I switched from an XPS 13 to an M2 Air recently. The differences are striking.
I have my XPS 13 browsing HN next to my M1 air. That's all the XPS is doing, firefox browsing HN. My M2 has multiple docker containers, a collection of office apps open, browsers, vs code... and so on.
My XPS battery will barely last until 1pm if it isn't plugged in, and the fan kicks on for no apparent reason... It will last a little longer if I manually set it to "best battery life" but even that can be surprisingly ineffective for no apparent reason sometimes.
My M2 Air will last nearly two full working days (I haven't pushed it that far but so far it appears it would make it), the battery life is crazy. I go into the office and I don't even think about plugging it in, I know it will do fine.
I don't know what it is about macOS and using their M chips but the efficiency is amazing to me.
I even had a docker container freak out on my Air recently. It pegged a CPU core to 100% for a good 45 minutes. Temp skyrocketed. But I was on another virtual desktop and I didn't notice a thing. The OS ran smooth, vscode, node and everything else was running smooth. It wasn't until I looked at the status bar that I saw the CPU and temp had skyrocketed. I found the container responsible, killed it, and temp dropped quickly. Even under non ideal situations the Air performed well.
With my XPS the moment I put it down I think about where I can plug it in. If I pick up my XPS to quick order some Tacos and it wasn't plugged in from the start I feel like i"m in a race to get the order in "Come on, hold on, I need tacos!!!"
With my Air I don't even think about plugging it in, that's a completely new experience for a laptop for me.
I don't really understand the benchmarks and such that I've seen, but the every day user experience has been like night and day.
The CPU/SoC's efficiency is likely the core driver behind this difference, but I believe that Windows exacerbates the issue.
I recently installed Fedora 36 on my Tiger Lake (i5-1130G7) ThinkPad X1 Nano, and while the machine has never had particularly good battery life, it's more "calm" under Linux on average. Even while setting things up with various things running its fan didn't kick on and it didn't get warm like it typically would under both the Windows 10 installation it shipped with, as well the current upgraded Windows 11 install.
Additionally, while I haven't yet actually tested it, GNOME under Linux estimates that it'd get somewhere in the ballpark of 8-8.5 hours out of a full charge when running in "battery saver" mode, which is a good hour or two longer than Windows' estimate in its low power mode.
Of course the M-series devices I've used destroy the ThinkPad in terms of battery life, regardless of the OS it's booted into though.
Am I the only one not bothering with Windows' estimates at all? It will happily tell me I have two hours remaining and shut down after 40 minutes, without me touching the PC at all. I had this or similar experience with every windows laptop I ever used.
>If you’ve been following any of my articles about the performance of the cores in M1 series chips, you’ll have come across the term Quality of Service (QoS), which can have major impact on how fast code runs on processors under macOS.
In addition to each process being given a priority, a number that can be changed using the command tool renice, some years ago Apple introduced another setting, the QoS. This is set for each process, and can be one of four discrete values from 9 (the lowest, for background tasks) to 33 (the highest, for tasks involving user interaction).
> It pegged a CPU core to 100% for a good 45 minutes. Temp skyrocketed. But I was on another virtual desktop and I didn't notice a thing.
I reckon this is more of a heterogeneous architecture thing than a MacOS/Apple one. When you run a processor-intensive task, Grand Central Dispatch will assign it a relative priority and then, on new M1 chips, delegate the process to a core cluster. While one heavy program runs, another can operate alongside it on the efficiency cores or even another P-core cluster.
I've noticed this behavior as well on Alder Lake. There are several times I've booted up Bitwig with something like Elden Ring running in the background, and had no idea it was open while I worked on music.
Yeah it could absolutely be something that happens elsewhere outside Appple land. I tell that story more as a sort of indirect mention of some of the internet drama over "throttling" / general user experence rather than a story about what MacOS does. I really don't know what was responsible for everything still running smooth when that incident happened. For all I know Docker on Apple Silicon might be doing something there too to keep things from getting entirely out of hand.
I have a similar experience coming to m1 mba from an xps13. I had some buggy code change monitor/recompiler running that pegged a cpu core at 100%. The palm test would get hot and the battery would go to like 10% after a working day. Those were the only way I knew somerhing was up.
What time do you start browsing with the xps? 9 am making it 4 hours or so of life. That's pretty pathetic and it almost sounds like you have some background processes going on that are sinking your battery life and kicking on the fans. I put in a new battery in my 2012 mbp and I get about 6 hours ish browsing a very light website like HN (sinks like a stone on JS heavy websites of course). No fan ramp up either although I pin them to minimum 2000rpm on this computer. CPU stays at 50-60*c according to my fan controller.
I've a macbook pro, 2019. I find office 365 uses 100% of one cpu so reguarly (at least one of outlook, excel or PowerPoint will be acting up)
That I get 1.5 hours battery.
How does office behave so well for you? The cpu hardly makes a difference there, is the program is cpu hungry battery will be used
Do you have Defender installed? That’s the culprit for me on my work Mac. Keep ‘top -o cpu’ running and look for wdavdaemon blowing up, or just set a cron job to kill it every hour.
That's one thing I haven't installed yet. Just to get up and running quick while I was getting setup I installed the office apps as PWAs rather than go through the application install process and ... kinda left them that way.
But doing that they haven't caused any issues. Granted Teams, while on a video conference, will eat battery, but it handles a few meetings a day just fine overall.
This is not a surprise for anyone that has been using Windows under Parallels on an M1 Mac. What's important is for the real experience to be match the benchmark and it seems to fly for core office/productivity tasks.
I setup a VM for work stuff that includes a bunch of admin policies and work-installed junk a few weeks ago to work while traveling. It didn't even break a sweat and Teams felt as responsive as my recent i7 desktop. At the same time I was able to run all my usual dev stuff on the Mac. It felt like it would handle classic Visual Studio as well, but I didn't want to bother with the install.
Ehh... the answer is it kind of works well, but it really depends on what you're doing since you're running an x64 application (Visual Studio) on an ARM version of Windows running on a Mac M1 in parallels.
.NET development and in particular stepping through debugging is particularly slow, though I guess we should be happy it works at all.
How is this a shame for AMD or Qualcomm, who aren't part of this comparison at all?
> Windows running in VM on M2 is faster than native Windows on x86.
Which x86? 12th gen Intel? 11th gen Intel? Ryzen 6000? These are all wildly different processors. This comment is absurd. It's also "Windows ARM version running in a VM on M2", not x86 windows which is the only thing you'd care about running in VM on MacOS if you were actually going to do this for some reason.
If the article is true (and that's a big if, given Max Tech's history of tech reporting), instead of blaming the above companies I'd just congratulate Apple and thank them for putting the bar higher. AMD recent processors are still great on the desktop, and an absolute blast on the server, with extremely attractive value for money ratio.
> AMD recent processors are still great on the desktop, and an absolute blast on the server
Yes they are truly great but point to consider is they are just competing against Intel. Don't get wrong I love what AMD has done recently with Ryzen but we need ARM based servers which has perf per watt competing with M1/M2
I was shopping for a laptop a month ago and considering the M2 MacBook. The CPU performance is definitely impressive, but I ended up getting a Razer Blade 14 because it absolutely decimates the MacBook in GPU performance and gaming related stuff, unless you go top of the line MacBook Pro which would have been about $1200 more and couldn't run most games. If you don't need a great GPU I would definitely go with a MacBook, but if you need one you're just not going to beat an RTX 3080 and an AMD Ryzen.
Razer Blades look good on paper but be prepared for bloated batteries. Between the 5 Blades my friend and I own, all 5 had bloated batteries within a year, some catastrophically. I'm personally on battery number 4, in just 3 years of use.
My solution is a bit different, I have a Ryzen desktop with an NVIDIA GPU when I need to game, as I don’t game on the go, and honestly, gaming on the Mac doesn’t exist.
But I absolutely work on the go, and need the battery life I get from the Mac so I’m not constantly looking for a place to charge.
Seems like multi-core scores are all over the map (probably depending on the cooling of the laptop), but not really impressive when comparing to a passively cooled CPU. Single-core scores are meh compared to the M2.
It was an additional eye opener after I tried, unsuccessfully, to like Raspberri Pi. "Powerful 64-bit CPU"? After M1 I kept expecting it to be fast and to run non-ARM software :D
Once you try M1/M2 Macs it's very hard to go back to pretty much any hardware.
Raspberry Pi has a distinctively different target audience. If you expect an RPi to run non-ARM code, then I'd say it's not made for you.
I agree that M1/M2 Macs are good, but I implore everyone to not get sucked into and stuck into the Apple ecosystem. Nothing good can come out of tech dominance.
Please provide at least a single piece of evidence when blaming. I don't know them, but if you're saying I should not trust them - please explain why (not just “they are wrong”).
For everyone saying this must be the Windows Insider ARM based Windows version - the linked YouTube video shows him using (and paying for) the full Windows 11 x86. He even gives a referral code. It's at 48 seconds into the video.
Depends which next Ryzen you mean. 6000 series has been out for almost 6 months. CPU is the same, gpu is much better. The 7000 are expected to be much better - zen 4 + rdna 3. Yummy
Not that hard to find. Dell Inspiron and Alienware have AMD options. Lenovo's main X13 line has AMD variants. And of course all the Asus, MSI, Acers, etc.. of the world have AMD offerings. So does HP.
“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics”.
I really wish thermal throttling was the first major point of discussion for ALL laptop CPU's.
One of my work laptops never reached full cpu speeds in the real world because it would get thermally throttled!
>the XPS 13 Plus’ fan was really struggling here because, boy oh boy, did this thing get hot.
After a few hours of regular use (which, in my case, is a dozen or so Chrome tabs with Slack running over top), this laptop was boiling. I was getting uncomfortable keeping my hands on the palm rests and typing on the keyboard. Putting it on my lap was off the table.
I had the same experience, and it's incredibly frustrating -- both when you don't know about thermal throttling and when you do.
I'd do something that caused high load, and it would be briefly fast then suddenly everything would get sluggish. I naively thought this was normal ("under load") until some time I was doing the same workload on a similar-spec desktop CPU and it didn't happen. In trying to discovery why is when I first learned about thermal throttling.
My old work laptop was an i7 XPS-13. On bootup, it would spam the console with messages about the processor cores thermal throttling (partly due to cpu load from disk encryption)-- this was within a few seconds of power on in a too cold air conditioned office.
It's going to be partially this, but with AMD launching Ryzen 7000 mobile on 5nm we can see how close we get in performance per watt. I don't believe it will be enough to catch up.
Also remember this is running in a VM (guaranteed overhead) and Windows for ARM (this is the red head step child of Microsoft). Even if they closed the gap, this is still impressive.
I read and watch a decent number of PC hardware sites/channels and they don't seem to use geekbench. The only time I hear people mention geekbench is in relation to apple.
Is there a reason why pc hardware sites don't seem to use geekbench?
It is always better to benchmark with actual programs than it is with benchmark utilities. Geekbench's claims as a cross-platform test are also not really validated.
For example, let's check out the M1 Mini review that Anandtech did, specifically these two pages:
According to Geekbench, the M1 handily beats the 5950X in single-threaded work. However, according to Cinebench 1T and spec2017, the 5950X is faster at single-threaded. Who is "correct"?
The answer is a much more simple "look at the benchmark results that matter for your workloads." A good review will cover benchmarks of a variety of workloads as a result so you can figure out which matters to you. Which is never geekbench, since nobodies workload is ever geekbench. So a good review will tend to not include geekbench rather than include it, unless they just don't have better ways to compare whatever they're testing.
GB4/5 are... not a particularly high quality codebases. I can't offer anything more than that, but, well, lets just say that GB4/5 is my least favorite benchmark as a compiler engineer for AMD. It shouldn't be given much weight as a benchmark.
GeekBench is intended as a cross-platform benchmark.
> Designed from the ground-up for cross-platform comparisons, Geekbench 5 allows you to compare system performance across devices, operating systems, and processor architectures. Geekbench 5 supports Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux.
But it seems like there are a lot of other options.
PC hardware sites are probably less concerned with "cross-platform" benchmarks. As long as the system hardware and operating system are the same, varying only the component you're testing, you can test with any benchmark that runs on the system.
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I have my XPS 13 browsing HN next to my M1 air. That's all the XPS is doing, firefox browsing HN. My M2 has multiple docker containers, a collection of office apps open, browsers, vs code... and so on.
My XPS battery will barely last until 1pm if it isn't plugged in, and the fan kicks on for no apparent reason... It will last a little longer if I manually set it to "best battery life" but even that can be surprisingly ineffective for no apparent reason sometimes.
My M2 Air will last nearly two full working days (I haven't pushed it that far but so far it appears it would make it), the battery life is crazy. I go into the office and I don't even think about plugging it in, I know it will do fine.
I don't know what it is about macOS and using their M chips but the efficiency is amazing to me.
I even had a docker container freak out on my Air recently. It pegged a CPU core to 100% for a good 45 minutes. Temp skyrocketed. But I was on another virtual desktop and I didn't notice a thing. The OS ran smooth, vscode, node and everything else was running smooth. It wasn't until I looked at the status bar that I saw the CPU and temp had skyrocketed. I found the container responsible, killed it, and temp dropped quickly. Even under non ideal situations the Air performed well.
With my XPS the moment I put it down I think about where I can plug it in. If I pick up my XPS to quick order some Tacos and it wasn't plugged in from the start I feel like i"m in a race to get the order in "Come on, hold on, I need tacos!!!"
With my Air I don't even think about plugging it in, that's a completely new experience for a laptop for me.
I don't really understand the benchmarks and such that I've seen, but the every day user experience has been like night and day.
I recently installed Fedora 36 on my Tiger Lake (i5-1130G7) ThinkPad X1 Nano, and while the machine has never had particularly good battery life, it's more "calm" under Linux on average. Even while setting things up with various things running its fan didn't kick on and it didn't get warm like it typically would under both the Windows 10 installation it shipped with, as well the current upgraded Windows 11 install.
Additionally, while I haven't yet actually tested it, GNOME under Linux estimates that it'd get somewhere in the ballpark of 8-8.5 hours out of a full charge when running in "battery saver" mode, which is a good hour or two longer than Windows' estimate in its low power mode.
Of course the M-series devices I've used destroy the ThinkPad in terms of battery life, regardless of the OS it's booted into though.
Am I the only one not bothering with Windows' estimates at all? It will happily tell me I have two hours remaining and shut down after 40 minutes, without me touching the PC at all. I had this or similar experience with every windows laptop I ever used.
In addition to each process being given a priority, a number that can be changed using the command tool renice, some years ago Apple introduced another setting, the QoS. This is set for each process, and can be one of four discrete values from 9 (the lowest, for background tasks) to 33 (the highest, for tasks involving user interaction).
https://eclecticlight.co/2022/01/07/how-macos-controls-perfo...
I reckon this is more of a heterogeneous architecture thing than a MacOS/Apple one. When you run a processor-intensive task, Grand Central Dispatch will assign it a relative priority and then, on new M1 chips, delegate the process to a core cluster. While one heavy program runs, another can operate alongside it on the efficiency cores or even another P-core cluster.
I've noticed this behavior as well on Alder Lake. There are several times I've booted up Bitwig with something like Elden Ring running in the background, and had no idea it was open while I worked on music.
So longer than 4, but for just browsing IMO it should last much longer.
But doing that they haven't caused any issues. Granted Teams, while on a video conference, will eat battery, but it handles a few meetings a day just fine overall.
I should install those apps one day ...
I setup a VM for work stuff that includes a bunch of admin policies and work-installed junk a few weeks ago to work while traveling. It didn't even break a sweat and Teams felt as responsive as my recent i7 desktop. At the same time I was able to run all my usual dev stuff on the Mac. It felt like it would handle classic Visual Studio as well, but I didn't want to bother with the install.
.NET development and in particular stepping through debugging is particularly slow, though I guess we should be happy it works at all.
TBF, I think the M1 CPUs crossed the magic barrier already
Deleted Comment
Such a shame for Intel, AMD and Qualcomm.
> Windows running in VM on M2 is faster than native Windows on x86.
Which x86? 12th gen Intel? 11th gen Intel? Ryzen 6000? These are all wildly different processors. This comment is absurd. It's also "Windows ARM version running in a VM on M2", not x86 windows which is the only thing you'd care about running in VM on MacOS if you were actually going to do this for some reason.
But also wouldn't be possible without good work from Parallels.
If the article is true (and that's a big if, given Max Tech's history of tech reporting), instead of blaming the above companies I'd just congratulate Apple and thank them for putting the bar higher. AMD recent processors are still great on the desktop, and an absolute blast on the server, with extremely attractive value for money ratio.
Yes they are truly great but point to consider is they are just competing against Intel. Don't get wrong I love what AMD has done recently with Ryzen but we need ARM based servers which has perf per watt competing with M1/M2
I was shopping for a laptop a month ago and considering the M2 MacBook. The CPU performance is definitely impressive, but I ended up getting a Razer Blade 14 because it absolutely decimates the MacBook in GPU performance and gaming related stuff, unless you go top of the line MacBook Pro which would have been about $1200 more and couldn't run most games. If you don't need a great GPU I would definitely go with a MacBook, but if you need one you're just not going to beat an RTX 3080 and an AMD Ryzen.
But I absolutely work on the go, and need the battery life I get from the Mac so I’m not constantly looking for a place to charge.
https://valid.x86.fr/u8b004
I believe - it will OBLITERATE M2.
Also doesn't really obliterate the M2:
https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-2022
Seems like multi-core scores are all over the map (probably depending on the cooling of the laptop), but not really impressive when comparing to a passively cooled CPU. Single-core scores are meh compared to the M2.
Deleted Comment
(Apparently I’m wrong, leaving my original gaffe in place.)
Once you try M1/M2 Macs it's very hard to go back to pretty much any hardware.
I agree that M1/M2 Macs are good, but I implore everyone to not get sucked into and stuck into the Apple ecosystem. Nothing good can come out of tech dominance.
Those guys have absolutely no clue what they're talking about and just make bullshit click bait.
AMD's current offerings are pretty competitive with Apple. Unfortunately, they are hard to find. Yes, the real good stuff is almost unobtainium
Nothing new here, this is just better 5nm process advantage (which M2 undoubtedly has).
I really wish thermal throttling was the first major point of discussion for ALL laptop CPU's. One of my work laptops never reached full cpu speeds in the real world because it would get thermally throttled!
Exactly. Intel claims performance leadership based on their P series chips, which are always going to be throttled in a slim and light laptop.
For instance, Lenovo's thin and light ThinkPad X1 Yoga has two fans but still throttles:
>Unfortunately, the laptop got uncomfortably hot in its Best performance mode during testing, even with light workloads.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/review-lenovos-think...
Or the Dell XPS 13 Plus:
>the XPS 13 Plus’ fan was really struggling here because, boy oh boy, did this thing get hot.
After a few hours of regular use (which, in my case, is a dozen or so Chrome tabs with Slack running over top), this laptop was boiling. I was getting uncomfortable keeping my hands on the palm rests and typing on the keyboard. Putting it on my lap was off the table.
https://www.theverge.com/23284276/dell-xps-13-plus-intel-202...
I'd do something that caused high load, and it would be briefly fast then suddenly everything would get sluggish. I naively thought this was normal ("under load") until some time I was doing the same workload on a similar-spec desktop CPU and it didn't happen. In trying to discovery why is when I first learned about thermal throttling.
With Apple Silicon MBP I’m not sure what level of load should be to cause throttling with full-speed fans.
Also remember this is running in a VM (guaranteed overhead) and Windows for ARM (this is the red head step child of Microsoft). Even if they closed the gap, this is still impressive.
For example, let's check out the M1 Mini review that Anandtech did, specifically these two pages:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
According to Geekbench, the M1 handily beats the 5950X in single-threaded work. However, according to Cinebench 1T and spec2017, the 5950X is faster at single-threaded. Who is "correct"?
The answer is a much more simple "look at the benchmark results that matter for your workloads." A good review will cover benchmarks of a variety of workloads as a result so you can figure out which matters to you. Which is never geekbench, since nobodies workload is ever geekbench. So a good review will tend to not include geekbench rather than include it, unless they just don't have better ways to compare whatever they're testing.
These opinions are my own, not of AMD.
> Designed from the ground-up for cross-platform comparisons, Geekbench 5 allows you to compare system performance across devices, operating systems, and processor architectures. Geekbench 5 supports Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux.
But it seems like there are a lot of other options.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/macos12-windows-linux
PC hardware sites are probably less concerned with "cross-platform" benchmarks. As long as the system hardware and operating system are the same, varying only the component you're testing, you can test with any benchmark that runs on the system.