In November, Bob Borchers, Apple's vice president of global product marketing, mentioned in an interview that the performance of an 8GB RAM MacBook is similar to that of a Windows PC with 16GB RAM, in order to persuade everyone not to dwell on the 8GB number, but to feel the actual performance of the MacBook.
For this reason, some testing agencies have done a comparison of 8GB vs 16GB MacBook, and the test results showed that it was much worse, and then tested 8GB MacBook vs 16GB Windows PC to see if it is just as Apple said. But it turns out that the 8GB MacBook is significantly inferior to the 16GB Windows PC.
The test was conducted using Apple's latest-generation M3 MacBook Pro laptop compared to an Intel Windows laptop, with the MacBook Pro using an 8GB RAM version and an Intel Windows laptop with 16GB RAM.
Before the test starts, restart both laptops, and when you enter the desktop, you can see that the MacBook has occupied 584GB of RAM, only about 2GB of RAM is available:
Although the memory occupation of Windows notebook is also quite a lot, it is the same as 57GB, but since it's 16GB of memory, there's up to 10GB left to spare:
In the browser performance test, the score of the MacBook is indeed higher than that of the Windows PC, but when more and more windows are opened, it will definitely be affected:
Start with some light testingAfter opening 5 web windows, using Lightroom Classic output**, 16GB Windows PC is already faster than 8GB MacBook, 1 minute and 17 seconds to complete, MacBook will take 1 minute and 47 seconds, 30 seconds more, you may think that the gap is very small, but when the output ** is more and more, the gap will be greatly expanded:
The same goes for video output with Resolve 18 Studio, where the 16GB Windows PC also wins the 8GB M3 MacBook, but not by much, just 10 seconds faster
When using Photoshop, the speed of the two is very close, so it can be said that it is a tie:
Then move on to the heavy real testStarting multitasking, it was obvious that when the 8GB MacBook opened 10 web pages for pagination, the speed was significantly slower, and it took 2 minutes and 10 seconds to complete the Lightroom output job. The 16GB Windows PC is not affected and still maintains high speeds:
The same is true with Photoshop, but the 8GB MacBook is only a few seconds slower, not much of a difference:
However, in practice, an 8GB MacBook is much slower than a 16GB Windows PC, such as letting Lightroom output first, then opening Photoshop to enable HDR** settings, and then coming back to see who finishes the output first. The results show that the 16GB Windows PC is significantly ahead of the 8GB MacBook
The gap is even more obvious when browsing the web,16GB Windows PC web pages are all read,8GB MacBook is still completely blank:
It can be seen that Apple's claim that the 8GB MacBook performs the same as the 16GB Windows PC, which is not true, and some people may say that the hardware configuration of this Windows notebook is very strong. But don't forget, this MacBook Pro is the latest generation of M3 chips, and its performance score is not inferior to that of flagship Windows laptops.