If there's an artifact here it's probably seasonality. E.g. a proper comparison would look at what the results were for just January over the past few years.

If there's an artifact here it's probably seasonality. E.g. a proper comparison would look at what the results were for just January over the past few years. It's easy to imagine that benchmarks in January might sample more from cheaper Christmas present laptops, while the rest of the year has more powerful professional purchases spread throughout. Or after Christmas upgrades, people get hand-me-down computers and disproportionately benchmark those to figure out what they're good for. You can invent a million scenarios, but it's extremely plausible that January results could be an outlier every year.