If you say that Intel MacBook Pro is a different product category from Arm MacBook Pro, then yes, gains are incremental within a product category.

The parent is arguing that really, these are the same product category. If you bought, say, a middle-of-the-road MacBook Pro every time a new one was announced, you’d see a huge jump in performance (more than just incremental) when moving from Intel to M1, then a return to incremental improvement from M1 to M2.

I’m pretty convinced by them. I think that Apple has done such a good job of compatibility that all MacBook Pros are essentially the same product category. And the M1 performance improvement really was a step change over Intel.

No, that's not what I am saying.

> gains over intel 9 Macbook Pro on the higher end Mac Pro's

I'm saying you can't compare a MBP to a Mac Pro, like you tried to do, because that wasn't my claim. My claim is that the first Apple Silicon MBP was only an incremental increase in performance from the last Intel MBP. And I am saying this is true, within specific model lines, for everything Apple ever released. And I don’t have specific knowledge of this, but I would assume it is true for every other computer and platform, that each subsequent generation of model is a little faster than the last, and not twice as fast or even 50% faster.

> My claim is that the first Apple Silicon MBP was only an incremental increase in performance from the last Intel MBP.

M1 MacBook Air was 2-3x as fast as previous model. MacBook Pro was closer to 2x.

Both with dramatically improved battery life.

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook-pro-m1-benchmarks-are...

> M1 MacBook Air was 2-3x as fast as previous model. MacBook Pro was closer to 2x.

Incorrect. The Late 2020 M1 MacBook Air has just under a 35% performance increase in single core performance over the Early 2020 i7 MacBook Air, though nearly a 2.5x increase in multicore performance[1] (because it has more cores). That doesn't make it 2-3 times faster as the single core performance is a bottleneck, but its multicore performance increase is certainly impressive, it just means the Air's small formfactor was hamstrung by Intel multicore and got to breath a little in the platform switch with more cores, not that the last Intel models are 2-3 times slower than the first Apple Silicon models. That's absurd. The MBP has much less impressive performance increases in the platform switch compared to Air. Looking at the last and fastest intel MBP, the 13-inch mid-2020, and comparing to the first M1, the 13-inch Late-2020, the performance increased[2] about 30% in single core performance and increased 40% in multicore performance, which is typical of the performance increases between the last Intel and first Apple Silicon selections of most other Mac models.

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/17

[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-retina-intel-...

those benchmarks you linked are not spelling out the same story that you are.

M1 vs intel looks to be a 1.5x to 2x improvement on the air in synthetic benchmarks.

That's not what the numbers say. It's on the order of low dozens of percent improvement, not hundreds of percent.

I don't mean to be rude, but I think in order for you to be right then either I have different site content than you or I am blind.

MBA 2020 (early) i3, i5, i7 are scoring 972, 1048 and 1113 respectively.

MBA 2020 (late) M1 scores 1707.

thats 175% of 972 and 150% of 1113.

Am I wrong?

Thats a huge leap in performance for the high end, but even more so for the entry level.

> Am I wrong?

Yes. And you're making it overly complicated. Look at the benchmarks[1] for one single model, the 13" mid-2020 MBP, single core performance is 1213. Now look at the very next generation of that machine, the 13" late-2020 MBP M1, single core performance is 1708. What percentage of 1213 would you need to add to 1213 to make it equal 1708? About 40% of 1213 then added to 1213 would give you 1708, so the increase in performance in single core for this model jumping from Intel to Apple Silicon M1 is a 40% increase, not 150% or whatever.

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-retina-intel-...

Take a look at what was written in the reply more carefully. There’s no mention of the word “increase” that you added. Simply that the machine is 150% of the previous version (ie 50% increase).

If you’ve done (1707 - 1113) / 1707 to get to a just under 35% increase for the Air then thats the wrong calculation.

Geekbench isn't showing you the complete picture. Its running time is short so it doesn't stress the thermal management capabilities of the device like the real-world benchmarks I posted do.

This benchmark shows the difference in performance of the M2 devices when you run them for a long period:

https://wccftech.com/m2-macbook-air-throttling-problem-under...

The success of the M1 is not just raw performance numbers but its efficiency.

Let's base our opinions on facts. Taking the 13" Pro example the annualized growth in single thread performance from the 2008 model to the last Intel model is about 13.2%. The increase from the last Intel to the M1 model was about 41% (multi-threaded around 67% faster). Way outside the typical progress from before the M1. Now the Macs live on the trajectory of Apple's in-house silicon which will probably slow to 10-20% improvement per year but which has for the last decade sat way above the Intel trajectory for laptop performance.

> Way outside

This is where we disagree. I see a smooth slope of performance increases generationally. You see some kind of chasm opening up.

You're comparing five years of Intel performance increases vs one year for the Intel to M1 change.

And you still haven't explained where you get 'less than 35%' increase from.

> My claim is that the first Apple Silicon MBP was only an incremental increase in performance from the last Intel MBP.

Do you have anything to support this claim because all the benchmarks I’ve seen say something quite different.

I don't know what you're looking at, but all in-model benchmarks support my claim, i.e. for any specific particular model compared to it's next generation you will never see an exponential gain in performance, nor even a doubling of performance, but only incremental gains in performance not yet breaching a 35% increase, which going from the 2018 Mac mini to the 2020 Mac mini comes close to, but it isn't just true of the minis, its true of all models.

Yeah, Intel->Apple Silicon was one of the biggest improvements I can remember.

less than 35% performance increase, in fact.

Have you compared the Air?

The first Arm versus the last Intel? Base model versus base model. It’s an awful lot more than 35%, particularly in multi core. And it’s quiet and cool. It’s a massive generational leap.

https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-late-2020

With the Air, the single core performance increase is just under 35% from the last Intel to the first Apple Silicon. The multicore performance increased nearly 250%, due to more cores in Apple Silicon, but before you get too impressed, this is due to the fact that Air is too small to fit as many Intel cores, and does not translate to a machine that is 2-3 times faster because of the importance of single core performance. No other Mac saw as large a performance increase, and generally it's under 35% increase in single core performance and less than 40% increase in multicore performance, and that's because all the other Mac models are large enough to hold an equal number of Intel cores vs Apple Silicon. Air is just too small, so it's still not a generational leap, it's just that more Apple Silicon cores fit in the Air.

You seem to be doing a lot of gymnastics to try to put the chips on a level playing field, but this doesn't make any sense to me at all.

They're fundamentally different architectures, so when the Air experiences the jump in performance that it did, you can't just hand wave that away because "well if Intel had smaller and cooler cores, it wouldn't be as big of a difference".

On the contrary - this is the entire point.

Anecdotally, my 1st gen M1 air is significantly faster at almost every task when compared to my last-gen i9 16" MacBook Pro.

It seems your argument is just that some increments are smaller than other increments? It seems the primary point is that the move to M1 was a much larger jump than most jumps.

Anyone who has been purchasing Apple hardware over the years experienced this in a very practical sense.

The Air does not work as a counter example. It is one model, one single model saw performance increases of 150% in multicore performance, and understanding why is important, because NONE of the other models saw anywhere near that performance increase and much closer to 30%-40% increases across the board. And the level of these increases is slightly more than the increases seen from the second to last gen Intels and the last gen Intels. And those performance increases were slightly more than the third to the last Intels to the second to the last Intels. And the further you go back, the smaller the performance gains are, but fundamentally all of these performance gains are incremental and not abrupt. They follow Apple's trend of increasing performance incrementally at each new release.

@maursault Your argument appears to lack logic and contradicts the evidence presented in the data.

How do you get 35%?

I’m looking at a Geekbench of 1707 for the 2020 M1 and 1113 for the 2020 i7, 1048 for the 2020 i5 and 972 for the 2020 i3 (as shown in the link I provided). That’s an increase of over 50% in single core performance versus the i7, more than 60% versus the i5, and 75% if you compare to the i3.

Am I looking at the wrong machines? How are you comparing?