There’s no big Apple event today (well, not in any traditional sense, at least), but the company’s got quite a bit of news to share this morning. In addition to the new Mac Mini, a pair of new MacBook Pros just dropped, sporting souped-up M2 chips.
The 14- and 16-inch versions of the company’s high-end laptops now ship with a choice of the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips. The new Mini sports an M2 Pro option (in addition to the default M2), but the new Pros are the first — and thus far only — system to get the M2 Max chip. The 13-inch, meanwhile, stays put with the regular old M2 chip. The company says the top line system is “up to 6x faster” than the last generation of Intel systems (if you’re able to remember back that far).
Apple offers up the following speed comparisons:
- Rendering titles and animations in Motion is up to 80 percent faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and up to 20 percent faster than the previous generation.
- Compiling in Xcode is up to 2.5x faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and nearly 25 percent faster than the previous generation.
- Image processing in Adobe Photoshop is up to 80 percent faster than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and up to 40 percent faster than the previous generation.
“MacBook Pro with Apple silicon has been a game changer, empowering pros to push the limits of their workflows while on the go and do things they never thought possible on a laptop,” Greg Joswiak says in a release. “Today the MacBook Pro gets even better. With faster performance, enhanced connectivity, and the longest battery life ever in a Mac, along with the best display in a laptop, there’s simply nothing else like it.”
The new 14-inch model starts at $2,000. Fully specking out with the 12-core core CPU/38-core GPU M2 Max, 96 GB of RAM and 8 TB of storage will run you $6,300 (no one said it was going to be cheap). The 16-inch, meanwhile, starts at $2,500. If you opt for the M2 Max, 96 GB of RAM and 8 TB of storage, you’ll get it at a cool $6,500.
The battery life is now rated at 22 hours, which the company calls “the longest…ever in a Mac.” The screen is a Liquid Retina XDR, and new HDMI port can now support an 8K display up to 60Hz, or a 4K display up to 240Hz. There are three Thunderbolt 4 ports, along with MagSafe 3, a headphone jack and (sigh of relief) an SD Card slot I really could have used toting the new Air around CES the other week.
On the sustainability tip, a bunch of the material on-board is made of 100% recycled materials, including, “aluminum in the enclosure, rare earth elements in all magnets, tin in the solder of the main logic board, and gold in the plating of multiple printed circuit boards.” They also contain 35% more recycled plastic than their predecessors.
Both models are available for preorder today and are set to start shipping in exactly a week, on January 24.
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