Why is my similarly spec-ed windows laptop so slow? (Compared to my MacBook)

So I just got a Lenovo Thinkpad from work and it has an i5-5300U and 8 gigs of ram. My MacBook Air 2017 13 inch has the i5-5350U and also 8 gigs of ram. Both machines are similarly specd. But the Lenovo is ages slower than the MacBook. It struggles with 4 tabs on Firefox whereas my MacBook can take 15-18 tabs without the fan even ramping up. Hell I have 8 tabs open right now and my MacBook is fine. The Lenovo does have an HDD while the Mac has a SSD. I ran a browser benchmark on both systems and the Lenovo performed way worse than the Mac. Could an SSD make all this difference?