The Pythia had spoken, Apple was to announce new Macs at the very beginning of the year. It’s January 17 and the Cupertino giant is proving right the journalists and analysts who feed the Web with indiscretions, by introducing two new chips: the M2 Pro and the M2 Max, and three new Macs: the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro. , powered by the two new chips, and the Mac mini, equipped with a choice of an M2 or an M2 Pro.
The M2 is available in Pro and Max
Apple has therefore just presented the second and third versions of the M2 range, still engraved in 5 nm. Two SoCs which are intended to replace the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Thus, the M2 Pro is available in two versions, with up to 40 billion transistors, or 20% more than on the M1 Pro, and twice as many as in the M2.
The first version displays 10 CPU cores and 16 GPU cores, and a second that offers 12 CPU cores and 19 GPU cores. Apple aligns up to eight high-performance cores and four low-power cores, and promises performance in multithreaded up 20%, compared to the 10-core M1 Pro. The graphics part is not left out and, once again, Apple promises a performance gain of around 30% compared to the M1 Pro for the graphics part. With peaks at 40% in certain tasks in Photoshop, in particular.
Both versions of the chip manage a minimum of 16 GB of RAM and a maximum of 32 GB. As a reminder, the M2 supports 8, 16 and 24 GB of unified memory, with a memory bandwidth of 200 GB/s.
The M2 Max obviously sees bigger – with its 67 billion transistors, against 57 for the M1 Max, and is available in two versions. The first integrates 12 CPU cores and 30 GPU cores in its basic version, which can only support a maximum of 64 GB of RAM. The second also has 12 CPU cores, 38 GPU cores and can address a maximum of 96 GB of RAM. With 400GB/s bandwidth, which is twice as much as M2 Pro and four times as much as M2. In other words, once again, unified memory should give pride of place to large files, whether in video or 3D rendering.
For the M2 Max, Apple is advancing performance gains of around 30% compared to the M1 Max for the graphics part.
The two chips, M2 Pro and M2 Max, carry a Neural Engine with 16 cores still, but of new generation, “capable of performing 15,800 billion operations per second”, explains Apple. The Neural engine could be up to 40% faster as well.
In addition, the media engines are still there, too, capable of playing ProRes 4K and 8K video streams and decoding / encoding H.264, HEVC and ProRes videos. The Cupertino giant slips that the M2 Max could be up to twice as fast as its little brother in this area.
Obviously, Apple always highlights the performance / Watt ratio of its two SoCs, which should allow the machines that use them to ensure good autonomy, but also and above all the same performance whether they are connected to the sector or on battery .
The MacBook Pro is updating, smoothly…
Launched in October 2021, the high-end MacBook Pros had missed their annual meeting at the start of winter. We got used to the idea of having to wait: the wait was short.
Apple has just updated its business laptops by taking the M2 Pro and M2 Max where the M1 Pro and M1 Max once reigned. In addition to the announced performance gains, the greater amount of unified memory – shared between the CPU and the GPU – will allow even more data to be loaded into memory. A detail that is not one for professionals who will be able to load even more complex 3D scenes into memory to work on them and render them. Ditto for editors aficionados of 4K or 8K.
Turning to the M2 Max, available on the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro, grading in DaVinci Resolve is said to be 30% faster than the previous generation, and up to twice as fast as the latest. MacBook Pro Intel.
In Cinema 4D, the delta between Intel’s MacBook Pros and Apple’s latest hits a nice x6, while Gen M2 puts 30% better in view than Gen M1.
The power will not be everything, the autonomy should also be incredible, thanks to the energy efficiency of the Apple Silicon SoCs. The Cupertino giant thus announced a 22 hour battery life in video playback (Full HD) for the 16-inch model, equipped with an M2 Pro, 12 CPU cores, 19 GPU cores and 16 GB of RAM. It’s a record !
The Liquid Retina XDR panel is back in service, unchanged. On the other hand, the connection evolves. The HDMI port can thus manage “ 8K displays at 60Hz and 4K displays up to 240Hz “. For the rest, we find the three Thunderbolt 4 ports, the SDXC card reader and the MagSafe 3 connector. But, also and above all, the two Pro laptops switch to Wi-Fi 6E. In other words, they can, when they connect to a compatible router, take advantage of the third frequency band in 6 GHz. This will ensure better throughput.
Anyway, let’s talk about things that annoy a little, the prices. The 14-inch MacBook Pro is available in three models, priced from 2,399 euros, 2,999 euros and 3,699 euros, depending on whether they ship an M2 Pro (10 CPU/16 GPU – 512 GB SSD – 67 W or 12 CPU/19 GPU – 1TB SSD – 96W loader). Both models offer 16 GB of RAM by default. The third model, the most expensive, obviously adopts the M2 Max (12 CPU/30 GPU – 32 GB of RAM – 1 TB of SSD storage for a maximum of 8 TB still).
For the record, the 14-inch M1 generation MacBook Pros were available in two base models, with an M1 Max option, and were priced from 2,249 and 2,749 euros. We therefore note an increase of 150 euros and 250 euros on the first two models.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro is obviously more expensive. The first two versions work with the same M2 Pro (12 CPU/19 GPU – 16 GB of RAM and a 140 W charger) and are sold respectively for 2,999 euros and 3,229 euros. The difference is only in storage. 512 GB for the first and double that for the second. It is at the level of the third model that things get tricky. It’s the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 Max (12 CPU/38 GPU), which offers 32 GB of RAM by default and 1 TB of storage. Its 140 W charger may make you forget the painful… 4,149 euros.
For comparison, the MacBook Pro M1 Pro were sold for 2,749 and 2,979 euros, while the version equipped with an M1 Max wore a nice label at 3,849 euros… Here too, the prices are revised upwards.
Note that the 64 GB memory option is billed at 460 euros, and the 96 GB are displayed without flinching at 920 euros! Which brings the configuration to 5,069 euros… all the same.
Article in progress…
