18 TECH ADVISOR • MAY 2021NEWS ANALYSIS
Acer Swift 5 lasted 10 hours, 6 minutes.
The difference? Intel said it used Safari
to watch a Netflix stream with tabs open
with the screen set to a 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 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.CLAIM: ALL KINDS OF THINGS
JUST DON’T WORK ON THE M
Intel didn’t just get into the performance
of the M1. It also said it found the
MacBook Pro had serious shortcomings,
such as an inability to use more than one
display with a Thunderbolt dock.
And while the PC can use gaming
headsets, eGPUs, a third-party finger
print reader, Wacom Drawing tablet andXbox Controller, Intel said it found that
the MacBook Pro simply doesn’t work
witheGPUs,andhadmultipleissues
withother devices.
That’s just hardware incompatibility.
Intel’s rap battle with Apple also
highlights issues with plug-ins for
Ableton, Bitwig Studio, Avid Pro Tools,
FL Studio, Motu and many others.Our take: The fact that the MacBook
can only use a single external display is
a big problem. We’d want to verify that
ourselves, but it’s a serious weakness in
this multi-monitor world. Hopefully, it’s
just a bug from the new platform, but
for all we know, it’s a limitation of the
hardware too.
We’ve long said the lack of eGPU is
a major weakness because who doesn’t
want more performance for gaming?
But to be fair: we’ve already stressed the
Mac is pretty worthless for gaming, so
what exactly do you need that eGPU for?
Intel’s take on the software issues
is a little less problematic, we think.
When you pull up stakes and tell
allofyourdeveloperstoyetagain
rewritesoftwarefor yet another new
architecture... well, things will break.
The good news for M1 MacBook
users is these applications and plug-ins
will likely get fixed eventually. Mind you,
this doesn’t mean it’ll all get fixed for