Performance in a vacuum doesn't mean much. How something performs depends on the task. If you take all the laptops in the world and ask them to dive to the bott

Performance in a vacuum doesn't mean much. How something performs depends on the task. If you take all the laptops in the world and ask them to dive to the bottom of the ocean, they all perform badly (because they will not reach the bottom and they also won't survive, double failure). This is also why a lot of 'tests' doen't really tell you much on the actual use of the machine. Even if we can profile all users, and bucket their tasks in terms of system load you don't get a perfect testing system to compare machines. How 'good' something is, is almost a quality factor where the only real thing you can describe is "to what degree did the device do what you expected it to do". Good quality would be "meets expectation", bad quality would be "did not do what was expected" (and you can extrapolate from there). This is also where consumer satisfaction is generally measured, people get satisfied with their stuff if they can do what they wanted to do, not because of numbers on paper or tests on a website. Ironically, this is also where building your own PC with some cool GPU, Ryzen, and a bunch of M.2 SSDs tends to be satisfying, not because those component's numbers enabled your day to be better, but because you built something and you can use it, you feel ownership and accomplishment, and that's a quality you can be satisfied about. For an Air, the best you could probably do is describe what a user wants ("I would like to create some content, consume some media, play the odd game here and there, do some software engineering, some 2D work") and then after a while ask them how close the machine performed to their expectation. And even that will simply vary from user to user. Even work fleets have this problem, IT departments love to standardise, but unless the work all employees perform is specified to the degree where it could be completely automated you won't be able to construct a homogeneous fleet that covers everyone's needs. So you'll always end up with cases where it's an expensive solution, a cheap solution, a bad fit, a good fit, and that just gets averaged out on a quarterly report so we can call it 'good enough'.