Because $150 PCs are included in the 98 percent of laptops sold. Maybe Apple should compare its own $150 MacBook Air against a $150 Chromebook or Windows-based laptop. Of course, that would mean Apple would have to sell a product that most people can afford. I have no doubt the M1 will be impressive, but do I think it's going to compare to 8-cores of Ryzen 4000 performance or a GeForce RTX 2060? No.
So, not only does Apple not say what tests it's basing its claims on, it doesn't even say where it sources the comparable laptops. Does that mean the new fanless MacBook Air is faster than, say, Asus' stupidly fast Ryzen 4000 based, GeForce RTX 2060-based Zephyrus G14? Does it mean the MacBook Air is faster than Alienware's updated Area 51M? The answer, I'm going to guess is "no." Not at all. Is it faster than the miniLED-based MSI Creator 17? Probably not, either. And what is that "performance" claim hinged on? CPU performance? GPU performance? Performance running Windows? Is it using the same application running on both platforms? Is it experiential? Is this running Red Dead Redemption II or Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War? Is it running CyberLink's PowerDirector? Is it running Fortnite? While I have absolutely no idea what Apple is basing its claims on, I can tell you that I am 98 percent sure that any of the above laptops listed will wreck the MacBook Air doing any of the tasks I just named.
When Apple makes its claims, my guess is they are comparing the new M1 to Intel-based processors ranging from Atom to Celeron N to Core i3 and up, all with integrated graphics. But by not defining the word "performance," all this becomes just pure marketing spin. And is it really fair to compare a $999 MacBook to one that costs $150? Because $150 PCs are included in the 98 percent of laptops sold. Maybe Apple should compare its own $150 MacBook Air against a $150 Chromebook or Windows-based laptop. Of course, that would mean Apple would have to sell a product that most people can afford. I have no doubt the M1 will be impressive, but do I think it's going to compare to 8-cores of Ryzen 4000 performance or a GeForce RTX 2060? No.
Just because you don't like the metric they picked (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Just because you don't like the metric they pic (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the old adage: "statistics never lie, but you can make them say whatever you want."
Re:Just because you don't like the metric they pic (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the old adage: "statistics never lie, but you can make them say whatever you want."
I don't see any statistics being mentioned - either by Apple, or by this "author". In fact, this "author" seems to be doing exactly what he derides Apple for doing - engaging in a lot of vague statements.
Don't get me wrong - I expect Apple is full of it. And it seems like in some ways they're taken a step backward (no eGPU support, max 16GB of RAM), which makes me wonder if these may have been rushed out the door.
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Anandtech has a nice deep dive into the A14, which sheds some light on what to expect from M1.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive [anandtech.com]
Re:Just because you don't like the metric they pic (Score:5, Insightful)
Right: "Apple, it's faster than 98% of PC laptops.* ** *** "
PC Magazine: "Nice try, Apple! There's no way it's faster than these 3 laptops which are clearly in the top 0.5%!"
I'm not saying that Apple isn't making dubious claims, just that this author managed to scrape up even more dubious counterarguments from the same rhetorical dumpster. Anybody not willing to admit that isn't being intellectually honest.
Perhaps the dumbest argument (Score:5, Insightful)
Quoting the article: ...
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No, the New MacBook Air is Not Faster Than 98% of PC Laptops
is it really fair to compare a $999 MacBook to one that costs $150?
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The author might be surprised to learn that with 462 horsepower, Mercedes-Benz AMG GT R ($208,886) is in fact faster than 98% of cars on the road. More expensive - yes, that too. And faster. Being more expensive doesn't make it "not faster".
The Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat, with over 700 horsepower, is also faster than 98% of cars on the road. And slightly more expensive, at $69,000.
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Re: Just because you don't like the metric they pi (Score:2)
You may know how to defend against misleading statistics, but that does not absolve the misleader.
The adage holds.
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I concede your point.
Who are you and what did you do with the real Internet?
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It's the old adage: "statistics never lie, but you can make them say whatever you want."
I recall it being, "Statistics will say anything you want if tortured long enough."
Re: Just because you don't like the metric they pi (Score:2)
Apple has a sub $1k laptop? I thought they were known for charging a premium for both their name and not skimping on hardware?
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The Air is under $1k if you're buying with an educational discount. That's about it.
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The MacBook Air is under 1K$USD for everyone!
After all, 999$USD is under 1000$USD...
Yeah, I also hate those stupid ending-in-99 prices.
Most laptops are cheap laptops (Score:3)
Used by ordinary people, students. $500 ones. That work OK.
So certainly the expensive Apple ones are faster than Most laptops. But 98% is just nonsense, in Australia they could be prosecuted for false advertisment.
Re: Most laptops are cheap laptops (Score:2)
Really? At some point shouldnt the fool that falls for it hold some accountability?
Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool that follows him?
I get advertising some vitamin cures cancer, but subjective embellishments?
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The M1-powered Macbook Air is faster than 98%* of laptops.
* 98% as measured by 2020 sales volume.
The difference being that 98% by 2020 sales volume might be true, whereas 98% by distinct models available in 2020 would not. ACMA wouldn't pursue them based on a sales volume claim.
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They achieve the speed with a new variation of the butterfly keyboard called the Butterfinger Keyboard that adds CPU strokes when you type.
Type fast? Then you can out do 98% of typists and achieve superior performance over slower typists. Try it and see if I'm lying.
Re: Just because you don't like the metric they pi (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has a sub $1k laptop? I thought they were known for charging a premium for both their name and not skimping on hardware?
The current gen Intel Macbook Air starts at $999, and can be found on sale for less. I picked one up for testing some MDM stuff with last month for $899 at BestBuy for instance.
Honestly if you do an Apple to apples comparison, their laptop prices are not really much more expensive than a comparable laptop (CPU, RAM, SSD, screen resolution, battery life, weight/size, build materials, etc) from say Dell's XPS line or Lenovo X1 line. Now if you can do without "thin and light" and can live with some plastic instead of aluminum, magnesium, or carbon fiber body materials, then you can get much better bang for the buck. Of course you also need to want to use MacOS but that's a personal preference some people apparently have. Not really my cup of tea but for what most people use laptops for it probably doesn't really matter.
Re: Just because you don't like the metric they p (Score:2)
Apples to apples eh? ;-)
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Apple has a sub $1k laptop? I thought they were known for charging a premium for both their name and not skimping on hardware?
With minimal storage and memory. For significantly more that $1k, you max out at 16Gig of memory. The intel macbook I'm typing this on has 64Gig of DRAM and 2T of flash. The max spec M1 macbook on the Apple web site today cannot handle the in memory working set of the algorithms I run. So I see it in the same class as chromebooks, albeit with a nicer case.
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Your comment is dumber than 98% of all comments on Slashdot this year.
Re:Just because you don't like the metric they pic (Score:5, Insightful)
The opening rant here is clearly inspired by someone that has limited reading comprehension skills.
The statement "M1 is faster than the chips in 98 percent of PC laptops sold in the past year," is clearly looking at overall sales trends. It's not saying it's faster than 98% of all models available, just 98% of all PC laptops sold in the past year.
Know what 98% of laptops sold are? Cheap shit bought to surf, email and vid chat with friends. Especially in the past year where even computer n00bs are looking for a good way to keep in touch with people during lockdowns. I've got several relatives I've helped through the purchase process that bought commodity PCs in the $300 range. I'm sure the new M1 based Apples smoke the crap out of most PCs in that range.
I'd be far more curious to see how it stacks up against PCs in the same price range, but marketing most likely won't be involved in publishing that data. We'll have to wait for the benchmark folks to get ahold of a few of them first.
Re: Just because you don't like the metric they pi (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just because you don't like the metric they pic (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Just because you don't like the metric they pic (Score:4, Insightful)
From the PC World article
but do I think it’s going to compare to 8-cores of Ryzen 4000 performance
to which the answer is yes, apparently (comparable at least). Against a honking dedicated GPU. Not yet.
Interesting times we live in. AMD seems to be doing quite well (again), and Intel, not so much.
Re: Just because you don't like the metric they pi (Score:2)
One can conclude that this is 98% claim is bullshit purely from the fact that Apple itself left the higher end of its lineup on Intel. So M1 really does not make sense in that segment. At the same time in PC world, comparable gaming laptop sales account to well over 2%. Add to this high end BIM workstations, etc.
Re: Just because you don't like the metric they p (Score:2)
Apple doesn't update their entire line at once. This was just the first batch. Expect Mx chips to find their way into the rest of the Mac lineup over time as other models are refreshed. I bet there will be an M1 iMac next year, and probably an M2X (or some such) Mac Pro and iMac Pro soon after.
Re: Just because you don't like the metric they (Score:2)
That may be. But the fact remins that M1 is not even the fastest chip in 98% of *macs* sold today. Let alone all pcs.
The gist (Score:4, Informative)
"the average selling price of personal computers in 2019 was 632 U.S. dollars or 733 U.S. dollars in constant currency. Overall, the average PC selling price in recent years has been relatively constant at around 630 actual U.S. dollars."
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
(I don't see anything on that page indicating whether "average" here means mean or median).
So the $150 part is an extreme example. Nevertheless $999 is around 50% more than $632.
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"Macbook Air is faster than 98% of laptops sold" is a statement applying to an entire population of laptops sold, not a mean. Therefore it includes cheap laptops, average laptops and expensive laptops. Apple is claiming suzerainty over them all.
Just like a really smart kid who scores at the 98th percentile in the SATs is smarter than 98% of the entire kid population, including the really dumb kids, the average kids, and some of the smart kids.
Re:The gist (Score:4, Insightful)
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The real metric would be to see if the Macbook Air was faster than even 1% of Laptops sold if the performance was weigted by cost of laptop. Apple sells luxury products.
First, that's not what Apple claims. They claim "faster than 98% of all laptops sold", and that claim is very realistic, while PC World's counter argument is garbage.
But now to your claim: The MacBook Air beats Apple's quad core laptops, and it is most likely to beat all or almost all quad core PCs. And when you look at laptops above 4 cores, they get expensive. They are more expensive than the base model MacBook Air, and most are more expensive than a MacBook Air with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD. Since the spe
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Real techies dont use Apple products. its more of a silicon valley poseur thing.
There are plenty of brilliant software engineers working on Apple hardware. It used to be one of the most popular choices of work laptop at Facebook and Google. A great deal of Youtube's functionality was written on Apple hardware, for example. Some of the most brilliant software engineers I know are using it.
"Real techies" know that a computer is just a tool - any tool will do. But a well-built, reliable tool is better than a flimsy one.
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"Real techies" know that a computer is just a tool - any tool will do. But a well-built, reliable tool is better than a flimsy one.
Apple has occasionally built tools well and reliably, but they have also had a lot of severe misses which had neither performance, nor reliability. When they have these problems they do their best to pretend they don't happen, and most iCustomers play along, but others do not forget.
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Why don't we see if it's faster than N% of laptops with the same weight/dimensions while we are at it.
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The last 12 months of "PC laptops" were probably significantly biased downwards by sales of low-end laptops for remote learning. The M1 might be faster at browser-type benchmarks than my four-year-old Dell XPS 9550, but it is almost certainly faster than the two laptops my family bought in the last year (both Samsung Chromebook 4+ units, with a price starting at less than a third of the MacBook Air).
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No, it is not fair. So they are not fair when they made that statement but they may be right. Also the 98% claim says "notebook/laptops sold in the past 12 months" not what are in the market as of today. It is likely to beat almost all notebook/laptops for CPU benchmarks except with i9 and may be 11th gen i7. So the claims may be correct, plus the disclaimer might say what kind of testing they did and how they acquire 98% figure. I doubt any lawyer will file class action based on this statement.
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$999 may be seen as a break point for those in the market for something considered a "cheap laptop", so Apple is targeting that market.
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Re:The gist (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ah, I see. I was seeing this from the price of the MacBook Air.
This reply also applies for b5anon's comment.
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TL;DR I need to drink coffee before posting on Slashdot.
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PC World not Mac World (Score:2)
Now I am not taking Apples Claims with any sort of weight. However this guys Claims not based on measurements and tests, but from just pointing out the top models of PCs and saying they are probably much faster. Isn't that strong evidence as well.
I am expecting that Apples Chips will be faster than most laptops for some set of tasks, while the other laptops may be faster in many other tasks. The real question is, are the tasks that Apple is doing better at stuff you are wanting to use a computer for, vs
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Winner! People don't buy laptops for the purpose of running "industry-standard benchmarks". I'm taking everything Apple says with a grain of salt and reserving judgment until independent tests are conducted in realistic use cases.
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Indeed, after all Apple's own marketing is that 2% of Windows laptops are faster than their new MacBooks.
It's just a question of "is a 1000$USD Windows laptop slower, the same or faster than the new M1-equipped MacBooks."
However, they did point out specific numbers when comparing their own intel-powered MacBooks with their
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Tell us how it compares to other $1000 laptops.
Beats $2,000 Apple laptops. So it will beat most if not all $1,000 laptops. If you haven't noticed yet, or kept your eyes closed, the A14 in an iPad Pro is bloody fast, and this is a much higher clocked 4+4 core version.
Read the AnandTech article about the A14. That is very, very close to a 10900 quad core in speed; the M1 will be a lot faster. Then look at their technical details, and you just go WTF? 192KB L1 instruction cache + 128KB L1 data cache. 2MB L2 cache. 16MB unified memory cache. 16 GB of RAM
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I am not taking Apples side. I haven't had an Mac in about 10 years. Apple like to over exaggerates its claims. However they rarely outright lie about them. I expect his M1 chip is plenty good for a laptop, and for most people. However I doubt you are going to feel like you are running a super computer using it. Just an above average laptop.
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You come across as being an ignorant shit. That's probably not happenstance.
You come across as being an arrogant fuckwit. I know for a fact that's not happenstance. I've read your posts. You post one-liners and think you're clever. You're not.
It's REAL simple ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Let the data speak for itself.
When AMD revealed the Radeon RX 6000 GPUs at the end of the presentation @24:18 [youtu.be] they listed what games, settings, driver versions, resolutions, etc. that they tested at.
While Apple may be telling the truth there is only one response:
Show us the data!
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I'm pretty sure they are required by law to do that in some countries like Germany.
Which makes you wonder what's in store for Apple if this makes it into the press in those nations.
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They wanted to, but Brent Spiner is not returning their calls.
Benchmarks already posted. (Score:5, Interesting)
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You would have a point if A. said "we have great scores in one of the most useless benchmarks out there".
Re:Benchmarks already posted. (Score:4)
Sites that review non-mobile CPUs don't use Geekbench or other mostly synthetic benchmarks.
They run Cinebench, Photoshop, various games, Firefox compile, video rendering, real world stuff.
That's because those synthetic benchmarks don't give useful results that people can base buying decisions on.
The other interesting test we need to see is if it overheats. The current Intel based Macbooks hit 99C and thermal throttle in seconds. Short benchmarks look okay but longer ones see decreased performance.
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It won't overheat. The DTK never -never- gets above room temp under any load I set up,
including all the polygons I can throw at it. Image processing is mysteriously fast. Instantaneous, mostly.
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Not to mention that benchmarks of their iPhone CPUs are also faster than some desktop-grade Intel CPUs for some tasks. It seems more than normal that Apple CPUs with higher power requirements and heat dissipation capabilities would score even higher.
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Also true. In fact I complained about this myself in one of my other comment.
98% of what, though? (Score:2)
Are they saying that the M1-powered Apple outperforms 98% of the laptop MODELS sold over that period, or are they saying that it outperforms 98% of the laptops sold...
There is a slogan here in Sweden (the home of Volvo, where most families own at leasr 1 Volvo), that the most popular car by sales every year is Ahlgrens Bilar (Ahlgrens Cars) - small sweets/soft candies (similar to gummy bears) in the shape of cars. You get about 150 of them in a bag, and of course there are a lot of bags of Ahlgrens Bilar so
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Are they saying that the M1-powered Apple outperforms 98% of the laptop MODELS sold over that period, or are they saying that it outperforms 98% of the laptops sold...
Yeah, the quote in the summary is literally:
Laptops sold in the past year. Lots of which will be cheapos for remote learning and keeping in touch with family during the pandemic.
I've got a several year old business machine that's probably faster than most laptops sold in the last year for most use cases. That's a low bar to pass right now.
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All I know is that someone pointed out that the Raspberry Pi 4 is at least as powerful, if not more, than my 2010 Mac mini. And that makes me sad.
So while I am waiting for benchmarks, I'm ready to buy an M1-equipped Mac mini (16GB of course) because at this point, buying an i5 Mac mini would be shooting myself in the foot.
Numbers are hard for some people... (Score:5, Insightful)
M1 is faster than the chips in 98 percent of PC laptops sold in the past year.
TFA is misinterpreting the quote and not applying numbers correctly.
They're not saying the M1 is faster than the individual systems like the Zephyrus, the Area 51M or the Creator 17.
They're saying if you look at the total count of PCs sold in the previous 12 months, the M1 is faster than 98% of them. So this means they're looking at all of the low end business laptops that many enterprises buy for their employees, the underpowered home laptops used for homework and streaming, and heck they've probably thrown in all of the Chromebooks into that total, too. And small portables sold overseas. We're likely talking about hundreds of millions of units (there were over 261 million sold in 2019, and with covid and lockdowns sales this year have been well exceeding those numbers).
From that perspective, they can say 2% of the sales have been Zephyrus, Area 51Ms or Creator 17s which is likely true when you consider we're talking about the total of all sales worldwide.
I know, I know, numbers are hard. They're just not for everyone.
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Bingo. I'm sure the Chromebook-alike machines VASTLY outsell the high-end "stupidly fast Ryzen 4000 based, GeForce RTX 2060-based Zephyrus G14", just on account of the latter being stupidly expensive, too.
Probably by a margin of 98 to 2, or thereabouts.
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Thank you. I don't know why people are having such a hard time with this. The summary of what was being said by Apple is "If you have a cheap laptop, our cheap laptop (which you can probably afford) is faster than it."
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I had that thought as well until I looked at the market data - gaming laptops comprise 10% of all laptop sales. That's discrete hardware. Even the GTX 1660 mobile can pump out 10 TFLOPS (the M1 can output 2.6), and every discrete card is going to have dedicated GDDR memory, not shared DDR4 SO-DIMM memory.
I suspect Apple's claim is further nuanced: faster than 98% of all laptops with integrated graphics. AMD's high-end Radeon 9 mobile parts with integrated graphics can best Apple's FLOPS numbers. Number
I counter your baseless argument! (Score:2)
He accuses Apple of lying and lacking proof to justify their statement, while simultaneously not having any proof. He has a future as a campaign manager.
Specifically he calls out dedicated but niche gaming laptops from Alienware, which may be faster (I have no idea), but probably are not selling in huge volumes.
I'll believe it when I see it (Score:2)
For the longest time now, Apple has been using Intel processors so it has been possible to directly compare Macs and PCs as far as raw computing performance is concerned.
With the Apple Silicon Macs it's going to be like the old PowerPC days, when you couldn't directly compare the hardware specs. I suspect this is why Apple didn't publish any GHz numbers for the new machines; you can't compare them directly to Intel processors anymore.
This reminds me of the PowerMac G4 and G5 days, when Apple claimed that th
Geekbench (Score:4, Informative)
Basically the M1 is better than all of Intel desktop & laptop CPUs and most AMD laptop CPUs at Geekbench and some other benchmarks when run natively on ARM. Sure, that is irrelevant to myself, as I use x86 VMs daily for development and they would be significantly slowed down on an ARM chip, but you can't really call it an outright lie, just classic marketing hyperbole, certainly not deserving a rant like this.
Apple has done much worse too. I am old enough to remember the switch from PowerPC to Intel CPUs. For a while they were selling both, so they had a section on the Apple website dedicated to showing off how much faster the PowerPC Macs are compared to PCs - conveniently using Pentium 4 (instead of the much faster back then AMD CPUs) and enabling AltiVEC on the Mac benchmarks but no SSE on the P4. AT THE SAME TIME, the "new" Intel Mac pages linked to a different section of the website, where there were benchmarks showing off how much faster the new Intel Macs were compared to the PowerPC Macs, to warrant the upgrade! If they could pull that off with a straight face, they can pull off anything.
Obviously this is marketing, but... (Score:2)
The super-fast laptops mentioned here don't make up a great share of the market. The article makes a lot of noise about data but provides none of its own.
Is the new M1 MacBook pro faster than 98% of the MODELS of PC laptop sold last year? No. Clearly not.
Do the laptops mentioned in the article make up more than 2% of all PC laptop sales last year? Well, I have no idea, and apparently neither do they, because they don't have any numbers for me to look at. I suspect that the vast majority of laptops are inexp
Stop the hate (Score:3, Insightful)
Benchmarks or lack of benchmarks aside. I realize the author of TFA gets paid to write his opinions on things. I get that, I really do.
The computing community (heck, the whole world) as a whole needs to stop this incessant fanboy flame war.
It's OK to love and use Apple products.
It's OK to love and use PC products.
It's OK to dislike Apple products.
It's OK to dislike PC products.
It is not OK to make someone else feel like shit because of the things they like or dislike.
If folks took the time to really learn how the other person things/feels/lives this world would be a MUCH better place. In all areas, not just choice of Hardware/Software.
All mainstream media outlets, now-a-days present these opinions-as-news nuggets to attract attention for their advertisers - if we stop reading/watching/listening to this nonsense it will go away.
Please just show me an article with benchmarks and let me formulate my own way to feel about it. I don't need you to do my thinking for me :)
Also maybe don't get so upset by marketing material...
New MacBook Air is more Expensive than 98% of PCs (Score:3)
Probaby not bullshit, but with a big asterisk (Score:2)
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If you look at Apple's own performance benchmarks on the page for the new M1 Air: https://www.apple.com/au/macbo... [apple.com]
They give a performance delta against the previous generation MacBook Air. Reading the footnotes at the bottom of the page, they are quoting a performance increase against the older top-spec, configure-to-order Air with a 10th Generation Intel Core i7 and 16 GB RAM. So, they're not comparing against the previous base model Air to make it look good, they're comparing it against a maxed-out MacBo
It worked (Score:2)
They got your attention, and you gave them free PR. Congrats
Latest vs older (Score:2)
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On the page for the MacBook Air, Apple are specifically comparing the performance delta against the 2020 MacBook Air with the top-spec i7 CPU. This is a 10th Gen Core i7 that was released in Q2 2020.
https://www.apple.com/au/macbo... [apple.com]
PCWorld full of it (Score:5, Insightful)
If you go by numbers, 50% of all laptops are rubbish. Another 40% are passable. Then we get to decent powerful ones. The thing is, the MacBook Air beats Apple's own current quad core models. An iPad Pro is close to this, and with four performance cores and another 10% from four low power scores, the MacBook Air is pretty fast.
Of the top ten percent of laptops, probably 80% have quad core processors. And they are slower than a MacBook Air. And yes, the top 20% of the top 10% will beat the MacBook Air. Which is what Apple said.
That also agrees nicely with previous claims that the processor in the fastest iPhone runs faster than 90% of all PC laptops. That excludes the top 10% with quad core processors, anything below gets beaten.
So PCWorld mentioned a few laptops that will beat the MacBook Air - but the question is how many are they selling?
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Apple's claim is quite clear, and it is factual, but it is still bullshit. They need to compare not to the vast majority of laptops sold, but to price-competitive laptops. And they need to use a better benchmark, not just the one they found that favors their hardware. The problem with that is that most useful benchmarks won't run on their hardware because they are application benchmarks based on applications that won't run on Apple's weird hardware. For Apple that's a benefit, because they can say "we didn'
The benchmarks are there, you just need to look (Score:2)
Look on the page for the MacBook Air: https://www.apple.com/au/macbo... [apple.com]
Apple give more specific information about the tests they are using.
Scroll down to CPU and click on the See how M1 redefines speed:
Comparing to the previous MacBook Air which has a 10th Generation Core i3, i5 or i7 Ice Lake CPU and Intel Iris Plus graphics, the new Air with M1 is 3.9x faster at transcoding ProRes video, 3.6x faster at building a project in Xcode, 2.5x better at winning Amp Designer plug-ins in Logic Pro and 2.3x faster e
What is Apple's definition of a "PC laptop"? (Score:2)
Honestly, what is the legal definition of a "PC laptop"? Not what is the first thing to come to mind, but the real legal definition? Apple maybe playing fast and loose with the legal definition of a "PC laptop", knowing that while it legally means one thing, the public will think it means another. (Like how a food product can say "lite",
Is it best in class? (Score:2)
Comparing a $60k car with a $30k car isn't a fair comparison.
Is the M1 faster than 98% of competitors in the same class or price range?
I would guess the answer would be not best in class.
Reading comprehension fail (Score:3)
So, not only does Apple not say what tests it's basing its claims on, it doesn't even say where it sources the comparable laptops. Does that mean the new fanless MacBook Air is faster than, say, Asus' stupidly fast Ryzen 4000 based, GeForce RTX 2060-based Zephyrus G14? Does it mean the MacBook Air is faster than Alienware's updated Area 51M?
No, they say it's faster than 98% of PC laptops sold. Even if 50% of the available model types are faster, PC laptops sell in much larger volumes at the lower specs. This only needs to be faster than a pretty average laptop running something like an i3 to beat 98% of laptops sold.
Was "Faster" defined? (Score:2)
Source for laptops they compared to (Score:2)
Since they didnt say what laptops, I think they used a use laptop for their laptops sold during 2020...
https://www.pcliquidations.com... [pcliquidations.com]
Or they are only testing a single thing, like the sssd or ram.
M1 MacBook Air Outperforms High-End 16-Inch MBP (Score:2)
Apple Silicon M1 Chip in MacBook Air Outperforms High-End 16-Inch MacBook Pro [macrumors.com]
"The first benchmark of the new chip appears to be showing up on the Geekbench site."
Single Core 1687
Multi Core 7433
That's no slouch of a machine.
Why not? (Score:2)
I guess you have never benchmarked an iphone.
https://browser.geekbench.com/... [geekbench.com]
Its very possible (in native mode obviously)
How about real world..., (Score:2)
Do 3d graphics render smoothly with high poly count? Does Photoshop work smooth without pauses and hickups? Do large files open and load fast? Is video high rez and plays without hiccups? Does Javashit abuse us at blazing speeds while we are surfing the web?
Raw benchmarks and real world usage are often two different things, performance wise.
Re: (Score:2)
On my DTK? Yes.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, you were modded-down because you were being a douche and posting inaccurate information as fact.
You ran afoul of fantards (Score:2)
Apple fans are happy with everything Apple does so they deserve what they buy for good or ill.
Re:I was modded down for saying this (Score:5, Informative)
I was modded down as flaimbait in the previous story where I pointed out that, as a matter of obvious fact, that apple is full of shit.
You were modded down because your post [slashdot.org] started off with an obviously untrue statement: you said this was "their first try" of a company that is actually ten years and a dozen or so generations into designing their own chips, which a number of posters pointed out to you.
Contrary to your suggestion that this is their first try, Apple actually began shipping their in-house designed chips with the Apple A4 (in the first iPad) and just began shipping the A14 (in the latest iPhone and iPad Air). Contrary to your suggestion that they have no basis for their claims about GPUs, it's been widely reported for years that they've been licensing technology from leaders in the field (e.g. Imagination). Contrary to your suggestion that Apple itself lacks the in-house expertise, they were recruiting and acquiring top talent in the field (e.g. PA Semi) long before they ever began shipping their own designs. In fact, Jim Keller, the guy who headed up their initial A-series designs? After he left Apple (just to give you a sense of how long Apple has been in the game), he went to AMD and headed up the design on a little architecture named "Zen". Maybe you've heard of it?
Moreover, while pundits at PC World and members of the peanut gallery such as yourself insist that it's lunacy to accept their claims and that Apple might as well be asking us to believe that they "reverse engineered alien technology", AnandTech says [anandtech.com]:
Apple’s claim of having the fastest CPU core in the world seems extremely plausible.
Given the choice between the deep expertise in this field at AnandTech and a guy whose post is predicated on denying that the last decade happened, I'll take AnandTech's opinion any day. But you don't need to agree with that sentiment to flip over to page 4 of that article, where you'll find benchmarks comparing the already-shipping Apple A14 against the latest desktop chips out of Intel and AMD.
Short version: the A14's single-threaded performance roughly lands above the latest i9 but under the latest Ryzen 9 (though multi-threaded performance is admittedly conspicuously missing), but then you need to recognize that the M1 chip in these new Macs is both a step up from the A14 and has a significantly greater thermal envelope, so it'll be interesting to see where it lands in its performance.
Re: (Score:2)
No mod points at the moment, but that was a fact-filled, informative post.
Re:How to lie with statistics (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple is good at one thing, and one thing only. They are the best in the world at that one thing, and nobody comes close.
Unfortunately that one thing has nothing to do with technology. It's marketing. Pretty much every other company on the planet would give anything to have the marketing clout that Apple does. It takes a specific genius to be able to get a large pool of people to not only pay significantly more for a product than for an objectively better competitor, but to feel so good about getting fleeced that they try to tell everyone else how superior the company is. Apple has been able to do this for many years now, they are REALLY good at it!