What just happened? We already knew that Intel and Apple's relationship turned sour after the latter started opting for its in-house silicon over Chipzilla's. At Computex 2021, team blue really burnt its bridges with Cupertino, making sure that everyone knows Macs are inferior to Windows-based laptops when it comes to gaming.
During the event, Intel said its Windows laptops "provide a better gaming experience than 100% of Apple Mac laptops." That could be a response to Apple's previous claims that the M1 SoC boasts the world's fastest CPU core, which on its website clarifies that this is "when it comes to low-power silicon." Nevertheless, the M1 has been a revelation, leading to Intel launching an ad campaign mocking M1-powered MacBooks and bringing back the "I'm a Mac" actor Justin Long to diss Apple.
Intel didn't hold back at Computex. As it has done in the past, the company highlighted how over half of today's most popular games aren't supported on macOS, including Cyberpunk 2077, Apex Legends, GTA V, PUBG, and Valorant. It also showed the inferiority of emulators by running Valheim through Parallels, which looks pretty terrible even on low settings.
It's wasn't just the M1-powered Macs that Intel went after. It showed a slide comparing a MacBook Pro packing a Core i9 9980HK and AMD Radeon Pro 5600M to an Intel-branded system with a Core i5 11400H and a GeForce RTX 3060. The Windows machine was way ahead in all the benchmarks.
In addition to showing how much better its PCs are for games, which we've long known, Intel also illustrated how an increasing number of creators---the MacBooks' traditional customers---also use their laptops for gaming, suggesting that Windows machines would be the better option.
Apple is aiming to complete the transition to its in-house silicon by 2022, so get used to seeing this sort of shade-throwing from Intel.
Thumbnail image: Jeramey Lende