It's almost 70x more powerful. A 4 year old 3070 laptop was cheaper when it came out and has about 200 TOPS, 7 times as much. It's just factually incorrect to call it "faster than any AI PC", it's far slower than a cheaper laptop from 4 years ago.
In that context it seems fair to make the comparison between a MacBook and the PC version which is closest on perf/watt rather than absolute performance on a space heater.
You need to understand that the presentation, and product, wasn't made for the perf/watt crowd. That’s also why they’re so successful with consumer electronics: 9X% of the population is not part of the perf/watt crowd.
I understand the product and the use cases. 90+% of people don't care about perf/watt, because it's an irrelevant implementation detail. People care about speed and autonomy.
The average user who is comparing this against a PC for AI stuff would prefer a faster PC with a (much!) larger battery and the same autonomy at the end of day in that task but that's much faster every time. If I need to do intensive enough on-device AI workloads for efficiency to matter and on battery, why would I take an iPad with a 30Wh battery, 2x perf/watt, and 1x speed over a laptop with a 65Wh battery, 1x perf/watt, and 10x speed? The latter will give me a better experience, it will be more responsive and last longer.
So at the end of the day, Apple's comparison is extremely misleading at best, and a straightforward lie at worst.
> the average user who is comparing this against a PC for AI stuff
If your primary use case is local AI on battery, you're probably into some small hundredths of a percent of the population here, who would be better served on some budget cloud compute (self deployed even) rather than heating up your lap.
> why would I take an iPad with a 30Wh battery...
Because it fits between the pages of the book in your backpack, has a nice pencil, and can *also* do ok with local AI.
> If your primary use case is local AI on battery, you're probably into some small hundredths of a percent of the population here, who would be better served on some budget cloud compute (self deployed even) rather than heating up your lap.
There is no other use case where the power efficiency of the NPU matters, so you should direct this criticism at Apple.
> Because it fits between the pages of the book in your backpack, has a nice pencil, and can also do ok with local AI.
So if the only avantage is the form factor, why did Apple decide to compare it against PCs?
> The average user who is comparing this against a PC for AI stuff would prefer a faster PC
I'm saying this would not be an average user. The average user would not be comparing AI capabilities, they open an app that uses AI, with a high chance of not even being aware of it.
> So if the only avantage is the form factor, why did Apple decide to compare it against PCs?
What should they have compared it to? There's only one other tablet on the market, with an old chipset and a fraction of the performance, that just received its first real video editor late last year [1].
I agree though, they could/should have made clearer comparisons, along with Intel, AMD, Samsung, Nvidia, and everyone else. But, as with all general audience marketing presentations from all tech companies, vested technically literate users will look to the benchmarks, after release.
> I'm saying this would not be an average user. The average user would not be comparing AI capabilities, they open an app that uses AI, with a high chance of not even being aware of it
What is the point here? If the average user doesn't care about comparing AI capabilities, then clearly Apple wasn't targeting that user in their AI capability comparison.
> What should they have compared it to? There's only one other tablet on the market, with an old chipset and a fraction of the performance, that just received its first real video editor late last year [1].
It's very clear that Apple is trying to make the case that the iPad Pro is a replacement for a laptop. In fact, that was their core marketing claim when it came out : "What's a computer?" [1], and arguably that's the point of their latest ads where they market it as a general purpose computer. Given the price point and the marketing, yes, they should be comparing it with a computer when making the case it's a good replacement for a computer. And when they do, they should not be misleading to the point of falsehood.
If they thought that peak performance didn't matter, they wouldn't quote peak performance numbers in their comparison, and yet they did. Peak performance clearly matters, even in battery powered devices: many workloads are bursty and latency matters then, and there are workloads where you can be expected to be plugged in. In fact, one such workload is generative AI which is often characterized by burst usage where latency matters a lot, which is exactly what these NPUs are marketed towards.
