The performance gap between a PC and a Mac running the same VBA Sudoku solver is not a curiosity, it is a warning. The numbers are clear: 1.082 seconds on an M4 Pro Mac versus 625 milliseconds on an Intel i9 PC. That is nearly half the time. For a single puzzle, the difference is trivial. For a workflow that runs dozens or hundreds of macros a day, those milliseconds compound into real friction. The user who posted this test is not complaining about speed; they are documenting a constraint. And that constraint matters more than most people realize.
The practical meaning for you is straightforward. If you rely on VBA macros, whether for financial modeling, data cleaning, or custom automation, you are not getting equal performance across platforms. The M4 Pro is a capable chip, but VBA was built for the Windows runtime. Apple's architecture, even with emulation, introduces overhead that shows up in every loop and every cell reference. This is not a judgment on either machine. It is a fact about the toolchain. The i9 desktop runs the same code faster because the environment was designed for it. If you work on a Mac and feel like your spreadsheets lag behind colleagues on PCs, this benchmark explains why.
What this means for your decision-making is simple: do not assume parity. If your team is split between platforms, the person on a Mac is spending more time waiting. That is a productivity cost you can measure. And it points to a deeper issue. VBA is a legacy technology, maintained rather than improved. It does not adapt to new hardware the way modern tools do. The gap between these two runtimes is not going to close. Microsoft has not optimized VBA for Apple Silicon, and there is no reason to expect that to change. The solution is not to switch computers. It is to consider whether the tool itself is worth the friction.
The smartest response is to explore alternatives that are platform-agnostic. AI-native spreadsheets, for example, can run complex logic without relying on a decades-old scripting language. They execute on the cloud, not on your local chip. That means the same code runs at the same speed whether you are on a Mac, a PC, or a tablet. The VBA benchmark is useful data, it tells you exactly where the bottleneck lives. Now the question is whether you want to keep working around it, or find a path that does not require a faster processor to solve the same puzzle.