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Those Geekbench Scores Don’t Tell the Full Story

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 1 min read

Apple Silicon M1 chip in MacBook Air outperforms high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro | Hacker News

I’m not sure what to make of these scores, but it seems wrong that the Mini and Pro significantly underperform the Air in multi core. I find it hard to imagine this benchmark is going to be representative of actual usage given the way the products are positioned, which makes it hard to know how seriously to take the comparisons to other products too.

The scores they’re referring to are:

  • Single Core: Air 1687, Mini 1682, Pro 1714
  • Multi Core: Air 7433, Mini 7067, Pro 6802

This is what I was trying to get across in my video today as well. According to Geekbench, the MacBook Air is faster than the Mac Mini and MacBook Pro, both of which have active cooling and Apple themselves said are faster.

My take: I know we feel like we need to fill out timelines with declarative statements about how amazing these M1 chips are going to be, but let’s wait…checks watch…3 more days to test them in the real world.