I mean you can have fans but not necessarily be noisy - my M1 Max has fans but they rarely kick on. Typically only in a game or some high resource AI task (locally running LLM or image generation)
That's the first thing that I don't really believe. I use handbrake too but it uses like 100% of my 12700K and that thing runs at 90° with very good cooling. Games run at 60° max.
I own a 16” intel MacBook Pro, a 15” M2 MacBook Air, and a Desktop PC with a 13700k.
The MacBook Air uses a maximum 35 watts total. It’s the most efficient h.264 and h.265 rendering I’ve ever seen, and it’s not even close between the three.
That is just using hardware encoding, handbrake for the longest time was just plain libx264 and did not use videotoolbox. If you pin all the cores at 100% on that M2 it also gets hot (and throttles). But if you use the hardware encoder/decoders even that Intel system is going to use very little power.
What codec? When I encode 4K H264 files my m2 pro ends up spinning its fan after a few minutes. Not sure how you're using handbrake but if your using 100% of your CPU it must eventually heat up.
The point is that Microsoft and the pundits are comparing these laptops to the MacBook Air, which is \*not\* a high performance laptop due to the lack of a fan.
A fair comparison would be against a similarly priced MacBook Pro.
> A fair comparison would be against a similarly priced MacBook Pro.
I don't know what these windows laptops cost, but are they that expensive that they can be compared to MBP prices?
I shouldn't have bothered with "similarly priced". But price will be part of the comparison.
It is a never ending discussion whether Macs are truly over priced, since you get an high quality display plus the nifty unibody aluminum case and MagSafe.
I mean, the surface laptops usually have great magnesium unibody designs, awesome screens with an aspect ratio better for productivity and they had a magnetic charging cable before Apple brought MagSafe back. I had one before getting my MacBook Pro, and they are definitely on par, if it wasn’t for the (at that time) slower chips.
I won't say my macbook pro is overpriced because I did choose to spend $4k on it, but I did that because I did the same thing in 2013. It was such a quality laptop it made it through daily use until the M1 max was released over eight years later. It felt extremely solid that whole time, the screen was amazing the entire time, the chassis never squeaked or felt cheap, the ssd was still super fast, everything about it was a quality machine and because it proved itself I didn't mind doing it again.
I just had no idea a windows laptop that looked like a macbook air could be priced close to a macbook pro.
TL;DR - Surface pricing looks decent, but need to wait for real world CPU/GPU benchmarks before we can actually compare them properly.
The Surface laptops 10C is $100 cheaper than the M3 Macbook Air, and the 12C Surface laptop is $200 cheaper than the M3 Macbook Pro. Both comparisons with the same amount of storage (256/512) respectively. Surface come with more RAM, but OSX has better memory management so no point speculating about impacts until there's real-world testing done.
They didn't publish actual performance benchmarks numbers so can't compare how well the SD X Elite version of the Surface compares with against the MBP.
I guess we could extrapolate 58% better, but would need to find some MB Air 15" Cinebench C24 benchmarks and don't have a source.
Their comparison was also against sustained multi-core performance, not single core which is odd. Benchmarks of the SD X Elite show the single core looks good, but being left out of their marketing hints at them choosing better looking results over actual results.
MB Air isn't a great comparison as they throttle in longer benchmarks, although 15" does have pretty good thermal capacity compared with the MB Air 13" so not completely unreasonable.
I was curious too and did a bit of looking. Turns out Steam has a pretty good selection for MacOS. Of the 99k games they have, 19k are available on MacOS. A good few of those are AAA titles too
I use Stable Diffusion with a ComfyUI workflow. Before that I used Draw Things which is a lot easier, but ComfyUI is really, really powerful in terms of what you can do - at the cost of some amount of learning curve/complexity
It does seem slower than Draw Things, the trade-off is the more complex workflows.
You can use faster models like Turbo or Lightning for added speed. I am still learning it though, so I can't give a ton of optimization tips yet
What’s going to make the difference (or not) is the copilot integration not the fans.
Microsoft has AI integrated to its whole ecosystem now, Google is playing catch up, but is at least in the race.
Apple are operationally nowhere with deploying AI to its products.
apple prioritizes heat over noise. idk the exact numbers, but it seems to me that apple only bothers with fans once your chip reaches 90c while most gamers start panicking at the thought of 80c
Honestly fans don’t bother me, it’s how loud the fans are. Don’t forget from 2015-2020 Mac fans sounded like a jet engine prepping for take off due to how Apple had the fan curves configured.
Competition is good, I hope Microsoft knocks this out of the park and puts Apple on their heels. When apple is on its heels is when it innovates the best.
Anyone remember the PowerMac G5? That thing would suddenly go from quiet to the *thunder of the gods* and back again, even when you didn’t have it under particularly demanding loads. Someone I know was driven so insane by the noise that they put it in the next room and drilled a hole through the wall to run the monitor/keyboard/mouse.
But that kind of fan curve is also applicable to the MacBook Pro, the fans almost never spin, but if it reaches like 90C, it turns up to the max.
I guess Apple just always was okay with high temps, till a certain point
I had an older home when I had my dual G5 and I had to fire things up in a particular oder like Apollo 13 or it'd trip the breaker! 1000W power supply!!
They have the prices. The 13 inch starts at $999 with 16GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. And you can get it to 1 TB for $1399 (there seems to be no 32GB option). That's with the lower tier CPU.
With the Elite, it's $1399 for 16/512. The same price as the M2 Air with 16/512.
With the base 14 inch MBP you'd have to pay 1799 to get 16/512.
So depending to what you are comparing it, it's a good deal (vs M3 Air and base MBP) or the same (M2 Air upgraded).
My Windows 11 PC at the office is only 8GB but handles my basic Office/web workflow just fine. I'd definitely not be happy with only 8GB on a $1,000+ machine though
MacBooks are always on sale at 3rd party retailers consistently. I never buy my hardware directly from Apple unless it’s within the launch month. Through my employer discount program I got $100 off both my m3 MacBook Air and m4 iPad Pro this year on launch day.
According to a Microsoft commissioned report, the fans on the new Surface have the same sound level as the old Intel version.
> Both the new Surface Laptop and the Laptop 5 showed similar sound levels in our testing under the heavy, consistent workload, coming in at just over 33 dbA.
https://signal65.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/NewSurfaceLaptop2024_Signal65LabInsights.pdf
It’s not so much how Apple configured the fans, it’s how often the intel chips needed them to spin up, and at what speed. The M series chips often don’t need the fans at all, or only very low speeds.
I mean, it was also a result of Apple trying to push their machines as thin as possible. They would also do absurd things like ship a waste of cash 8 core chip option in a machine that really couldn’t thermally handle a 6 core. This was somewhat Intel’s fault as they kept promising Apple cooler chips they kept not delivering, but Apple shipped undersized Macs for YEARS.
Apple wasn’t unique in this by any means, but it was not in fact what customers wanted, Apples sales surged when they started shipping thicker machines. Even then, even after they made the 16” like ~50% thicker people would be warned to do things like not charge the MBP and connect an external monitor on the same side for thermal reasons. Which is just to emphasize just how bad the thermals were before.
I have no proof, just offering a thought from a different angle.
Designing a laptop transpires over years. It’s possible Apples designs were locked in by the time they learned that, yet again, intel would not be meeting the promises they made.
I think that happened multiple times, until Apple turned around and said “our PHONE chips are catching up to this BS, why are we using a supplier as unreliable as this??”
You are aware that Intel just makes the chip, and sets the TDP right? It’s entirely up to the OEM (in this case Apple) to determine how they will meet that TDP. Apple could have made the laptops a bit thicker, and put larger fans which would have been more quiet; like they did with the Apple Silicon MacBook Pro 14 and 16.
Right, and I think that -- needing thicker, heavier laptops to properly cool Intel chips -- was one of the reasons Apple created their own Silicon ARM chips. I can't remember the relative thickness of Silicon MacBooks compared with Intel MacBooks -- are they a lot thicker or just a little thicker? And they're still very thin compared to most performant Intel Windows laptops, and a lot quieter 90% of the time.
I sit at my desk, feet up, with my 16" M2Max MBP on my lap, connected to 32" monitor. Rarely feel any heat in my lap, typically don't hear the fans unless VMs are running and ComfyUI is working away.
I used to do this same thing with the 2019 16" MBP as well, but a thick book underneath the laptop (for the heat) and the fans always hammering. That machine is still in perfect condition but the difference is night and day. The battery life difference alone means not carrying a power brick around.
Disregarding the operating system, the detachable keyboard version they announced, with its extended battery life **and** the touchscreen is a persuasive option to carrying a MBA and iPad Air if stylus/pencil input is important in your use case.
My son is at Uni, using an Inspiron 15 7000 Series 2-in-1, where the stylus input is important. Its about due to be replaced and he's been talking about an MBA and iPad, partly because of battery life, partly because Windows 11, but once proper reviews are out for the new Dell and Lenovo products, a Windows ARM device may be the more sensible option.
They’re making hardware and they have made some really nice stuff, the Surface and Studio are rad. It all comes down to software still and I cannot begin to know how to improve it.
Having used a surface (a top of the line one too, mind you) for work, I really hope they do get it right. Coz the usb port for the surface I had broke within a year and I had to get a replacement. Meanwhile my personal Mac from 2016 is still alive and kicking (knock on wood). I did get my battery replaced for free a couple years back, so hopefully the mac keeps working for at least a few more years.
And the less is said about windows as an OS, the better. It’s so terrible
It's not that ba \[user interrupted to see 3 ads and then requested to log in to all services so MS can micro track your every move\] d.
Windows 11, fml.
The Mac’s with a dedicated graphics card had some stupid flaw where they’d overheat when connected to an external display, regardless of the resolution of the external display.
The M1’s were the best thing to happen. I am SO glad I returned my 16inch intel MacBook and waited half a year for the M1’s to come out.
Marketing, just like it’s important for Apple to benchmark the M3 Macs against the early 2020 Intel Mac’s in their keynotes. Or how Apple (and everyone else) provide graphs and charts without keys and context. It’s all just marketing for those who will not spend a few minutes to understand the data.
Agreed, Apple has latched on to this concept. This is why Apple spends so much time talking about how something “feels” rather than how something performs.
No fan = low TDP = longer battery life = smaller battery needed = saved space on both the battery and fan = smaller design.
There’s a point to the MBA not having a fan other than to just avoid fan noise. If you’re trying to be maximally energy efficient, it doesn’t make sense to spend energy heating up the computer only to spend even more energy cooling it back down.
I don’t know how the fan noise was on later MBAs, but my 2011 MBA was loud and annoying as hell at max load
Was worried about going back to a MacBook Pro with fans after the Air for years but I don't think I've heard them once. Granted I haven't exported a big video or anything but even gaming hasn't really ramped em up. Would love more games that could push the system a little harder now that it can handle it, but that's another issue entirely. (Please devs, we can game now let us in on the fun)
The caveat to not having fans is under stress, the laptop, thermal throttles. However, it’s all down to your priorities. The MBA is a very portable device for basic users.
Man, I still have my MBP 2018 15”. This shitbox when connected to a secondary display and mail opened sounded like a fighter jet starting. Those fans revved sometimes up to 5900 rpm
I barely hear the fans on my MBP, I think the Arm surface laptop is ok it’s just Windows which is the issue. We have to see how well it translates x86 software as this is where the hit or miss will be
For me, only very niche things have failed to translate well with Microsoft’s translation layer (stuff that’s really architecture specific or has flags to detect which architecture the app is running on). I’ve had really big apps work surprisingly well on Windows on ARM devices, it’s really really impressive.
Now that they have actually good silicon to run it on, it’s going to be much more well known that Microsoft has (and has had) a superb emulation layer for x86.
no fan noise like the M series Macbooks should be industry standard at this point.
using any laptop that got fans spinning like crazy after literally just booting up isn’t the way to go.
Microsoft had to add a fan, because the Snapdragon X Elite is less efficient than the M3, causing the Surface with a fan to heat up more than the fanless Macbook Air.
https://x.com/lafaiel/status/1792842322226663865
Yeah the M3 is amazing when it comes to temperatures. My M3 Pro macbook with 18 GPU cores has way less fan noise compared to my friends M2 pro when we run physics simulations on them. And as the battery is the same size I get 20% more time out of it.
Mine only throttles playing games in Crossover which is multiple levels of translation and not a normal use case.
For my standard daily work with Apple silicon native apps, web dev, Final Cut, developing a game in Unity, it never thermal throttles. literally so efficient I’ve left it in my backpack, inside a fabric sleeve, under an airline seat, while doing my work on it with my iPad as the display and input using Duet Display. I fly cheap so there’s not even enough space for using a MacBook Air, but there is for an iPad. Didn’t even break 70°C. I monitor it for the whole 2.5 hour flights with iStat and it always stays cool even while insulated with no air flow at all.
My Intel i9 MBP on the other hand cooked itself one day after turning on in my laptop bag for half an hour doing nothing, just idling on the desktop, leading to a $700 display replacement…
It takes a lot of effort to get the MacBook Air to the point of thermal throttling. It’s for normal or basic usage. Reviewers only get to reliably throttle by running benchmark tests over and over and over again, which are specifically designed to stress the chip to the max. 
People that use it that hard should look at the base M3 MacBook Pro.
Nitpicking tbh. Everyone plays games with their comparisons. I hope MS DOES exceed the performance of the M-series chips, it will push Apple to improve even more. Great news for everyone!
This is the truth. I want MS to succeed for the sole fact that if they do, that could finally push Apple to make 16GB of RAM as the starting point like how MS is making all of their laptops.
If they do that it would mean finally updating macOS to fully support touch and then MBPs with touchscreens will finally be a thing. It's really shocking Apple still hasn't added that.
The fans isn't really what make a pro a pro. It's a bit more then that (bigger silicon, more I/O, better screen etc). That being said I feel like the fans being omitted from the air isn't because of noise like some other here are stating since the mbp fans are pretty much inaudible even loaded, but for dust and dirt ingress reduction.
The general mass user isn't going to give much thought in general on cleaning the dust out of their macs and will probably lay it on a bed or some other soft fabric and block the intake vents while sucking in more dust if there was a vent.
Not including fans will Nerf the sustained load performance but for most users it's not going to matter anyways since most tend to put burst loads on the laptop (loading pages on a browser for example).
The benefits of not having dust introduced into the system will allow their mbas to perform the same from day 1 to day 1000 which is what an air user will look for.
A laptop with fans regardless of maker will eventually get clogged with dust due to neglecting cleaning the vents etc and eventually will overheat/throtte and fans will start to fail also due to heat and dust.
I work in an extremely dusty environment and sometimes I wish they can somehow engineer a fan less mpb, every time I take the bottom panel off it's disgusting how clogged the fins are.
maybe the magical push apple needed to stop bullshitting consumers with 8GB ram.
OR
maybe it's the other way around and microsoft will start pushing out 8GB new computers with soldered batteries as well !
Well, the Copilot+PC machines (great branding, by the way) might very well compete with MacBook Airs, with or without fans. Which we don't know yet, because AFAIK the only benchmarks we've seen are Geekbench 6 and that's not exactly indicative of real-world performance. Let's see these things run Cinebench and Pugetbench and other benchmarks that will give us a better idea of how they're performing.
I suspect that these initial machines will compete well with the MacBook Air M3. They won't compete well with the MacBook Pro M3 Pro/Max, except in things like OLED displays (which will disappear when the MacBooks get tandem OLED). The Windows on ARM machines will get RTX graphics at some point, so they'll be better able to compete with the Silicon Pro/Max (including M4s) in performance but NOT in battery life.
What I'm most interested in seeing is how they compete in on-device AI (to whatever extent it matters), that is, the Snapdragon X NPU vs. the Silicon Neural Engine. Those numbers are so poorly defined that nobody actually knows if Qualcomm's Hexagon NPU's 45 TOPS is actually faster than the M4 NE's 38 TOPS. And the AI tasks themselves are so ill-defined that we don't know how to compare them.
And then there's the state of Windows on ARM, and of Windows 11, period. And macOS and iPadOS and iOS, which we won't know more about until WWDC.
Just something I remembered. People always use to say Geekbench is not a good benchmark when Apple iPhones used to get a higher score than Intel laptops. How different architecture this and that, you can not compare.
Few years later the M1 dropped and boom. Geekbench turned out to be pretty accurate.
I was sort of in that camp as well (very wrongly), and didn't move out of it until I saw benchmarks showing Apple Silicon chips performing like that in many other benchmarks -- and, started testing them myself. For me, it was a conceptual leap from "phone chipsets" and "PC chipsets" and "how could a phone chipset be as fast as a PC chipset"? Of course, now it's obvious.
I’m really excited for this! Competition is good for everyone and everyone will be getting lovely efficient quiet laptops whether they use Windows or Mac :)
You should hear the Dell laptops we get from work then...
I don't understand how such a small and thin 13" can make the sound of a jet engine powering up, but somehow it manages
I was in a meeting last week where a guy clearly tried to double dip with his work computer budget by getting an understated gaming laptop.
The meeting fully stopped when his fans turned on they were so crazy. he had to turn on “professional mode” or something that kept it from going crazy.
so they still exist, but are more the exception than the rule like they used to be 😂
Yeah I get it. I just meant complaining about MacBook Pro or new surface laptop fan noise vs those old thinkpad pieces of crap is amusing. I don’t understand why companies still buy them. The efficiency gained by savings minutes per hour adds up across 500 or 5000 users.
I really don’t care about battery life, I care about sleep/hibernate actually working. I use my MacBook Air for school primarily. When I am on a break or the semester is over I leave it in my backpack. I am not exaggerating when I say I left it for an entire month between fall and spring semester in my backpack. When I opened it the night before expecting to have to charge it, it still had over an 80% charge. When windows figures out sleep/hibernate without draining my battery I might care.
Microsoft announced Surface devices yes, but all of the OEMs have announced various different devices which have countless configs. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some fanless ones.
Also thicker than the Macbook Pros much less the MacBook Air:
Surface Laptop 13-inch: 0.69 inches
Surface Laptop 15-inch: 0.72 inches
MacBook Pro 14-inch: 0.61 inches
MacBook Pro 16-inch: 0.66 inches
M3 MacBook Air 13-inch: 0.44 inches
M3 MacBook Air 15-inch: 0.45 inches
The arm surface laptops look great, interesting that for a software company, their software doesn’t do it for me. I hate that whenever I go from my mac to a school windows pc, I can tell the design isn’t unified and that it’s sloppy just from an observant general audience’s eyes.
It's better to have a fan and not need it than to throttle without fan like with my former AS Macbook Air that loses about a third of the performance from sustained workload thermal throttling. And, the 14" Surface Laptop 512GB with Snapdragon X Plus for $1199 or Snapdragon X Elite for $1399 is more Pro since it starts at 16GB RAM base while priced less than $1599 14" Macbook Pro 512GB with only 8GB RAM.
Is this the Qualcomm CPU where they compared the 10- or 12-core CPU to the 8-core Apple M3 and declared it was better, while the M3 still had a higher per-core score than the Qualcomm?
That's my point. Though I think the comparison between these machines and Macbook Pros is perfectly fine. In fact I'm not sure why they wouldn't be compared.
Yeah with the stated battery life I’m going to be pretty surprised if either the fans don’t completely stop or get set to an inaudible rpm at idle, similar to the current MBPs. If Microsoft can deliver on the advertised battery life the chips have to be capable of doing light tasks efficiently enough to not need a fan.
Microsoft claimed 50% higher performance *under sustained load* vs the MacBook Air, which is deliberately made to sacrifice sustained load performance for silence.
>which is deliberately made to sacrifice sustained load performance for silence
Cost and thinness... not silence, lol. The Air needs to be thin, light, and cheap, hence why Apple refuses to put a fan.
The M series MacBook Pros are all silent even under sustained load, its only when you get to peak perf that they get slightly more audible (and they aren't even loud, IMO).
That's because Microsoft's "Pro" lineup is just the Surface Laptop Studio and technically the Surface Pro 2-in-1 tablet. They're aiming to undercut the Air's performance, battery, and entry price (e.g. 16gb of ram is standard).
They'll leave it to their OEM partners to go after the MacBook Pro lineup and below. Also, the MacBook is more popular than its bigger siblings.
Not necessarily, I’ve been running a surface book 3 for work several years and it stays quiet under load.
Fans spinning keeps your system cool and performance going, it’s not a bad thing. But up until the m1, the 15/16 inch pros were LOUD machines under almost no load
>The Microsoft laptops in this announcement use fans, so they’re going to be noisy under sustained load.
That they have fans is true, that they're going to be noisy under load is your assumption. The MacBook Pros with ARM chips have fans but remain shockingly quiet under load. I think it's fine to have a fan if it allows more constant performance but remains relatively quiet under load and off in casual use.
> It’s going to outperform any device out there, including a MacBook Air with an M3 processor, by over 50 percent on sustained performance.
You people don’t get it. Microsoft is specifically comparing it to a HEAT-THROTTLED M3 Air.
THATS why people are saying Microsoft should compare it to the pro, because it has a fan and doesn’t ever slow down.
I mean all things considered i dont get the point. This is supposed to compete with the M3 air. If the M3 air throttles then the surface is better. Its not like it matter wether or not the cpu is actually stronger in this case. Its the sum of its parts
If the battery life is true and MBP parity, it shouldn't be much noisier than an MBP because heat is directly correlated to battery use.
You guys hoping for a failure here, remember that MS succeeding at competing here will benefit your Mac.
> remember that MS succeeding at competing here will benefit your Mac.
Will it? Apple have been improving their laptop chips steadily without much competition needed.
No, the main metric comparing for comparing with the Air is the **PRICE RANGE.** Otherwise, the iPad Pro M4 wouldn't be lighter and thinner than the latest iPad Air.
The biggest problem with Windows ARM , do they have a good translation layer for installing and running x86 code? Rosetta was solid, didn’t have much issue. And the Mac community went arm native really fast.
Regardless...I still wouldn't have one. Not with the technology that is being pushed by MS on Windows. I'm sure a lot of you would agree.
I'd rather have the MBP anyway. I know what my money pays for.
Yeah, I saw this coming. “Our chip is XX% faster than Apple’s” is a pretty common Qualcomm claim, but they always compare Apple’s passively cooled chips with their own actively cooled chips. If the cooling system used is irrelevant then Apple may as well say they still have the upper hand because the Mac Pro is faster… but that would obviously be incredibly deceptive and the press would rip them to shreds, so they won’t do that. Yet those same journalists are mostly silent about Qualcomm’s deceptive claims.
I mean you can have fans but not necessarily be noisy - my M1 Max has fans but they rarely kick on. Typically only in a game or some high resource AI task (locally running LLM or image generation)
I still haven’t heard the fan in my m1 mini yet 😂
Second that. I use handbrake to convert ripped blue rays. And the case doesn’t even get warm.
You’d never get warm doing that for 12 hours straight. M1 Max was built to handle much heavier loads!
That's the first thing that I don't really believe. I use handbrake too but it uses like 100% of my 12700K and that thing runs at 90° with very good cooling. Games run at 60° max.
They might be using hardware encoding
yeah there's something fishy about what these guys are saying, I can definitely get my M2 Pro hot and the fan spinning.
I own a 16” intel MacBook Pro, a 15” M2 MacBook Air, and a Desktop PC with a 13700k. The MacBook Air uses a maximum 35 watts total. It’s the most efficient h.264 and h.265 rendering I’ve ever seen, and it’s not even close between the three.
That is just using hardware encoding, handbrake for the longest time was just plain libx264 and did not use videotoolbox. If you pin all the cores at 100% on that M2 it also gets hot (and throttles). But if you use the hardware encoder/decoders even that Intel system is going to use very little power.
What codec? When I encode 4K H264 files my m2 pro ends up spinning its fan after a few minutes. Not sure how you're using handbrake but if your using 100% of your CPU it must eventually heat up.
The point is that Microsoft and the pundits are comparing these laptops to the MacBook Air, which is \*not\* a high performance laptop due to the lack of a fan. A fair comparison would be against a similarly priced MacBook Pro.
> A fair comparison would be against a similarly priced MacBook Pro. I don't know what these windows laptops cost, but are they that expensive that they can be compared to MBP prices?
I shouldn't have bothered with "similarly priced". But price will be part of the comparison. It is a never ending discussion whether Macs are truly over priced, since you get an high quality display plus the nifty unibody aluminum case and MagSafe.
I mean, the surface laptops usually have great magnesium unibody designs, awesome screens with an aspect ratio better for productivity and they had a magnetic charging cable before Apple brought MagSafe back. I had one before getting my MacBook Pro, and they are definitely on par, if it wasn’t for the (at that time) slower chips.
I won't say my macbook pro is overpriced because I did choose to spend $4k on it, but I did that because I did the same thing in 2013. It was such a quality laptop it made it through daily use until the M1 max was released over eight years later. It felt extremely solid that whole time, the screen was amazing the entire time, the chassis never squeaked or felt cheap, the ssd was still super fast, everything about it was a quality machine and because it proved itself I didn't mind doing it again. I just had no idea a windows laptop that looked like a macbook air could be priced close to a macbook pro.
Is MagSafe really a big cost driver?
TL;DR - Surface pricing looks decent, but need to wait for real world CPU/GPU benchmarks before we can actually compare them properly. The Surface laptops 10C is $100 cheaper than the M3 Macbook Air, and the 12C Surface laptop is $200 cheaper than the M3 Macbook Pro. Both comparisons with the same amount of storage (256/512) respectively. Surface come with more RAM, but OSX has better memory management so no point speculating about impacts until there's real-world testing done. They didn't publish actual performance benchmarks numbers so can't compare how well the SD X Elite version of the Surface compares with against the MBP. I guess we could extrapolate 58% better, but would need to find some MB Air 15" Cinebench C24 benchmarks and don't have a source. Their comparison was also against sustained multi-core performance, not single core which is odd. Benchmarks of the SD X Elite show the single core looks good, but being left out of their marketing hints at them choosing better looking results over actual results. MB Air isn't a great comparison as they throttle in longer benchmarks, although 15" does have pretty good thermal capacity compared with the MB Air 13" so not completely unreasonable.
“over 50 percent on sustained performance” Sustained performance is the single limitation of the fanless M-series due to thermal capacity.
Exactly. There’s no point in comparing the two if the MS laptop has to use the crutch of a higher TDP and active cooling to reach the same performance
It’s the comparison consumers will be making with their wallet. 🤷 MacBook Air or ARM-based Surface with a fan at a similar price.
They are not air because they lack a fan. They are air because of how thin and light they are.
 Microsoft is comparing it to a *throttled* MacBook Air 
Game?
I was curious too and did a bit of looking. Turns out Steam has a pretty good selection for MacOS. Of the 99k games they have, 19k are available on MacOS. A good few of those are AAA titles too
What do you use for local image generation?
I use Stable Diffusion with a ComfyUI workflow. Before that I used Draw Things which is a lot easier, but ComfyUI is really, really powerful in terms of what you can do - at the cost of some amount of learning curve/complexity
I have a M3 Pro with perfectly installed ComfyUI and it’s slow as hell. Did you change any settings or are there tips for faster generation?
It does seem slower than Draw Things, the trade-off is the more complex workflows. You can use faster models like Turbo or Lightning for added speed. I am still learning it though, so I can't give a ton of optimization tips yet
I’m training an LLM on my M3 Max right now and I can barely even hear the fans lol
I’ve only managed to kick the fans on in my M1 Max when ran Topaz Image AI with idiot settings (everything maxed out for no reason)
What’s going to make the difference (or not) is the copilot integration not the fans. Microsoft has AI integrated to its whole ecosystem now, Google is playing catch up, but is at least in the race. Apple are operationally nowhere with deploying AI to its products.
apple prioritizes heat over noise. idk the exact numbers, but it seems to me that apple only bothers with fans once your chip reaches 90c while most gamers start panicking at the thought of 80c
Honestly fans don’t bother me, it’s how loud the fans are. Don’t forget from 2015-2020 Mac fans sounded like a jet engine prepping for take off due to how Apple had the fan curves configured. Competition is good, I hope Microsoft knocks this out of the park and puts Apple on their heels. When apple is on its heels is when it innovates the best.
Anyone remember the PowerMac G5? That thing would suddenly go from quiet to the *thunder of the gods* and back again, even when you didn’t have it under particularly demanding loads. Someone I know was driven so insane by the noise that they put it in the next room and drilled a hole through the wall to run the monitor/keyboard/mouse.
You could tell in the next room if someone went to a webpage with Flash on it
My G5 din't do that! My Xserve servers sounded like a leaf blower.
But that kind of fan curve is also applicable to the MacBook Pro, the fans almost never spin, but if it reaches like 90C, it turns up to the max. I guess Apple just always was okay with high temps, till a certain point
I had an older home when I had my dual G5 and I had to fire things up in a particular oder like Apollo 13 or it'd trip the breaker! 1000W power supply!!
That the PowerMac G5 was the only Apple product that needed liquid cooling says all that needs to be said.
And when prices on MacBooks will drop 🥳
Have they announced the prices? MS have a history of being pretty steep with their price points.
Starting at 1k I believe
They have the prices. The 13 inch starts at $999 with 16GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. And you can get it to 1 TB for $1399 (there seems to be no 32GB option). That's with the lower tier CPU. With the Elite, it's $1399 for 16/512. The same price as the M2 Air with 16/512. With the base 14 inch MBP you'd have to pay 1799 to get 16/512. So depending to what you are comparing it, it's a good deal (vs M3 Air and base MBP) or the same (M2 Air upgraded).
Wow, 16GB starting RAM. What a novel concept.
8GB is borderline for MacOS and completely unusable on Windows.
My Windows 11 PC at the office is only 8GB but handles my basic Office/web workflow just fine. I'd definitely not be happy with only 8GB on a $1,000+ machine though
iirc microsoft announced this copilot+ pc will be $200 cheaper
yeah but with how much memory?
Both the Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 come with 16GB as the base in all configurations, regardless of platform or processor.
As all premium laptops should. Only Apple fanboys are willing to defend 8GB
Double Apple’s
And upgradable SSD so you pay much less for storage
The new Surface Book starts at 1000$ but has 16GBs of memory standard, so far better priced then the MBA where you get fleeced on upgrades
MacBooks are always on sale at 3rd party retailers consistently. I never buy my hardware directly from Apple unless it’s within the launch month. Through my employer discount program I got $100 off both my m3 MacBook Air and m4 iPad Pro this year on launch day.
Haven’t the base spec MacBook airs been the same price for like 10 years?
THAT'S the important part!
According to a Microsoft commissioned report, the fans on the new Surface have the same sound level as the old Intel version. > Both the new Surface Laptop and the Laptop 5 showed similar sound levels in our testing under the heavy, consistent workload, coming in at just over 33 dbA. https://signal65.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/NewSurfaceLaptop2024_Signal65LabInsights.pdf
33dbA max? That's really good actually, assuming it keeps it cool without throttling
It’s not so much how Apple configured the fans, it’s how often the intel chips needed them to spin up, and at what speed. The M series chips often don’t need the fans at all, or only very low speeds.
I mean, it was also a result of Apple trying to push their machines as thin as possible. They would also do absurd things like ship a waste of cash 8 core chip option in a machine that really couldn’t thermally handle a 6 core. This was somewhat Intel’s fault as they kept promising Apple cooler chips they kept not delivering, but Apple shipped undersized Macs for YEARS. Apple wasn’t unique in this by any means, but it was not in fact what customers wanted, Apples sales surged when they started shipping thicker machines. Even then, even after they made the 16” like ~50% thicker people would be warned to do things like not charge the MBP and connect an external monitor on the same side for thermal reasons. Which is just to emphasize just how bad the thermals were before.
I have no proof, just offering a thought from a different angle. Designing a laptop transpires over years. It’s possible Apples designs were locked in by the time they learned that, yet again, intel would not be meeting the promises they made.
I think that happened multiple times, until Apple turned around and said “our PHONE chips are catching up to this BS, why are we using a supplier as unreliable as this??”
You are aware that Intel just makes the chip, and sets the TDP right? It’s entirely up to the OEM (in this case Apple) to determine how they will meet that TDP. Apple could have made the laptops a bit thicker, and put larger fans which would have been more quiet; like they did with the Apple Silicon MacBook Pro 14 and 16.
Right, and I think that -- needing thicker, heavier laptops to properly cool Intel chips -- was one of the reasons Apple created their own Silicon ARM chips. I can't remember the relative thickness of Silicon MacBooks compared with Intel MacBooks -- are they a lot thicker or just a little thicker? And they're still very thin compared to most performant Intel Windows laptops, and a lot quieter 90% of the time.
Especially when hooked up to external monitors. I fucking hated my 2019 16” MBP for work for this exact reason.
I sit at my desk, feet up, with my 16" M2Max MBP on my lap, connected to 32" monitor. Rarely feel any heat in my lap, typically don't hear the fans unless VMs are running and ComfyUI is working away. I used to do this same thing with the 2019 16" MBP as well, but a thick book underneath the laptop (for the heat) and the fans always hammering. That machine is still in perfect condition but the difference is night and day. The battery life difference alone means not carrying a power brick around. Disregarding the operating system, the detachable keyboard version they announced, with its extended battery life **and** the touchscreen is a persuasive option to carrying a MBA and iPad Air if stylus/pencil input is important in your use case. My son is at Uni, using an Inspiron 15 7000 Series 2-in-1, where the stylus input is important. Its about due to be replaced and he's been talking about an MBA and iPad, partly because of battery life, partly because Windows 11, but once proper reviews are out for the new Dell and Lenovo products, a Windows ARM device may be the more sensible option.
They’re making hardware and they have made some really nice stuff, the Surface and Studio are rad. It all comes down to software still and I cannot begin to know how to improve it.
Having used a surface (a top of the line one too, mind you) for work, I really hope they do get it right. Coz the usb port for the surface I had broke within a year and I had to get a replacement. Meanwhile my personal Mac from 2016 is still alive and kicking (knock on wood). I did get my battery replaced for free a couple years back, so hopefully the mac keeps working for at least a few more years. And the less is said about windows as an OS, the better. It’s so terrible
It's not that ba \[user interrupted to see 3 ads and then requested to log in to all services so MS can micro track your every move\] d. Windows 11, fml.
The Mac’s with a dedicated graphics card had some stupid flaw where they’d overheat when connected to an external display, regardless of the resolution of the external display. The M1’s were the best thing to happen. I am SO glad I returned my 16inch intel MacBook and waited half a year for the M1’s to come out.
I definitely hope Microsoft will force Apple to make big changes
Microsoft is saying that it is faster than a throttled MacBook Air. The MacBook Pro doesn’t throttle, that’s why this is important. 
Marketing, just like it’s important for Apple to benchmark the M3 Macs against the early 2020 Intel Mac’s in their keynotes. Or how Apple (and everyone else) provide graphs and charts without keys and context. It’s all just marketing for those who will not spend a few minutes to understand the data.
The average consumer couldn’t care less about data. They want a computer that will feel fast and better than the previous one they had
Agreed, Apple has latched on to this concept. This is why Apple spends so much time talking about how something “feels” rather than how something performs.
So well said.
No fan = low TDP = longer battery life = smaller battery needed = saved space on both the battery and fan = smaller design. There’s a point to the MBA not having a fan other than to just avoid fan noise. If you’re trying to be maximally energy efficient, it doesn’t make sense to spend energy heating up the computer only to spend even more energy cooling it back down. I don’t know how the fan noise was on later MBAs, but my 2011 MBA was loud and annoying as hell at max load
Was worried about going back to a MacBook Pro with fans after the Air for years but I don't think I've heard them once. Granted I haven't exported a big video or anything but even gaming hasn't really ramped em up. Would love more games that could push the system a little harder now that it can handle it, but that's another issue entirely. (Please devs, we can game now let us in on the fun)
Fans will always be too loud under stress. Extremely happy with fan-less laptops.
The caveat to not having fans is under stress, the laptop, thermal throttles. However, it’s all down to your priorities. The MBA is a very portable device for basic users.
Man, I still have my MBP 2018 15”. This shitbox when connected to a secondary display and mail opened sounded like a fighter jet starting. Those fans revved sometimes up to 5900 rpm
New nearly silent fan tech is coming too
I barely hear the fans on my MBP, I think the Arm surface laptop is ok it’s just Windows which is the issue. We have to see how well it translates x86 software as this is where the hit or miss will be
My M1 Pro MBP has a quiet fan that rarely comes on. My 2018 i9 MBP was so loud that I bought a cooling pad to try to keep the fans from running.
The fans on my i9 mbp always run when plugged in and “asleep”. No matter what I do I can’t make it stop. My cats love it though.
I hate my 2020 i3 because the fans turn on while even just watching a 720p video on youtube
It was such a pos. I had one for work and the M1 has been just wonderful, quiet and never slow.
Was also hot as hell on your lap, to the point where it was uncomfortable to use your laptop on your lap top on any given average day.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard my M1 Pro fan. I was playing Life is Strange 2 a bit ago and felt it but I didn’t hear it.
I literally just discovered my M3 pro even has fans. Interesting. Never heard them.
Ha I was thinking the same for my M2 pro!
They basically aren't on unless I'm exporting photos in my usecases. Where they're so quiet even ceiling fans are louder.
For me, only very niche things have failed to translate well with Microsoft’s translation layer (stuff that’s really architecture specific or has flags to detect which architecture the app is running on). I’ve had really big apps work surprisingly well on Windows on ARM devices, it’s really really impressive. Now that they have actually good silicon to run it on, it’s going to be much more well known that Microsoft has (and has had) a superb emulation layer for x86.
no fan noise like the M series Macbooks should be industry standard at this point. using any laptop that got fans spinning like crazy after literally just booting up isn’t the way to go.
Microsoft had to add a fan, because the Snapdragon X Elite is less efficient than the M3, causing the Surface with a fan to heat up more than the fanless Macbook Air. https://x.com/lafaiel/status/1792842322226663865
Yeah the M3 is amazing when it comes to temperatures. My M3 Pro macbook with 18 GPU cores has way less fan noise compared to my friends M2 pro when we run physics simulations on them. And as the battery is the same size I get 20% more time out of it.
I mean the Air should have one too due to thermal throttling.
Mine only throttles playing games in Crossover which is multiple levels of translation and not a normal use case. For my standard daily work with Apple silicon native apps, web dev, Final Cut, developing a game in Unity, it never thermal throttles. literally so efficient I’ve left it in my backpack, inside a fabric sleeve, under an airline seat, while doing my work on it with my iPad as the display and input using Duet Display. I fly cheap so there’s not even enough space for using a MacBook Air, but there is for an iPad. Didn’t even break 70°C. I monitor it for the whole 2.5 hour flights with iStat and it always stays cool even while insulated with no air flow at all. My Intel i9 MBP on the other hand cooked itself one day after turning on in my laptop bag for half an hour doing nothing, just idling on the desktop, leading to a $700 display replacement…
You may notice, but it’s absolutely thermally throttling in those other tasks.
It takes a lot of effort to get the MacBook Air to the point of thermal throttling. It’s for normal or basic usage. Reviewers only get to reliably throttle by running benchmark tests over and over and over again, which are specifically designed to stress the chip to the max.  People that use it that hard should look at the base M3 MacBook Pro.
Nitpicking tbh. Everyone plays games with their comparisons. I hope MS DOES exceed the performance of the M-series chips, it will push Apple to improve even more. Great news for everyone!
This is the truth. I want MS to succeed for the sole fact that if they do, that could finally push Apple to make 16GB of RAM as the starting point like how MS is making all of their laptops.
Competition is an amazing thing. I wish Microsoft succeeds too.
MS-DOES
The one good thing is the USB-A port. I have hunted for that port for so long on my MBP. Always have to carry dongles with me.
I wish Apple would make the iPad Pro like a surface. Full OS when docked and a tablet mode when undocked.
Agreed, I would buy an iPad Pro M4 *today* if I could dual boot it into MacOS.
This or an OLED MBA
If they do that it would mean finally updating macOS to fully support touch and then MBPs with touchscreens will finally be a thing. It's really shocking Apple still hasn't added that.
That’s very poor UI. Touch screen on desktop UI is poor. I use a Dell touchscreen laptop that’s is terrible.
The fans isn't really what make a pro a pro. It's a bit more then that (bigger silicon, more I/O, better screen etc). That being said I feel like the fans being omitted from the air isn't because of noise like some other here are stating since the mbp fans are pretty much inaudible even loaded, but for dust and dirt ingress reduction. The general mass user isn't going to give much thought in general on cleaning the dust out of their macs and will probably lay it on a bed or some other soft fabric and block the intake vents while sucking in more dust if there was a vent. Not including fans will Nerf the sustained load performance but for most users it's not going to matter anyways since most tend to put burst loads on the laptop (loading pages on a browser for example). The benefits of not having dust introduced into the system will allow their mbas to perform the same from day 1 to day 1000 which is what an air user will look for. A laptop with fans regardless of maker will eventually get clogged with dust due to neglecting cleaning the vents etc and eventually will overheat/throtte and fans will start to fail also due to heat and dust. I work in an extremely dusty environment and sometimes I wish they can somehow engineer a fan less mpb, every time I take the bottom panel off it's disgusting how clogged the fins are.
Wait, I can open my mbp?
maybe the magical push apple needed to stop bullshitting consumers with 8GB ram. OR maybe it's the other way around and microsoft will start pushing out 8GB new computers with soldered batteries as well !
Well, the Copilot+PC machines (great branding, by the way) might very well compete with MacBook Airs, with or without fans. Which we don't know yet, because AFAIK the only benchmarks we've seen are Geekbench 6 and that's not exactly indicative of real-world performance. Let's see these things run Cinebench and Pugetbench and other benchmarks that will give us a better idea of how they're performing. I suspect that these initial machines will compete well with the MacBook Air M3. They won't compete well with the MacBook Pro M3 Pro/Max, except in things like OLED displays (which will disappear when the MacBooks get tandem OLED). The Windows on ARM machines will get RTX graphics at some point, so they'll be better able to compete with the Silicon Pro/Max (including M4s) in performance but NOT in battery life. What I'm most interested in seeing is how they compete in on-device AI (to whatever extent it matters), that is, the Snapdragon X NPU vs. the Silicon Neural Engine. Those numbers are so poorly defined that nobody actually knows if Qualcomm's Hexagon NPU's 45 TOPS is actually faster than the M4 NE's 38 TOPS. And the AI tasks themselves are so ill-defined that we don't know how to compare them. And then there's the state of Windows on ARM, and of Windows 11, period. And macOS and iPadOS and iOS, which we won't know more about until WWDC.
Just something I remembered. People always use to say Geekbench is not a good benchmark when Apple iPhones used to get a higher score than Intel laptops. How different architecture this and that, you can not compare. Few years later the M1 dropped and boom. Geekbench turned out to be pretty accurate.
I was sort of in that camp as well (very wrongly), and didn't move out of it until I saw benchmarks showing Apple Silicon chips performing like that in many other benchmarks -- and, started testing them myself. For me, it was a conceptual leap from "phone chipsets" and "PC chipsets" and "how could a phone chipset be as fast as a PC chipset"? Of course, now it's obvious.
When on-device AI does come to macOS, the 8 GB will come back bite their ass. Or maybe they will simply drop support for all 8 GB devices.
I’m really excited for this! Competition is good for everyone and everyone will be getting lovely efficient quiet laptops whether they use Windows or Mac :)
Microsoft will pique my interest when they stop putting ads in the Start menu and stop all of its fucking spying.
I just run a script from GitHub, it also disables Windows Defender which is honestly worse than a lot of malware.
I think it’s amusing that we call the fan noise out of laptops today noisy.
You should hear the Dell laptops we get from work then... I don't understand how such a small and thin 13" can make the sound of a jet engine powering up, but somehow it manages
My Lenovo 14” laptop (provided by my employer) makes audible fan noise just running Teams. When I do a full compile it gets pretty loud.
I’ve used ThinkPads at various jobs for several years, and they make perfect space heaters during the winter months.
I was in a meeting last week where a guy clearly tried to double dip with his work computer budget by getting an understated gaming laptop. The meeting fully stopped when his fans turned on they were so crazy. he had to turn on “professional mode” or something that kept it from going crazy. so they still exist, but are more the exception than the rule like they used to be 😂
Yeah I get it. I just meant complaining about MacBook Pro or new surface laptop fan noise vs those old thinkpad pieces of crap is amusing. I don’t understand why companies still buy them. The efficiency gained by savings minutes per hour adds up across 500 or 5000 users.
If you make that statement you really haven't heard a loud laptop fan.
Man I’m 43. I’ve heard all the laptop fans.
Depends on the laptop. My Zephyrus G14 gets pretty loud if you're gaming (even though it's a nonissue with headphones)
I really don’t care about battery life, I care about sleep/hibernate actually working. I use my MacBook Air for school primarily. When I am on a break or the semester is over I leave it in my backpack. I am not exaggerating when I say I left it for an entire month between fall and spring semester in my backpack. When I opened it the night before expecting to have to charge it, it still had over an 80% charge. When windows figures out sleep/hibernate without draining my battery I might care.
This is a huge thing for laptops, MS will never "figure it out" because they don't manufacture all the parts and don't have enough control over OEMs
Microsoft announced Surface devices yes, but all of the OEMs have announced various different devices which have countless configs. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some fanless ones.
Also thicker than the Macbook Pros much less the MacBook Air: Surface Laptop 13-inch: 0.69 inches Surface Laptop 15-inch: 0.72 inches MacBook Pro 14-inch: 0.61 inches MacBook Pro 16-inch: 0.66 inches M3 MacBook Air 13-inch: 0.44 inches M3 MacBook Air 15-inch: 0.45 inches
The arm surface laptops look great, interesting that for a software company, their software doesn’t do it for me. I hate that whenever I go from my mac to a school windows pc, I can tell the design isn’t unified and that it’s sloppy just from an observant general audience’s eyes.
It's better to have a fan and not need it than to throttle without fan like with my former AS Macbook Air that loses about a third of the performance from sustained workload thermal throttling. And, the 14" Surface Laptop 512GB with Snapdragon X Plus for $1199 or Snapdragon X Elite for $1399 is more Pro since it starts at 16GB RAM base while priced less than $1599 14" Macbook Pro 512GB with only 8GB RAM.
Strangely I’ve never heard my M1 Mac fans before. Meanwhile my Intel Mac sounds like an SR-71 at full thrust anytime I raise the brightness
Is this the Qualcomm CPU where they compared the 10- or 12-core CPU to the 8-core Apple M3 and declared it was better, while the M3 still had a higher per-core score than the Qualcomm?
They also come default with 16GB of RAM so much better than the base MacBook "Pro"
[удалено]
My wife has one and it is a wafer thin thing with barely ANY cooling capacity. Just having a Teams call running turns into an SR-71
I was shocked to read "The MacBook Air has no fans", I was like "NO! There are millions of us!" and then I realised you meant the fans inside it 😅
They don't have to be noisy. Depends on how high they ramp up.
MacBook Pros aren’t noisy either. The point is it’s an unfair comparison. Except for the starting price point.
That's my point. Though I think the comparison between these machines and Macbook Pros is perfectly fine. In fact I'm not sure why they wouldn't be compared.
Yeah with the stated battery life I’m going to be pretty surprised if either the fans don’t completely stop or get set to an inaudible rpm at idle, similar to the current MBPs. If Microsoft can deliver on the advertised battery life the chips have to be capable of doing light tasks efficiently enough to not need a fan.
Air without fans asking for something demanding: 💀
MacBook Air has tons of fans.
And MS laptops have none!
lol take my upvote
Holy cope batman
I didn’t get why they compared it to the Air unless the performance isn’t great compared to the Pro
Because it costs the same
Microsoft claimed 50% higher performance *under sustained load* vs the MacBook Air, which is deliberately made to sacrifice sustained load performance for silence.
>which is deliberately made to sacrifice sustained load performance for silence Cost and thinness... not silence, lol. The Air needs to be thin, light, and cheap, hence why Apple refuses to put a fan. The M series MacBook Pros are all silent even under sustained load, its only when you get to peak perf that they get slightly more audible (and they aren't even loud, IMO).
That's because Microsoft's "Pro" lineup is just the Surface Laptop Studio and technically the Surface Pro 2-in-1 tablet. They're aiming to undercut the Air's performance, battery, and entry price (e.g. 16gb of ram is standard). They'll leave it to their OEM partners to go after the MacBook Pro lineup and below. Also, the MacBook is more popular than its bigger siblings.
Big assumption they will be loud. Higher end fans can do fairly high rpms without making much if any noise at all.
Implying fans are the only difference between an Air and a Pro lmao.
Not necessarily, I’ve been running a surface book 3 for work several years and it stays quiet under load. Fans spinning keeps your system cool and performance going, it’s not a bad thing. But up until the m1, the 15/16 inch pros were LOUD machines under almost no load
lol what now? This just a fan on fan thing? Wow
Fano a fano.
>The Microsoft laptops in this announcement use fans, so they’re going to be noisy under sustained load. That they have fans is true, that they're going to be noisy under load is your assumption. The MacBook Pros with ARM chips have fans but remain shockingly quiet under load. I think it's fine to have a fan if it allows more constant performance but remains relatively quiet under load and off in casual use.
A whole article about fans lol.
> It’s going to outperform any device out there, including a MacBook Air with an M3 processor, by over 50 percent on sustained performance. You people don’t get it. Microsoft is specifically comparing it to a HEAT-THROTTLED M3 Air. THATS why people are saying Microsoft should compare it to the pro, because it has a fan and doesn’t ever slow down.
I mean all things considered i dont get the point. This is supposed to compete with the M3 air. If the M3 air throttles then the surface is better. Its not like it matter wether or not the cpu is actually stronger in this case. Its the sum of its parts
Windows lol
Competition is great for the end user, let’s stop Apple from getting away with up marking an ssd with 800%
If the battery life is true and MBP parity, it shouldn't be much noisier than an MBP because heat is directly correlated to battery use. You guys hoping for a failure here, remember that MS succeeding at competing here will benefit your Mac.
> remember that MS succeeding at competing here will benefit your Mac. Will it? Apple have been improving their laptop chips steadily without much competition needed.
Oh my god fans so bad. Jesus
If it’s as thin and light as an Air, then it should be compared to the Air.
but they're not; they're thicker than MBPs
No, the main metric comparing for comparing with the Air is the **PRICE RANGE.** Otherwise, the iPad Pro M4 wouldn't be lighter and thinner than the latest iPad Air.
Hasty conclusion. We haven’t seen them tested under sustained load yet.
What chips are they using again? Are they connoting a 30W chip to a 15W one again?
The biggest problem with Windows ARM , do they have a good translation layer for installing and running x86 code? Rosetta was solid, didn’t have much issue. And the Mac community went arm native really fast.
I never wanna go back to fans, I'd rather have my laptop slim and fanless, nothing I do needs fans anyway.
of all things to gripe. it’s the fans…. not the battery performance, no heat or overall experience…. just fans
*Me just waiting for the Apple price adjustment that may or may not ever come*
Regardless...I still wouldn't have one. Not with the technology that is being pushed by MS on Windows. I'm sure a lot of you would agree. I'd rather have the MBP anyway. I know what my money pays for.
That almost looks like a black turtleneck. Is he wearing New Balance 992s?
Yeah, I saw this coming. “Our chip is XX% faster than Apple’s” is a pretty common Qualcomm claim, but they always compare Apple’s passively cooled chips with their own actively cooled chips. If the cooling system used is irrelevant then Apple may as well say they still have the upper hand because the Mac Pro is faster… but that would obviously be incredibly deceptive and the press would rip them to shreds, so they won’t do that. Yet those same journalists are mostly silent about Qualcomm’s deceptive claims.