When Apple released Apple Silicon, it was a huge breath of fresh air - suddenly the web became snappy again! And the battery lasted forever! Software has bloated to slow down MacBooks again, RAM can often be a major limiting factor in performance, and battery life is more variable now.
Intel is finally catching up to Apple for the first time since 2020. Panther Lake is very competitive on everything except single-core performance (including battery life). Panther Lake CPU's arguably have better features as well - Intel QSV is great if you compile ffmpeg to use it for encoding, and it's easier to use local AI models with OpenVINO than it is to figure out how to use the Apple NPU's. Intel has better tools for sampling/tracing performance analysis, and you can actually see you're loading the iGPU (which is quite performant) and how much VRAM you're using. Last I looked, there was still no way to actually check if an AI model was running on Apple's CPU, GPU, or NPU. The iGPU's can also be configured to use varying amounts of system RAM - I'm not sure how that compares to Apple's unified memory for effective VRAM, and Apple has higher memory bandwidth/lower latency.
I'm not saying that Intel has matched Apple, but it's competitive in the latest generation.
My work laptop will literally struggle to last 2 hours doing any actual work. That involves running IDEs, compiling code, browsing the web, etc. I've done the same on my Macbook on a personal level and it barely makes a dent in the battery.
I feel like the battery performance is definitely down to the hardware. Apple Silicon is an incredible innovation. But the general responsiveness of the OS has to be down to Windows being god-awful. I don't understand how a top of the line desktop can still feel sluggish versus even an M1 Macbook. When I'm running intensive applications like games or compiling code on my desktop, it's rapid. But it never actual feels fast doing day to day things. I feel like that's half the problem. Windows just FEELS so slow all the time. There's no polish.
I currently have a M3 Pro for a work laptop. The performance is fine, but the battery life is not particularly impressive. It often hits low battery after just 2-3 hours without me doing anything particularly CPU-intensive, and sometimes drains the battery from full to flat while sitting closed in a backpack overnight. I'm pretty sure this is due to the corporate crapware, not any issues with Apple's OS, though it's difficult to prove.
I've tended to think lately that all of the OSes are basically fine when set up reasonably well, but can be brought to their knees by a sufficient amount of low-quality corporate crapware.
If you have access to the Defender settings, I found it to be much better after setting an exclusion for the folder that you clone your git repositories to. You can also set exclusions for the git binary and your IDE.
That M2 MBA however, it only feels sluggish at > 400 Chrome tabs open because only then swapping becomes a real annoyance.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2022/07/14/m2-macbook-air-slower-ssd-bas...
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/m5-macbook-pro...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/AcerNitro/comments/1i0nbt4/slow_ssd...
Except that you can replace Windows with Linux and suddenly it doesn't feel like dogshit anymore. SSDs are fast enough that they should be adding zero perceived latency for ordinary day-to-day operation. In fact, Linux still runs great on a pure spinning disk setup, which is something no other OS can manage today.
With Windows, you're probably still getting SATA and not even NVMe.
The options in that space are increasingly dwindling which is a problem when supporting older machines.
Sometimes it is cheaper to get a sketchy m2 ssd and adapter than to get an actual sata drive from one of the larger manufactures.
(I love my MacBook Air, but it does have its limits.)
My recommendation to friends asking about MBP / MBA is entirely based on whether they do anything that will load the CPU for more than 7 minutes. For me, I need the fans. I even use Macs Fan Control[0], a 3rd party utility, to control the fans for some of my workflows - pegging the fans to 100% to pre-cool the CPU between loads can help a lot.
My used M1 mba is the fastest computer I’ve ever used. If a video render is going to take more than 7 minutes I walk away or just do something in another app anyway. The difference of a few mini means nothing.
What’s surprising is it DOES throttle using Discord with video after an hour or so, unless the battery is already full (I’m guessing it tries to charge which generates a lot of heat). You get way less thermals with a full battery and it using power instead of discharging/charging the battery during heavy usage.
Happiness #1
Apples CPUs are most powerful efficient however, due to a bunch of design and manufacturing choices.
But to answer your question, yes Windows 11 with modern security crap feels 2-3 slower than vanilla Linux on the same hardware.
Also, all the top nearly 50 multi-core benchmarks are taken up by Epyc and Xeon chips. For desktop/laptop chips that aren't Threadripper, Apple still leads with the M3 Ultra 32-core in multi-core passmark benchmark. The usual caveats of benchmarks not being representative of any actual workload still apply, of course.
And Apple does lag behind in multi-core benchmarks for laptop chips - The M3 Ultra is not offered in a laptop form-factor, but it does beat every AMD/Intel laptop chip as well in multicore benchmarks.
Obviously it's an Apple-to-Oranges (pardon the pun) comparison since the AMD options don't need to care about the power envelope nearly as much; and the comparison gets more equal when normalizing for Apple's optimized domain (power efficiency), but the high-end AMD laptop chips still edge it out.
But then this turns into some sort of religious war, where people want to assume that their "god" should win at everything. It's not, the Apple chips are great; amazing even, when considering they're powering laptops/phones for 10+ hours at a time in smaller chassis than their competitors. But they still have to give in certain metrics to hit that envelope.
1 - https://thepcbottleneckcalculator.com/cpu-benchmarks-2026/
What does "single core gaming performance" even mean for a CPU that doesn't have an iGPU? How could that not be a category error to compare against Apple Silicon?
I was looking at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
See also:
https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-list/cinebench-scores
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks vs https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
Just a guess, but I would interpret it to mean how fast the CPU can issue commands to the GPU (which is usually, though not always, done in a single thread). For example, that could be measured by choosing a graphically lightweight game at minimum settings together with the best possible GPU and measuring the framerate. I.e. Making sure the bottleneck is the CPU, how high does the framerate go?
Whether the package includes a GPU or not is irrelevant, because what is being compared is the CPU part of the package, not the GPU. Whether they both happen to live within the same package or even the same die is irrelevant.
The distance was not huge, maybe 3%. You can obviously pick and choose your benchmarks until you find one where "your" CPU happens to be the best.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks vs https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
Apple leads all of these in single core, by a significant margin. Even at geekbench.com (3398 for AMD 9950X3D vs 3235 for the 14900KS vs ~4000 for various Apple chips)
I'm not sure I could find a single core benchmark it would lose no matter how hard I tried...
My personal M1 feels just as fast as the work M4 due to this.
With maximum corporate spyware it consistently takes 1 second to get a visual feedback on Windows.
The cores are. Nothing is beating a M4/M5 on single CPU performance, and per-cycle nothing is even particularly close.
At the whole-chip level, there are bigger devices from the x86 vendors which will pull ahead on parallel benchmarks. And Apple's unfortunate allergy to effective cooling techniques (like, "faster fans move more air") means that they tend to throttle on chip-scale loads[1].
But if you just want to Run One Thing really fast, which even today still correlates better to "machine feels fast" than parallel loads, Apple is the undisputed king.
[1] One of the reasons Geekbench 6, which controversially includes cooling pauses, looks so much better for Apple than version 5 did.
It’s probably the single most common corner to cut in x86 laptops. Manufacturers love to shove hot chips into a chassis too thin for them and then toss in whatever cheap tiny-whiny-fan cooling solution they happen to have on hand. Result: laptop sounds like a jet engine when the CPU is being pushed.
The issue is actually very simple. In order to gain more performance, manufactures like AMD / Intel for a long time have been in a race for the highest frequency but if you have some knowhow in hardware, you know that higher frequency = more power draw the higher you clock.
So you open your MS Paint, and ... your CPU pushes to 5.2Ghz, and it gets fed 15W on a single core. This creates a heat spike in the sensors, and your fans on laptops, all too often are set to react very fast. And VROOOOEEEEM goes your fan as the CPU Temp sensor hits 80C on a single core, just for a second. But wait, your MS Paint is open, and down goes the fan. And repeat, repeat, repeat ...
Notice how Apple focused on running their CPUs no higher then 4.2Ghz or something... So even if their CPU boosts to 100%, that thermal peak will be maybe 7W.
Now combine that with Apple using a much more tolerant fan / temp sensor setup. They say: 100C is perfectly acceptable. So when your CPU boosts, its not dumping 15W, but only 7W. And because the fan reaction threshold is so high, the fans do not react on any Apple product. Unless you run a single or MT process for a LONG time.
And even then, the fans will only ramp up slowly if your 100C has been going on for a few seconds, and while yes, your CPU will be thermal throttling while the fans spin up. But you do not feel this effect.
That is the real magic of Apple. Yes, their CPUs are masterpieces at how they get so much performance from a lower frequency, but the real kicker is their thermal / fan profile design.
The wife has a old Apple clone laptop from 2018. Thing is for 99.9% of the time silent. No fans, nothing. Because Xiaomi used the same tricks on that laptop, allowing it to boost to the max, without triggering the fan ramping. And when it triggers with a long running process, they use a very low fan rpm until it goes way too high. I had laptops with the same CPU from other brands in the same time periode, and they all had annoying fan profiles. That showed me that a lot of Apple magic is good design around the hardware/software/fan.
But ironically, that magic has been forgotten in later models by Xiaomi ... Tsk!
Manufactures think: Its better if millions of people suffer from more noise, then if we need to have a few thousand laptops that die / get damaged, from too much heat. So ramp up the fans!!!
Of course Apple did pick a very good sweet spot favoring a wide core as opposed to a speed daemon more than the competition.
That's true in principle, but IMHO a little too evasive. In point of fact Apple 100% won this round. Their wider architecture is actually faster than the competition in an absolute sense even at the deployed clock rates. There's really no significant market where you'd want to use anything different for CPU compute anywhere. Datacenters would absolutely buy M5 racks if they were offered. M5 efficiency cores are better than Intel's or Zen 5c every time they're measured too.
Just about the only spaces where Apple is behind[1] are die size and packaging: their cores take a little more area per benchmark point, and they're still shipping big single dies. And they finance both of those shortcomings with much higher per-part margins.
Intel and AMD have moved hard into tiled architectures and it seems to be working out for them. I'd expect Apple to do the same soon.
[1] Well, except the big elephant in the room that "CPU Performance Doesn't Matter Much Anymore". Consumer CPUs are fast enough and have been for years now, and the stuff that feels slow is on the GPU or the cloud these days. Apple's in critical danger of being commoditized out of its market space, but then that's true of every premium vendor throughout history.
Early on personally I had doubts they could scale their CPU to high end desktop performance, but obviously it hasn't been an issue.
My nitpick was purely about using clock per cycle as a performance metric, which is as much nonsense as comparing GHz: AFAIK Apple cpus still top at 4.5 GHz, while the AMD/Intel reach 6Ghz, so obviously the architectures are optimized for different target frequencies (which makes sense: the power costs of a high GHz design are astronomical).
And as an microarchitecture nerd I'm definitely interested in how they can implement such a wide architecture, but wide-ness per-se is not a target.
It was a discussion about how the P cores are left ready to speedily respond to input via the E cores satisfying background needs, in this case talking specifically about Apple Silicon because that's the writer's interest. But of course loads of chips have P and E cores, for the same reason.
You are comparing 256 AMD Zen6c Core to What? M4 Max?
When people say CPU they meant CPU Core, And in terms of Raw Speed, Apple CPU holds the fastest single core CPU benchmarks.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/
Where the M5 (non-pro, the one that will be in the next MacBook Air) is on top.
When the M5 multicore scores arrive, the multi-core charts will be interesting.
My Apple silicon laptop feels super fast because I just open the lid and it's running. That's not because the CPU ran instructions super fast, it's because I can just close the lid and the battery lasts forever.
Replaced a good Windows machine (Ryzen 5? 32 Gb) and I have a late intel Mac and a Linux workstation (6 core Ryzen 5, 32 Gb).
Obviously the Mac is newer. But wow. It's faster even on things that CPU shouldn't matter, like going through a remote samba mount through our corporate VPN.
- Much faster than my intel Mac
- Faster than my Windows
- Haven't noticed any improvements over my Linux machines, but with my current job I no longer get to use them much for desktop (unfortunately).
Of course, while I love my Debian setup, boot up is long on my workstation; screensaver/sleep/wake up is a nightmare on my entertainment box (my fault, but common!). The Mac just sleeps/wakes up with no problems.
The Mac (smallest air) is also by far the best laptop Ive ever had from a mobility POV. Immediate start up, long battery, decent enough keyboard (but If rather sacrifice for a longer keypress)
I still use an M1 MB Air for work mostly docked... the machine is insane for what it can still do, it sips power and has a perfect stability track record for me. I also have a Halo Strix machine that is the first machine that I can run linux and feel like I'm getting a "mac like" experience with virtually no compromises.
I didn't find any reply mentioning the easy of use, benefits and handy things the mac does and Linux won't. Spotlight, Photos app with all the face recognition and general image index, contact sync, etc. Takes ages to setup those on Linux and with macs everything just works with an Apple account. So I wonder if Linux had to do all this background stuff, if it would be able to run smoothly as Macs run this days.
For context: I was running Linux for 6 months for the first time in 10 years (which I was daily driving macs). My M1 Max still beats my full tower gaming PC, which I was using linux at. I've used Windows and Linux before, and Windows for gaming too. My Linux setup was very snappy without any corporate stuff. But my office was getting warm because of the PC. My M1 barely turn on the fans, even with large DB migrations and other heavy operation during software development.
After I put an SSD in it, that is.
I wonder what my Apple silicon laptop is even doing sometimes.
Mac on intel feels like it was about 2x slower at these basic functions. (I don’t have real data points)
Intel Mac had lag when opening apps. Silicon Mac is instant and always responsive.
No idea how that compares to Linux.
This is a metric I never really understood. how often are people booting? The only time I ever reboot a machine is if I have to. For instance the laptop I'm on right now has an uptime of just under 100 days.
It rebooted and got to desktop, restoring all my open windows and app state, before I got to the podium (it was a very small room).
The Mac OS itself seems to be relatively fast to boot, the desktop environment does a good job recovering from failures, and now the underlying hardware is screaming fast.
I should never have to reboot, but in the rare instances when it happens, being fast can be a difference maker.
My work desktop? Every day, and it takes > 30 seconds to go from off to desktop, and probably another minute or two for things like Docker to decide that they’ve actually started up.
Presumably a whole bunch of services are still being (lazy?) loaded.
On the other hand, my cachyos install takes a bit longer to boot, but after it jumps to the desktop all apps that are autostart just jump into view instantly.
Most time on boot seems to be spent on initializing drives and finding the right boot drive and load it.
But I'm running a fairly slim Archlinux install without a desktop environment or anything like that. (It's just XMonad as a window manager.)
Even Windows (or at least my install that doesn't have any crap besides visual studio on it) can run for weeks these days...
My work PC will decide to not idle and will spin up fans arbitrarily in the evenings so I shut it down when I’m not using it.
Something else to consider: chromebook on arm boots significantly faster than dito intel. Yes, nowadays Mediateks latest cpus wipe the floor with intel N-whatever, but it has been like this since the early days when the Arm version was relatively underpowered.
Why? I have no idea.
It’s all about the perf per watt.
The switch from a top spec, new Intel Mac to a base model M1 Macbook Air was like a breath of fresh air. I still use that 5 year old laptop happily because it was such a leap forward in performance. I dont recall ever being happy with a 5 year old device.
There are dozens of outlets out there that run synthetic and real world benchmarks that answer these questions.
Apple’s chips are very strong on creative tasks like video transcoding, they have the best single core performance as well as strong multi-core performance. They also have top tier power efficiency, battery life, and quiet operation, which is a lot of what people look for when doing corporate tasks.
Depending on the chip model, the graphics performance is impressive for the power draw, but you can get better integrated graphics from Intel Panther Lake, and you can get better dedicated class graphics from Nvidia.
Some outlets like Just Josh tech on YouTube are good at demonstrating these differences.