No, the new Arm MacBook Air is not faster than 98% of PC laptops

pcworld.com

10 points·webmobdev··6 comments

Article says "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." (emphasis mine)

The event video says LAST year: https://youtu.be/5AwdkGKmZ0I?t=1561

"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." ... those laptops listed got reviewed 2020 so I think they're 2020 models.

No, it says "Sold in the last year". That implies laptops sold in 2020. I agree, without quantifying anything it's just marketing.

More interestingly, will there be any software available I'll want to run? Running iPhone and iPad apps on a MacBook probably won't be very satisfying.

It'll run pretty much all the same stuff as the current/previous generation of MacBooks. XCode builds universal binaries, which covers the bulk of current apps, and a built-in translation/emulation layer (Rosetta 2) helps bridge the gap with some of the rest. Plus iOS apps as well.

They are trying to capture the PC market: this marketing message is targeted toward consumers and possibly analysts, not technical people, to sell and raise the stock. I suspect they will succeed, in due time though.

Kinda silly article. The laptops the author sites for his examples are the top 1% of the high performance category.

The point is they don’t quantify anything, or the exact methods they used to get those metrics - it’s basically pulled out of thin air (or their asses).

I look forward to hearing about an AG or consumer protection group/agency pressing Apple on this.

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