Intel’s Latest Anti-Apple Campaign Answers Questions Nobody Asked

Following what seemed like a brief détente in its unhinged ranting against Apple’s new M1 chips, Intel is jumping back into its one-sided fray by making an argument that nobody ever seems to have disagreed with in the first place.

In one of the most staggeringly obvious statements to come out of the company in recent months, Intel points out that Windows PCs are simply better at gaming than Macs. However, Intel also makes the claim that it’s this poor gaming performance on Apple laptops and desktop computers that proves its own devices to be far superior.

There’s only one problem with this, however: in the benchmarks that Intel provides to make this case, it’s comparing Intel-based Windows PCs with Intel-based Macs. You just can’t make this stuff up.

Of course, it shouldn’t come as a surprise from a company that released a marketing campaign that accidentally showed a MacBook Pro as containing “The World’s Best Processor”, nor one whose CEO suggested it could manufacture Apple’s M1 chips after weeks of mocking the same chip as being substandard to its own — and he actually managed to say this with a straight face.

In fact, it seems likely that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger’s attempts to woo Apple into the fold as a customer of its newly created Intel Foundry division may have been one of the reasons why the company has been relatively quiet over the past few months. However, we also have no doubt that Apple politely declined Intel’s invitation, but either way, Intel has once again come out swinging with its usual array of half-baked arguments.

This latest assault comes in an interview with PC Gamer’s Alan Dexter with Ryan Shrout, Intel’s Chief Performance Strategist, who has clearly taken the gloves off, stating clearly that Apple is “now a competitor.”

In a recent call with Intel’s Ryan Shrout about the performance of its 11th Generation H-series laptop processors, he took some time out to throw some serious shade Apple’s way. Actually, Ryan was throwing shade around as if it was going out of fashion, with AMD, ARM, and Apple all getting some. Maybe Intel simply doesn’t like the start of the alphabet? Anyway, most of the exasperation was reserved for its old bestie, Apple.

Alan Dexter, PC Gamer

Intel Inside?

Of course, one of Intel’s biggest challenges is that as much as Apple is moving to Apple Silicon, the whole process is still too new for Intel to discount the many years that its own chips were at the heart of Apple’s Macs.

For example, Intel has pilloried Apple for relying on USB-C ports and requiring dongles for connectivity, yet this is a problem shared by many Windows laptops, not to mention that Apple started that transition over five years ago, back when Intel’s chips were still firmly entrenched in Apple’s MacBooks.

However, now it looks like Intel is being even more disingenuous in its latest gaming benchmarks, which compares the performance of its latest 11th-generation H-series laptop processors, not with Apple’s M1 chip, but with its own Core i9 9980HK found in Apple’s Intel-powered 2019-era 16-inch MacBook Pro.

While Intel’s chart uses terms like “the best Mac laptop for gaming” and “most powerful MacBook Pro,” the fine print clearly shows that it’s using the 16-inch MacBook Pro with Intel’s Core i9-9980HK and an AMD Radeon Pro 5600M as its baseline to compare against an Intel Core i5-11400H with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060.

Needless to say, this is an absurd comparison on so many levels. Firstly, one would certainly hope that Intel’s brand new 11th-gen CPUs are faster than its two-year-old 9th-gen chips, but it’s also trying to claim that the “most powerful MacBook Pro” is, in fact, one that was released over 18 months ago — something we very obviously know isn’t true.

However, as skewed as these comparisons already are, it’s even more amusing that Intel is trying to make a point that nobody is even arguing with in the first place.

While the iPhone and iPad are easily the best mobile gaming platforms, it’s fair to say that no Apple user in their right mind would try to suggest that the Mac is a better gaming platform than a Windows PC. It’s perhaps one of the biggest straw man arguments ever made in the decades-long Mac-vs-PC platform wars.

Even Dexter seems somewhat mystified at that amount of vitriol Intel is throwing toward Apple in trying to make a point that pretty much everybody already agrees with — that is, that gaming truly is better on the Windows side.

To be fair, gaming on a Mac absolutely is rubbish, and it’s not something I’d want to do. But I’m still surprised that Intel is so angry about it all. I even asked if Intel was burning its bridges with Apple? The answer was that Apple has been very public about moving to its own silicon and that it is now a competitor. All’s fair in love and war I guess.

Alan Dexter, PC Gamer

Ultimately, however, this just shows more evidence that Intel is absolutely terrified of Apple Silicon — and it has every reason to be — but it also has no idea what to do about it. The most ironic thing is that Intel could have made most of these points against an M1 MacBook; while the benchmarks would have clearly shown Apple’s chips as being superior in many ways, all the points about games not being readily available on macOS, would still apply, plus the lack of ARM-based Apple Silicon game titles would make an even stronger case for why an Intel-based laptop is better for gaming.

Instead, however, all that Intel really demonstrates here is that a brand new Intel Windows laptop running its latest and most powerful CPUs happens to outperform a 2019 MacBook Pro running an Intel chip that’s two full generations behind. Go figure.