About MacIQ
MacIQ is built and maintained by Gordon Shepherd, founder of IQ Labs, a small UK studio that builds comparison sites on one rule: every figure names where it came from and when it was read.
This site holds 100 Macs and 5,018 sourced figures. Nobody here has measured anything.
Where the figures come from
- Specifications are Apple’s own.
- Benchmark rows are Primate Labs’ Geekbench figures.
- The macOS 27 release date is Apple’s (its security releases page); earlier macOS release dates and each Mac’s security-update note come from endoflife.date.
- Used and trade-in prices are CeX’s.
- Review pages quote named publications word for word, with a link to each article and a battery or brightness figure that is the reviewer’s own, never ours; they carry no scores.
The chip on each figure says which kind of source it is, and the link beside it names the page.
The same figures are available as JSON, each with its source and read date, on the data page.
How it works
A spec sheet is read from the model’s Tech Specs page on Apple Support and each figure is stored with the page it came from and the date. Two Macs are compared row by row, and each Mac’s figure is printed beside the other’s, with its source. No row is marked as a win and none is judged, because a partial set of judgements would imply every other row is equal. There is no overall score, no index and no best Mac; the table is the whole of the summary. Apple’s own compare tool lists only the Macs Apple still sells; MacIQ holds 100 Macs, released from 2014 to today, so a Mac you already own can be set beside a new one row by row. The full method is on the methodology page.
What it does not do
- It does not measure Macs. There is no lab, and no figure pretends there is.
- It does not score Macs or pick a best one.
- It does not sell Macs, take commission, or run adverts.
- It does not publish photographs. Every picture is a drawing from a sourced figure.
- It does not collect anything about you. The “Your Mac” setting lives in your browser and is sent nowhere.
Corrections
If a figure is wrong, the source linked beside it is the place to check first; if the source says something different from the page, that is our error and we want to know. Corrections go to hello@maciq.app; the contact page says what to send. A sourced correction is applied and dated: fixed figures carry a new read date, and where we got something wrong in print we say so on the page.
There are no photographs to take down. The site’s image policy says what its drawings claim and what they do not.
Mac, MacBook, iMac, Mac mini, Mac Studio, Mac Pro and macOS are trademarks of Apple Inc. MacIQ is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Apple Inc.