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points by ritzaco 2 days ago | 0 comments

> Phenomenal battery life: In addition to the huge leap in performance, battery life gets up to 14 additional hours for Intel-based upgraders

the m2/m3 announcements were already kind of cringe to keep saying 'HEY IT'S BETTER THAN INTEL' but at this point it's just embarrassing?

[–] Grombobulous 2 days ago

Fun fact: the laptop in this size/performance class with the best battery life is a Windows Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, not a MacBook Pro!

So Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago rather than what Intel is delivering now.

[–] zuhsetaqi 2 days ago

> Fun fact: the laptop in this size/performance class with the best battery life is a Windows Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, not a MacBook Pro!

Source for that fun fact?

[–] cromka 2 days ago

I think they refer to low-tier Wildcat which, indeed, is more efficient than Apple's CPU in Neo, which they typically get compared against.

[–] Grombobulous 1 day ago

Nope! I’m talking about the 358H compared to the M5. Multiple similar Windows laptops outlast the M5 MacBook Pro and Air.

Framework 13 Pro, Lenovo ThinkPad X9 15p Aura Edition, for example.

[–] cromka 1 day ago

Have you considered battery in them?

[–] Grombobulous 20 hours ago

Yes, the Framework 13 Pro battery is almost identically sized to the MacBook Pro 14.

The Thinkpad X9 15p Aura Edition has a slightly larger ~80Whr battery.

The battery size is also not a consumer-facing spec, they only care about size/weight/performance. If Lenovo can fit a bigger battery into their chassis and it's roughly the same exterior size/weight as a MacBook Pro, this isn't some kind of win for Apple where we can declare their victory because their chip is more power efficient. The user cares about the size/weight/performance/battery life.

As of the M5, MacBook systems are not on the top of those charts. I suspect that the M6 may help put Apple back on top, but the overarching point is that Panther Lake is highly competitive and that Intel is now with in a year of Apple in terms of mainstream laptop chips.

I.e., it's not like 2020 where an M1 MacBook Air is such a compelling choice because it's faster than an i9 Intel and gets double the battery life with no fan.

[–] Grombobulous 1 day ago

Just Josh Tech’s review of the Framework 13 Pro or the Lenovo ThinkPad X9 15p Aura Edition. Multiple similar sized/classed laptops get better battery life.

This is of course as of the M5, M6 hasn’t been tested yet.

[–] desolate_muffin 2 days ago

last time I checked, every Windows laptop had the absolutely massive caveat that it needed to throttle performance by a ton to have a low enough TDP to compete on battery life. You just cannot match the efficiency of ARM Apple chips with an x86 chip.

[–] Grombobulous 1 day ago

But the problem is “last you checked” is before Panther Lake came out.

It is not 2020 anymore. Look up reviews. Just Josh Tech’s ThinkPad X9 15p Aura Edition review, for example.

What you’re saying is just absolutely not true at all and is only backed by your gut feeling.

[–] desolate_muffin 1 day ago

As far as I can tell after just looking at the specs, what I said is still the same. For example, an Intel Core Ultra 5 Processor 338H has a TDP of 25-65W vs. the M5 TDP of 3-27W. These aren't even directly comparable, but it gets worse going higher in the Intel Stack.

Further, every Windows laptop seems to have a worse display. For example, an M5 Macbook Pro 14" has a 120Hz 254ppi mini-LED display with a peak brightness of 1600 nits vs. a Dell XPS 14" with a 120Hz 161ppi LCD display with a peak brightness of 500 nits.

So it seems like they have figured out that they can put bigger batteries, worse displays, and throttle TDP to get better battery life, but it is still not possible for them to beat Apple's efficiency just based on those TDP numbers alone—these chips are just drawing more than 2x the power at peak load.

I don't understand why there isn't more effort towards ARM in the Windows world.

[–] Grombobulous 20 hours ago

You are quoting an incorrect TDP number for the 338H (65W is not correct), and in addition to that you are misreading "maximum" as its minimum. It idles at far lower than 25W. And anyway, TDP is not a standardized number, it's not a real spec. Chip manufacturers are known for fudging those numbers.

I can see that you are depending on an outdated perception of Apple's competition, and I'm especially confused about what you're saying with displays. I would try comparing a more comparable laptop? I'm confused at why you're quoting a Dell without the display upgrade option, which only costs $150.

Lenovo X9 15p Aura Edition has a very nice OLED display. OLED displays consume more power than LCD, and yet it still beats MacBook Pro 14" M5 in battery life. See Just Josh Tech's video on this model for benchmarks and comparisons.

If it's not bright enough for you, great, there are other laptops with tandem OLED displays, like the ASUS ProArt P14.

I also think more generally it's easy to pick out a bad laptop that competes with Apple since there are so many models that compete against Apple instead of going through the effort to find which computers are the best-reviewed alternatives. Dell XPS 14 is not really at the top of Windows reviewers' rankings as an overall choice.

There is a lot of effort toward ARM in the Windows world, keep up with the times. The Qualcomm X2 Elite is another chip that's catching up with Apple's offerings, it's only lagging behind in graphics capability. It gets very similar performance and battery life otherwise, and Qualcomm laptops are frequently discounted.

Or maybe look at RTX Spark. Those computers definitely have nice displays as well, like the ASUS ProArt P14. That OLED panel has very similar specs to Apple's PROLED offering.

[–] BugsJustFindMe 2 days ago

> Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago

Apple didn't fully stop selling Intel macs until June 2023. And they compare against the most recent previous model too.

[–] asimovDev 2 days ago

in 2023 they were only selling desktop Intel Macs. I am pretty sure by 2021 they weren't selling Intel laptops unless maybe refurbished

[–] wtallis 2 days ago

There's no happy medium here that would satisfy everybody: when they make marketing claims about improvements relative to products from several years ago, they get criticized for not focusing on the improvements relative to last gen (even if those comparisons are also somewhere in the announcement). When they focus on the most recent generations, people complain that it doesn't make sense to upgrade every year.

Just accept that even if you aren't still using an Intel MacBook Pro, the comparison is still relevant to some part of their target market.

They only just dropped support for Intel Macs from this fall's operating system release (but are still doing security patches for the releases that Intel Macs can run). A year from now, it actually will be fairly reasonable to expect them to give up marketing to the holdouts.

[–] anamexis 2 days ago

I would guess there's still quite a lot of people on Intel Macs out there (they were sold 5 years ago), so it is still very much worth it for Apple to market to them.

[–] thibaut_barrere 2 days ago

More people than you think (outside tech) are using Intel Macs at the moment (family computers etc).

[–] jwilcoxson 2 days ago

Exactly. A late model Intel Mac is still a perfectly cromulent computer in 2026.

[–] Razengan 2 days ago

"cromulent" sounds like such a disgusting word that isn't.

probably because of its adjacency to "corpulent" lol

[–] anamexis 2 days ago

The word "cromulent" was coined by the TV show The Simpsons in a gag.

> Mrs. Krabappel: "Embiggens"? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.

> Ms. Hoover: I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.

But now it has made it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

[–] booty 2 days ago

I think it makes sense. Do you think most potential buyers are coming from last year's model, or from laptops that are more like 3-5 years old?

As long as they're clear about the comparisons they're making ("X% more battery life than Y" as opposed to simply ("X% more battery life") I'm good with it.

[–] zaphar 2 days ago

Why? Apple devices have the best battery life in the market right now to my knowledge. It's an important part of the evaluation for a laptop which is the opposite of cringe.

[–] Grombobulous 2 days ago

Actually, they don’t! Intel Core Ultra Series 3 beats Apple laptops as of the M5 on battery life.

IIRC the Framework 13 Pro beats the MacBook Pro at both video streaming tests and office productivity with 300 bits brightness tests. (Framework live-streamed the video playback test, and the office provided productivity tests I referred to were done by Just Josh Tech)

Perhaps the M6 has leapfrogged but that remains to be seen.

[–] porridgeraisin 2 days ago

In usual developer type tasks, among my friend group what I hear is that panther lake laptops are competitive with M4 laptops. But, M4s do that with a 55Wh battery, whereas most panther lake laptops come with a 70Wh battery. So if you're discussing chip performance per watt then it's probably an edge to apple silicon.

[–] Grombobulous 2 days ago

72.4 Wh is the size of the M4 MacBook Pro battery, about the same size as the Framework 13 Pro.

Intel and now Qualcomm are really not far off on performance per watt. Mostly Apple maintains an advantage on single core performance.

The Panther Lake integrated GPU in the X7/X9 SKI is actually faster than the one you get in the base M5.

[–] porridgeraisin 2 days ago

You're right. I think I remember those numbers from an Air vs 3xxH comparison.

[–] dmitrygr 2 days ago

Neither of those have comparable perf

[–] Grombobulous 2 days ago

They do, please look up reviews of Panther Lake 338H/358H. Example: Lenovo Thinkpad X9 15p Aura Edition

[–] dmitrygr 2 days ago

I did. I am seeing single core geekbench scores of 2700 compared to my MacBook Air at 3500. This, for a laptop that is thicker and heavier than my air.

[–] Grombobulous 1 day ago

1. It’s Geekbench, not a real experience of using the system. A geekbench number being xx% slower doesn’t mean that the system is xx% slower at doing tasks. It’s a synthetic benchmark.

2. The Intel chips beat out the M5 in multi-core and GPU.

3. These Geekbench scores are close enough that they are in the same performance class. We aren’t talking about 1,000 versus 3,500. The end user isn’t noticing a performance difference between 2700 and 3500, especially since that number is single core only (most workloads can take advantage of multiple threads these days).

Even if we concede that the Intel chip is slower for single core tasks only we can’t just lie and say it’s not in the same performance class. It’s very clearly comparable by objective data.

What we can say definitively by objective measures is that Intel is behind by a year at most, which essentially doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of “which laptop to I buy?” It’s close enough that the processor shouldn’t be part of the buying consideration for the majority of consumers. Intel is not years and years behind what Apple is putting out there, this is not the M1 where Apple was beating Intel in performance and getting double the battery life. We are looking at much more incremental differences where the buyer will not notice a difference over the lifespan of the product.

[–] dmitrygr 1 day ago

multi core scores? So you'll happily accept a 100,000-core pentium one class CPU to replace your laptop? it will have higher multicore score. No? Really? Oh? why not?

[–] asadotzler 2 days ago

why tack on the goalpost moving? And geekbench single core isn't the only measure of performance.

[–] dmitrygr 2 days ago

in my original post, i said "perf", i am not sure what you imagined, but i am not moving anything, geekbench single core score is a perfectly reasonable thing to measure under the name "perf"

[–] jwilcoxson 2 days ago

Competition is a beautiful thing.

[–] throwitaway222 2 days ago

I recall seeing some crazy stats like 41+ hours maybe on a snapdragon processor w/windows. I imagine your screen brightness would have to be like 99% dark and not playing videos is my guess.

[–] RunSet 1 day ago

On the other hand their hardware only supports one operating system.

So it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

[–] Guillaume86 2 days ago

That's not what the marketing is saying, they keep comparing to their own super old intel models.

[–] ErneX 2 days ago

They want those users to upgrade, I don’t see the problem.