This year is a lot more competitive than any of the past ~4 years for premium laptops.
The asus expertbook ultra even has a much better screen, a much better keyboard, and a very similar haptic trackpad. Weighs less than a 13 inch macbook air too. There's cheaper options too that are close to as good (minus the screen).
PTL’s highest SKU is comparable to the base M5 for only multicore perf at double the power use in every benchmark I’ve seen. It lags significantly behind in single core.
But I’d love to see a benchmark showing otherwise.
Just the latest I’ve seen https://youtu.be/7OxE7FwJPJM?si=b5T0PbmhUD1TXhX4
But I can find none that have PTL actually anywhere near M5 without strapping a much larger battery to the device
It's been five years since M1 and Intel has never been competitive in single-core perf per watt with Apple. It would be surprising if it changed.
Panther lake and the M5 have been out (I know fan makes a difference, but hey it's still a decent reference), and fully tested by a number of reviewers. The "almost every way" comment is with the exception of single-core scores. Outside of that metric, when you look at photoshop/premiere/davinci resolve/compilation/SSD speeds/multicore cinebench; both are about as fast as one another (with some back-and-forth wins on either side). How is it a ridiculous claim when so many publications/reviewers have arrived at the same conclusion?
The point is both achieve nearly the same experience (performance wise) averaged-out, doing real work, and any differences are small enough that it hardly matters. The tests are out there. See: Just Josh (youtube), Notebookcheck (various articles), Zip Tie Tech (youtube), Phoronix (article), Hardware Canucks (youtube), and Max Tech (youtube). Plenty of test results for actual panther lake machines.
The Max Tech review (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q77AzvY3FTE) directly doing a head to head of the M5 macbook pro vs the Expertbook ultra is a good enough summary of how close they actually are. Bunch of heavier tasks being run one after the next, all on battery, side-by-side, in a nicely edited video. As a whole, the chips are more similar than they are different. They are 100% in the same performance tier.
In the real-world, stuff like animation timings for switching virtual desktops are 100% more noticable than the single-core performance gap between those two chips. Or having a 120Hz vs 60Hz like these new macbook airs.
IMO, the main tradeoff with choosing these intel chips over the M5 is the price. Only the X7/X9 panther lakes have the strong GPU, and those are priced significantly higher than base M5 macs (which already have a strong GPU). But for someone who really prefers linux (like the parent comment), then I do think it's worth it.
I do hope that it’s fixed though. I haven’t followed Windows laptops that closely, but my work laptop from a few years ago does lose battery surprisingly quickly when “sleeping”.
Linux on the other hand has always been able to sleep as expected. I'm definitely advocating for panther lake + linux. Not panther lake + windows, which I hoped was clear given the context of the parent comment.
I haven’t used a Linux laptop in over a decade personally, so can’t really speak to that much though.
What I do know is that Windows sucks and macOS has absurdly good battery life, both in active use and in sleep.
Ever since lunar lake (intel's prev-gen ultrabook chip), this isn't even true anymore.
And now with panther lake, competing windows and macOS laptops do have comparable active use battery life, especially when comparing against macbook airs which do sometimes lose because of their smaller batteries.
This guy: https://www.youtube.com/@JustJoshTech does really good battery tests (brightness at 300 nits, looped office tasks, wifi on, BT on), and a number of windows laptops match even the 14in macbooks pros. That macbook pro already gets noticably more battery life than both the 13 and 15in macbook air.
For a specific example ,the current XPS14 without the OLED (meaning the base 1200p screen) will have hours more battery life than any macbook. If you're looking for "absurdly good battery life", both macOS and windows laptops can give you this today. Your last comment hasn't been true (at least for active use) for at least since lunar lake came out (end of 2024).
Only Apple has been laser-focused to give us this experience.
Battery life in sleep (and in general) could be better, but on the whole I've been quite happy with it.
I was about to write a post mourning how much I wish Panther Lake really could compete, but lacked the memory bandwidth to offer a real challenge. But supposedly it can go up to 9600MT/s which would bring Panther Lake to ~150GB/s.
I am curious what the NPU on M5 has. The 50 TOp/s on Panther Lake is... fine. Apple is really seeing huge success with MLX, with an adoptable software stack that the PC world is super struggling to deliver.