MacBook Pro declared 'best performing' Windows laptop

MacBook Pro declared 'best performing' Windows laptop(news.cnet.com)

17 points by thetabyte 13 years ago | 11 comments

fmavituna 13 years ago |

There are couple of reasons, one stated in the article, but second is a little bit more subtle, only advanced users will buy Mac and then install Windows on it. Those users generally don't execute everything they see on the web, free or crapware etc.

Another one from the article: "A main factor in this machine's metrics is the fact that every Windows installation on it is clean. With PC manufacturers loading so much crapware on new laptops, this is a bit of an unfair competition. But, on the other hand, PC makers should look at this data and aspire to ship PCs that perform just as well as a cleanly installed MacBook Pro."

freehunter 13 years ago |

Dell features many machines on the top 10. Lenovo only has one, at the bottom of the list, and it's their ultrabook. It's a commonly believed statement that Lenovos are some of the most reliable laptops, and Dells are closer to the bottom.

Does this result disprove that? Or does common knowledge show these results are based on inaccurate information? Or is it just that Thinkpad users are less likely to install Soluto?

misterbwong 13 years ago |

The ranking is a bit disingenious. FTA

A main factor in this machine's metrics is the fact that every Windows installation on it is clean. With PC manufacturers loading so much crapware on new laptops, this is a bit of an unfair competition. But, on the other hand, PC makers should look at this data and aspire to ship PCs that perform just as well as a cleanly installed MacBook Pro.

0x0 13 years ago | |

Still, that's a very real problem with buying laptops these days, especially for non-techies. Sounds quite fair to me!

27182818284 13 years ago | |

That's probably the best point in the whole thing. All of the crapware installed with Windows makes for a big performance hit.

dwyer 13 years ago |

What's really interesting here is not that a $1199 Macbook Pro outperformed a bunch of sub-$1000 PC laptops, but that the $429 Acer outperformed the rest of them, including the $2199 Macbook Pro.

astrodust 13 years ago | |

The benchmark here is crazy subjective.

The Retina screens are probably going to get lower scores due to the way Windows handles them. It'd be nice if they give a more detailed breakdown of how those seemingly random numbers were calculated.

jiggy2011 13 years ago |

If you are measuring "crashes per week" rather than "crashes per hour of runtime" you are going to get results that favour laptops which are not used much.

heironimus 13 years ago |

They test things like Windows crashes, hangs, and BSOD's per week. I assume Macs have much lower occurrences of these because most of the time spent on them is in OSX rather than Windows.

My personal Mac is better than any of these. I has 0 Windows errors per week because I don't run Windows on it.

Not exactly an objective measure.

ebbv 13 years ago |

According to a "Soluto Score" so it's as meaningful as how much you trust whoever those guys are.

I get so tired of these rankings that purport to be objective. The only opinion that matters when you are buying a computer for you to use is yours. Insert biggest "Duh." in history here.

illuminate 13 years ago | |

Ah, I imagine it's a reported score among users who run their brand of "continuous optimization" software? Those reports are nearly as useless as Alexa rankings.