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Comment by ritzaco

17 hours ago

> Phenomenal battery life: In addition to the huge leap in performance, battery life gets up to 14 additional hours for Intel-based upgraders

the m2/m3 announcements were already kind of cringe to keep saying 'HEY IT'S BETTER THAN INTEL' but at this point it's just embarrassing?

Fun fact: the laptop in this size/performance class with the best battery life is a Windows Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, not a MacBook Pro!

So Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago rather than what Intel is delivering now.

  • > Fun fact: the laptop in this size/performance class with the best battery life is a Windows Intel Core Ultra Series 3 laptop, not a MacBook Pro!

    Source for that fun fact?

    • I think they refer to low-tier Wildcat which, indeed, is more efficient than Apple's CPU in Neo, which they typically get compared against.

  • > Apple is now comparing against computers they were selling 7-8 years ago

    Apple didn't fully stop selling Intel macs until June 2023. And they compare against the most recent previous model too.

    • in 2023 they were only selling desktop Intel Macs. I am pretty sure by 2021 they weren't selling Intel laptops unless maybe refurbished

  • last time I checked, every Windows laptop had the absolutely massive caveat that it needed to throttle performance by a ton to have a low enough TDP to compete on battery life. You just cannot match the efficiency of ARM Apple chips with an x86 chip.

There's no happy medium here that would satisfy everybody: when they make marketing claims about improvements relative to products from several years ago, they get criticized for not focusing on the improvements relative to last gen (even if those comparisons are also somewhere in the announcement). When they focus on the most recent generations, people complain that it doesn't make sense to upgrade every year.

Just accept that even if you aren't still using an Intel MacBook Pro, the comparison is still relevant to some part of their target market.

They only just dropped support for Intel Macs from this fall's operating system release (but are still doing security patches for the releases that Intel Macs can run). A year from now, it actually will be fairly reasonable to expect them to give up marketing to the holdouts.

I would guess there's still quite a lot of people on Intel Macs out there (they were sold 5 years ago), so it is still very much worth it for Apple to market to them.

I think it makes sense. Do you think most potential buyers are coming from last year's model, or from laptops that are more like 3-5 years old?

As long as they're clear about the comparisons they're making ("X% more battery life than Y" as opposed to simply ("X% more battery life") I'm good with it.

Why? Apple devices have the best battery life in the market right now to my knowledge. It's an important part of the evaluation for a laptop which is the opposite of cringe.

  • Actually, they don’t! Intel Core Ultra Series 3 beats Apple laptops as of the M5 on battery life.

    IIRC the Framework 13 Pro beats the MacBook Pro at both video streaming tests and office productivity with 300 bits brightness tests. (Framework live-streamed the video playback test, and the office provided productivity tests I referred to were done by Just Josh Tech)

    Perhaps the M6 has leapfrogged but that remains to be seen.

  • I recall seeing some crazy stats like 41+ hours maybe on a snapdragon processor w/windows. I imagine your screen brightness would have to be like 99% dark and not playing videos is my guess.