12 PCWorld MARCH 2021NEWS INTEL BENCHMARKS SAY APPLE’S M1 ISN’T FASTER
performance tests can be cherry-picked by
those looking to prove an outcome, battery
life usually can’t be disputed.
Apple’s official claim gives the M 1
MacBook up to 18 hours of battery life using
the Apple TV app to watch a 1080p video
with the brightness set to “8 clicks from the
bottom.” Apple also claims up to 15 hours
browsing 25 “popular” websites with the
same “8 clicks” criteria.
When Intel pitted a MacBook Air M 1
against an Acer Swift 5 with a Core
i7-1165G7, however, it found both basically
dead even. The MacBook Air came in at 10
hours and 12 minutes, and the Acer Swift 5
lasted 10 hours and 6 minutes.
The difference? Intel said it used Safari to
watch a Netflix stream with tabs open and thescreen set to a relatively bright 250 nits. On the
Acer, Safari was subbed out for Chrome, but the
brightness and Netflix remained the same.
Intel did add that Apple’s “8 clicks up” is
about 125 nits of brightness on the MacBook
Air, which is pretty dim.
Our take: We agree 125 nits is a pretty
silly brightness to use for video testing. After
all, who wants to watch a movie on a laptop
but then dims the screen so much you can’t
actually see most of it?
Probably the largest disconnect here
might be the difference between the Apple
TV app, which could possibly be highly
optimized instead of Safari, but it’s hard to
believe Safari would not be heavily
optimized already. We’d really want to do
additional testing of our own here.