Microsoft is clearly worried about Apple. The marketing for the company’s new Surface Laptop Ultra directly calls out the MacBook Pro, and Microsoft is even encouraging MacBooks for trade-ins.
Now that the Surface Laptop Ultra has started shipping, early reviews of the laptop have posted, including one from our sister publication PCWorld. Give that review a read when you can, but PCWorld’s review makes no MacBook Pro comparisons. And that’s what we’re here for! We’re going to take a look at some of the benchmark results and see how Microsoft’s laptop compares to Apple’s MacBooks.
Results are expressed as Geekbench scores. Higher scores/longer bars are faster. Surface Laptop Ultra’s Windows power slider set to “Best performance”
Geekbench 7 is an overall, general-purpose performance benchmark, and in Single-core CPU testing, the Nvidia RTX Spark N1X 20-core CPU chip in the Surface laptop ranks below that of the two-year-old A18 Pro chip in the MacBook Neo. In Multi-core CPU testing, the Nvidia chip beat Apple’s M5, but is 21 percent slower than the 15-core M5 Pro. As you can see in the chart, the M5 Max has a sizable lead over the RTX Spark.
Results are expressed as Cinebench scores. Higher scores/longer bars are faster. Surface Laptop Ultra’s Windows power slider set to “Best performance”
Cinebench 2024 is more media-focused, rendering an image using Maxon’s Redshift engine. In Single-Core CPU performance, the Nvidia chip is even slower than Apple’s A18 Pro-surprising that a chip made for a mobile phone is faster. In Multi-Core CPU benchmarks, the Nvidia chip still lags behind the M5 Pro.
As far as battery life, PCWorld couldn’t run the same test we do (playing a 4K video saved to the laptop’s SSD until the battery runs out). However, their testing, which involved streaming a 4K YouTube video, lasted about 8 hours, a far cry from the 20 hours we got in our tests.
One last thing to note about the 15-inch Surface Laptop Ultra is its price. The model PCWorld tested costs $3,699 and has an Nvidia RTX Spark N1X 20-core CPU, a 6,144-core GPU (Nvidia counts cores differently than Apple), 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. For comparison, Apple sells the 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro 18-core CPU, a 20-core GPU, 48GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD for $3,599. So for $100 less, you can get an M5 Pro MacBook Pro that’s much faster in general use than Microsoft’s laptop. The 14-inch model with the same specs is $3,299, $300 cheaper than the Surface Laptop Ultra.
Before you get all excited, let’s be fair to Microsoft, they promote the Surface Laptop Ultra as “built for local AI,” and we don’t run the same AI benchmarks as PCWorld, so we’ll hold off on judgment in the AI arena. However, the M5 Pro and Max chips are the last of this chip design that Apple will produce. With the M7 due next year, Apple is reportedly focusing on AI performance, which will but a greater focus on the things Microsoft is touting. So, look out.
But as far as general-purpose productivity goes, Apple doesn’t really have anything to worry about–we said that even before we saw these results.
