In the year since Qualcomm first debuted its Snapdragon X Elite, the competition hasn’t been silent. Intel released both Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake chips, the latter of which felt like a legitimate response to Qualcomm’s advances in battery life and efficiency.
But Qualcomm isn’t impressed by Intel’s latest offerings.
Qualcomm doesn’t have new PC chips to announce at its annual summit — instead, the company spent some time with journalists pointing out that some of the claims made by Intel are leaving out some important details.
Qualcomm has two main criticisms of how Intel has talked about its new Lunar Lake or Core Ultra Series 2 chips. First, that Intel has left off from its direct comparisons Qualcomm’s highest configuration, the X1E-84-100. Instead, Intel relies on the X1E-80-100 and X1E-78-100 in its comparisons. According to the numbers Qualcomm presented, as you can see in the graph below, leaving out the X1E-84-100 allows Intel to take the lead in some performance benchmarks. The other slight wrinkle, according to Qualcomm, in Intel’s marketing is that its own highest-end configuration, the Core Ultra 9 288V, isn’t yet available in retailers. That call into question Intel’s claim that these are “the fastest cores.”
The larger argument, of course, is that Qualcomm’s part still offers better power efficiency. In particular, Qualcomm calls out the fact that Lunar Lake chips consume 38% more power at peak performance.
Of course, performance wasn’t Intel’s biggest claim with the Core Ultra Series 2. It was all about battery life. And in my own testing, I was thoroughly impressed by just how long these laptops last, especially in the most demanding workloads. For now, it takes the crown in terms of battery life.
Qualcomm doesn’t dispute Intel’s ambitious claims, but notes that Intel isn’t telling the whole story. As we learned in our own testing, Core Ultra Series 2 chips don’t perform well on battery, which is a strength of Arm chips, including both Snapdragon X Elite chips and Apple Silicon. Qualcomm shows that across the board, Intel’s latest chips have a serious dip in performance while on battery, dropping as much as 54% in some tests.
To be fair, this has always been true of Intel’s chips, but Qualcomm has a point. As long as Intel’s battery life is, it’s true that you’re losing a solid amount of performance. That’s not true with the Snapdragon X Elite.
For most people, however, they just might choose the extra hours of battery life over some performance. Let’s not forget: we’re talking about small, thin-and-light laptops — not high-performance machines. That calculation might change in larger, more powerful laptops. But right now, Intel’s focus on battery life feels like the right choice — even if it was being a bit misleading when comparing against Qualcomm.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.