Good news, intel panther lake (and the laptops they come in) are on par with M5 macbooks in almost every way.

This year is a lot more competitive than any of the past ~4 years for premium laptops.

The asus expertbook ultra even has a much better screen, a much better keyboard, and a very similar haptic trackpad. Weighs less than a 13 inch macbook air too. There's cheaper options too that are close to as good (minus the screen).

▲

dagmx an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Can you quantify your claim?

PTL’s highest SKU is comparable to the base M5 for only multicore perf at double the power use in every benchmark I’ve seen. It lags significantly behind in single core.

But I’d love to see a benchmark showing otherwise.

Just the latest I’ve seen https://youtu.be/7OxE7FwJPJM?si=b5T0PbmhUD1TXhX4

But I can find none that have PTL actually anywhere near M5 without strapping a much larger battery to the device

	▲	philistine 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's ridiculous to claim high and mighty that a chip that's not out yet is competitive. The only real way to test a laptop chip is in a laptop with the thermal choices made by the laptop maker. Hell, the M5 has been mostly benchmarked on the Macbook Pro, and that has a fan! The M5 is not going to be as impressive in the Air. It's been five years since M1 and Intel has never been competitive in single-core perf per watt with Apple. It would be surprising if it changed.

▲

lotsofpulp 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are there any non-Apple laptops yet where you can just close the lid and put the laptop in your bag and not worry about it being on?

▲

philistine 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Let me wax poetics here. Apple has been chasing the dream of the portable computer for so long, and has been at the forefront of the ultimate form factor of the personal computer, the laptop, since the early 90s. It's not surprising to me that the company that made an OS for everything, and a project to make an OS for everything, cannot figure out a reliable way to bring us a bicycle for the mind where you just close the lid.

Only Apple has been laser-focused to give us this experience.

▲

brokencode 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s funny that this is even remotely a concern in 2026. We have computers you can talk to but Windows laptops maybe won’t go to sleep in your backpack.

I do hope that it’s fixed though. I haven’t followed Windows laptops that closely, but my work laptop from a few years ago does lose battery surprisingly quickly when “sleeping”.

▲

criddell 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can go into Windows settings and change what happens when you close the lid to hibernate or power down.

	▲	eknkc 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That is more like a “wish” in windows.

▲

jauntywundrkind 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> M5 also features faster unified memory with 153GB/s of bandwidth

I was about to write a post mourning how much I wish Panther Lake really could compete, but lacked the memory bandwidth to offer a real challenge. But supposedly it can go up to 9600MT/s which would bring Panther Lake to ~150GB/s.

I am curious what the NPU on M5 has. The 50 TOp/s on Panther Lake is... fine. Apple is really seeing huge success with MLX, with an adoptable software stack that the PC world is super struggling to deliver.

▲

peyton 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For something like my daily personal laptop the warranty is a big factor. I’d rather not deal with shipping it off to Asus for a couple months when it doesn’t boot or whatever.

	▲	BeetleB 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Would warranty cover a Macbook with Linux on it?

▲

5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]