No, The Surface Book is Not Twice as Fast as a MacBook Pro

This is a daily opinion column written by Lowell Heddings, the founder of How-To Geek, featuring his take on the latest in the world of technology.

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When Microsoft announced the very interesting Surface Book laptop / tablet hybrid, they also claimed that it was twice as fast as a MacBook Pro. That claim seemed ridiculous then, and after some benchmarking, we know that it is.

Surface Book vs. MacBook Pro: It isn’t twice as fast. It’s three times as fast

Of course we had to pit the Surface Book vs. the MacBook Pro. It’s like Ford vs. Chevy, or Coke vs. Pepsi. Each side has its diehard fans, plus others who just want to know which is better.

Microsoft claims its new Surface Book is “twice” as fast as its equivalent MacBook Pro. Well, we ran some benchmarks, and hate to say it, but Microsoft lied. The Surface Book isn’t twice as fast.

It’s three times as fast.

If you go on to read the article, you’ll find that all of the tests found the two machines almost equal, with the MacBook Pro winning by a small margin in CPU and Geekbench and various other tests — despite the Surface having a newer Skylake processor that hasn’t made it into the MacBook yet.

So where does the Surface Book beat the MacBook? Graphics performance in certain tests, if you pay for the higher-end Surface Book that has the extra discrete graphics card in the keyboard base. And the “three times” nonsense? That’s from a Tomb Raider video game frames-per-second benchmark. Nevermind that the tests were using OpenGL on the MacBook against DirectX on the Surface, rather than using Apple’s new Metal API, which is more similar to Direct X than OpenGL is. It’s a good way to pad the numbers to make the Surface look faster.

So no, the Surface Book is not actually twice as fast. Or 3 times as fast. In real-world performance, the MacBook Pro is actually (slightly) faster, which shouldn’t surprise anybody.

The only place the Surface Book is faster is… playing video games. Which pretty much always requires Windows anyway, since the state of gaming on Mac is virtually non-existant.