An actually useful Mac benchmark

Technology General Discussion
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So I’m likely infamous now here for the number of rants I’ve gone on about benchmarks.

I had a meeting yesterday with a couple of long term customers and we got in to an extended discussion about our certification testing.

So just to emphasize our priority, in certification testing is the best experience with and best compatibility with, our custom devices. The fact that we get useful performance information is just a nice little side benefit.

Both customers asked if there was any widely available benchmarks that we do use, and Speedometer is one of them.

So again, to clarify, my problem with benchmarks generally is not the benchmarks themselves, but the misuse of them. In other words, if the benchmark(s) actually reflect something(s) that you actually use the system(s) for on an ongoing basis.

When I see RED is when so many “reviewers” land on two or three tests they like and declare it to be the definitive resource for all their tests (I’m looking at you, The Verge…)

So, extra long preamble out of the way, Speedometer for Mac/IOS is one we do use for two reasons.

One, is that by a good margin, most users spend the majority of their time, business or personal in the web browser.

Second, this tool is an excellent way to look at generational improvements such as M1 to M2

M2 Mac speeds for web browsing are the fastest ever seen (9to5mac.com)

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I just love (pun intended) the full title of Ben’s article:

Not that it much matters, but M2 Mac speeds for web browsing are the fastest ever seen

A breath of fresh air if you ask me…

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The only useful benchmarks for me have been the Notebookcheck Witcher 3 framerate and power usage tests. I don’t even look at others since the only thing that’s critical, for me, on a Windows device is game performance per watt and Witcher 3 is a good representative of the type of games I play which require best performance without eating up too many watts.

Too bad Witcher 3 doesn’t run native on M1 Macs. The tests aren’t very useful when run through Parallels, et al.

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EXACTLY! If you don’t actually use your system for that, the benchmark in question is meaningless.

BTW: By far the one that get’s abused more than any at the moment is Speedtest.net and the associated smartphone apps.

I’ve had more customers than I can count argue with me about us saying a certain device may be superior or that a carrier is better based solely on quick run of that test, while ignoring things like stability and overall signal quality.

eg. more time than I can count, I’ve seen carrier A be “faster” than carrier B in speedtest, but when they actually upload 200-400 mb files, the results are often far different

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