Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 120 posts

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

#71

Post by dagmx »

gigel82 wrote: post #69

People that want gaming choose Windows, people that want productivity choose Mac. I don't see where this new product fits. You can't game with the paltry "arm companion" GPU and you can't be productive with tons of ads (product placement, "notifications" and tips, as well as the literal "hot singles near you" variety included). Maybe this is some kind of corporate devices for the old-school enterprises that rock Team…

It’s a fairly competent and competitive GPU for a low end SoC. Allegedly roughly comparable to an AMD 780M.

https://videocardz.com/newz/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-elite-adre...

That said, Microsoft’s comparisons should tell you who this is for: people who might otherwise buy a MacBook Air. That’s the segment that’s largely not doing creative work or gaming, but needs something for business use, or productivity on the go.

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

#72

Post by Gigachad »

albertopv wrote: post #43
lotsofpulp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's Windows Modern Standby, one of the stupidest choice Microsoft ever made. Basically the laptop stays on to connect to the Internet to still receive mail and notifications.

MacBooks also have this or something like it. You can ping the MacBook with find my even if it’s been asleep for ages.

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

#73

Post by akmittal »

dagmx wrote: post #59

Partially copying my comment from the Copilot+ thread They do some sleight of hand when doing the comparisons during the release today. The Surface Laptop is physically a competitor to the actively cooled MacBook Pro (in fact it’s thicker). Their performance and battery metrics are against the slimmer and passively cooled MacBook Air. Their performance comparison is between the M3 and the Snapdragon X Elite when the…

It's clear that elite x is not better than M3 in everything. But considering how far behind ARM on windows was, even having 5-10% slower chip is also a great improvement.

Hope Qualcomm manage to make 15-20 jump with each generation like Apple.

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

#74

Post by threeseed »

seam_carver wrote: post #26

Hopefully it forces apple to up the base ram or storage. Competition is good!

There is no need to. 95% of users are never going to need to more than the base.

Desktop apps are increasingly moving to the web not the other way around.

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

#75

Post by qnleigh »

Windows battery benchmarks have always been wildly overoptimistic on Surface products. Factor of 2 to 4 in my experience. Various bugs and bloat cause them to run hot when idling, or in the case of my most recent purchase, when sleeping! In both cases the device had these problems from day one.

As for performance benchmarks, I don't care what numbers they get if it takes a full 8 seconds to open a context menu when I right click something. I'm even less enthusiastic if I'm forced to use Windows 11 and put up with ads.

Surface hardware is amazing, but if Windows doesn't lose all of this bloat then I am done with it.

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

#76

Post by masklinn »

_cenw wrote: post #62
TulliusCicero wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why battery life in gaming laptops is so incredibly shit even when doing non-gaming tasks. I thought a while back Intel and AMD worked on hardware/software to automatically switch to integrated graphics when you don't need the discrete GPU? Did nothing come of that? I don't expect the battery life to be as good as non-gaming laptops, of course, but I feel like it should probably last longer than li…

Been like that forever. Usually gaming laptops prioritize their cooling systems over battery size. And don’t underestimate the high refresh rate panel likely optimized for at least 500 nits.

> And don’t underestimate the high refresh rate panel

Literally one of the reasons Apple added variable refresh rates on their pro phones: if you can vrr down, you save a ton of battery when you run the panel at 1Hz.

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

#77

Post by lispm »

I wonder how much performance will be used to run all the advanced Microsoft telemetry software (which collects & reports user data for Microsoft and which can't be disabled) and all that ad software they force on users.

I still wonder how it is legal to use Microsoft software in the EU in government surroundings. The German authorities publish tons of papers on how to use Windows&related ( https://www.bsi.bund.de/SiteGlobals/Forms/Suche/EN/Servicesu... ) , instead of simply disallowing to use Microsoft software.

With the data collection for "AI" it only gets worse.

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

#78

Post by wmf »

EarthLaunch wrote: post #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://ww…

Qualcomm is a little ahead of the M4 (8400 vs. 7500) but they're behind the M3/M4 Pro/Max/Ultra.

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

#79

Post by Nextgrid »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #14
perryizgr8 wrote: post #10

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.

It's not that they haven't sorted this out, it's that they intentionally broke it. S3 sleep was a solved problem all the way back in the Windows XP days.

The problem is that S3 sleep means the machine is actually sleeping, and short of timers being set ahead of time or explicit wake events by PCI devices, the machine is unable to think which means it can't do important things like download ads^W suggestions or similar. It's technically possible to do Wake-on-WLAN/WWAN but would require moving a ton of logic to the WAN card (it would need an entire network and app stack in order to maintain high-level TLS/etc connections with the various sync servers autonomously and wake the host when something new comes in) and in practice nobody bothered to do it because it's just not actually solving any problem the users care about - even when useful data is being fetched, it turns out that in practice nobody minds waiting 5 seconds for their Outlook to refresh.

Microsoft's "solution" however was to simply remove S3 sleep, so now the machine is incapable of it and is constantly in S0 (powered on state) and it's up to the OS to ensure nothing resource-hungry is running so that the CPU can actually enter its low-power states. This might be doable on an OS built from scratch (it's after all what all smartphones do successfully), but not with Windows if they want to preserve backwards compatibility with the PC we know and love, so in the end you get machines that have the risk of overheating & draining their whole battery while "sleeping"... but hey at least when it works your ads are up to date, progress I guess.

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

#80

Post by petesergeant »

qnleigh wrote: post #75

Windows battery benchmarks have always been wildly overoptimistic on Surface products. Factor of 2 to 4 in my experience. Various bugs and bloat cause them to run hot when idling, or in the case of my most recent purchase, when sleeping! In both cases the device had these problems from day one. As for performance benchmarks, I don't care what numbers they get if it takes a full 8 seconds to open a context menu when I…

> battery benchmarks have always been wildly overoptimistic

Assuming that’s accurate, isn’t that just straight consumer fraud?

Post reply on HN