All of Microsoft's MacBook Air-beating benchmarks

theverge.com

4 points·vyrotek··4 comments

"I wasn’t able to run the benchmarks myself, but the results should serve as an important data point as we get closer to the launch of these Copilot Plus PCs on June 18th. It’s also important to note that, unlike Apple’s MacBook Air, Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop isn’t fan-less, allowing it to squeeze more performance out. Microsoft only compared its Surface Laptop to the MacBook Air M3 — not a MacBook Pro that comes equipped with fans." It looks like there are not quite there yet.

It's annoying that the article (and many others) don't mention that the Snapdragon X Elite has 12 CPU cores (I believe all high-performance cores) vs. the M3's 8 CPU cores (4 performance, 4 efficiency). So it's not surprising that the Snapdragon wins at multi-core benchmarks. It is surprising if the Surface can really get that claimed battery life with those cores and a fan. It's only slightly heavier than the MacBook Air (2.96 vs 2.7 lbs) so there probably isn't much more battery in there.

These are going to be impressive machines and we'll all hopefully benefit from some more heated competition.

How's the software? MSFT there yet???

Mixed, in my opinion. They've got some good stuff in Terminal and the Windows Subsystem for Linux plus Visual Studio Code if that's your thing. 90% of the time it can feel about like being on a native Linux or macOS. I think the Linux filesystem performance still lags though. They can have issues rendering fonts on high DPI displays at non-integer scales.

But they really shoot themselves in the foot with crap like constantly pushing the Edge browser, Bing, Copilot, etc. and forcing ads on the user.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com