Microsoft recently held a benchmarking event at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, to showcase the performance of its new Qualcomm-powered Surface Laptop against Apple’s bestselling MacBook Air M3. The company presented multiple benchmarks and simulated real-world tests, highlighting the Surface Laptop’s advantages in various key aspects, including performance, price, and battery life.
In Cinebench’s multithreaded workload, the Surface Laptop scored 980 compared to the MacBook Air’s 630, showing a 50% performance increase. Geekbench 6 multithreaded tests showed the Surface Laptop scoring 14,000, 16% higher than the MacBook Air’s 12,000.
However, Microsoft avoided single-threaded performance metrics, where the MacBook Air M3 might have an advantage. Testing real-world performance using HandBrake, the Surface Laptop completed encoding a 4K video file in five minutes and eight seconds, beating the MacBook Air M3’s time of six minutes and 26 seconds. This was twice as fast as the Surface Laptop 5, which uses a 12th Gen Intel Alder Lake CPU.
Surface Laptop’s Benchmarking Event Revealed
Battery life was another significant focus. In simulated web browsing tests, the new Surface Laptop achieved 16 hours and 56 minutes, surpassing the MacBook Air M3’s 15 hours and 25 minutes. Microsoft also ran a video playback test where the Surface Laptop lasted over 20 hours, compared to the MacBook Air M3’s 17 hours and 45 minutes.
The final performance aspect covered was related to AI tasks. Microsoft’s Surface Laptop, equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite processor, scored significantly higher on the Procyon AI Computer Vision benchmark, recording a score of 1,745 compared to the MacBook Air’s 889. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite delivers 45 TOPS of AI acceleration performance, compared to M3’s 18 TOPS. Microsoft’s showcase of its new Copilot Plus PCs presents a compelling case against Apple’s MacBook Air M3. The real-world testing and user reviews expected in the coming months will further clarify these claims’ validity.
