BenchmarkXPRT Blog banner

Tag Archives: MacBook

WebXPRT can help you choose the right back-to-school tech

For many students, the excitement and anticipation of a new school year is right round the corner! In addition to being an opportunity to dive into new subjects, meet new people, and make progress toward learning goals, the back-to-school season often provides students and teachers with a chance to shop for new technology to meet their needs in the coming year. The tech marketplace can be confusing, however, with a slew of brands, options, and claims competing for back-to-school dollars.

Never fear: WebXPRT can help!

Whether you’re shopping for a new phone, tablet, Chromebook, laptop, or desktop, WebXPRT can provide industry-trusted performance scores that can help give you confidence that you’re making a smart purchasing decision.

And in this age of AI, WebXPRT performance scores do account for specific AI tasks. The benchmark includes timed AI tasks in two workloads, which reflect the types of light browser-side inference tasks that are now quite common in consumer-oriented web applications and extensions. You can read more about that in previous blog entries on the “Organize Album using AI” and “Encrypt Notes and OCR Scan” workloads.

To see how devices stack up, the WebXPRT 4 results viewer is a good place to start. The viewer displays the WebXPRT 4 scores of over 975 devices—including many of the hottest new releases—and we’re adding more scores all the time. To learn more about the viewer’s capabilities and how you can use it to compare devices, check out this blog post.

Another way to find WebXPRT scores is to go directly to the tech press. If you’re considering a popular device, there’s a good chance that a recent tech review includes a WebXPRT score for that device. There are two quick ways to find these reviews: You can either (1) search for “WebXPRT” on a tech review site or (2) use a search engine and enter the device name and WebXPRT as search terms, such as “Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon” and “WebXPRT.”

Here are a few recent articles and tech reviews that used WebXPRT:


If you’re excited about the opportunity to buy new tech for school, WebXPRT can provide you with the information you need to make more confident tech purchases. As this new school year begins, we hope you’ll find the data you need on our site or in an XPRT-related tech review. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about WebXPRT or WebXPRT scores!

Justin

WebXPRT in PT reports

We don’t just make WebXPRT—we use it, too. If you normally come straight to BenchmarkXPRT.com or WebXPRT.com, you may not even realize that Principled Technologies (PT) does a lot more than just managing and administering the BenchmarkXPRT Development Community. We’re also the tech world’s leading provider of hands-on testing and related fact-based marketing services. As part of that work, we’re frequent WebXPRT users.

We use the benchmark when we test devices such as Chromebooks, desktops, mobile workstations, and consumer laptops for our clients. (You can see a lot of that work and many of our clients on our public marketing portfolio page.) We run the benchmark for the same reasons that others do—it’s a reliable and easy-to-use tool for measuring how well devices handle web browsing and other web work.

We also sometimes use WebXPRT simply because our clients request it. They request it for the same reason the rest of us like and use it: it’s a great tool. Regardless of job titles and descriptions, most laptop and tablet users surf the web and access web-based applications every day. Because WebXPRT is a browser benchmark, higher scores on it could indicate that a device may provide a superior online experience.

Here are just a few of the recent PT reports that used WebXPRT:

  • In a project for Dell, we compared the performance of a Dell Latitude 7340 Ultralight to that of a 13-inch Apple MacBook Air (2022).
  • In this study for HP, we compared the performance of an HP ZBook Firefly G10, an HP ZBook Power G10, and an HP ZBook Fury G10.
  • Finally, in a set of comparisons for Lenovo, we evaluated the system performance and end-user experience of eight Lenovo ThinkBook, ThinkCentre, and ThinkPad systems along with their Apple counterparts.

All these projects, and many more, show how a variety of companies rely on PT—and on WebXPRT—to help buyers make informed decisions. P.S. If we publish scores from a client-commissioned study in the WebXPRT 4 results viewer, we will list the source as “PT”, because we did the testing.

By Mark L. Van Name and Justin Greene

WebXPRT 4 is good to go with the latest Apple software release

Last month, we reported the good news that our WebXPRT 4 tests successfully ran to completion on the beta releases of iOS 17.2, iPadOS 17.2, and macOS Sonoma 14.2 with Safari 17.2. When we tested with those beta builds, WebXPRT 4 did not encounter the issue of test runs getting stuck on iOS 17.1 while attempting to complete the receipt scanning task in the Encrypt Notes and OCR Scan subtest. Unfortunately, during the past several weeks, this fix was only available to Apple users running beta software through the Apple Developer Program.

We’re happy to report that Apple has now finalized and published the general releases of iOS 17.2, iPadOS 17.2, and Safari 17.2. WebXPRT 4 tests running on those platforms should now complete without any problems.

We do appreciate everyone’s patience as we worked to find a solution to this problem, and we look forward to seeing your WebXPRT 4 scores from all the latest Apple devices! If you have any questions or concerns about WebXPRT 4, or you encounter any additional issues when running the test on any platform, please let us know.

Justin

XPRT possibilities with ChromeOS Flex

Recently, Tom’s Guide published an interesting article about how they used ChromeOS Flex to turn a ten-year-old Apple MacBook Pro into a functioning Chromebook by replacing the laptop’s macOS operating system with ChromeOS. ChromeOS Flex is a free Google tool that allows users to create a bootable USB drive that they can then use to install ChromeOS on a wide variety of hardware platforms that traditionally run other operating systems such as macOS or Windows. Because ChromeOS is a cloud-first, relatively low-overhead operating system, the ChromeOS Flex option could breathe new life into an old laptop that you have lying around.

Never having encountered a MacBook Pro with ChromeOS, we were interested to learn about Tom’s experience running XPRT benchmarks in this new environment. WebXPRT 4, WebXPRT 3, and the CrXPRT 2 performance test apparently ran without any issues, but we have not yet seen a CrXPRT 2 battery life result from a ChromeOS Flex environment. We plan to experiment with this soon.

We were happy to publish the results on our site, and will consider any ChromeOS Flex results we receive for publication. If you submit results from ChromeOS Flex testing, we ask that you use the “Additional information” field in the results submission form to clarify that you ran the tests in a ChromeOS Flex environment. This will prevent any possible confusion when we see a submission that lists a traditional macOS or Windows hardware platform along with a ChromeOS version number.

Do you have experience running CrXPRT or WebXPRT with ChromeOS Flex? We’d love to hear about it!

Justin

Check out the other XPRTs:

Forgot your password?