The $1,799 MacBook Pro 13 vs. the $650 Acer Swift 3: Guess who wins?

Can a budget PC smoke Apple’s new MacBook Pro 13? Yes, it can.

- GORDON MAH UNG

Apple’s MacBook Pro 13 just came out, and it already has a tough adversary. That foe is not the usual high-end, high-priced Windows workhorse like the Dell XPS 13 (go. pcworld.com/d930) we just tested, as great as it is. No, the reason Apple should worry is because based on our sister site Macworld’s preliminary performance tests (go.pcworld. com/ptst), this $1,799 premium laptop could be lapped by the $650 Acer Swift 3.

That’s not a typo. The Acer Swift 3 costs just six hundred fifty dollars. But this budget laptop has a secret weapon: AMD’s Ryzen 7 4700U (go.pcworld.com/470u). When we reviewed the Acer Swift 3 ( see page 37), it surpassed all expectations by keeping pace with laptops far bigger and more expensive. And sorry to say, the MacBook Pro 13 is in the same pickle as those other powerhouses. Keep reading and weep, Apple.

It’s pretty, but is it fast?.

WHAT’S INSIDE THE MACBOOK PRO 13

The MacBook Pro 13’s spec list is first-class all the way, starting with a 10th-gen Core i5-1038NG7 with a base clock of 2GHz and boost clock of 3.8GHz. You’ve probably never heard of the chip before, and neither have we. You can’t even find it in Intel’s official database of CPUs. All we know is it’s an Ice Lake chip built on Intel’s most advanced 10nm process. It features four cores with HyperThreading and Iris Plus graphics. We can’t confirm it, but we strongly believe it to be a 28-watt TDP chip, which means it can generate nearly twice the heat of a standard 15-watt TDP Ice Lake chip and therefore, technically, run faster.