Comment by pocketsand

8 hours ago

Obvious massive asterisk that benchmarks are not always realworld use:

Apple M5, Single core Geekbench: ~4,200 (https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-14-inch-2025)

Apple M5 Pro (15-core, lower core version), multicore: ~26,000 (https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/18535781)

compare this to the top of the line Intel Panther Lake chips, which have comparable battery life. I cherry picked a 16" Dell XPS machine, which has the best thermal headroom, for its best score: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/18390748

Single core: ~2,900 Multicore (16-cores): 16,900

Geekbench is bursty, so we can look at more sustained test, Cinebench 2024:

https://nanoreview.net/en/laptop-compare/dell-xps-16-2026-vs...

Single core:

XPS 16 (2026): 111 MacBook Pro 16 (M5, 2026): 203

Multicore: XPS 16 (2026): 613 MacBook Pro 16 (M5, 2026): 2065

on GPU, https://spylab.ai/seo/v5/C54a/

"Despite the XPS 16's discrete Nvidia RTX 4070 laptop GPU, the MacBook Pro M4 Pro's unified memory architecture outpaced the Dell in 4K video export and machine learning inference benchmarks by 22 percent on average."

For GPU, this is not comprehensive. It depends heavily on whether it needs raw grunt, where Nvidia discrete chips will win. When the processes uses the NPUs on Apple's chips, it will often win. They trade blows.

Efficiency I think is close to a wash on the latest machine, but before Panther Lake, Apple's win handily. My Framework 13 on AMD would last me about 2 hours doing regular work; my Macbook Pro doing the same workload would last over 10 hours. Thank goodness Intel caught up here.

I do scientific computing where Apple has some disadvantages. Matrix math heavy things lose out to discrete GPUs, as do -- I'm told -- things depending on 512-bit extensions (e.g., AVX).

Until last week, prices on Framework/Dell vs. Apple were similar. I think Apple is probably 10-20% expesnive at this point, but adjusting for performance, Apple still comes out ahead.

Apple's displays used to have a huge advantage. Now that you can get OLED displays on performant, efficient Panther Lake machines, this is far less of an Apple advantage.

The upshot is that the new Panther Lake machines caught up considerably to Apple, but they're still about 20-30% slower (sometimes more) in most workloads, and IMO the build quality is still not quite as good. I think many of them actually have better displays. Battery life is comparable on better equipped PCs. IMO once you can work an entire day and a little more unplugged, you're good to go.