Apple Says New MacBook Air Up to 23x Faster Than Intel-Based Model, But Read the Fine Print

[efoocool]

yeah, now compare it with my first Apple laptop, iBook G4 2006, base model

 

[cpnotebook80]

My wallet is safe this march. 😇

 

[mxrider88]

Compare it to a g5 while you are at it. How stupid, seriously. Pure marketing, they turned into a pure marketing company. Tell them to go back to making good software instead of talking up every little new product they release

 

[H2SO4]

well, they are documenting what they are comparing, nothing wrong with that.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm continues to use benchmarks and no real world comparison ...

So two wrongs do in fact make a right. Is that what you are saying?

 

[Jeeve Stubbs]

Apple should stop comparing its latest Macs to the Intel ones. It's getting a bit ridiculous at this point.

 

[Fluffyk]

Someone’s desperate here. What a dumb comparison.

 

[macfacts]

I am a scientist. 😂

Why would you keep so many tabs open, when you can save bookmarks, favorites, links??

That’s just bizarre

I think most people keep up to 5 to 10 open

If you’re researching or working in a project maybe 10 to 30.

But keeping hundreds open, you’re a tab enthusiast or hoarder.

Why bookmark when one can just click the history tab.

 

[Ashcanwin]

and safari still sucks and freezes constantly.

Really? I haven’t had any issues. It must be the pron sites your visiting.

 

[MacATDBB]

They can state what they compared in the fine print, but it still comes down to an app that uses Core ML so will gain a huge speed boost from a chip with a hardware neural engine (so CPU + GPU + NE) relative to the intel CPU+GPU only implementation. So kind of apples versus oranges.

 

[Abazigal]

Apple should stop comparing its latest Macs to the Intel ones. It's getting a bit ridiculous at this point.

Makes sense if Apple is marketing to people who are still using Intel Macs. If you have an M2 or M3 Mac, you likely won’t be tempted to upgrade however good it may be.

 

[Mrkevinfinnerty]

This is interesting, maybe time to trade in my Apple 2

 

[wyrdness]

Meanwhile, my MacBook Pro i9 eats my M4 Pro mini for lunch in real world use.

Odd, because my MacBook M2 Pro beat my old MacBook Pro 16" i9 in absolutely every respect (except thickness).

 

[wyrdness]

comparing it to a 6yo chip is peak dishonesty

Not when their aim is to persuade owners of 6 year old machines to upgrade to a new one.

 

[Veinticinco]

It's widely regarded as the most stable mac os release of all time.

Everyone loves Snow Leopard. 💖

Snow Leopard was an absolute beast. Zero body fat/bloat, core stability off the charts and honed to perfection. The culmination of a corporate culture that truly valued user experience above all else, especially arbitrary comparative specs.

Like many users at the time, I held it up as a beacon as to why Apple was truly different and far superior to Microsoft.

And then Jobs died…

 

[tyranne201]

Are you using an Intel Mac, or are you making this up?

I usually keep about a hundred Safari tabs open, sometimes several hundreds of them, and never had any issues in any of my M-series Macs.

On the other hand, this may be because my devices are usually loaded with RAM.

M1 Pro. and the cursor constantly doesn't change to a hand. a bug well know for several months now.

 

[pelowj]

I think it's fair – they must be marketing these at people still on Intel Macs. The vast majority with an Apple Silicon Mac of any generation are going to be thinking it's already fast enough for everything they do.

 

[Manzanito]

Snow Leopard was an absolute beast. Zero body fat/bloat, core stability off the charts and honed to perfection. The culmination of a corporate culture that truly valued user experience above all else, especially arbitrary comparative specs.

Like many users at the time, I held it up as a beacon as to why Apple was truly different and far superior to Microsoft.

And then Jobs died…

And then Bertrand Serlet left, too.

 

[StoneJack]

calm down people it is marketing after all

 

[dale303]

First, Apple said it compared a new 2025 MacBook Air with a 10-core M4 chip and 32GB of RAM to a 2020 MacBook Air with a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM. Both of the MacBook Air models were configured with a 2TB SSD. These are the best specifications that are or were available for each of these MacBook Air models.

So, Apple compared the new model to the fastest-ever Intel-based MacBook Air. That's fair.

​

Overselling x2.

The Macbook Air they're comparing it against is a "2020 1.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based MacBook Air". This is a five year old laptop!!. Things have moved on a bit since then in all computing sectors (except Intel Mac laptops it seems).

Compare with say a more modern higher end Intel Windows laptop of around the same price with an Intel Core i9 10885H and those numbers (apart from the cherry picked one) start looking a bit samey.

Ignoring the Apple-ade, this is simply a modest incremental improvement, not a massive leap.

 

[johnediii]

Apple taking cues from nVidia... RTX 5070 has RTX 4090 level of performance. LOL.

Except you don't need cryogenic cooling for the power connector in a Mac. 🙃

 

[iMac The Knife]

Yeah, well my wife's iPad Mini Gen 5 is 7,000x faster than my 1984 128k Macintosh. These types of comparisons are a joke. Do better Apple.

 

[turbineseaplane]

It must really be bothering them that people continue to use their existing older machines that work just fine

😂

Been typing this morning on my 2015 MacBook Pro that I use for travel

 

[rippley5150]

Also, it's 860,000x faster than iBook



View attachment 2489140

There was a a very small company out of Hong Kong that used to put new Macbook Air internal parts into those shells. They were rather expensive but they looked really cool !!

 

[TJFDenver]

still can't virtualize the range of guest VM's like my intel though ... so no moving forward for me

 

[CarlJ]

I find this disrespectful. That’s why I said, “I think”.

Yes, you said "I think". And then you went on to imply that anyone doing other than exactly what you do is exhibiting bizarre behavior or must be a hoarder of some sort. You were literally responding to someone listing a number of fields where many users tend to keep many tabs open. Again, your use case is not everyone's use case.