That doesn't really answer my question, though - I don't use Geekbench to do tasks, so I don't really care what geekbench scores are.
What is responsive, or rather, what was unresponsive on your Intel system, that has changed?
Again, I keep seeing people using the word "snappy" without any qualification, and that says to me this is a psychological thing, where people are convincing themselves something is better / faster, to internally justify their spend.
Like the only thing I think is "slow" on my mac, is Swift Playgrounds, but I wouldn't place that at the feet of it being a Xeon system, I'd say it's because it's a Catalyst app, and ALL catalyst apps are hot garbage, because Catalyst is a terrible technology that lowers the average of Mac software.
Sleep and wake on my system are worse than my old machine - it's 31 seconds for the system to sleep (I restart maybe every 30-40 days - usually only when there's a security update, or if I'm travelling for the weekend), but again, thats not the processor, that's the operating system, and I suspect the sheer number of peripherals I have.
First off, as I wrote, usual caveats apply to synthetic benchmarks.
Is the M1 Pro faster in synthetic benchmarks than my 5,1? Yes.
Is it considerably faster in actual real-world tasks, most if not all the time? Yes.
Does it feel faster and more responsive, most if not all the time? Yes. But that feeling is backed up, for me and others, by actual fact.
I never really thought the 5,1 was slow. It can do all the things it can do as fast as it ever did, of course, just like its predecessors (PM 6100/66, G3 beige 266Mhz, G4 MDD dual gig, and my MP 1,1 2.66 quad- still in occasional use, that one). It might boot up a bit quicker if I went to NVMe- but not that much faster than SATA. Gaming, Handbrake encoding, etc, would be a bit improved by a faster GPU, and so on…but that's all into the realms of spending increasingly large sums of money pursuing increasingly marginal gains, on a 14 year old system. For my use, I've got it optimal in terms of cost/benefit. And it is still, much of the time, slower than the MBP. Not just a little bit slower, often massively slower. For example, right now as I'm typing this, I am also encoding a 1080p file in Handbrake, VideoToolbox (so using the media engine), and over 200 fps with 30-35% CPU usage. About double the speed of the 5,1 using the RX580. Still while typing this, switched to software encode, CPU pegged, fan running fast but quieter than the old beast ever is, and it's still as fast as the 5,1 with hardware. Even maxed-out, the 5,1 wouldn't get near a base model M1 (let alone M2 or M4 generations) mini in many tasks. Startup is massively quicker on this MBP, and the system is immediately fully responsive after that, no spinning beachballs (or Windows equivalent). Software updates- even full macOS installs- are rapid. No half-hours watching that progress bar doing a security update, unlike the tower. I can think 'I'll just do
that', power this up, do whatever
that is, and shut it down again when the old beastie would still be getting itself ready.
You might still be better served by your 7,1 right now, an AN Other system as its replacement…but whatever does takes its place, I'd be very surprised if it didn't feel snappier, regardless of OS. Each of my desktops certainly has…
