Microsoft says new Surface Pro is faster than 15" M3 MacBook Air
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
This is so underrated. I got a new macbook air as a temp while my m1 max gets repaired and it blows my mind how I had it unplugged for 2 days over the weekend and the battery is still going.
It's like range anxiety in cars, not worrying about hunting down my usb-c charger I left in some random room is nice
Yours is the sort of things I got with my Linux work laptop, and it’s miserable: a few years down the line battery degradation means after a 3 days weekend you have even odds the laptop will have slept itself to shutdown.
That’s about normal for it.
The 12" MacBook. Great form factor, bad software (graphics driver code was especially poor), poor keyboard, lousy battery life, slow CPU & graphics. Similar size now with the 13" MacBook Air, but much better.
The i9 MacBook Pro. Too heavy, not enough cooling, extra GPU chip (in the laptop) with lots of power demand, Thunderbolt chips with lots of power demand, CPU with lots of power demand, fans were often on (for example with anything which uses the extra GPU). Now a 16" MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon is virtually silent AND fast.
I currently have a Mac mini with M2 Pro, a MacBook Pro with M2 Pro and the new iPad Pro M4. All are very snappy and virtually silent. They use very little idle power and don't get warm in normal use. The i9 MacBook Pro would produce a lot of heat when attached to an external screen and doing a "simple" video call, due to the power hungry additional GPU needed to drive the external screen.
Support? Big "hmmm" energy.
Even on an old, well-understood, and revered[0] laptop (the ThinkPad T530), I was having an unexpectedly-dead battery when running Windows.
It's a work laptop, and it is pretty much only used for occasional actually-portable computing work like programming of other devices in the field. It spends most of its time in the work truck, hibernated and unplugged -- sometimes, for weeks at a stretch.
I began to accept its increasingly-poor apparent battery health and started to explain it to myself as "Well, it is pretty old."
Or so I thought, anyway: One day it was sitting there on a table, unplugged, and I noticed that it came to life by itself and then hibernated again a few minutes later.
WTF?
Waaaay too much investigation later, I found that a part of an HP printer driver was forcing it to wake every couple of hours...for reasons that I don't care to explore, since none of those reasons could possibly have any positive merit.
Waaaay too much poking-and-prodding after that, I was able to disable the offending thing using powercfg on the command line.
And now, it seems fine. The battery life is not particularly good and never will be, but at least it's not "Surprise! I'm completely dead!!!" anymore.
This kind of sloppiness in software seems to be considered normal in the Windows space, and an abusive HP printer driver doesn't care if it is running on a 9-year-old ThinkPad or a 9-day-old Surface: It will abuse all of them just the same.
[0]: I hate numeric keypads, and gamer laptops, and computers that are built down to a budget as a primary design criteria. The T530 is approximately the last 15" PC laptop that lacks a numeric keypad, and that does not have stupid gamer-glam functions or styling, and that isn't built down to a budget price. It is stoic and plain and black, and both the keyboad and the touchpad are centered on the screen.
I don't expect the battery life to be as good as non-gaming laptops, of course, but I feel like it should probably last longer than like an hour and a half.
I know Linux has powertop which can measure energy usage per subsystem. Not sure if windows has something like that to answer your question?
Usually gaming laptops prioritize their cooling systems over battery size. And don’t underestimate the high refresh rate panel likely optimized for at least 500 nits.
Literally one of the reasons Apple added variable refresh rates on their pro phones: if you can vrr down, you save a ton of battery when you run the panel at 1Hz.
“the MacBook Pro’s ProMotion display can range from 24Hz to 120Hz.”
https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/19/macbook-pro-promotion-tidbits....
ill give it up for any actually good things tho, i did try a macbook air during a long trip and the battery life is truly excellent and worth dealing with the downsides
I don't know how good the Linux support for this hardware is, but, if it works well, the reason of buying Macs for their battery life gets blown out of the water.
As for performance benchmarks, I don't care what numbers they get if it takes a full 8 seconds to open a context menu when I right click something. I'm even less enthusiastic if I'm forced to use Windows 11 and put up with ads.
Surface hardware is amazing, but if Windows doesn't lose all of this bloat then I am done with it.
Assuming that’s accurate, isn’t that just straight consumer fraud?
It's not "up to a million hours usage", because it's impossible to use it for a million hours.
Who said they never reach those numbers? All manufacturers have disclaimers that the "UP TO numbers" have been achieved in their labs in their own controlled environment, and some even specify some the conditions: Pass Mark, wifi, power-mode screen brightness, etc.
Your car also specifies some very optimistic MPG/range specs that most owners will never reach but they were reached in a lab somewhere running on a dyno.
I'm of the opinion that's getting into the realm of impossible numbers, absent evidence otherwise.
If you get it out of the box and it doesn't get what they specify - that's misleading at best, fraud at worst.
The car tests do specify the testing conditions, so I would expect that my car would perform the same under the specified conditions.
And how can we verify that he didn't have some power virus running in the background to generalize that 2-4x claim as being a universal fault with all devices?
The manufacturer makes a claim based on a (obviously biased) controlled lab condition. When you use the device outside that lab condition then it obviously won't apply anymore (duh).
The manufacturer can't promise an exact battery life on YOUR use case since everyone's use case will be completely different, and once you introduce external apps beyond the manufacturer's own control, then everything goes out the window.
But if I get a new device out of the box, make no changes, and it doesn't get those numbers, then it's a lie.
That's been my experience before (not with a Surface), and it was OP's experience with a Surface.
I guess that would be fraud, but that depends on what all the fine print on the battery claim states.
If they do disable these things in their test, then that's super dishonest.
Desktop apps are increasingly moving to the web not the other way around.
[0]: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-...
Probably not soon. They just refreshed the macs with M3s, and put the M4s in the ipads pro, I assume due to TSMC yield issues with a bleeding edge process (yes, ipads outsell macs, but not the ipads pro, which is a low volume "halo" product).
We also have a support contract for repair of Surface Pro units, and when these die they get sent away to Microsoft and a replacement eventually arrives. From what I can tell, they have dreadful repairability.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/surface-it-pro-blog/s...
>Built with integrity by design, many Microsoft Surface devices are now easier to repair1 and maintain, providing commercial customers with greater flexibility while extending the use of devices.
>Commercial customers can obtain service for Surface for Business devices in several ways. You can get service directly from Microsoft or use a third party Authorized Service Provider. Or with skilled technicians, you can repair2 devices yourself following the applicable Surface Service Guide or article.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-service-an...
I still wonder how it is legal to use Microsoft software in the EU in government surroundings. The German authorities publish tons of papers on how to use Windows&related ( https://www.bsi.bund.de/SiteGlobals/Forms/Suche/EN/Servicesu... ) , instead of simply disallowing to use Microsoft software.
With the data collection for "AI" it only gets worse.
51-83 GB/s for current Surface Pro 9 with Intel Core i7-1265U (3200-5200 MT/s). [0]
100 GB/s for current Macbook Air 13/15" M2/M3. [1]
0: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/226258/...
Got burned one too many times trying to sleep/hibernate HP business laptops by closing the lid and they stayed on and got hot. Not once has that happened with a MacBook.
The problem is that S3 sleep means the machine is actually sleeping, and short of timers being set ahead of time or explicit wake events by PCI devices, the machine is unable to think which means it can't do important things like download ads^W suggestions or similar. It's technically possible to do Wake-on-WLAN/WWAN but would require moving a ton of logic to the WAN card (it would need an entire network and app stack in order to maintain high-level TLS/etc connections with the various sync servers autonomously and wake the host when something new comes in) and in practice nobody bothered to do it because it's just not actually solving any problem the users care about - even when useful data is being fetched, it turns out that in practice nobody minds waiting 5 seconds for their Outlook to refresh.
Microsoft's "solution" however was to simply remove S3 sleep, so now the machine is incapable of it and is constantly in S0 (powered on state) and it's up to the OS to ensure nothing resource-hungry is running so that the CPU can actually enter its low-power states. This might be doable on an OS built from scratch (it's after all what all smartphones do successfully), but not with Windows if they want to preserve backwards compatibility with the PC we know and love, so in the end you get machines that have the risk of overheating & draining their whole battery while "sleeping"... but hey at least when it works your ads are up to date, progress I guess.
It's bewildering that Microsoft have made hibernate hidden by default. Yet at the same time, "fast startup" is enabled by default! Something as simple as power states has deliberately been completely broken.
It gets everything we'd expect from a vertically integrated product. You still need to deal with windows' paradigms, but also get a real linux as a bonus.
I thought the general consensus was that Apple was years ahead of the competition. What breakthrough did Snapdragon come up with?
If people are bailing it could be the new competition is that compelling, or it could be that your customers have been looking to jump ship and this product was compelling enough to tip them over.
Surface Laptop with X Plus also beats M2 and starts at the same price.
Even the Intel and AMD machines coming later down the line will require Windows 11 to be utilized to their full potential. Intel Thread Director being an easy one to point out; Alder Lake onwards all run suboptimally on Windows 10 due to lack of support and awareness. Also new drivers for the NPUs, for whatever good they will serve.
They do some sleight of hand when doing the comparisons during the release today.
The Surface Laptop is physically a competitor to the actively cooled MacBook Pro (in fact it’s thicker).
Their performance and battery metrics are against the slimmer and passively cooled MacBook Air.
Their performance comparison is between the M3 and the Snapdragon X Elite when the M3 has throttled (their wording is sustained performance). The Elite is a significantly higher TDP product line than the M3 and its own sibling.
Their battery comparison is between the M3 and the Snapdragon X Plus. This is the lower wattage SoC, paired with a thicker body that likely has a larger capacity battery as a result.
It’s very unlikely that the device has both stronger performance AND longer battery life, because those are handled by different SKUs. Likely you will choose whichever metric matters more to you.
Still a strong showing, but take the “benchmarks” with a heavy grain of salt.
Hope Qualcomm manage to make 15-20 jump with each generation like Apple.
I’m looking forward to more aarch64 support everywhere. I just wish companies were more straightforward about what’s being presented.
Though I believe that perf per watt will end up being closer to an M2 than an M3. If you take the battery size of an M2 MacBook Pro it also claims similar battery life as the Snapdragon X Plus here.
More discussion:
You can't game with the paltry "arm companion" GPU and you can't be productive with tons of ads (product placement, "notifications" and tips, as well as the literal "hot singles near you" variety included).
Maybe this is some kind of corporate devices for the old-school enterprises that rock Teams and Office and all that jazz.
It's a shame because if the hardware is as good as they make it sound, it might've been a great productivity device, but they need serious slimming down work in Windows, or an unlocked bootloader for Linux.
https://videocardz.com/newz/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-adre...
That said, Microsoft’s comparisons should tell you who this is for: people who might otherwise buy a MacBook Air. That’s the segment that’s largely not doing creative work or gaming, but needs something for business use, or productivity on the go.