The long-awaited successor of the Apple M1 Silicon, the Apple M2, has finally been announced with the associated products selected for the initial launch which are the MacBook Pro and Mac mini series for both mobile and stationed users.
We’ll start things off with the mobile department MacBook Pro which will be getting the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips that handle every productivity task with even more performance while consuming less battery. The M2 Pro will be featuring 10 – 12 CPU cores, up to 19 GPU cores, and a buffed Neural Engine, the SoM is capable of hitting 200GB/s unified memory bandwidth which is 2X M1’s amount, while staying within the 32GB RAM figure.
Meanwhile, the M2 Max is aiming for the moon with 12 core CPU, up to 38 GPU cores, and a maximum of 96GB RAM for the fastest rendering time possible within a laptop form factor. Connectivity-wise, Wi-Fi 6E support has finally been added while display options are now supporting 8K60Hz or 4K240Hz via HDMI with the Thunderbolt 4 ports coming in at 3, an SDXC card slot, and a MagSafe charging port.
On the other hand, the Mac mini receives the M2 and M2 Pro with the former targeting an even lower starting price of just USD599. At that price figure, the base M2 rolls for an 8 CPU + 10 GPU core combo to go with 24GB RAM and 100GB/s of bandwidth. Don’t worry about its performance though as Adobe Photoshop are up to 50% faster and churns out 8K ProRes 422 video stream in 30FPS within Final Cut can be performed simultaneously with ease.
The M2 Pro has more selections when it comes to the performance part but the maximum it can go is the 12 CPU + 19 GPU core + 32GB RAM. Overall improvements in benchmarks show that it can perform 40% faster in terms of AI workload over M1 thanks to the new Neural Engine, 5x 8K ProRes 422 30FPS video stream or 23X if you drop 8K down to 4K, and up to 2.8x more frames in titles like Resident Evil Village.
A flourish of I/O has been given as well. In the M2 Pro’s case, there are 4x Thunderbolt 4 with one of them supporting an 8K display, 2x USB-A, 1x HDMI, Ethernet (With optional 10GbE), and an upgraded 3.5mm headphone jack capable of driving high-impedance headphones. The wireless section contains Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 respectively.
Starting Price and Availability
The M2-equipped Apple MacBook Pro and Mac mini are available for preorder starting today with the actual launch happening on February 3 and they all start at the following price in Malaysia:
- MacBook Pro (14-inch) – from RM8,799
- MacBook Pro (16-inch) – from RM10,799
- Mac mini – from RM2,499
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The new Mac Mini with M2 Pro chip delivers great performance that makes us wonder if Apple might continue with Mac Studio and instead only offer at the higher end the Mac Pro with M2 Ultra chip. Mac Mini with M2 Pro chip delivers awesome speeds and power according to the available Geekbench results and other benchmarks. If you need a tough computer that has powerful performance and speed within reasonable budget this might be the one. With M2 Pro Mac Mini Apple has seriously cannibalized its more medium end product – Mac Studio. Time will demonstrate how these Mac Minis perform for gaming, but I would have preferred to see 64 GB Ram version. Currently Mac Studio with M1 Ultra is the perfect alternative for gamers for example as it is able to deliver above 100 FPS gaming experience. Of course, the RTX3090 is faster than m1ultra and wins gaming category, however whether Mac Mini with M2 pro or new Macbook Pro can offer better gaming experience remains to be seen.
I doubt the new ones will have a big difference in performance, but still – more efficient than an x86 PC with an RTX 3090 or something similar.