Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra has begun shipping, and Macworld compared the first review results, from its sister publication PCWorld, with Apple’s MacBooks on 16 October. The 15-inch model’s single-core Geekbench 7 score came in below Apple’s two-year-old A18 Pro from the MacBook Neo, and it managed only about eight hours of streaming 4K YouTube video, against roughly 20 hours of local 4K playback in Macworld’s MacBook Pro tests.
In Geekbench 7 multi-core, Nvidia’s RTX Spark N1X 20-core CPU beat Apple’s M5 but trailed the M5 Pro by 21 per cent, with the M5 Max well ahead. Cinebench 2024 results followed the same pattern: the Nvidia chip was slower than the A18 Pro in single-core and behind the M5 Pro in multi-core.
Macworld notes Microsoft’s marketing directly targets the MacBook Pro and encourages trade-ins. The prices do not help Microsoft’s case:
| Model | Specification | Price (US) |
|---|---|---|
| Surface Laptop Ultra 15-inch | Nvidia RTX Spark N1X, 20-core CPU, 6,144-core GPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD | $3,699 |
| MacBook Pro 16-inch | M5 Pro, 18-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 48GB RAM, 1TB SSD | $3,599 |
| MacBook Pro 14-inch | M5 Pro, 18-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 48GB RAM, 1TB SSD | $3,299 |
Microsoft promotes the Surface for local AI, but Macworld does not run the same AI benchmarks as PCWorld and held off on judging that area. According to Macworld, Apple’s M5 Pro and M5 Max are the last generation of that chip design; the M7, expected next year, is reported to focus heavily on AI performance.