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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

#81

Post by kstrauser »

binkHN wrote: post #13
dmix wrote: 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.

My work MBP has been neglected in a bag next to my desk for 2 weeks now. I just opened OmniFocus on my phone and it shows that my laptop last synced this afternoon.

That’s about normal for it.

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

#82

Post by dagmx »

akmittal wrote: post #73
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.

Sure, that’s why I end my comment with saying that it’s a strong showing.

I’m looking forward to more aarch64 support everywhere. I just wish companies were more straightforward about what’s being presented.

Though I believe that perf per watt will end up being closer to an M2 than an M3. If you take the battery size of an M2 MacBook Pro it also claims similar battery life as the Snapdragon X Plus here.

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

#83

Post by gumby »

InfiniteVortex wrote: post #2

Very interesting developments. I wonder how good X Elite's performance per watt is compared to the M3. Then again, Apple will soon restock all Macs with M4-level processors (reported, take it with a grain of salt). M4 beats the X Elite, but its not really a fair comparison since the X Elite is meant to compete with the M3. It seems like the X Elite is close to M3, but uses much more power [0]. [0]: https://nanoreview…

> Then again, Apple will soon restock all Macs with M4-level processors

Probably not soon. They just refreshed the macs with M3s, and put the M4s in the ipads pro, I assume due to TSMC yield issues with a bleeding edge process (yes, ipads outsell macs, but not the ipads pro, which is a low volume "halo" product).

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

#84

Post by Rinzler89 »

petesergeant wrote: post #80
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?

That's why battery claims are always UP TO not AT LEAST.

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

#85

Post by Scarbutt »

threeseed wrote: post #74
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.

But the browser wants all your RAM.

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

#86

Post by qnleigh »

petesergeant wrote: post #80
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?

I've always wondered this. For example I can't imagine how they ever achieved their quoted battery benchmarks with system processes running in the background, like indexing. These regularly consumed >50% CPU resources on my older Surface pro even on battery and were not easy to disable (I never did because doing so would cause other problems). But I can't see how you would achieve the quoted battery life without doing so...

If they do disable these things in their test, then that's super dishonest.

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

#87

Post by brokenmachine »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #84
petesergeant wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> battery benchmarks have always been wildly overoptimistic Assuming that’s accurate, isn’t that just straight consumer fraud?

That's why battery claims are always UP TO not AT LEAST.

It still fraud (in my opinion) if you can never reach those numbers under any circumstances.

It's not "up to a million hours usage", because it's impossible to use it for a million hours.

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

#88

Post by threeseed »

Scarbutt wrote: post #85
threeseed wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the browser wants all your RAM.

If the browser needs more than 8GB it will swap. Which will be completely unnoticeable with today's SSDs.

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

#89

Post by mananaysiempre »

xcv123 wrote: post #40
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.

Same thing happened with my Dell Precision laptop. Fixed it by wiping the hard drive and installing Linux.

Notably on recent CPU generations the CPU vendors yanked S3 support completely, so you have to rely on your Linux installation being able to adequately manage power in S0ix. While it won’t be hostile to you like a Windows one, I’m yet to see this work as well as S3 with regard to battery life.

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

#90

Post by selcuka »

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.

MacOS does that too, it's called Power Nap. You can turn it off, though.
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