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Microsoft says new Surface Pro is faster than 15" M3 MacBook Air

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Re: Microsoft says new Surface Pro is faster than 15" M3 MacBook Air

#11
> As for battery life, Copilot+ PCs support up to 15 hours of web browsing or 22 hours of local video playback. The MacBook Air models offer the same 15 hours of wireless web browsing, but only 18 hours of local video playback.

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.

Re: Microsoft says new Surface Pro is faster than 15" M3 MacBook Air

#12
Very excited to see this. Microsoft Windows was always a bottleneck for us when it came to ad content delivery to Windows users. With this incredible performance of Surface Pro, we will deliver ads to those users at a speed they have never see before. By the time you close one ad, 3 others are already open. Thank you Satya for making this happen.

Re: Microsoft says new Surface Pro is faster than 15" M3 MacBook Air

#13
post #9

> As for battery life, Copilot+ PCs support up to 15 hours of web browsing or 22 hours of local video playback. The MacBook Air models offer the same 15 hours of wireless web browsing, but only 18 hours of local video playback. 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. I…

I don't know how it compares, but my recent AMD ThinkPad uses about 1% of the battery per hour while in "modern standby." I figure I have at least three and up to 4 days of being unplugged before it's forced to shut down.

Re: Microsoft says new Surface Pro is faster than 15" M3 MacBook Air

#14

Do they sleep/wake properly though? If not, it's going to be absolutely useless for me.

Can’t believe it’s 2024 and Microsoft has not sorted this out yet. I switched to MacBooks 15 years ago because I liked being able to close the lid at any moment and stuff it into my laptop and go.

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.

Re: Microsoft says new Surface Pro is faster than 15" M3 MacBook Air

#15

Faster doesn't tell the whole story. For example, I'll take 80% as fast with 8 hours of battery life over 100% speed at 2 hours.

If you read more than just the headline you'd find that the third sentence of the article talks about battery life.

Re: Microsoft says new Surface Pro is faster than 15" M3 MacBook Air

#16
post #9

> As for battery life, Copilot+ PCs support up to 15 hours of web browsing or 22 hours of local video playback. The MacBook Air models offer the same 15 hours of wireless web browsing, but only 18 hours of local video playback. 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. I…

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Re: Microsoft says new Surface Pro is faster than 15" M3 MacBook Air

#17
post #9

> As for battery life, Copilot+ PCs support up to 15 hours of web browsing or 22 hours of local video playback. The MacBook Air models offer the same 15 hours of wireless web browsing, but only 18 hours of local video playback. 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. I…

Macs have always had great battery life and the Apple Silicon chips took it to another level. It remains to be seen if any Windows laptop can actually consistently achieve their marketed battery life given Windows’ terrible track record for power management and proper sleeping.

Re: Microsoft says new Surface Pro is faster than 15" M3 MacBook Air

#18
How does the memory bandwidth compare? Based on my usage, that's key in responsiveness between Mac and PC now. Also for LLMs in memory. I compare the current top Surface Pro with the current Macbook Airs.

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/...

1: https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs/

Re: Microsoft says new Surface Pro is faster than 15" M3 MacBook Air

#19
post #3

So the new pro-level laptop from MS+QCOM (they are bragging of the specs of the one with Snapdragon X Elite chip which starts at $1,500) and ships in a month beats last year's entry-level mac, which starts at $999 and has been shipping for a year?

If they ship on time they might get four months before Apple has a faster machine. And the last six weeks to two months of that, people will likely wait and see (if they consider anything from MS at all that is).
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