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.