All of Microsoft’s MacBook Airs outperform benchmarks

Microsoft is on a mission to dethrone the MacBook Air with its new range of Copilot Plus computers. He’s so confident he’s finally gotten Windows on Arm right that he spent an entire day pitting his new Surface Laptop against a MacBook Air at his headquarters in Redmond, Washington, last month. On the edge a host of benchmarks and simulated real-world tests were shown to demonstrate a new Qualcomm-powered Surface Laptop beating Apple’s best-selling laptop.

While I’ve already detailed Microsoft’s confidence in beating Apple’s M3 processor earlier, I thought it would be useful to go over all the comparison claims and battery life ratings in detail. Microsoft touched on some of these during its Surface and Windows AI event last week, but the claims on stage weren’t always as detailed as what Microsoft officials showed me last month.

I wasn’t able to run the benchmarks myself, but the results should serve as an important data point as we approach the launch of these Copilot Plus PCs on June 18th. It’s also important to note that unlike Apple’s MacBook Air, Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop isn’t fanless, allowing it to squeeze out more performance. Microsoft only compares its Surface Laptop to the MacBook Air M3 — not the fan-equipped MacBook Pro.

Benchmarks aren’t everything, anyway, and we’ll get a better idea of ​​true real-world performance and battery life when we review the Surface Laptop next month.

Microsoft kicked off the day of benchmarks by first measuring raw performance between the Surface Laptop and the MacBook Air M3. It showed two benchmark claims, including sustained performance using Cinebench 2024’s multi-threaded workload and peak performance using Geekbench 6’s multi-threaded test.

The Surface Laptop achieved a score of 980 in multi-threaded Cinebench 2024 and a score of 14,000 in multi-threaded Geekbench 6. Microsoft avoided highlighting the single-threaded scores on both benchmarks, presumably because the MacBook Air would score slightly better here.

Either way, Microsoft claims its new Surface Laptop will beat the MacBook Air M3 in Cinebench multithreaded workloads by 50 percent. In Geekbench 6, the Surface Laptop is only 16 percent better. On stage last week, Microsoft also said its Copilot Plus range of computers will be “58 percent faster than the MacBook Air M3.”

Microsoft then covered what it describes as “real-world performance.” The main test here was the HandBrake ToS benchmark, which measures how long it takes to encode a 4K video file. The Surface Laptop with the Snapdragon X Elite managed this in five minutes and eight seconds, faster than the six minutes and 26 seconds it took the MacBook Air M3.

More importantly, it was twice as fast as a Surface Laptop 5 running a 12th-generation Intel Alder Lake processor, which took 10 minutes, 30 seconds to complete the task. The Surface Laptop 4 took even longer, at 13 minutes, 32 seconds.

Microsoft’s comparisons with the MacBook Air M3 also concern battery life. During the tests, I saw how Microsoft simulated battery life when browsing the web and playing video. Microsoft uses a script to simulate web browsing. The 2022 Intel-based Surface Laptop 5 took eight hours and 38 minutes to fully drain the battery; the new Surface Laptop lasts twice as long, reaching 16 hours and 56 minutes. That beats the same test on the 15-inch MacBook Air M3, which lasted 15 hours and 25 minutes.

Microsoft ran a similar video playback test that showed the Surface Laptop lasted over 20 hours, with the MacBook Air M3 reaching 17 hours, 45 minutes. That’s also nearly eight hours more than the Surface Laptop 5, which lasted 12 hours and 30 minutes.

Microsoft said on stage last week that the new Copilot Plus PCs with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor will offer “20 percent longer battery life than the latest 15-inch MacBook Air.”

The last benchmarks that Microsoft showed me were related to NPU performance. Microsoft claims that the NPU in the Snapdragon X Elite is almost twice as fast on AI acceleration tasks as Apple’s M3 Neural Engine in the cross-platform Procyon AI Computer Vision benchmark.

The Surface Laptop scored 1,745 on the Procyon AI Score, while the MacBook Air managed 889. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite has 45 TOPS of AI acceleration performance, well above the 18 TOPS found on the M3.

Microsoft also showed off the Surface Laptop, achieving 4.5x output efficiency for its Phi Silica model, faster processing than the M3, along with 24 TOPS/watt peak output efficiency.