I'm curious how the X Plus and the X Elite "Thin and Light" are both listed with 23W according to that Anandtech article. the X Elite has 2 more cores than the Plus - so either it must be running at lower clock, or it is actually using a little more power (each core is likely using somewhere around 1W if they are anything like the Apple Performance Cores)
23 is minimum 82.33 is max draw. Though reports are comin in that it touches 100 now. Oh. And that’s just the cpu portion of the chipset.
It’s not a rosy picture compared to 10-20 for the Apple iPad m4.
It’s worth noting that the m3 pro can hit 42w in total chipset draw. But then it also eats away at Qualcomm’s performamce claim shenanigans.
Meanwhile the 16 core m3 max can use up to 87w. In total chipset power (54 cpu, 33 GPU) But it absolutely decimated the Qualcomm to dust. Hence no mention of it’s true competitor in their marketing. Apple uses less power and embarrasses their best offering without breaking a sweat. And that’s last-gen Apple.
The QC chips look decent at 23w, but in order to post respectable benchmark scores, they have to guzzle electricity. And the performance doesn’t scale all that well past 23w. Diminishing returns.
In the end, this is good news that someone on the WinTel side of things is at least trying (though it took ex Apple chipset engineers to get there), but still nowhere near Apple’s performance per watt abilities - or even just flat out performance, period.
History repeats itself. Something new appears, tons of marketing and hype follow, then the dust begins to settle… and it’s the same ol’ stuff.
Given the Surface has a fan, why compare it to the MacBook Airs rather than the MacBook Pros?
Surface Laptop 15" is $1299 for Snapdragon X Elite with 16 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD
MacBook Air 15" is $1299 for M3 with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD
Microsoft doesn't mention unified memory in its marketing, so it could be DDR for the Surface which is approximately 50% as efficient as unified memory. If so, the RAM difference in this comparison is negligible. I also wonder what the SSD speed is for the Surface. The M3 MBA SSD has a read speed of 2880 and a write speed of 2108.
8 GB of RAM is still 8 GB of RAM.
The NPU may take 8 GB of RAM just for itself at times. 16 GB was chosen as the minimum for a reason.
How do you explain this video? It compares a 16GB $2000 Mac laptop with unified memory versus a 16GB $2100 Windows laptop with DDR. If what you were saying were true, then the results could be expected to mostly similar. Instead, the Windows laptop isn't even remotely close to the performance of 16GB unified memory. There are other tests by the same channel where an 8GB unified memory system is only beaten by 10% or 11% in performance versus a 16GB DDR system.
It’s a minefield for anyone buying a PC (so many utter pieces of crap out there) but great to see some decent competition for the MBA. Apple’s shortcoming as always is that stinginess with soldered in GPU’s, hard drives and RAM. It’s always annoyed me that these otherwise brilliant machines from the world’s second richest company are hobbled by their tightarseness.
Apple's shortcoming? You can't upgrade the CPU, GPU, hard drive or RAM on these new Surface laptops. Exactly like Apple, what you buy is what you got. And exactly as is typical, Apple initially gets slammed by other companies for leading on design decisions like these, only for those same companies to later copy Apple and do the same.
It’s a minefield for anyone buying a PC (so many utter pieces of crap out there) but great to see some decent competition for the MBA. Apple’s shortcoming as always is that stinginess with soldered in GPU’s, hard drives and RAM. It’s always annoyed me that these otherwise brilliant machines from the world’s second richest company are hobbled by their tightarseness.
Apple's shortcoming? You can't upgrade the CPU, GPU, hard drive or RAM on these new Surface laptops. Exactly like Apple, what you buy is what you got. And exactly as is typical, Apple initially gets slammed by other companies for leading on design decisions like these, only for those same companies to later copy Apple and do the same.
You can upgrade the SSD on the new Surface laptops, though Microsoft states this should be done by an authorized technician.
The elephant in the room though is Copilot. I haven’t used it myself but I know several people who have as part of Office365. They hate it, like truly despise it. Copilot is pushy and they find it getting in the way more than ever helping. Clippy on steroids. So the hardware is only part of the story. The real test will come with Apple’s AI efforts this fall. Let’s hope they aren’t as obnoxious as Microsoft’s apparently are.
I could be wrong, but on every demo of Copilot in MS Office that I have seen, you start it by clicking an icon in the toolbar, very different from Clippy. I don't see it as pushy if it works in that way.
The people I talked to said you can do it that way, but it will also pop up whenever it feels it could be of help. This is what they find most obnoxious, it’s not a little thing in the corner, but a Copilot window in the middle of the screen in front of what you’re trying to do.
I have been watching some Copilot sessions from last week Build event, and I haven't seen what you describe. At some point I'll activate the Copilot trial to see how it works, and I'll see if it's as intrusive as you say.
I only scanned the article but I don’t see a Performance per Watt comparison. Even in a chip loses to another I feel that knowing the PPW is more important to gauge the efficiency of the chip.
Nice to see more competition in this area. With TSMC and ARM-based tech, the Apple M-series had a huge advantage to x86 and Intel. Now we see Microsoft being able to offer something similar and add innovation with touch based inputs and CoPilot designed for Windows.
And while things are moving forward in PC-land, we have Apple blocking touch from macOS, penny-pinching on memory, and there is still no LLM in macOS. WWDC better be good, the transition to M4 should move fast, and the basic AI features must get here in Q3.
Disruption makes it all interesting again.
I'm guessing that you are speaking of Arm disrupting x86.
Given the Surface has a fan, why compare it to the MacBook Airs rather than the MacBook Pros?
Surface Laptop 15" is $1299 for Snapdragon X Elite with 16 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD
MacBook Air 15" is $1299 for M3 with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD
Microsoft doesn't mention unified memory in its marketing, so it could be DDR for the Surface which is approximately 50% as efficient as unified memory. If so, the RAM difference in this comparison is negligible. I also wonder what the SSD speed is for the Surface. The M3 MBA SSD has a read speed of 2880 and a write speed of 2108.
8 GB of RAM is still 8 GB of RAM.
The NPU may take 8 GB of RAM just for itself at times. 16 GB was chosen as the minimum for a reason.
How do you explain this video? It compares a 16GB $2000 Mac laptop with unified memory versus a 16GB $2100 Windows laptop with DDR. If what you were saying were true, then the results could be expected to mostly similar. Instead, the Windows laptop isn't even remotely close to the performance of 16GB unified memory. There are other tests by the same channel where an 8GB unified memory system is only beaten by 10% or 11% in performance versus a 16GB DDR system.
The comparison was 8 GB vs 16 GB. When the ram usage is maxed out, clearly, unified or not, it has to swap with the SSD. Hence my statement about 8 GB still being 8 GB.
If you want to pay even more for 16 GB on the Mac, that's fine, but that's not what I wrote in my earlier post, nor is what you quoted.
I'd also point out the test I listed was done by the same channel as the video you posted:
"So you guys can see that 8 GB is not the same as 16, especially when you're actually going to be using the system"
Given the Surface has a fan, why compare it to the MacBook Airs rather than the MacBook Pros?
Surface Laptop 15" is $1299 for Snapdragon X Elite with 16 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD
MacBook Air 15" is $1299 for M3 with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD
Microsoft doesn't mention unified memory in its marketing, so it could be DDR for the Surface which is approximately 50% as efficient as unified memory. If so, the RAM difference in this comparison is negligible. I also wonder what the SSD speed is for the Surface. The M3 MBA SSD has a read speed of 2880 and a write speed of 2108.
8 GB of RAM is still 8 GB of RAM.
The NPU may take 8 GB of RAM just for itself at times. 16 GB was chosen as the minimum for a reason.
How do you explain this video? It compares a 16GB $2000 Mac laptop with unified memory versus a 16GB $2100 Windows laptop with DDR. If what you were saying were true, then the results could be expected to mostly similar. Instead, the Windows laptop isn't even remotely close to the performance of 16GB unified memory. There are other tests by the same channel where an 8GB unified memory system is only beaten by 10% or 11% in performance versus a 16GB DDR system.
The comparison was 8 GB vs 16 GB. When the ram usage is maxed out, clearly, unified or not, it has to swap with the SSD. Hence my statement about 8 GB still being 8 GB.
If you want to pay even more for 16 GB on the Mac, that's fine, but that's not what I wrote in my earlier post, nor is what you quoted.
I'd also point out the test I listed was done by the same channel as the video you posted:
"So you guys can see that 8 GB is not the same as 16, especially when you're actually going to be using the system"
I urge you to exercise caution with this YouTube channel.
They generally start with a conclusion that they want to prove, and concoct a scenario to get there to "prove" it.
Given the Surface has a fan, why compare it to the MacBook Airs rather than the MacBook Pros?
Surface Laptop 15" is $1299 for Snapdragon X Elite with 16 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD
MacBook Air 15" is $1299 for M3 with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD
Microsoft doesn't mention unified memory in its marketing, so it could be DDR for the Surface which is approximately 50% as efficient as unified memory. If so, the RAM difference in this comparison is negligible. I also wonder what the SSD speed is for the Surface. The M3 MBA SSD has a read speed of 2880 and a write speed of 2108.
8 GB of RAM is still 8 GB of RAM.
The NPU may take 8 GB of RAM just for itself at times. 16 GB was chosen as the minimum for a reason.
How do you explain this video? It compares a 16GB $2000 Mac laptop with unified memory versus a 16GB $2100 Windows laptop with DDR. If what you were saying were true, then the results could be expected to mostly similar. Instead, the Windows laptop isn't even remotely close to the performance of 16GB unified memory. There are other tests by the same channel where an 8GB unified memory system is only beaten by 10% or 11% in performance versus a 16GB DDR system.
The comparison was 8 GB vs 16 GB. When the ram usage is maxed out, clearly, unified or not, it has to swap with the SSD. Hence my statement about 8 GB still being 8 GB.
If you want to pay even more for 16 GB on the Mac, that's fine, but that's not what I wrote in my earlier post, nor is what you quoted.
I'd also point out the test I listed was done by the same channel as the video you posted:
"So you guys can see that 8 GB is not the same as 16, especially when you're actually going to be using the system"
I urge you to exercise caution with this YouTube channel.
They generally start with a conclusion that they want to prove, and concoct a scenario to get there to "prove" it.
I'm usually cautious with most YouTube channels (along with the majority of things I read or hear online). In this case though, their testing methods appear reasonably transparent.
This is another video that does a nice job of breaking down potential issues with RAM limitations and swap-memory:
My point still stands on the limitations of 8 GB of RAM compared to 16 GB. Traditionally, this may have varied depending on what the user was doing with their device. Moving forward, the limitation may be especially true when running inference on an NPU. This is a scenario where the RAM usage can be quite heavy, similarly, this is a task that may enter many mainstream user's regular workflows - hence, the RAM availability may not just be an issue anymore for power users that are trying to do large tasks, or many smaller tasks at the same time.
So contrary to what foregoneconclusion suggested, 8 GB of unified memory does not become a "negligible" comparison with a traditional 16 GB.
Given the Surface has a fan, why compare it to the MacBook Airs rather than the MacBook Pros?
Surface Laptop 15" is $1299 for Snapdragon X Elite with 16 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD
MacBook Air 15" is $1299 for M3 with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD
Microsoft doesn't mention unified memory in its marketing, so it could be DDR for the Surface which is approximately 50% as efficient as unified memory. If so, the RAM difference in this comparison is negligible. I also wonder what the SSD speed is for the Surface. The M3 MBA SSD has a read speed of 2880 and a write speed of 2108.
8 GB of RAM is still 8 GB of RAM.
The NPU may take 8 GB of RAM just for itself at times. 16 GB was chosen as the minimum for a reason.
How do you explain this video? It compares a 16GB $2000 Mac laptop with unified memory versus a 16GB $2100 Windows laptop with DDR. If what you were saying were true, then the results could be expected to mostly similar. Instead, the Windows laptop isn't even remotely close to the performance of 16GB unified memory. There are other tests by the same channel where an 8GB unified memory system is only beaten by 10% or 11% in performance versus a 16GB DDR system.
The comparison was 8 GB vs 16 GB. When the ram usage is maxed out, clearly, unified or not, it has to swap with the SSD. Hence my statement about 8 GB still being 8 GB.
If you want to pay even more for 16 GB on the Mac, that's fine, but that's not what I wrote in my earlier post, nor is what you quoted.
I'd also point out the test I listed was done by the same channel as the video you posted:
"So you guys can see that 8 GB is not the same as 16, especially when you're actually going to be using the system"
I urge you to exercise caution with this YouTube channel.
They generally start with a conclusion that they want to prove, and concoct a scenario to get there to "prove" it.
I'm usually cautious with most YouTube channels (along with the majority of things I read or hear online). In this case though, their testing methods appear reasonably transparent.
This is another video that does a nice job of breaking down potential issues with RAM limitations and swap-memory:
My point still stands on the limitations of 8 GB of RAM compared to 16 GB. Traditionally, this may have varied depending on what the user was doing with their device. Moving forward, the limitation may be especially true when running inference on an NPU. This is a scenario where the RAM usage can be quite heavy, similarly, this is a task that may enter many mainstream user's regular workflows - hence, the RAM availability may not just be an issue anymore for power users that are trying to do large tasks, or many smaller tasks at the same time.
So contrary to what foregoneconclusion suggested, 8 GB of unified memory does not become a "negligible" comparison with a traditional 16 GB.
There was not. They generally do good work, but they also know what will rile up the YouTube audience.
The RAM situation is... complicated, and I'm not going to delve into it again.
The vast majority of today's Mac buyers, and just about all of the crowd that uses it as an iPhone accessory, are going to be fine with 8GB of integrated RAM for years. An acute minority will not be.
Comments
That's AI right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al1OAg9Gin8
"However Microsoft doesn't mention brightness, while Apple says it can manage up to 500 nits."
The new Surface Laptop goes up to 600 nits.
source: Microsoft Keynote, Introducing Copilot+ PCs
https://youtu.be/aZbHd4suAnQ?t=2567
https://www.noemamag.com/mapping-ais-rapid-advance/
https://beebom.com/early-snapdragon-x-elite-benchmarks-cant-beat-apple-m3/
If you want to pay even more for 16 GB on the Mac, that's fine, but that's not what I wrote in my earlier post, nor is what you quoted.
I'd also point out the test I listed was done by the same channel as the video you posted:
"So you guys can see that 8 GB is not the same as 16, especially when you're actually going to be using the system"
They generally start with a conclusion that they want to prove, and concoct a scenario to get there to "prove" it.
I'm usually cautious with most YouTube channels (along with the majority of things I read or hear online). In this case though, their testing methods appear reasonably transparent.
This is another video that does a nice job of breaking down potential issues with RAM limitations and swap-memory:
My point still stands on the limitations of 8 GB of RAM compared to 16 GB. Traditionally, this may have varied depending on what the user was doing with their device. Moving forward, the limitation may be especially true when running inference on an NPU. This is a scenario where the RAM usage can be quite heavy, similarly, this is a task that may enter many mainstream user's regular workflows - hence, the RAM availability may not just be an issue anymore for power users that are trying to do large tasks, or many smaller tasks at the same time.
So contrary to what foregoneconclusion suggested, 8 GB of unified memory does not become a "negligible" comparison with a traditional 16 GB.
The RAM situation is... complicated, and I'm not going to delve into it again.
The vast majority of today's Mac buyers, and just about all of the crowd that uses it as an iPhone accessory, are going to be fine with 8GB of integrated RAM for years. An acute minority will not be.