How MacIQ works

Sources

On a Mac's page and on a comparison the distinction sits in the numbered Sources list: each figure has a small footnote number (the source most of a Mac's figures share is marked once, near the top, and a figure with no number of its own is from it), and its entry says "Apple's figure" or "third-party figure", names the source, links the exact page and gives the day we read it. The class names where a figure came from; it does not grade the truth. A manufacturer's own specification is not a suspect document.

Official

Apple's published specification for its own hardware, from the model's Tech Specs page on Apple Support or another Apple page named beside the figure. If Apple says a MacBook Air weighs 1.24 kg, that is what it weighs, and we record it as the specification rather than as a claim awaiting adjudication.

4,818 of 5,018 figures

3rd party

A named independent publication or database — cited on the page it appears on, with its own link and retrieval date. On MacIQ there are three: Primate Labs’ own Geekbench chart for the benchmark rows, endoflife.date for macOS release dates and the end of security support, and CeX for used and trade-in prices. We use one where Apple publishes nothing, not to second-guess a figure Apple does publish.

200 of 5,018 figures

Measured

A named lab's own bench result — someone put the device on a rig and reported what it did. It is the one class that earns the accent, because it is the one class that is genuinely different from reading a spec sheet.

0 of 5,018 figures — MacIQ has no lab, so nothing here is measured by us and nothing is relabelled as if it were

Two rules hold across all three. Every figure links its source and prints the date we read it (through its footnote), because a source without a date is a rumour. And a figure we do not have is never estimated, never interpolated from a sibling model, never carried over from last year's Mac. Absence is stated once, never as an empty row: a row that cannot exist on a Mac (a Mac mini's display, an iMac's battery, an Intel Mac's Neural Engine) is not shown, and on a comparison where only one Mac can have it the other side shows a dash, and its footnote reads "Doesn't apply: …" with the reason; a figure Apple does not publish for a Mac is named in one line under its table, with the Apple pages we checked, and on a comparison that Mac's cell shows a dash and its footnote says "Not published by Apple", with the pages we checked. Which rows cannot exist is a rule over the kind of Mac and its chip, not a list of Macs, and it never hides a row that has a figure.

Every figure is for the base configuration of the model and chip tier as Apple lists it — base memory, base storage, base core counts — unless the row is labelled maximum (the largest memory or storage Apple offered). The range Apple offered is recorded as text in the options rows, so nothing is averaged across configurations. A price is the Apple UK store’s today where Apple still sells the Mac, and the UK launch price where it does not — from Apple’s UK newsroom press release or from an archived Apple UK Store page (Wayback Machine capture) dated in the source line — or, for a few Macs, the last Apple UK store price MacIQ holds, labelled as that; the page says which, and only the first is a price in the structured data.

The figures on a Mac’s page, with the same sources and read dates, are also published as JSON; the data page describes the files.

Facts, side by side

The comparison, upgrade and answer pages do not judge. They print both Macs’ figures side by side, each with a footnote to its source, and pick no winner: no tick, no “better”, no verdict. A partial set of ticks would suggest that every other row is equal, which is untrue, so the reader decides.

• Every row is printed the same way. Both figures are set in the same type, with no accent colour, no tick and no word about which is better or whether the gap matters. Where Apple states a feature for one Mac and states that the other does not have it, the two cells say Yes and No.
• A dash always has a reason. Where one Mac has no figure, its cell shows a dash and a footnote says why: “Doesn’t apply: …” where the row cannot exist on it (for a chip whose cores Apple names differently, the footnote says what Apple lists instead), or “Not published by Apple” where Apple gives no figure, with the pages we checked. A dash is never read as “none”.
• A footnote on a row states a fact about the figures, never a verdict. Two different Apple battery tests, figures stated under different conditions, Thunderbolt ports of different generations, or two Apple pages that disagree (each figure is then printed with its own source). It says how the figures were stated and nothing about which is better.
• A comparison opens with facts. Under its heading it states the two prices, each labelled with its kind (Apple’s UK store today, or the launch price and where it was read), and works out no gap between prices of different kinds. Where the two are different kinds of Mac it also says what is built in on one and not the other (“the iMac M1 has a built-in 24-inch display and a camera, whereas the Mac mini M1 has neither”). That is said from the kind of Mac, never from a gap in our data: a figure Apple does not publish is named as not published, not turned into a claim that the Mac lacks the feature.
• An upgrade page sets your Mac beside the newest Mac of its line. The newer Mac is the newest one that Apple still sells in the same line and chip tier (for a line Apple has ended, the line that replaced it, from a fixed list kept in the site’s code: the 13-inch MacBook Pro to the 14-inch, the 15-inch to the 16-inch, the 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMac to the 24-inch iMac, and the 11-inch MacBook Air and the 12-inch MacBook to the 13-inch MacBook Air), picked by that rule and not by opinion. The page then prints the same Quick Look and specification as a comparison, lists the other lines on sale at about the same price as links to their own side-by-side pages, and gives what the Mac fetches used. It says whether the Mac still gets security updates and for how long, and does not say whether to move.
• A Mac’s page can set it beside yours. Once you have told the site which Mac you own, the page shows a strip of key figures (price, chip, CPU and GPU cores, memory, storage, weight and battery) for both Macs side by side, in the same type, with no word about which is better. A dash means one Mac has no figure on file. The strip links to the full comparison, where every figure has its source.
• An answer that orders Macs orders them by one stated figure. The lightest MacBook and the longest battery life are lists sorted by the one figure Apple states, with equal figures sharing a rank and a separate table for each Apple battery test. The order is a fact about that figure. It is not a verdict, and no row says whether its gap to the top matters.

What we do not do

• No score, no index, no best Mac. An overall score is a ranking with no stated question behind it, which is how a site ends up ranking the machine it happened to like. A comparison picks no winner: it prints both Macs’ figures, and the opening lines state only prices and the kind of Mac. The decision is the reader’s.
• No reviewer-score averaging. Averaging other people's out-of-ten verdicts produces a number whose meaning is nobody's — not theirs, and not ours.
• No affiliate-ranked results. Nothing on this site is ordered by what pays. The catalogue's order is Apple's own division of the range and then release date, which are facts about the Mac rather than judgements of ours.
• No prices without a date and a source. An RRP is a figure retrieved from one shop on one day; printed bare it becomes a promise we are not tracking and cannot keep.
• Few sources, all named. Every specification row is read from the model’s Tech Specs page on Apple Support, or from apple.com/uk where the support page omits a figure; model identifiers, colours and some macOS rows from Apple’s Identify-your-Mac pages; a handful of rows (memory options, Neural Engine cores, graphics, colours and the macOS a Mac shipped with) from the launch press release on Apple’s UK newsroom; dates from Apple’s UK newsroom — the in-stores day where the release gives one, and otherwise the order date, the month, or the announcement, labelled as such; launch prices from Apple’s UK newsroom or from archived Apple UK Store pages (Wayback Machine captures, dated in the source line); today’s prices from the Apple UK store; the newest macOS from Apple’s own compatibility lists and Identify-your-Mac pages; and the three benchmark rows from Primate Labs’ Geekbench chart. Two outside sources are used for other things: endoflife.date for earlier macOS release dates, the end of security support and each Mac’s support note, and CeX for used and trade-in prices, described below. The macOS 27 release date is from Apple’s security releases page. Quoted reviews and news items are the other places a source outside Apple appears, and they are set out in the two items that follow. No spec databases, no Wikipedia. A figure not on those pages is omitted.
• Reviews are quoted, never scored. The review pages quote short passages, at most 30 words each, from 203 articles in 9to5Mac, AppleInsider, Ars Technica, Engadget, Expert Reviews, Laptop Mag, Macworld, Notebookcheck, Six Colors, Stuff, T3, TechRadar, The Verge, Tom's Guide, Trusted Reviews and Wired, publications named on an allow-list (The Verge, Ars Technica, Tom's Guide, TechRadar, Wired, Engadget, Macworld, Six Colors, AppleInsider, Which?, Trusted Reviews, Expert Reviews, T3, Stuff, Computerworld, Laptop Mag, TechCrunch, 9to5Mac and Notebookcheck); adding one is a reviewed change. Each quote links to its article and is checked word for word against the live page before it is stored, and the build refuses a quote that is not on it. A quote is shown only if it stands on its own: its subject, its comparator and any qualifier that sizes or reverses it must be inside the quote, within 30 words, and where that cannot be done the finding is dropped rather than patched with a fragment. A review counts as one of the exact Mac only where the article states the model it tested; a review of another configuration of the same chassis is marked as such and quoted for design only. A date is labelled as the article labels it: “Published” or “Updated” only where the article prints that word beside the date, and “Dated” where it prints the date with no label (an update mentioned only in an editor’s note is not used as the date). Where a reviewer’s own battery or brightness figure can be set beside an Apple claim it is, called a different test where the tests differ; it is theirs, never stored as a MacIQ measurement. There are no scores, stars or averages.
• News is what a source printed. Each news item states a change the site can show and links its source: launch and on-sale dates and launch prices from Apple’s UK newsroom, store prices from the Apple UK store, macOS release dates from Apple’s security releases page. The date is labelled for what it is: “Happened” for a day a source gives, “Seen on Apple UK store” or “Seen on CeX” for the day MacIQ read a price (neither says when it changed), and “Date listed by endoflife.date” for the end of security support endoflife.date lists, which is that site’s cycle end and not necessarily the day of Apple’s last patch. No rumours.
• No photographs. Every Mac page carries our technical drawing and nothing else — a to-scale outline from Apple's published dimensions, with corner rounding as our drawing convention. A drawing states exactly what we have a source for; a press photograph is somebody else's picture of somebody else's product. The image policy says the rest.
• No prices we invented. The cost panel republishes CeX's own published used and trade-in prices, read by product ID, linked to the exact CeX page and dated with the day we read them. A CeX listing counts only if its name agrees with the Mac on line, Apple's model identifier, chip and tier, screen size and base configuration; a Mac we cannot match that way gets no price at all. Where colours price differently we print the range, never an average. Where CeX showed none of a listing online or in store on the day we read it, the panel says it was out of stock when read. If CeX ever objects, the panels come down the same day.
• No third-party score as a sortable column. A Geekbench figure is cited on a device page, attributed to Primate Labs and dated, and printed in a comparison beside the other Mac’s, the same as any other figure. It will not become a column you can rank the catalogue by: a systematic extraction of someone else's scores into our own sortable table is the substantial part of their database, and database right protects exactly that.