Apple's MacBook Pro, in its current profile, is trusted among the best ultrabooks. This chassis has been around for a few years. But the company's M5 Max, including an 18-core CPU with Apple's fastest cores ever, as well as a 40-core GPU and 128GB of unified memory, feels fresh, new, and of the moment.

The huge amount of memory and a powerful GPU allow for a wide variety of workloads, including those who are dabbling in local AI.

And if you're not into AI, it's still good at everything else, assuming your software works on a Mac. It's strong for graphics work, video production, compiling code, and yes, all of the usual stuff you would do on a laptop. And it does it all with polish and finesse, including an industry-leading touchpad and the option for a stunning, glare-reducing nano-texture screen.

The system is staggeringly expensive at $5,849 as tested, but this is a tool you use for work, not a personal expense. For real Pros making their living on this machine, all of the speed may be worth it.

Design of the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

At this point, Apple's MacBook Pro design is familiar and well-worn. It's still functional, still pretty, and still focused more on the work you're doing than standing out.

The aluminum chassis, with flat surfaces and rounded corners, is minimalist, with Apple's tone-on-tone reflective Apple logo making the biggest statement on the machine.

With the lid open, you'll see the 14.2-inch screen surrounded by thin bezels, except for the notch around the webcam. Years in, I'm still vaguely annoyed by it, though even I will admit I've gotten largely used to it at this point.

The keyboard sits in a black well in the silver chassis, a signature of the MacBook Pro models that I still love to this day. Speaker grilles line each side, with a large touchpad underneath. It all sits on a sturdy base that feels incredibly premium.

The left side of the laptop houses the MagSafe charging port, two Thunderbolt 5 ports, and the 3.5 mm headphone jack. On the right side, you'll find a full-sized SD card slot, another Thunderbolt 5 port, and an HDMI output.

The MacBook Pro measures in at 12.31 x 8.71 x 0.61 inches and weighs 3.56 pounds with the M5 Max.

MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max) Specifications

M5 Max

The M5 Max chip uses the Fusion Architecture, similar to what has previously been seen in Apple's M-series Ultra chips. The CPU and GPU are on separate dies, connected by a high-speed interconnect.

The 40-core GPU, paired with the 128GB of RAM, should be a powerful combo for video editing, VFX, and for local AI development. Because the M5 Max uses unified memory, most of that RAM can be directed straight to the GPU.

Both M5 Max variants have 18-core CPUs. Six of those are Apple's "super" cores, its fastest performance cores yet. The other 12 are "performance" cores, new cores (taking the old performance name - got it?) that can thread the needle between power and efficiency.

Productivity Performance on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

We're comparing the MacBook Pro to a suite of recent laptops. Without a ton of workstations in our database, we're comparing to recent consumer systems. The Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra may try to look like a Mac, but it pairs an Intel Core Ultra 7 356H with 32GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 discrete laptop GPU. There's also the Asus ZenBook Duo (UX8407) with two screens running off of Intel's latest top laptop chip, the Core Ultra X9 388H with integrated Intel Arc B390 graphics and 32GB of memory. Lastly, the ultra-repairable Framework Laptop 16 puts AMD's Ryzen AI 7 350 and an RTX 5070 together, along with 16GB of RAM.

The M5 Max handled everything I threw at it. Photo editing workloads were a breeze. So were my experiments in Blender. Even my trials in LM Studio running open-source models like Google's Gemma 3 27B left plenty of Apple's 128GB of RAM open, with the system producing new tokens extremely quickly.

In benchmarks, the MacBook Pro with M5 Max devastated the competition.

On Geekbench 6, Apple's super cores were the fastest in single-core testing, with a score of 4,338. In multi-core, the super and performance cores reached 29,430, devastating the rest of the field. The next highest in both was the ZenBook Duo, with scores of 3,031 and 17,283, respectively.

Apple showed off in our file transfer test. It claims its SSDs are twice as fast as the previous generation, and the results speak for themselves. The MacBook Pro completed our 25GB file transfer test at a rate of 3,835.38 MBps. The next fastest, at 1,724.69 MBps, was the Framework.

In our Handbrake video encoding test, the Mac transcoded a 4K video to 1080p in 1 minute and 55 seconds. That’s nearly a minute-and-a-half faster than the next fastest, the Galaxy Book6 Ultra, at 3:18.

To compare against other historical Mac chips, we run the Xcode Benchmark, which sees how fast a system compiles a large codebase. The MacBook Pro with M5 Max took 87 seconds, putting it on par with the last Max chip we have in our database, the M3 Max (85 seconds).

Our ten-run Cinebench 2026 stress test started at a score of 8,058 before immediately diving into the mid-7,000's as the heat picked up. The fans did get the score back up to 7,990 at run 5, but otherwise, scores were largely stable.

Because macOS doesn't provide access to clock speeds, we have to rely on other measures. Cinebench 2026 estimates that the M5 Max runs up to 4.6 GHz on a single core and 4.3 GHz multi-core.

Gaming and Graphics on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

The 40-core GPU, with access to much of the 128GB of unified memory, is a powerhouse.

When I played around with the intensive life simulation game InZoi, I followed one of my characters from home to a volleyball game on a pier, with the game typically running between 40 and 50 frames per second at 1920 x 1200 at the high preset before even using MetalFX. That's impressive for a game whose developer recommends desktop GPUs and adding Nvidia DLSS or AMD FSR on a Windows gaming rig.

On 3DMark Steel Nomad, the MacBook Pro achieved a score of 3,865. The next best, the Framework Laptop 16 with a dedicated RTX 5070, notched a grade of 3,009.

On the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark at ray tracing ultra, which we use for high-end gaming rigs, the MacBook Pro averaged 30.84 frames per second at 1920 x 1200. Using the "For this Mac" setting, it averaged 80.39 FPS at the same resolution, and 35.7 FPS at 3025 x 1890.

Another system we ran that test on at ray tracing ultra, the Framework Laptop 16 with an RTX 5070, reached 38 fps at 1920 x 1080.

Display on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

I've rhapsodized before about Apple's nano-texture displays for the MacBook Pro. I'm going to do it again.

Apple's 14.2-inch screen has a "Liquid Retina" resolution of 3024 x 1964, with a variable refresh rate that climbs up to 120 Hz with ProMotion. The Mini-LED backlighting isn't quite OLED, but it looks pretty great. It also comes with TrueTone enabled, which adjusts the image on your screen to ambient lighting with a color sensor (you may want to turn this off for photo or video editing for more exact colors).

That nano-texture panel is $150 extra and can only be configured on Apple's website. I don't know if I could get myself to cough up the money, but it's really beautiful. I work near a window both at the office and at home, and it does a great job of reducing (or effectively eliminating) reflections. If you're going to use your MacBook Pro for field work like video editing on the go, it may be worth it to you, and you should strongly think about the upgrade.

The screen also delivers with multimedia. When I watched the trailer for The Odyssey, I was impressed by deep black levels, as well as vivid colors like deep blues in an endless ocean and spots of green grass growing in dirt in a forest.

On our colorimeter and light meter, the MacBook Pro proved to be extremely bright, measuring in at 529.4 nits, significantly higher than the 455-nit Asus ZenBook Duo, an OLED screen that was the next most luminous on the list.

The Mac's screen covers 87% of DCI-P3 color volume and 122.9% of sRGB volume, largely in line with the Samsung Galaxy Book6 Ultra and the ZenBook Duo.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

Apple's keyboards continue to be excellent to type on. The chiclet keys are comfortable, include a full-sized function row, and inverted-T arrow keys. It all makes sense.

Yes, some Windows laptops at this price point — especially gaming rigs — beat the MacBook Pro on travel. Some even offer mechanical keys. But I find that Apple's keyboard feels very comfortable, even after long typing sessions. Even the plastic on the keys feels good. On the monkeytype typing test, I reached 118 words per minute and 98% accuracy, which is about as good as I get.

Apple's Force Touch trackpads continue to be the best in the industry with smooth glass, comfortable haptics, and intuitive gesture support in macOS. It also helps that on the MacBook Pro, it's large and luxurious. Short of using an external mouse, I don't have any notes here.

Audio on the MacBook Pro (14-inch M5 Max)

The MacBook Pro's six-speaker sound system with force-cancelling woofers continues to amaze.

The Beaches' cover of "I Ran (So Far Away)" sounded excellent with clear vocals, energetic guitar, snappy drums, and a thumping bassline. It easily filled a photography studio in our office. The MacBook Pro line continues to offer the best speakers on a laptop, period.

If you use headphones for audio production (or just have a fancy pair), the MacBook Pro's 3.5 mm headphone jack supports high-impedance cans.

Upgradeability on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

The common refrain with modern MacBooks is to think very carefully about configuring before you buy. While there are eight pentalobe screws on the bottom of the MacBook Pro's chassis, you can't actually upgrade major components yourself. The SoC and the SSD are soldered, so you can't replace them on your own. If you need a repair, your best bet is probably Apple's Genius Bar.

Upgrades are pricey (see the configurations section, below), though they don't seem as huge as they did before the RAM crisis hit.

Battery Life on the (14-inch, M5 Max)

The MacBook Pro can easily last you a day on a charge. The new Pro topped the charts on our battery test, which browses the web, streams video, and runs OpenGL tests all at 150 nits of brightness. The system ran for 17 hours and 58 minutes, surpassing the next best in the field, the Samsung Galaxy Book 6 Ultra, by more than 2 hours.The M5 Max system lasted only slightly less than the vanilla M5 version, which ran for 18:14.

Heat on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

During our Cinebench stress test, I took skin temperature measurements to see how hot the system gets to the touch under a rigorous workload.

The hottest point was actually the center of the keyboard, reaching 116.5 degrees Fahrenheit. While it wasn't too hot to type on, the heat was noticeable.

The touchpad stayed cool at 86 F, while the hottest point on the bottom measured 103.5 F.

We used Tunabelly Software's TG Pro, which measures internal Mac temperatures, to measure the M5 Max. The chip averaged 83.59 C during the test.

Webcam on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

Housed in the MacBook Pro's notch, there's a 12MP webcam. You'll look great using it. It's sharp and can easily highlight every button on a shirt or hair on your head. It supports Center Stage, a feature in macOS that allows the camera to focus on you even as you move around.

The webcam also has "Desk View," which lets you show your desk or table on video calls, which is good for showing anything that might be on old-school paper. But it's always a bit distorted, and I rarely find myself using that feature, in part because of that.

Software on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M5 Max)

The MacBook Pro with M5 Max ships with macOS Tahoe (we tested with version 26.3.1). With that, it brings "Liquid Glass" a new design language (also found in iOS 26 and iPadOS 26) that makes heavy use of translucent effects, adds a ton of icons to menus, and makes a bunch of aesthetic choices that have been controversial among Mac diehards. We went into that more in our review of the Macbook Pro with M5.

But Tahoe also brings some great new features, including a huge update to Spotlight that adds tons of actions, a built-in clipboard history, and far more automations for shortcuts. That's on top of adding Live Activities from the iPhone to the Mac, as well as a phone app with call screening.

You get a bunch of pre-installed apps in the box. These include Safari, Messages, Maps, Apple TV (the app, which houses the service of the same name), Reminders, Notes, Passwords, FaceTime, Photos, and more. Some users of the MacBook Pro are prime candidates for Apple's new Creator Studio, a subscription competitor to the Adobe Suite (and, to some degree, Microsoft Office), including Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Mainstage, Compressor, Motion, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform. The latter four still come with free versions preinstalled in macOS.

MacBook Pro (14-inch) Configurations

We tested the 14-inch MacBook Pro in an extremely expensive, $5,849 configuration designed for those who need the most performance and want the beautiful nano-texture display. With an M5 Max boasting 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores, 128GB of RAM, and 4TB of storage, along with the glare-reducing panel, this system is truly for those who are using their systems for work.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M5 Max starts at $3,599 with an 18-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 48GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage. Upgrading to the 40-core GPU will cost you $300, and the nano-texture screen is $150.

The base M5 Max starts at 36GB of RAM, but our 40-core GPU variant starts at 48GB. From there, a bump to 64GB is $200 more, or the jump to 128GB is a whopping $1,000 more (but really, is that whopping in today's PC industry?). Storage starts at 2TB. A bump to 4TB is $600, while 8TB will cost you $1,800.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro also comes with Apple's M5 Pro, starting at $2,199, or the standard M5 (see our review) beginning at $1,699. The 16-inch MacBook Pro starts at $2,699 with the M5 Pro and $3,899 with M5 Max.

Apple sells the 14-inch MacBook Pro with a 1-year warranty. Beyond that, AppleCare+, which covers repairs, battery replacement, and priority support, is $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year (or is available as part of AppleCare One for $19.99 per month, covering up to three products).

Bottom Line

If you need power for your job or hobbies, there's very little the MacBook Pro can't do. The super cores and performance cores on the M5 Max, combined with a 40-core GPU and 128GB of RAM, can handle anything from rendering to gaming to local AI, assuming you can afford that top configuration's high price tag.

The nano-texture screen continues to be an eye-popper, even if the mini-LED screen, while great, isn't quite OLED. The keyboard and trackpad are comfortable, and it's hard to argue with battery life that runs for almost 18 hours.

If you have a top-end M3 or M4 system, you may not need to upgrade yet. But professionals with older systems may see benefits with the faster SSDs and stronger cores.

The RAM and SSD pricing are still high — very high. But it's harder to criticize Apple than it used to be, with the memory and storage industry in a crisis. Now, everyone's charging high prices for upgrades.

But the 128GB configuration isn't one for a hobbyist. It's for someone making a living with this system. It puts the Pro in, well, Pro. If you need an attractive, portable powerhouse and your workloads can be performed on macOS, the MacBook Pro with M5 Max won't disappoint.

Apple has kicked off its second day of early 2026 product releases with two new chips, new MacBook Pros, and a new Liquid Retina XDR display. But starting things off, let’s discuss the latest additions to the powerful Apple Silicon family: the M5 Pro and the M5 Max.

The M5 Pro and M5 Max increase the maximum CPU core count to 18 (up from 14), but with a twist. Apple says that it’s now using six of its most performant cores ever, which it dubs “super cores.” 12 all-new performance cores join these super cores to handle sustained multitasking workloads. Together, Apple says that the new CPU core can deliver up to a 30 percent uplift in multi-threaded performance compared to M4 Pro and M4 Max.

The M5 Pro now supports up to 64GB of unified memory (up from 48GB on the M4 Pro), with a total bandwidth of 307 GBps. The M4 Max doubles both metrics, delivering support for up to 128GB of unified memory operating at 614 Gbps.

When it comes ot graphics, the M5 Pro now features 20 GPU cores, which the M5 Max features up to 40 cores. Each GPU core contains a neural accelerator, and, combined with higher memory bandwidth, Apple claims up to a 35 percent performance boost in ray-tracing apps compared to the M4 Pro and M4 Max. Other notable features include a 16-core neural engine on both chips and support for Thunderbolt 5.

The new M5 Pro and M5 Max are found in Apple’s refreshed MacBook Pros, which are still available in 14-inch and 16-inch form factors. According to Apple, users will see up to a 4x improvement in AI performance compared to the previous generation, and up to an 8x uplift compared to first-generation Apple Silicon.

If that wasn’t enough, Apple has also enhanced the storage subsystem, delivering double the performance for the onboard SSDs (up to 14.5 GBps). In addition, M5 Pro systems will now come with 1TB of base storage, while M5 Max systems will start at 2TB. Apple has stuck with Wi-Fi 6E across several generations of MacBook Pro refreshes, but now it’s using its in-house N1 networking chip, which combines Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.

Other features include a 12MP Center Stage camera with Desk View support, a Liquid Retina XDR display (1600 nits peak HDR brightness) that still includes a nano-texture option, and up to 24 hours of battery life.

The new 14- and 16-inch MacBooks will be available for pre-order starting tomorrow, March 4th. However, there are some price hikes to accompany the increased performance and base storage. The 14-inch MacBook Pro now starts at $2,199 (up from $1,999) with the M5 Pro, while the 16-inch MacBook Pro now starts at $2,699 (up from $2,499). If you want to step into the M5 Max versions of those systems, you're looking at $3,599 and $3,899, respectively.

Apple is reportedly finally releasing touchscreen MacBooks, decades after the first touchscreen Windows laptops appeared on the market. According to prominent Apple leaker Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, the long-awaited feature will finally arrive this year, but during the company’s fall event and not in March, where it’s expected to announce new iPad models and an entry-level MacBook priced between $599 and $699.

Aside from getting a touch-sensitive screen, sources say that the upcoming MacBook Pros will also get an OLED display, while the controversial notch will be replaced by the Dynamic Island, first introduced in the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max in 2022. The rest of the laptop will still look the same, though, ensuring that veteran MacBook Pro users will still feel comfortable even if they upgrade to the latest version. Under the hood, it is expected that Apple will debut M6 chips with the OLED models, according to previous reports.

macOS will also reportedly introduce some changes to accommodate the additional functionality delivered by the touch screen. Because fingers inherently cover a larger space than a cursor, it’s reported that the new MacBook Pro will automatically shift the interface depending on the input method. For example, if you touch the menu at the top of the screen, it will automatically enlarge to make it easier to select what you want and prevent any mispresses. A new context menu is also reportedly being developed that will appear around your finger, making access to commands and other shortcuts much more ergonomic. These changes go in line with Apple’s “it just works” philosophy, ensuring that everything would work as intended, whether you prefer using a mouse or the touch screen.

Steve Jobs famously said in 2010 that touchscreen laptops do not work, which is probably the reason why it took so long for Apple to introduce one. In fairness, Jobs was probably right, especially with the available technology back then. But the arrival of Apple Silicon chips that grow more powerful with every generation, while still staying efficient, probably meant that implementing a UI that would smartly and seamlessly switch between cursor and touch controls.

Despite finally adding touch control to the MacBook Pro, Gurman says that it still won’t replace the iPad. In fact, it’s the iPad that’s becoming more like a MacBook, especially with the release of iPadOS 26. Whatever the case, the Apple tablet will supposedly always be touch-first, while the upcoming MacBook Pros will have a blend of touch gestures and cursor movements, allowing its users to choose whichever they like without taking away from the experience of using either input method.

When Apple unveiled the 2025 MacBook Pro last week with the new M5 chip, one of the main upgrades it listed was 2x SSD speeds, a claim that rings true in our review of the device. However, a directed comparison between the outgoing M4-equipped MacBook Bro and the new M5 one was still on the cards, and now, we've gotten just that. YouTuber Max Tech put both laptops head-to-head to see whether Apple's claims were true, and it turns out, the company may have actually undersold the new machine's SSD speeds.

In the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, the SSD in the M5 MacBook Pro achieved read speeds of up to 6,323 MB/s, compared to just 2,031 MB/s on the M4 MacBook Pro. It's not like the M4 is "slow" in a vacuum, but the M5 SSD is over three times faster, which is a great generation uplift. Moving to the write speeds, the trend continues but less aggressively, with the M5's SSD reaching a similar 6,068 MB/s while the M4's SSD could only manage 3,293 MB/s, constituting an 84.31% difference. If you average out both results, the SSD in the M5 MacBook Pro is actually ~2.5x faster overall.

These speed improvements could be a result of a better controller allowing the flash to run faster, since PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs on PCs can achieve similar numbers. Apple routes 4x PCIe lanes to the SSD on its base chips, but doubles that to 8x on the Pro/Max/Ultra variants of the same silicon. Nonetheless, 6K+ MB/s across both read and write means smoother video editing for professionals that can benefit them in edge-case scenarios, not that it felt particularly slow before. You can also expect better random read/write speeds that should make the OS feel snappier in general.

Max Tech opened up both devices before performing the test to show the internal layout, which was identical. They share the same cooling systems with a single fan and a single heatpipe, along with two NAND modules (256 GB each) to ensure optimal performance. The base variant of the M2 Pro MacBook Pro from 2023 was stained with controversy because of this, when Apple decided to use a single 512 GB NAND chip, which crippled storage speeds drastically, so it's nice to see such a massive turnaround a couple of years later.

Apple is back with another hardware refresh of the 14-inch MacBook Pro, this time with its new M5 system-on-a-chip. The M5 provides a healthy boost in CPU performance over the M4 found in last year’s base 14-inch MacBook Pro and a significant uplift in SSD performance.

Our review unit came equipped with a 1TB SSD and 32GB of RAM, but those are both pricey upgrade options for what is the entry point into the MacBook Pro family. With an as-tested price of $2,349, it’s an expensive purchase for a MacBook without a “Pro” or “Max” in its CPU name.

Design of the Apple MacBook Pro (M5, 14-inch)

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That seems to be Apple’s mantra regarding the current design of the MacBook Pro. Apple has been using this same chassis for multiple generations, save for some changes to the available colors (like Space Black replacing Space Gray).

The aluminum chassis is still attractive. Our review unit came cloaked in Space Black, which is a fingerprint magnet. The chassis is solid, with none of the flex that you’ll find in systems that use plastic or a combination of plastic and aluminum. The one niggle that I have with the design is the cutout in the keyboard deck that allows your finger to slide in and lift the lid. The corners on either side of the cutout are sharp and can poke your fingers/hand if you’re not careful.

With that said, you get quite a few ports on this laptop, including three Thunderbolt 4 ports, a full-size SDXC, HDMI 2.1, 3.5 mm audio jack and a MagSafe 3 connector. I’ve always been a fan of MagSafe and was happy to see it return when the current chassis design debuted back with the M1 Pro and Max chips.

Many people complain about the notch at the top-center of the display, which houses the Center Stage camera. It’s somewhat of an eyesore, but I’ve become used to it over time. The way it’s positioned, it sits in the space that is usually occupied by the Menu bar for apps, so I don’t feel like I’m being robbed of any additional screen real estate. Do I wish that Apple found a better way to integrate the webcam? Yes. Does the current iteration really encroach on the daily usability of the laptop for me? No.

The other item of note with our MacBook Pro review unit is that it has the nano-texture display option, which costs an additional $150. The screen coating reduces glare and helps to minimize reflections, which can be beneficial outdoors, or in indoor areas with bright light sources.

Our 14-inch MacBook review unit measures 12.31 x 8.71 x 0.61 inches and weighs 3.4 pounds, which is identical to last year’s model with the M4.

Apple MacBook Pro Specifications (M5, 14-inch)

Productivity and Graphics Performance on the Apple MacBook Pro (M5, 14-inch)

Our review unit is equipped with Apple’s newly released M5 processor, which is also found (for now) in the iPad Pro and Vision Pro. When used in the MacBook Pro, the M5 features 10 CPU cores (4 performance cores, 6 efficiency cores),10 GPU cores, and a 16-core NPU.

The new MacBook Pro had no trouble outdistancing the other assembled competition — 14-inch MacBook Pro (M4), Lenovo Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition (Core Ultra 7 258V), Dell 16 Premium (Core Ultra 7 255H) — in every performance benchmark.

Apple consistently delivers anywhere from 10- to 20-percent improvements over the prior generation when it comes to CPU performance, and the M5 is no exception. Using the Geekbench 6 synthetic CPU benchmark, our system achieved a single-core score of 4,288, roughly a 10% boost over the preceding MacBook Pro with the M4 chip. The multi-core score saw an uplifting to 17,926 versus 15,114 on the M4 (just over an 18% uplift).

However, the CPU isn’t the only area that Apple decided to address when it comes to hardware upgrades. When Apple announced the M5 MacBook Pro, it boasted a 2x improvement in SSD speeds over the previous generation. In our file transfer test, which copies 25GB of data, we saw 1,917.35 MBps compared to 1,167.29 MBps for the M4 MacBook Pro (also with a 1TB SSD). It wasn’t quite a 2x improvement, but is still a remarkable year-over-year leap.

We also saw a significant improvement in our Handbrake test, where we transcode a 4K video file to 1080p. Last year’s 14-inch MacBook Pro (M4) completed the job in four minutes and 57 seconds. However, the new M5-equipped model finished nearly a minute and a half quicker, taking just three minutes and 31 seconds.

We use Cinebench 2024 to stress test laptops, and the benchmark estimates a single-core clock of 4.6 GHz and a multi-core clock of 3.5 GHz. During our 10-run test, the system started at 1,042 and then settled in the 1,100 to 1,128 range for the duration.

The M5 includes a 10-core GPU, which provides up a 4x improvement in peak GPU compute compared to the M4 thanks to the inclusion of a dedicated Neural Accelerator baked into each core. Overall graphicps performance is said to increase by up to 30 percent over the GPU in the M4.

In the real world, we saw 57 frames per second (FPS) at 1200p and 28 FPS at native resolution in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. For comparison last year’s M4-equipped system recorded 36 FPS and 18 FPS, respectively. In addition, our review unit managed 44 fps at 1200p and 31 fps at native resolution in Cyberpunk 2077 using the “For this Mac” setting.

Display on the Apple MacBook Pro (M5, 14-inch)

Apple’s MacBook Pro family uses an IPS display with Mini LED backlighting. This is a noticeable upgrade from the entry-level MacBook Air, with its more traditional LED-backlit IPS display. The “Liquid Retina” display has a 3,024 x 1,964 resolution and a “ProMotion” refresh rate that maxes out at 120 Hz.

Although this Mini LED can’t quite touch the black level performance of competing OLED panels, it still a great looking display. The nano-texture display option, as configured on our review unit, is a great addition. My personal laptop is an older 14-inch MacBook Pro (M3) with the glossy screen finish. It’s incredible to see the two side by side to highlight the difference in reflection reduction.

I’m not a musical kind of guy by any means, but I went to the theater last year with my wife and thoroughly enjoyed Wicked. Naturally, I’m excited to see the sequel, so I watched the final trailer for Wicked: For Good. Pinks and green are prominent in the trailer and looked wonderful on the display, and the Mini LED panel performed well in the more dimly-lit scenes featuring the Wicked Witch and her flying monkeys.

Among the assembled group, our 14-inch MacBook Pro proved to be the brightest, as measured by our light meter. It pegged 558 nits, just barely edging out last year’s model (556.6 nits). This performance placed it well ahead of the Yoga 9i’s OLED panel (421 nits) and the Dell 16 Premium (367 nits).

Color performance was virtually unchanged compared to M4 MacBook Pro, which shows that Apple is likely using the same panels year-over-year. We measured 81.7 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut and 115.4 percent of the sRGB color space. However, the Yoga 9i had more saturated colors, thanks to its OLED panel.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the Apple MacBook Pro (M5, 14-inch)

One of the great things about Apple being conservative with redesigns for the MacBook Pro is that the excellent keyboard remains intact. Among laptop keyboards, Apple and Lenovo remain my far and away favorites, and the scissor switches on the MacBook Pro are a delight to use. They’re clicky with just enough travel to satisfy my fingers, and are far superior to problematic butterfly switches that Apple thankfully banished.

Apple employs single-zone white LED backlighting, which turns on automatically in low-light conditions. If you want to manually control the keyboard backlighting, you can do so by navigating to System Settings --> Keyboard.

Using the keyhero.com test, I leisurely strolled to 91 words per minute with 95 percent accuracy, which was in the same ballpark as my performance last year with the 16-inch MacBook Pro (M4 Pro).

Another feature that I like on MacBooks is the large haptic trackpad, which simulates a physical “click.” The benefit of this design over traditional top-hinged trackpads that you find in Windows laptops is that the surface will register a click no matter where you press. The glass surface also is smooth to the touch, allowing my finger to easily glide when navigating through macOS Tahoe.

Audio on the Apple MacBook Pro (M5, 14-inch)

The sound system on our review unit hasn’t changed compared to last year, which is a good thing. The six-speaker setup is one of the best you’ll find on any laptop regardless of price, and includes support for Dolby Digital, Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital Plus and Apple Spatial Audio.

It’s not often that I can comment on noticeable bass effects in a laptop sound system, but the is most definitely the case with the 14-inch MacBook Pro. I played Rainey Haynes’ “I’m Old Enough to Rock and Roll,” which is a jamming track from one of my favorite 80’s movies: Iron Eagle. The steady drum line, synths and Tina Turner-esque vocals soar on the sound system. Even with the volume dialed up to near max levels, I could barely discern distortion.

Upgradeability of the Apple MacBook Pro (M5, 14-inch)

Upgradeability and MacBooks don't go together. While you can remove four pentalobe screws at the bottom of the chassis to remove the cover, it won't do you any good when it comes other upgrading system components. The M5 SoC is a system-on-a-chip design with our review unit's 32GB included on-die. The 1TB SSD is soldered onto the motherboard, so you're out of luck there as well.

In other words, you'll want to ensure that you have select enough RAM and storage that you'll need for the life of the machine at the time of purchase. Unfortunately, the upgrades are pricey (far more than you would expect in the Windows PC realm), with an upgrade from 16GB to 32GB of RAM costing $400 and boosting the SSD from the base 512GB to 1TB ringing in at $200.

Battery Life on the Apple MacBook Pro (M5, 14-inch)

Battery life has consistently been a strong point for the MacBook Pro in the Apple Silicon era, and the M5 continues that tradition.

Our 14-inch MacBook Pro unit is equipped with a 72.4 Whr battery, enough to deliver 18 hours and 14 minutes of runtime using our battery test, which involves browsing the web, running OpenGL tests, and streaming video at 150 nits of brightness. However, this result was 20 minutes less than last year’s MacBook Pro with the M4.

Despite the 20-minute shortfall compared to last year, the result easily bested the Dell 16 Premium by 2.5x (7:15) despite its larger 99 WHr battery. The Yoga 9i 2-in-1 Aura Edition was also no match, with a runtime of 12 hours and 47 minutes.

Heat on the Apple MacBook Pro (M5, 14-inch)

We measured skin temperatures during our Cinebench 2024 stress test on the 14-inch MacBook Pro. As soon as the test began, the system fans spun into high gear to keep the system temperatures in check.

The hottest point measured was near the left exhaust vent at 108 degrees Fahrenheit, while we saw 104 F between the G and H keys. The touchpad was much cooler at 82.8 F. The system overall felt warm, but it was tolerable to sit on my lap while wearing shorts.

During the Cinebench 2024 stress test, we measured temperatures using the TG Pro app. The overall system temperature, which takes an average of several components (i.e., power supply, battery, SSD, logic board, etc.) was 73 degrees Celsius (163 degrees Fahrenheit). The M5 itself registered 87 degrees C (188 F).

Webcam on the Apple MacBook Pro (M5, 14-inch)

Like last year’s mode, the new M5 uses a 12MP Center Stage camera. Image quality looked impeccable, with good detail in my face (wrinkles, grey hairs in my beard, and everything else), and excellent color representation. I used the camera while sitting on a couch with a brightly lit window behind me, and the picture still looked great without blowing out details or causing halo effects.

The Center Stage feature keeps your face centered in the frame during calls, should you move around in your seat. It’s a neat feature, but I prefer to leave the feature off — sometimes I just want to briefly duck out of frame to sneeze, and not everybody on a call needs to see that.

Software on the Apple MacBook Pro (M5, 14-inch)

The big change with macOS 26 Tahoe is the addition of the “Liquid Glass” makeover, a design language that it shares with iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. This an overabundant use of translucent menus and icons, which reflect displayed content in real time. Liquid Glass has been controversial since it was first announced at WWDC, and Apple tweaked the effect during the beta period to appease the naysayers. Now that Liquid Glass is in its final form, I’m mostly OK with how it looks, mainly because its reach in macOS Tahoe isn’t as broad as it is in iOS or iPadOS.

Besides the fresh coat of paint for the UI, macOS Tahoe brings features like Live Translation for the Messages app and FaceTime, Live Activities for Mac, a refresh Phone app, Call Screening, more intelligent search Spotlight, and a universal clipboard (with history).

Apple Intelligence was a prominent new feature Apple announced last year for macOS Sequoia, but most of the headlining features involving Siri never materialized. Apple took a lot of flak for overpromising and underdelivering, and expect the previously announced Siri features to debut sometime next year. With that said, Apple stayed relatively mum about Apple Intelligence updates for macOS Tahoe.

With that said, macOS continues to be a well-rounded operating system with a slew of Apple-provided apps out of the box. One of my favorites is iPhone Mirroring, which allows you full access to your iPhone’s screen from your macOS Tahoe desktop. It especially comes in handy when I need to perform two-factor authentication verification with my phone, and my phone is in another room or I’m too lazy to dig it out of my pocket.

Apple MacBook Pro (M5, 14-inch) Configurations and Warranty

Apple offers three preconfigured options for the M5 MacBook Pro, all of which feature the M5 chip with a 10-core CPU and a 10-core GPU. The base system features 16GB of unified memory and a 512GB SSD for $1,599. The middle tier includes a 1TB SSD for an additional $200 ($1,799). The top configuration gives you 24GB of unified memory and a 1TB SSD for $1,999.

However, Apple also offers built-to-order configuration that allow you to further tweak the system to your specific needs. Our review unit came with 32GB of unified memory, a 1TB SSD, and the nano-texture display option, which brought the as-tested price to $2,349. That's quite pricey for an entry-level MacBook Pro with Apple's base-level chip.

If you want an M5 MacBook Pro with all the trimmings, opting for 32GB of RAM, a 4TB SSD, the nano-texture display option and the 96W USB-C power adapter balloons the price to $3,369.

Apple's MacBook Pro comes with a one-year warranty. You can opt for Apple's extended warranty, Apple Care Plus, which costs $99.99/year or $9.99/month. The coverage adds unlimited repairs covering accidents, 24/7 priority tech support, and battery replacement.

Bottom Line

Not only did Apple increase CPU performance for the 14-inch MacBook Pro this year with the brawny new M5, but it also delivered a healthy uplift in SSD performance. Despite the performance increases, battery life remains within the margin of error with last year’s model at over 18 hours.

The performance is wrapped in a high-quality chassis with plenty of ports for pro users, although the Space Black finish remains susceptible to fingerprints. Our usual complaints about Apple laptops remain, including the high price of SSD and memory upgrades.

I’ll add one more: the lack of Wi-Fi 7. I find it odd that a laptop starting at $1,599 doesn’t include Wi-Fi 7 as standard equipment, and this is made even more puzzling considering that Apple’s excellent N1 Wi-Fi chip is available already in the iPhone 17/Air/Pro and the new iPad Pro (M5). Both the Dell and Lenovo assembled here include Wi-Fi 7. While we reviewed the Dell 16 Premium and used it as a competitor here, the Dell 14 Premium, which aligns more closely with the 14-inch MacBook Pro in terms of size, includes Wi-Fi 7 standard in its base $1,249 configuration.

Speaking of the Dell 14 Premium, it is a worthy alternative to the 14-inch MacBook Pro. You can spec one out with a Core Ultra 7 255H, 32GB LPDDR5X, a 1TB SSD and a 14.5-inch 3.2K touch OLED for $1,949, undercutting Apple’s offering, as-tested, by $400.

If you already have a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 chip, I would recommend you sit this one out. However, if you’re coming from a much older M1 or M2 version, the performance gains are hard to ignore.

With that said, at its base price of $1,599 with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, the 14-inch MacBook Pro is a strong productivity workhorse. But once pricing starts cresting the $2,000 mark with hardware upgrades, the value proposition starts to wane.

Apple unveiled the latest addition to its family of homegrown chips — the M5 — a couple of days ago, and it's powering both the new iPad Pro and the 14-inch MacBook Pro. New Geekbench listings spotted by Tech Info reveal that the performance in single-core scores is enough to rival Intel's Ultra 9 285K and breeze past AMD's 9950X3D. As is to be expected, it struggles in multi-core against those models, but the results show the potential of Apple's latest silicon and the surely-inevitable Pro and Max variants of this new chip.

The M5 iPad Pro scores 4,138 points in the single-core test, outperformed by the M5 MacBook Pro, which scores 4,263 points. That's not too bad, but the real jump is observed in multi-core results, where the M5 MacBook Pro scores 17,862 points versus the iPad's 16,366 — constituting a 9% difference in performance. That's with the same 10-core base configuration on either device, but the MacBook does have active cooling and a much thicker chassis that can prevent thermal throttling and allow the chip to boost higher, sustaining that for longer periods of time.

It's easy to see why a fully-fledged "pro" laptop would outperform a thin (albeit overkill) tablet, even though they carry the same quality silicon under the hood. Apple never actually discloses clock speed numbers in its tech specs, but in the Geekbench listings, we see that the iPad Pro's M5 ran at 4.43 GHz, while the MacBook Pro's M5 topped out at 4.61 GHz. So, this doesn't necessarily equate to chip binning, but more so the enhanced cooling factor.

More importantly, though, these numbers are enough to beat the recently-launched Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, which scored around 4,080 points in the single-core Geekbench test, meaning the M5 in even the iPad is faster — and that's using official Qualcomm numbers. Moreover, compared to the M4, the new M5 is almost 10% ahead in single-core performance, and around 15% faster in multi-core performance versus the newest M4 MacBook Pro listing on Geekbench.

Compared to PC chips, the M5 is only behind a few single-core listings on Geekbench, if we count the best results, which makes sense considering how there's literally only one M5 MacBook Pro score right now, so it's quite cherry-picked. This also serves as your disclaimer for taking all these numbers with a grain of salt, since the sample size is simply too low at the moment to jump to any conclusions.

Intel's Core i9-14900KS scores 4,457 points in the single-core test, making it 4.6% faster. The current-gen Core Ultra 9 285K isn't far off at 4,306 points, rendering the M5 only about 1% slower. AMD's fastest chip on Geekbench is actually the midrange Ryzen 5 7600 with 4,226 points, but that test is deemed invalid; therefore, both the 9950X and the 9800X3D take the top spot, with 3,616 (and 3,615) points — which the M5 comfortably bests.

In multi-threaded performance, though, the M5 gets absolutely shredded across the board, and that's because it simply doesn't have enough cores to stack up to the AMD and Intel flagships. However, this could change with the higher spec'd 14-core M5 that hasn't been tested yet, and we'd assume the M5 Pro and M5 Max will certainly help level the playing field in this regard. The table above uses numbers from Geekbench's processor benchmark database to paint a more accurate picture, alongside the extreme differences we mentioned earlier.

After teasing a new product launch on X earlier today, Apple has just announced the 2025 refresh to its 14-inch MacBook Pro lineup, now equipped with the shiny new M5 chip. The press release, accompanied by a separate M5 announcement, was just published on the company's website, unpacking the new laptop in great detail. It's largely an iterative update, with the new chip nicely slotting in for yesteryear's M4 in an otherwise largely unchanged package.

There are no design tweaks or exciting features to speak of. The chassis, including the 14-inch Mini LED display, is identical to previous models — just like all the other core features such as ports, speakers, keyboard, trackpad, and even the 12 MP webcam. The battery is once again quoted to last 24 hours in video playback, and you still only get Wi-Fi 6E. However, the SSD is 2x faster compared to last gen, and you can now spec it up to 4 TB, twice as much as previous gen.

It's clear that Apple is entirely focused on what's inside, the latest generation of its homegrown M-series silicon — M5. This swap is what likely enables the memory bandwidth to be upgraded from 120 GB/s on the M4 to now "over 150 GB/s" on the M5.

The SoC package includes a 10-core CPU, a 10-core GPU with "a Neural Accelerator in each core," and a 16-core NPU for on-device AI. The M5 chip is built on TSMC's N3P node and has a faster GPU that can deliver 1.6x more FPS in games, 20% faster multi-core CPU performance, and 1.7x quicker render times in Blender — all versus the M4. Apple even says it's 86x more powerful than Intel-based Macs in AI applications.

The price for the new 14-inch MacBook Pro remains the same as last year, with the base model starting at $1,599, offering you a 512 GB SSD and 16 GB of RAM. Keep in mind that, just like M4, the base M5 isn't available on the 16-inch models as they start out with a Pro chip (so, presumably M5 Pro). The device is available to pre-order right away, with general availability beginning next week on October 22. Alongside the MacBook Pro, Apple also refreshed the Vision Pro and the iPad Pro with the new M5 chip.

The tablet gets Apple's in-house C1X modem and N1 networking chip that brings Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 support, offering faster connectivity across the board with 30% less power usage compared to the M4 iPad Pro. On the other hand, the mixed reality headset now has a new Dual Knit headband, also available for purchase separately for $99. Therefore, M5's improvements in performance, battery life, and AI-powered workflows are present on the Vision Pro and iPad Pro as well.

Accompanying that is the fresh software for each of these devices, including the MacBook Pro, with the latest OS versions adding newer features and, of course, the Liquid Glass visual overhaul. Prices remain the same as last gen for both the iPad and Vision Pro as well.

A new app called TrackWeight has been unveiled by Canadian maker and blogger Krish Shah. Put simply, the macOS application commandeers your Apple MacBook's Force Touch trackpad pressure sensors for weighing scale duties. The app code is now available on GitHub, released under the very flexible open-source MIT License.

This might sound like one of those ideas where you wonder why it hasn’t been done before. However, Shah notes on his GitHub that there are several important contributions that helped make his idea become a real app. It didn’t rely upon inspiration alone.

As well as wielding resources like SwiftUI for the user interface, and Combine for reactive data flow, Shah notes the prior work by Takuto Nakamura (@Kyome22) and the Open Multi-Touch Support library. The programming library provides “access to global multitouch events on macOS trackpads [and] detailed touch data including position, pressure, angle, and density,” Shah explained on his GitHub.

A touch too much

Mac gamer and YouTube creator Andrew Tsai tested Cyberpunk 2077 on four different Macs, where he found the game was able to perform relatively well on all models that are within spec. He shared the results of the test in a YouTube video, where he compared four MacBooks — an M4 MacBook Pro (16GB / 10-core GPU), an M3 Max MacBook Pro (48GB / 40-core GPU), an M1 Max MacBook Pro (32GB / 32-core GPU), and, lastly, an M1 MacBook Air (8GB / 8-core GPU). Andrew also tried running the game on the M4 MacBook Pro via Crossover.

Mac gamers have been patiently waiting for this AAA title to land on macOS, with many expecting its arrival in early 2025. Although a bit late, the game did eventually land last July 17, with users who’ve previously bought it on Steam able to install it directly on their Apple computers at no additional cost. CD Projekt Red set the game’s recommended specs at M3 Pro and 18GB of unified memory for smooth 1080p 60 FPS gameplay, although you can get away with a base M1 chip paired with 16GB of unified memory.

With this in mind, Andrew tested four MacBooks to see how they’d compare:

According to Tsai's results, the best-performing MacBook was powered by the M3 Max chip, with its 40-core GPU and 48GB of unified memory, with the game achieving more than 78 FPS at 1080p High and upscaling turned off. When he set MetalFX to quality, performance jumped to more than 100 FPS, delivering an absolutely smooth gameplay experience. The next best system tested was the M1 Max MacBook Pro. Despite being a first-generation model, its Max designation allowed it to perform better than the base M4 chip on the MacBook Pro, delivering a consistent 51.87 FPS whether MetalFX is turned on or off.

Those who didn’t get a top-of-the-line MacBook can still enjoy the game with upscaling, as the M4 chip can still deliver more than 30 FPS with upscaling turned on. If you’re not a fan of that tech, you can still get cinematic gameplay with MetalFX: Off, as you still get an average of 26.22 FPS. The worst performer is the first-generation M1 MacBook Air, which the game does not officially support because it only has 8GB of unified memory. As expected, the benchmark only achieved a little over 12 FPS — and that’s with MetalFX set to quality. Andrew didn’t bother testing the M1 MacBook Air with MetalFX: Off, as it might’ve crashed the laptop.

Another interesting test the YouTuber did was to run the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark on the M4 MacBook Pro through the CrossOver compatibility layer. Interestingly, it only lost about three FPS compared to the game running natively. Still, Andrew expects these FPS numbers to improve over the coming months as the developers optimize the game more for the Apple Silicon.

The MacBook Air is one of the most popular laptops — and best ultrabooks — around. Starting at $999 with a speedy M4 processor, strong build quality, and long battery life, it's incredibly well-liked, especially among people already in Apple's ecosystem.

But the MacBook Pro, with its gorgeous display, more ports, and more performant chips is right there. You might see those upgrades and think that it's worth the extra cash.

And it's true — on a pure spec sheet basis, the MacBook Pro is better in almost every way. Some people may be willing to splurge for the nicer screen, better speakers, and the promise of more performance. But should you?

For many people, the MacBook Air is more than enough, especially for the price. But if you're not sure which you need, read on for a head-to-head comparison.

Design of MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro

It's unsurprising that the MacBook Air and Pro have a family resemblance. Whichever you choose, you'll get Apple's latest design, with blocky sides, curved corners, sturdy aluminum build quality, and a mirror-shiny aluminum Apple logo.

You'll also get a notch for the webcam no matter which model you choose, as well as a haptic touchpad and a backlit keyboard with full-size function keys.

One of the bigger changes you'll notice is in size and weight. The Macbook Air comes in 13-inch and 15-inch screen sizes, while the Pro goes for modern, larger 14-inch and 16-inch sizes.

Because the MacBook Air models don't use a fan, they can be extremely thin. The 13-inch Air is 0.44 inches thick, while the 15-inch MacBook Air is just a scratch larger. The smaller Air is the lightest of the bunch at just 2.7 pounds, light enough you barely notice it in a backpack, while the 15-incher is 3.3 pounds.

The 14-inch Pro is 0.61 inches thick, which is significantly bigger. This allows for more ports and for a fan to run over the M4, M4 Pro, or M4 Max. The difference in cooler on the chip is the difference in weight, which starts at 3.4 pounds with M4 and tops out at 3.6 pounds on the M4 Max. The 16-inch MacBook Pro is 0.66 inches thick and is 4.7 pounds whether you chose the M4 Pro or M4 Max.

The svelte MacBook Air only has three ports: a pair of Thunderbolt 4 (USB Type-C) ports and a 3.5 mm headphone jack. The system can also charge over MagSafe 3, which attaches to the side of the system magnetically and detaches if you trip and fall over the cord.

The Pro, however, has far more ports. No matter which you get, you'll get three USB Type-C ports (Thunderbolt 5 on the M4 Pro and M4 Max or Thunderbolt 4 on M4), an HDMI output, and a full-size SD card slot, and MagSafe 3.

If you don't use a ton of peripherals on the go, the MacBook Air's selection is sparse but usable. The MacBook Pro's ports allow for lots of extra peripherals. Either can be expanded with a USB Type-C hub or dock.

The last decision you'll have to make is what color laptop you want. The MacBook Pro keeps it simple with two options: silver and space black. But the Air has four choices: silver, starlight, midnight, and sky blue.

Performance of MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro

If you get a MacBook Air, you have one chip option: M4. The entry-level version has a cut down GPU, which you likely won't notice unless you're playing games.

But despite the name, the MacBook Air's claim to fame is that it's thin because there's no fan. The system uses passive cooling, which means the system will throttle under very intense workloads.

With the MacBook Pro, you have three choices: M4, M4 Pro, or M4 Max. In the Pro line, Apple uses active cooling, which means you'll have fans and heat pipes on the processor. Under light use, the fans have been silent in my experience. You really have to push these Arm-based processors to get the fans to kick in loud enough that you'll really notice them.

M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max all have similar single-core performance. But the cores scale significantly between the chips, so if you're a professional working with artificial intelligence, video editing, simulations or other multi-core workloads, the more powerful chips make a lot of sense.

For people who are primarily browsing the web, checking and sending emails, creating documents and slide decks, M4 should be plenty powerful.

Display of the MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro

For some, the display might be the top reason to upgrade from a MacBook Air to a MacBook Pro.

The MacBook Air's screen is good enough for most people. You either get a 13.6-inch, 2560 x 1664 screen or a 15.3-inch, 2280 x 1864 panel. Both are LED-backlit IPS displays, and in our testing, they get very bright.

Arguably the Air's biggest weakness when it comes to the screen is that it's stuck at a 60 Hz refresh rate, while the Pro goes up to 120 Hz and makes everything from macOS to web browsing to gaming smoother.

The MacBook Pro nets you either a 14.2-inch, 3024 x 1964 display or a 16.2-inch, 3456 x 2234 screen. These 'Liquid Retina XDR' displays use mini-LED displays that are brighter, offer more contrast, and support HDR content. And yes, these go up to 120 Hz with Apple's ProMotion and an adaptive refresh rate.

On the MacBook Pro, Apple also offers its nano-texture display as a paid upgrade. It's an extra $150, but the matte screen looks beautiful and works wonders outside.

Audio on the MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro

For a thin laptop, Macbook Air is pretty good. The 13-inch model has four speakers, and they're fine for casually listening to music and even for making calls without a headset on. The 15-inch bumps up to 6 speakers with force-cancelling woofers, marking a substantial improvement, especially in the low-end. The speakers are one of the few meaningful differences other than screen size on the two MacBook Air laptops.

Of course, the thicker MacBook Pro does mean better speakers. Like the 15-inch Air, both 14-inch and 16-inch Pro models have six-speaker systems with force-cancelling woofers, but you get higher quality sound. The 16-inch MacBook Pro have the best speakers I've ever heard on a laptop, though I wouldn't pay just for that.

In fact, if you're that much of an actual pro user, you probably need some of the best PC speakers, or at least a great pair of headphones.

Battery Life of the MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro

Ever since Apple switched to its own Arm-based chips with M1, battery life has been improving. With any of these systems, you should be able to close the lid, leave it unplugged on your desk, and find it still going a day or two later.

Chip efficiency does a lot, but bigger laptops mean bigger batteries.

In our battery test, which browses the web, streams video, and runs light OpenGL tests, the 15-inch MacBook Air with M4 ran for 15 hours and 14 minutes. The 14-inch MacBook Pro with the same chip lasted 18:36. A 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro lasted 21 hours and 1 minute.

All of which is to say, any of these laptops should get you through the day without a problem.

And while the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros will last longer, keep in mind that part of that is because they are heavier than the Air, so there's some give and take. I can handle less battery life if I'm getting more than 12 hours on a charge and the Air is easier to carry around.

Pricing of the MacBook Air vs MacBook Pro

There's a reason that the MacBook Air is Apple's most popular laptop, and that's because of the price. The 13-inch Air starts at $999 with a 10-core M4 CPU, 8-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD.

The 15-inch Air starts at $1,199 with a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB SSD.

In recent years, the $999 price point was reserved for a previous generation chip. For instance, when M3 was in vogue, the M2 option was $999. But with M4, Apple has eliminated that practice, making for an even better value for an excellent laptop.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,599 with the same M4 chips with 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU as the 15-inch Air, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB SSD. Bumping up to an M4 Pro starts at $1,999 (with a 12-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 24GB of RAM, and the same 512GB SSD), while an M4 Max starts at $3,199.

And the 16-inch MacBook Pro gets even pricier, starting at $2,499 with an M4 Pro with 14-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 24GB of RAM and 512GB SSD. The M4 Max version starts at $3,499 and boosts to a 32-core GPU, 36GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.

Of course, those are all the lowest possible prices, and Apple's upgrades to RAM and storage are often absurd, with hundreds of dollars for storage and RAM upgrades. Be sure to get what you want at purchase, though, because you won't be able to upgrade down the line.

Verdict

If you're just comparing specs on paper, the MacBook Pro is the better machine in most aspects. It has a nicer screen, more ports, stronger performance, and longer battery life.

In practice, though, the MacBook Air is a better machine for most people. It's lighter and easier to carry around, it has plenty of performance for the average person for either personal or professional use, and it lasts plenty long on a charge. While I think the 14-inch MacBook Pro is the sweet spot for screen size (and personally own one), I've used a 13-inch MacBook Air for work for awhile and adore it.

The truth is that most people don't need a MacBook Pro, even if some of the features — particularly the mini-LED display — are very nice to have. The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 serves as a sort of middle of the road pick if you're looking to upgrade for the display and more ports but don't need M4 Pro or M4 Max. . If you need the Pro features or would benefit from M4 Pro or M4 Max, you probably already know it.

For most people, spending less still gets an extremely capable Mac. The MacBook Air is best for most people, but the MacBook Pro has some niceties if you can afford it, or if you're doing very intensive work.

If you've been holding out for an Apple MacBook Pro laptop, now is an excellent time to pick up the 2024 14-inch model. It usually goes for around $1,799 but right now it's marked down to just $1,589 at Amazon—its lowest price to date. As of writing, we're not sure for how long it will be offered at this price. This is one of the latest models, released last year, that comes with the newest generation Apple Silicon M4 chip.

We reviewed a 16-inch version of this laptop last year and absolutely loved our experience. The specs are a little bit different between the one we reviewed and this one that's on sale but there's enough overlap to get an idea of what you can expect. We ended up rating the 2024 Apple MacBook Pro 4.5 out of 5 stars, praising it for its exceptional battery life and M4 processor performance.

The main processor powering this edition of the Apple MacBook Pro is, as we mentioned earlier, an M4 chip which has 10 cores — four of which are dedicated as performance cores and six are efficiency cores. The display is fairly notable, as well. It uses a 14.2-inch liquid retina XDR screen which can reach a maximum refresh rate of 120 Hz and has an impressively high maximum possible brightness of 1,600 Nits.

This laptop's memory, both RAM and SSD, can't be upgraded but you get 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD for storage with this offer, just make sure that is ample for your predicted needs. It has an HDMI port and is capable of supporting a secondary display. A 3.5mm jack is provided for connecting external audio peripherals. It has WiFi 6E wireless support and also comes with Bluetooth 5.3.

Visit the Apple MacBook Pro Laptop (2024) product page at Amazon for purchase options. It's also worth being aware that shipping can take one to two months for this particular edition.

Apple’s yearly updates for its MacBook Pro family are becoming predictable. Each year brings another generation of processors that deliver performance benefits while improvements to chip efficiency extend battery life. We also sometimes see new colors to spruce things up a bit.

This year is no different, as the new M4 generation of chips brings a healthy year-over-year performance uplift compared to the M3 generation. In addition, Apple has added a new $150 Nano-texture option for the display, which is also available on the Pro Display XDR, iPad Pro, and iMac.

These upgrades are enough to keep the MacBook Pro at the top of its game and an easy inclusion among the best ultrabooks and premium laptops.

Design of the MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro)

Apple last revamped the design of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro in late 2021. Although a lot has changed on the performance front since then, there are no visual changes to the chassis to note this time around. Our 16-inch Space Black review unit looks nearly identical to the 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 Max I tested almost a year ago.

The superlatives I lavished on that laptop remain here: the black finish with its anodization seal does its best to minimize (but not completely disguise) fingerprints, and the build quality is impeccable, as we expect from Apple’s laptops. There is a large keyboard and a massive haptic touchpad directly below it. Because Apple does not seem intent on putting number pads on its laptops, there is ample space in this 16-inch chassis to incorporate speakers on either side of the keyboard.

The only visual change, which I’ll discuss more in the Display section, is the new availability of a matte screen finish for the MacBook Pro family. All previous MacBooks in recent memory have included a glossy screen finish, which is excellent for sharp contrast and punchy colors but is highly reflective. The new nano-textured finish option on the MacBook Pro retains nearly all the “punch” of the traditional glossy display with the added distraction of reflections.

For better or worse, the notch for the ambient light sensor and 1080p webcam remains at the top-center of the display. I have gotten used to this design quirk found on Apple’s MacBook family of laptops, but not everyone is enamored with this design crutch.

There is a full assortment of ports on the MacBook Pro, which is what professionals want in a notebook. While previous MacBook Pros featured Thunderbolt 4 connectivity, MacBook Pros equipped with an M4 Pro or M4 Max processor feature Thunderbolt 5 support. The 16-inch MacBook Pro includes one Thunderbolt 5 (USB-C) port, an SDXC slot, and an HDMI 2.1 port on the right-hand side. Moving to the left, you’ll find two additional Thunderbolt 5 ports, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and a MagSafe 3 connector for power.

A 140W USB-C power adapter with a USB-C to MagSafe 3 cable for charging is included in the box. However, you can also use the included power adapter with a USB-C to USB-C cable to charge the MacBook Pro from any of the Thunderbolt 5 ports.

Our 16-inch MacBook Pro review unit measures 14.01 x 9.77 x 0.66 inches and weighs 4.67 pounds. The 14-inch MacBook Pro (M4) is 12.31 x 8.71 x 0.61 inches and weighs 3.4 pounds. Finally, the Dell XPS 16 (9640) has dimensions of 14.01 x 9.77 x 0.67 inches and weighs 4.8 pounds.

MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro) Specifications

Productivity Performance of the MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro)

The 2024 iPad Pro was the first device to gain access to Apple's new M4 family of processors. Now, Apple expanded its availability to the iMac, Mac mini, and MacBook Pro. Our review unit features an M4 Pro processor with a 14-core CPU (10 performance cores, 4 efficiency cores) and a 20-core GPU. According to Apple, the M4 Pro offers a 75 percent uplift in memory bandwidth (273 GB/sec) over the preceding M3 Pro. Also of note is that the M4 Pro includes a 16-core Neural Engine along with dedicated hardware media engines for handling H.264, HVEC and ProRes/ProRes RAW content.

Our review unit also has 48GB of LPDDR5X unified memory and a 2TB SSD. The CPU, memory, and SSD cannot be upgraded after purchase. So be sure to select the configuration that will suit your needs for the years to come when making your purchase.

The competitors include the 14-inch MacBook Pro (Late 2024, M4), 16-inch MacBook Pro (Late 2023, M3 Max), and the Dell XPS 16 (9640), which includes a Core Ultra 7 155H processor.

Starting with the Geekbench 6.1 synthetic CPU benchmark, the M4 Pro in the MacBook Pro put up some incredible performance on the single-core benchmark. The benchmark indicated that the chip was operating at 4.5 GHz. The laptop scores 3,910 on the single-core benchmark, far ahead of last year’s flagship 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 Max processor (2,330).

Things got more interesting on the multi-core benchmark, with the M4 Pro scored 22,822. This was within striking distance of the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M3 Max processor (which has two additional performance cores), which scored 23,163. The Dell XPS 16 (9640) was well behind in both benchmarks, scoring 2,373 in the single-core benchmark and 13,384 in the multi-core benchmark. The 14-inch MacBook Pro, with its base M4 processor was almost as strong as the M4 Pro in the single-core metric (3,807), but was well short in multi-core performance (15,114).

Shifting gears to our file transfer test, during which we copy 25GB of mixed-media files, the 16-inch MacBook Pro with M4 Pro blazed through at 2,237.5 Mbps. This wasn’t enough to topple last year’s laptop with the M3 Max processor (2,461.25 Mbps), but it was a few hundred Mbps ahead of the XPS 16.

On our Handbrake test, where we transcode a 4K video to 1080p, the M4 Pro completed the task in 2 minutes and 38 seconds, putting it just two seconds behind the M3 Max (2:36). The XPS 16 took 4 minutes and 42 seconds. The 14-inch MacBook Pro completed the task in 4 minutes and 27 seconds.

We use the Xcode benchmark to simulate compiling a large codebase with Macs. Our MacBook Pro review unit with M4 Pro accomplished the task in 92 seconds, just 7 seconds behind the M3 Max we tested in last year's 16-inch MacBook Pro. The Mac Studio with the M2 Max remained the fastest of all Macs we've tested, finishing in 58 seconds.

Cinebench 2024 estimates that the M4 Pro has a single-core clock of 4.5 GHz and a multi-core benchmark of 3.5 GHz. During our stress test, we ran the benchmark 10 times back-to-back and recorded scores and average CPU temperature. The 16-inch MacBook Pro was highly consistent, starting the stress test at 1,747 and finishing the test at 1,755. The score consistently hovered between those two endpoints with little variation.

We use TG Pro to measure the CPU temperature on Macs, but the current version (2.92) doesn’t fully identify the M4 Pro and its internal sensors. As a result, I could only obtain one consistent reading of 82 degrees Celsius from the CPU.

Gaming and Graphics on the MacBook Pro (Late 2024)

This M4 Pro isn’t the most performant member of the M4 family — that distinction lies with the M4 Max, for now. With that said, the processor features a 20-core GPU which should be adept at handling your creative needs or gaming, should you decide to use the MacBook Pro for that purpose.

While Macs aren’t exactly known as gaming powerhouses, I tried the system out with Resident Evil Village, which just so happens to be a game native to Apple Silicon and leverages the Metal 3 API. The GPU is overkill for this game, as I was locked in at 60 fps at 3,456 x 2,234 resolution with the Max graphics preset and MetalFX upscaling set to Quality. The 60 fps figure was measured by enabling the FPS HUD overlay using the macOS Terminal.

When you start a game in full-screen mode with macOS Sequoia, Game Mode is automatically enabled. Game Mode automatically gives your game priority access to the CPU and GPU for optimum performance. It also doubles the Bluetooth sampling rate to lower latency with connected peripherals (i.e., Bluetooth mouse, keyboard, Xbox/PlayStation controllers, and headsets).

Display on the MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro)

The 16-inch display on our MacBook Pro review unit is the largest available in Apple’s laptop family. It’s an IPS display with a 3,456 x 2,234 resolution and a maximum 120 Hz refresh rate. While all previous MacBook Pros have a mandatory glossy display, the new M4-equipped MacBook Pros are available with the Nano-texture option (our review unit is equipped with the option).

This isn’t a coating or film applied to the glass. Instead, the actual glass is etched with the Nano-texture, meaning it won’t wear off and is highly durable. The $150 option mostly eliminates reflections from overhead lights or windows, allowing for a more enjoyable viewing experience. It’s impossible to dismiss all reflections, but the Nano-texture option was just as good if not better than the matte options available on comparable Windows laptops.

The difference between the previous glossy display and the new Nano-texture option was readily apparent with my personal 14-inch MacBook Pro (M3 Pro) side-by-side with this review unit. While my MacBook Pro seemed to catch every stray reflection in my office and downstairs living room, the 16-inch MacBook Pro with Nano-texture fended off the reflections with aplomb.

Even better, the Nano-texture resulted in no serious degradation in picture quality. My eyes could perceive a slight dip in vibrancy compared to the glossy display, but it is still a brilliant display. We could exceed 1,500 nits in HDR mode (Apple claims a maximum of 1,600 nits).

Our instrumented tests showed a maximum brightness of 565 nits in SDR mode. Colors tests showed 81.4 percent coverage of DCI-P3 and 115 percent coverage of sRGB. All three numbers were within a percentage point of last year’s 16-inch MacBook Pro (M3 Max) with its glossy display. While the MacBook Pro easily eclipsed the 371 nits maximum of the XPS 15, it was no match for that laptop’s OLED panel in color performance.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro)

Apple’s familiar keyboard is back on this laptop. If you’re a fan of Apple keyboards, there’s nothing new to report on this front. The keyboard is still backlit, the keys are still responsive, and they actuate with a satisfying click. Finally, there’s a Touch ID biometric sensor integrated into the power button. Touch ID can be used to log in to your laptop, apps and websites or authenticate Apple Pay purchases (among other uses).

Keyhero.com is my go-to for typing tests online, and I managed 89 words per minute (wpm) with 94.68 percent accuracy. My results on last year’s model were 90 wpm and 95.67 percent accuracy.

As always, there’s a gigantic trackpad below the keyboard, one of the largest in the segment. It measures 6.3 x 3.9 inches and features haptic feedback to simulate a physical “click.” I’m used to the smaller touchpad on my 14-inch MacBook Pro, so moving up to the 16-inch counterpart opens an even greater area of freedom for my thumb to mouse around.

Audio on the MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro)

Apple hasn’t upgraded the audio subsystem on the new MacBook Pro, which shouldn’t be a problem for most people. The speakers on the MacBook Pro have always been excellent, and the six onboard speakers have no trouble belting out distortion-free audio at high volume levels.

For some tunes, I went back nearly 40 years to the 80s ballad, “Glory of Love”, by Peter Cetera. I’ve loved this song since I first heard it in The Karate Kid Part II. All I can say is that Apple knows how to tune its speakers because there was adequate bass from the drum beats, and the vocals were crisp, clear, and vibrant. The keyboard intro and electric guitar riffs near the end of the song sounded magnificent, even with the volume cranked up to around 90%.

Apple says the MacBook Pro supports Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, and Dolby Atmos. Apple’s Spatial Audio format is also supported for use in its family of AirPods wireless headphones. In addition, the 3.5 mm headphone jack includes support for high-impedance headphones.

Upgradeability on the MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro)

It should come as no surprise that the MacBook Pro is not upgradeable by any means by the end-user. What you see is what you get regarding the processor, memory, and storage, which is a bummer for those used to even limited upgrades on the Windows PC laptop side of things.

The system memory is on-package with the CPU and GPU, making upgrades impossible. Likewise, the NAND for the SSD is soldered onto the motherboard, marking another roadblock for upgrades. The MacBook Pro comes with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 onboard, but you can’t replace the modules if you wish to upgrade to Wi-Fi 7 in the future (like you can with PC laptops).

If you have a component that fails on your MacBook Pro, you can access the inside by removing eight pentalobe screws. However, we highly suggest you consult Apple’s official repair manual if you decide to go that route. Most people will probably opt for the Genius Bar.

Battery Life on the MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro)

MacBooks have always been battery life champs; our review unit is no exception. Our battery life test suite consists of browsing the web, running OpenGL tests, and streaming video connected to Wi-Fi with the screen brightness set to 150 nits. Under this scenario, the MacBook Pro lasted 21 hours and 1 minute, which is a fantastic result for a laptop this powerful. For reference, last year’s 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 Max lasted 18 hours and 5 minutes under the same test conditions.

The MacBook Pro uses a 100 WHr battery, which is replenished using a 140W USB-C power adapter with a MagSafe 3 connection on the laptop side.

Heat on the MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro)

Heat tests on the MacBook Pro were performed while the laptop was running the Cinebench 2024 stress test. This workout was enough to get the CPU nice and hot, and it also caused the dual internal fans to audibly spin up (3,500 rpm).

The keyboard reached 36.7 degrees Celsius (98.06 degrees Fahrenheit) between the G and H keys, and the trackpad measured a cool 26.1 C (78.98 F). While the aluminum chassis noticeably warmed during the stress test, it was not uncomfortably hot.

The hottest point on the MacBook Pro was at the bottom rear near the hinge, which hit 37.2 C (98.96 F).

Webcam on the MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro)

The MacBook Pro comes standard with a new 12MP Center Stage camera, which can automatically keep you centered in the frame, even as you move your body within a given space. However, the MacBook Pro’s webcam sits within a notch cut out from the top of the display. This takes away from your viewable display area and is a bit of an eyesore to some people. As someone who uses an iPhone and a 14-inch MacBook Pro with a notch daily, I’ve gotten used to the design quirk.

From a performance standpoint, it’s hard to find fault with the MacBook Pro’s webcam. The colors looked natural, with no overly saturated colors or inaccurate hues. Instead, I was presented with realistic-looking imagery in adequate and inadequate lighting conditions. My skin tones were accurately reproduced, and fine details (facial hair, moles) were clearly visible.

The new Center Stage camera also supports Desk View, which allows you to display an overhead view of your desk. This feature was previously only available on Macs using a supported iPhone.

macOS Sequoia and Software

The MacBook Pro comes preloaded with macOS Sequoia 15.1, which is the latest version of Apple’s consumer operating system. macOS Sequoia marks the debut of Apple Intelligence, which the company claims “helps you simplify and accelerate tasks big and small.” Siri is Apple’s long-serving and oft-maligned personal assistant, and Apple Intelligence in macOS Sequoia 15.1 allows it to have a better understanding of the questions you ask and uses personal context to obtain more relevant results. This also means that you will receive fewer “Here’s what I found on the web” responses from Siri when it gets confused.

One of the most useful new features I use often is the expansion of Continuity to allow direct access to your iPhone from your Mac. With iPhone Mirroring, you get a direct representation of your iPhone that you can control within macOS. What you would typically see on your iPhone screen displays on your Mac, and you can answer emails, check your Facebook feed, or interact with apps that aren’t available on your Mac. Using iPhone Mirroring, you can even drag and drop files between your Mac and iPhone.

Given that Apple controls its entire stack, you won’t find third-party bloatware on new Macs. Instead, you’ll get a whole suite of Apple apps, including Safari, Maps, FaceTime, Notes, GarageBand, Apple TV, and Apple Music (among others). Apple’s longstanding productivity suite is still alive and well, with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote being analogous to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

MacBook Pro (16-inch, M4 Pro) Configurations and Warranty

The base 16-inch MacBook Pro is priced at $2,499 and comes with a 14-core M4 Pro CPU, 20-core GPU, 24GB of unified memory, and a 512GB SSD. The next step up on the preconfigured ladder is the same configuration with 48GB of unified memory for $2,899. Stepping up to a 14-core M4 Max CPU, 32-core GPU, 36GB of unified memory, and a 1TB SSD takes the price to $3,499.

Our review unit is configured with a 14-core M4 Pro CPU, 20-core GPU, 48GB of unified memory, and the Nano-texture option for the display. That takes the total price for the configuration to $3,649. Upgrading from 48GB of memory to 64GB costs $200, while moving from 48GB to 128GB is $1,000. Likewise, SSD pricing is heart-attack-inducing, with a 2TB upgrade ringing in at $600. If you want 8TB of storage, that’s a $2,400 option.

If cost is no object, you can option the MacBook Pro with 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 128GB of unified memory, 8TB SSD, and the Nano-texture option for $7,349. That’s a princely sum for a laptop, but that’s the downside of not being able to add your own memory or SSD after the initial purchase.

Apple’s MacBook Pros come with a one-year warranty. You can opt for AppleCare Plus, which extends your warranty coverage for up to three years for an additional $399.

Bottom Line

Apple hasn’t rocked the boat with its latest MacBook Pro revamp. The chassis remains the same, which isn’t really an issue because Apple addressed most customer complaints with the current chassis design. You get three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI 2.1 connectivity, and an integrated SDXC slot for photographers. The speakers remain best in class, the MagSafe 3 connector is a novelty with benefits in the real world, and the keyboard and trackpad are still a joy to use.

This year’s update brings considerable performance improvements thanks to the M4 Pro processor. In our productivity benchmarks, it was comparable in performance to last year’s range-topping M3 Max processor. We have yet to test a MacBook Pro with an M4 Max chip, but we imagine it will be a multitasking monster. For those who are annoyed by glossy displays, the $150 Nano-texture option is a worthy upgrade to consider when configuring your system.

However, the usual caveats of MacBook Pro ownership remain, namely the high price of entry and the lack of user-upgradeable components. The second point is exacerbated by the high price of memory and SSD upgrades at the time of purchase. It’s also disappointing that there’s no Wi-Fi 7 here, even though it’s available on the iPhone 16 family of smartphones.

But for people firmly planted in the ecosystem, you know and accept the caveats, so this isn’t news. And it doesn’t distract from the fact that the 16-inch MacBook Pro is one of the best premium laptops on the market. If you already have an M3 Pro or M3 Max-based MacBook Pro, upgrading to the new M4 versions probably won’t make much sense. However, if you’re rocking an M1-based system or an even older Intel-based MacBook Pro, now’s the time to look at what these new models have to offer.

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The current MacBook Pro design is a few years old, but Apple isn't done pushing it. Along with a refresh to the M4 system on a chip, Apple has made a bunch of small changes to the base MacBook Pro ($1,599 to start, $1,949 as tested), that make one of the best ultrabooks better than ever.

I fell in love with the nano-texture display, an optional matte display upgrade that looks incredible when you use it in an office or in sunlight.

A bump to 16GB of base RAM (the M3 models started at 8GB) was long necessary, but now makes the Pro feel like a better value (at least, if you disregard the extremely expensive upgrade prices otherwise). An extra Thunderbolt 4 port on the left side adds parity to the M4 Pro chassis. And a bump to a 12MP webcam with Desk View, and there's plenty of new tricks for the entry MacBook Pro.

Design of the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M4)

If you've gotten used to the MacBook Pro over the last few years, with rounded corners, a boxy base, and Apple's minimalist design, the M4 model won't surprise you. The big difference this year is that you can get the 14-inch base model in Apple's space black color.

I quite like the black, but I have simple tastes. It's definitely nicer than the space gray Pro that I carry around as one of my personal devices.

There is one major functional difference between this year’s model and last year’s: An extra Thunderbolt 4 port on the right side, between the full-size SD card reader and the HDMI port. The left side still features the same two Thunderbolt ports, MagSafe, and 3.5 mm headphone jack. 

The extra USB-C/Thunderbolt port puts the base MacBook Pro on par with the M4 Pro-based version, which already had three of them, though this year, that's bumped up to Thunderbolt 5. The fact that the extra port is on the right side means you can charge this laptop from either side, which is a nice bonus, though MagSafe hasn't moved.

The display is still interrupted by a notch for the webcam. While I thought I would get past the oddity of it after all these years of Apple using it, I still find it mildly annoying. Still, it's not actually getting rid of any functional screen space, and I know many people who aren't bothered at all.

At 12.31 x 8.71 x 0.61 inches and 3.4 pounds, the Pro is just slightly heavier than the  3.3-pound 15-inch MacBook Air, which is 0.45 inches thick.

MacBook Pro (14-inch, M4) Specifications 

Productivity Performance on the MacBook Pro (14-inch M4)

The 14-inch MacBook Pro is the first laptop we're testing with Apple's M4 chip. M4 actually debuted on the iPad Pro earlier this year, but it's finally made its way to the Mac. It's a 10-core CPU with four performance cores and six efficiency cores, as well as a 10-core GPU and 16-core neural engine (or, as you may hear others say it, NPU). We also tested the laptop with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD storage.

M4 showed strong performance on benchmarks, easily competing with the Dell XPS 13 (Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100), Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition (Intel Core Ultra 256V) and Apple's own M3 in the 15-inch MacBook Air.

On Geekbench, the new Mac achieved a single-core score of 3,807 and a multi-core score of 15,114. For single-core performance, the next best competitor was Apple's own M3 processor (3,093 points), and that was without air cooling.

In multi-core, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite put up a strong second-place showing of 14,635, and that has two more cores than M4. Intel's Lunar Lake was last in both tests.

On our file transfer tests, the MacBook Pro copied roughly 25GB of files at a rate of 1,167.29 MBps, matching the M3 MacBook Air. Here, both the Yoga and XPS were faster.

The MacBook Pro took the crown in Handbrake, which we used to transcode a 4K video to 1080p. It took 4 minutes and 27 seconds, which is 20 seconds faster than the Snapdragon-based XPS. In comparison, Lunar Lake seemed slow, coming in closer to last year's M3 without air.

On Macs, we run the Xcode benchmark to simulate compiling a large codebase. The MacBook Pro with M4 completed the test in 141 seconds. That's a 6.2% improvement over the M3 in the 15-inch Air (150 seconds), but the Pro and Max chips, even from previous generations, completed the task faster with more cores.

We stress test laptops by running Cinebench 2024 over 10 runs, which usually takes a couple of hours. Results were fairly consistent; the highest run earned 1,001 points (run 2), but the system quickly settled into scores between 988 and 992. While we use TG Pro to log Mac temperatures (Apple doesn't reveal core speeds), it appears it wasn't ready for M4. It did, however, log overall system temperature, which reached 50.33 Celsius internally with an average across the power supply, power management dies, battery, and other components.

While many people don't see the Mac as a gaming machine, there's no doubt that M4 has some gaming chops. The 10-core GPU let me explore in No Man's Sky at 2560 x 1600 on the ultra preset between 60 and 70 fps.

An increasing number of games, like Control: Ultimate Edition, Death Stranding: Director's Cut, Baldur's Gate 3, the Resident Evil 4 remake, and more have been coming to Mac, running natively using Metal, but not at the same rate as these games come to Windows PCs. Next year, Cyberpunk 2077 is coming to the Mac (including Path Tracing!) which should be a big test of the Mac's prowess, even if the game is several years old at this point.

macOS Sequoia and Apple Intelligence

The M4 MacBook Pro ships with macOS Sequoia, which launched in October. In general, macOS doesn't contain much bloat. There are preinstalled apps including Safari, Mail, Messages, Weather, Notes, Maps, and FaceTime, as well as basic productivity software in Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. There's also Apple's subscription services, including Podcasts, Apple Music, Apple News, and Apple TV, which way too many people sleep on.

Apple still includes Rosetta 2, its translator for code designed for older Macs with Intel CPUs, though at this point I'm hard-pressed to find something that requires it. Most of the apps that I use have moved over to native Arm versions or are using universal binaries. Valve's Steam launcher, which some Mac gamers may use, is still using Rosetta, though the games that work are optimized for Apple Silicon.

macOS Sequoia is filled with a bunch of great features. I'm a fan of iPhone Mirroring, which lets you use most of the features on your iPhone without needing to pick up the device, as well as the ability to get my iPhone notifications in macOS. The new Window tiling is nice, though there's still some changes to be made to catch up to Windows there. There are also updates to Messages, including text formatting and emoji tapbacks, as well as new math logic implemented throughout, from Calculator to Notes.

But the big change that Apple is pushing is Apple Intelligence, which made its debut on the Mac with macOS Sequoia 15.1, days before this MacBook Pro was announced. But Sequoia only brings a few of the promised AI features, so it's a small start. My favorite changes so far are to Siri. Being able to hit Command twice to  launch the assistant and type my queries is sometimes more appropriate than speaking, especially on a laptop, and I found myself using it more often. The fact that Siri can now tell me about my Mac and has access to user guides is also a helpful addition.

I also like notification summaries, which can put multiple emails, texts, or even news headlines into one simple notification to read. In general, it works well, though it does occasionally make mistakes, including about who said what in emails.

Clean Up in photos lets you erase background distractions. This makes it easier than ever to do, but Apple is catching up to Google and Adobe here.

Apple's Writing Tools let you proofread, summarize, or re-write text in different tones. As someone who writes for a living, I find this all kind of impersonal, though I could see the summarization option can be useful for very long emails. Still, the AI can miss things, so you'll ultimately want to read that email.

But most of the most hyped Apple Intelligence tools aren't here yet, with more coming in macOS 15.2 and 15.3. MacOS 15.2 is expected to bring ChatGPT integration to Siri and the writing tools, while Image Playground will let you create images of yourself in a cartoon style. Even later, we may see further upgrades to Siri that can answer questions based on your email and calendar, what's on screen, and take actions for you in apps. But none of these features are here just yet (though some are available in developer betas). That means that as of this writing, Apple Intelligence is a pretty minor set of features.

While Apple is pushing Apple Intelligence on its lineup of M4 Macs (so much so that they're all starting with 16GB of base RAM now. About time!), you can use these features on any Mac with an M-series chip.

Display on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M4)

I'll get to all of the specs on Apple's 14.2-inch display. But what really got me on the unit Apple loaned us is the nano-texture screen. This won't be in any of the preconfigured versions (the ones most people will buy at Apple Stores, Best Buy, or Amazon), so if you want it, you'll have to order from Apple.

While the $150 upcharge for the nano-texture display is a lot of money, I really enjoyed it. My desk is right next to a window. Any laptop I use — as well as my desktop monitor, are prone to some glare, and I end up constantly adjusting the window shade. But the nano-texture display, which reduces glare and reflections, eliminated that problem. (At least, on the MacBook Pro. It couldn't help my ageing 4K monitor). It's a simple change, but it was kind of a game changer for me. If you use your Mac outside, you should absolutely consider it.

The 14.2-inch screen has a "Liquid Retina" resolution of  3024 x 1964 with a refresh rate that goes up to 120 Hz with ProMotion. The Mini-LED backlighting isn't quite OLED, but it looks pretty great.  It also comes with TrueTone enabled, which adjusts the image on your screen to the ambient lighting. I generally use it, except for photo editing when I want colors to be exact. 

When I watched the trailer for Ryan Coogler's upcoming vampire thriller, Sinners, I appreciated the deep blacks, especially when contrasted with fiery lanterns lighting some of the characters' faces.

The 14-inch Mac was the brightest of the test pool at 556.6 nits, easily surpassing the Yoga Slim 7i, XPS 13, and the LED-lit MacBook Air. Apple's display covered 80.2% of the DCI-P3 gamut and 113.3 % of the sRGB color space.

Lenovo rought the most colorful screen with the Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition, covering 108.5% of the DCI-P3 space and 153.2% sRGB. In my eyes, the brightness helps balance things out, but Lenovo brought the more vivid screen on paper. The Dell XPS 13's 1920 x 1080 LCD screen was great for battery life (see Battery Life, below) but nowhere near as bright or vivid as what the MacBook Pro or Yoga brought to the table. 

Apple includes a polishing cloth with the nano-texture laptop screens. It's been awhile since every Mac came with one, and I wish Apple would expand this. This screen can get smudgy if you touch it, so it's nice to have one in the box.

Keyboard and Touchpad on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M4) 

Apple's Mac keyboards continue to be reliable and comfortable. The layout, including full-sized function keys and arrow keys in an inverted T, works great. I particularly appreciate the full set of media keys on the function row, though I don't think I need a shortcut just for Focus modes. 

While some Windows competitors beat the Mac on key travel, I don't have any complaints on comfort. The Mac's only biometric login option, Touch ID, is built into the power button. (There's a whole notch, I'm waiting for Face ID to hit the Mac already).

On the Monkeytype typing test, I reached 124 words per minute and 98% accuracy. I rarely do better than that.

The haptic touchpads on Macs are still some of my favorites you can find on a laptop. It's a good size (though frankly, Apple does have a little extra room on the sides), the feedback feels natural, and the gestures always just work. I still tend to turn off the "natural" scroll direction, though I did give it the old college try out of the box with the MacBook Pro despite my preferences and eventually got used to it. I still won't say it's better.

Audio on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M4)

The six-speaker sound system on the 14-inch MacBook Pro continues to be one of the best in the industry (bested only, in my experience, by the 16-inch MacBook Pro). If you want to jam without headphones, these speakers do a tremendous job.

Case in point: the sounds of Mike Shinoda and K.Flay's "Make It Up As I Go" filled my apartment before I came close to maxing out the volume. When I did, there was almost no distortion. The raps and vocal verses were crisp and clear, as were the synths, guitars, snappy drums, and even some deep bass — the latter of which is exceedingly rare on 14-inch machines. The speakers also support Apple's spatial audio or dolby vision.

Upgradeability of the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M4) 

There's not much for the average person to fix or upgrade on the MacBook Pro. Eight pentalobe screws hold the bottom of the case on, but once you get in there, your options are minimal.

Like previous M-series chips, Apple's M4 is a system on a chip, which includes the memory. In addition, the storage is soldered to the board, rather than using M.2 slots like most of the competition. So you'll have to be judicious with your component choices when you order a MacBook Pro, because you'll be set with them until your next upgrade.

Most people with MacBook Pro repair needs will end up at the Genius Bar at one of Apple's many stores. For experts willing to rent a bunch of tools from Apple, these laptops will probably hit Self Service Repair soon.

Battery Life on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M4)

Ever since Apple transitioned to Arm-based Apple Silicon, it's been pumping out laptops with long battery life. That hasn't changed here, with the 14-inch MacBook Pro running for 18 hours and 31 minutes on our battery test, which browses the web, runs OpenGL tests, and stream video at 150 nits of brightness.

But while Apple's battery life was once class-leading, another company has become just as competitive when it comes to longevity. Specifically, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X chips are extremely competitive here. In fact, the Dell XPS 13 (9345) with the Snapdragon X Elite lasted longer (19:31), though with the caveat that it had a dimmer, lower-resolution display.

Intel hasn't entirely caught up here. The Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition, with an Intel Core 7 Ultra 256V ran for 14:08. That's not bad for x86, but not exactly Arm numbers.

Heat on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M4) 

During our Cinebench stress test, the MacBook Pro got warm, but not unusable. The fans kicked into high gear, and were plenty audible at the peak of the test.

The center of the keyboard actually proved to be the hottest touchpoint at 101.8 degrees Fahrenheit. It wasn't unusable, but it's toasty. The touchpad was a far cooler 86.5 F. The hottest point on the bottom of the system measured 99.6 F. That was towards the back of the unit, an inch or so from the vent.

 Webcam on the MacBook Pro (14-inch, M4) 

Apple has bumped its webcam from 1080p to 12MP with its latest Pros. No longer dubbed "FaceTime," Apple is now calling it a Center Stage camera, named after the feature that will focus on your face even as you move around.

In video calls, I looked pretty decent. Partially due to the window pouring natural light onto my desk. In that lighting, the webcam caught the bags under my eyes, the gray hairs creeping onto the side of my head, and the colors of all of the little trinkets on my bookshelf. With the windows behind me, my skin appeared a bit red and my blue eyes were less intense, but blown out windows will do that to most webcams.

This is the first time Apple has built its Desk View functionality directly into the Mac; you no longer need an iPhone for it. When you first launch Desk View, there's a nice tutorial that explains how to adjust the hinge and move your Mac to get optimal positioning, but the slice of your desk isn't very wide. In my testing, I found that the distortion of certain objects, including the function keys on my keyboard and even my fingers, was distracting.

MacBook Pro (14-inch, M4) Configurations 

The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 starts at $1,599 with a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Our review unit was one step up from that, with a 1TB SSD. That's $1,799, but since our system also came with the nano texture display (a $150 upgrade), it came out to $1,949.

As usual, Apple's upgrade prices for RAM and storage are hefty, if not downright egregious. But since these are all soldered, you have to buy what you'll need at the start, since there aren't any upgrades. Jumping up between 16GB and 24GB of RAM costs $200. Moving from 24GB to 32GB is another $200. For storage, moving from 512GB to 1TB is $200. The jump up to 2TB is $600. 

Apple also has versions of the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M4 Pro (and, instead of Thunderbolt 4, you get the newer, faster Thunderbolt 5). Those start at $1,999.

Apple sells the MacBook Pro with a one-year warranty. AppleCare Plus can be added for $99.99 per year or $279 for a three-year period, which also includes accidental damage protection for additional fees.

Bottom Line

The M4 MacBook Pro is a powerful, attractive, luxurious laptop. Apple's latest chip is strong, fast, and efficient with excellent battery life (though Qualcomm is very competitive on that front) and strong performance.

At this point in Apple Silicon's lifespan, that may be table stakes. But by beefing up the base RAM to 16GB (as it should've been, even on the base level Pro), adding an additional Thunderbolt port to the non-Pro versions, it also feels like you're getting a more valuable laptop. And if you pay for the nano-texture display, you'll get a beautiful matte screen that is great for working both at your desk or on the go.

If you're updating for Apple Intelligence, you may want to hold off. Some of the features are fun and useful, but many of the most interesting ideas haven't been released yet. And at the moment, those will work on any M-series chip. 

Once you get over the sticker shock of the RAM and SSD pricing, you're left with a strong workhorse that can compete with Windows — both in Arm or x86 — and more than ever feels like it can be your everything machine. 

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Apple's MacBook Pro lineup is getting a refresh with its latest M4 processors. Updates to the entry-level 14-inch laptop, along with the standard 14-inch and 16-inch machines, include the entire M4 lineup (so far), from M4 on the low end to M4 Pro and M4 Max on the top machines.

The M4 Pro and M4 Max laptops will be Apple's first with Thunderbolt 5, while each of the model are getting 12MP Center Stage Cameras. In some configurations (including a 16-inch M4 Pro and a 14-inch M4), Apple claims it reached 24 hours of battery life — quite literally all day. The 14-inch system with M4 now starts at 16GB of RAM standard, like the iMac and Mac Mini. This will allow for higher performance with Apple Intelligence, which launched earlier this week with macOS Sequoia 15.1.

The new models have optional nano-texture displays, similar to the iMac, that cost an extra $150. The display is set to get quite bright, showing SDR content at up to 1,000 nits and HDR at up to 1,600 nits of brightness. The Center Stage cameras keep you centered if you move around while on video calls. It also works with Apple's Desk View.

The laptops come on the heels of a refreshed iMac and a redesigned Mac Mini, bringing the M4 series to the Mac for the first time (it launched earlier in the iPad Pro).

The 14-inch MacBook Pro with M4 starts at $1,599 with a 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage. It has Thunderbolt 4 ports, rather than the Thunderbolt 5 ports in the M4 Pro and Max options. Bumping up to 24GB and 32GB of RAM costs an extra $200, while moving up to 1TB is $200 and 2TB is a very hefty $600.

The M4 Pro 14-incher starts at $1,999 with a 12-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 25GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, but can be boosted to a 14-core CPU, 20-core GPU, and 1TB of storage for $2,399. M4 Max options start at $3,199, including a 14-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 36GB of RAM and 1TB SSD for $3,199.

The 16-inch laptop starts with an M4 Pro (14-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 24GB RAM, 512GB SSD) for $2,499 and goes up to the top-end M4 Max (16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 48GB of RAM, 1TB SSD) for $3,999.

All of these laptops are available for pre-order now and will ship on November 8.

MacBook Airs get more starting RAM

While the M2 and M3 MacBook Air aren't seeing an upgrade to M4 just yet, Apple is boosting the base memory to 16GB. Starting prices aren't changing, with the M2 unit beginning at $999.

Just a few years ago, the idea of gaming on a Mac was a joke among the enthusiast PC community. But I'll give Apple this — it's clearly putting in the work. And while it definitely can't compete with Windows PCs or consoles on its library just yet, Apple does have one trick up its sleeve that I think, in time, may be able to draw a certain type of person to gaming on its platforms: the ecosystem.

At a small showcase, Apple showed me what a few years ago would have been unthinkable: a series of Macs running recent releases and previews of upcoming games, natively on Apple Silicon. It's a huge step that games like Assassin's Creed: Shadows and Frostpunk 2 are set to come day and date with PC, Xbox, and PlayStation releases. (Frostpunk 2 was on display. Assassin's Creed: Shadows was not.) And that's not all — the iPad and iPhone were also playing intensive games, thanks to Apple's shared chip architectures.

The company is catching up on some recent releases, like Palworld, which is set to release later this year. But toss in new developer tools and the idea that your games could carry over to other Apple devices, and that's where things get interesting.

Game Porting Toolkit 2

Announced at WWDC, this year's update to the Game Porting Toolkit should further help to streamline Apple Silicon Mac development for games already designed for the PC, and also, crucially, bring Mac games to the iPhone and iPad. 

The new version of the Toolkit includes AVX2 support, ray tracing, and improved performance. There are also new human interface guidelines, and new debugging tools for shaders in Xcode to help convert them to Metal (and unified shaders that should work once across the Mac, iPhone and iPad).

Apple showed off Control: Ultimate Edition running through the Game Porting Toolkit. The game is coming natively to Mac later this year, five years after the game's initial launch. A bit late, but it's a great game! 

Using the Windows version of Steam and the DirectX 12 version of the game, a MacBook Pro with an M3 Max played the title at 46 - 50 frames per second on high-quality settings and high ray tracing with a resolution of 1728 x 1117. I picked up the DualSense controller Apple had in front of the Mac and took on some Hiss guards as Jesse Faden, and it felt largely ready to go. If this is what convinced Remedy to port the game over, I can kind of see why it happened. With the M3 series and M4 chips supporting ray tracing tech, the game looks great.

The Unified Gaming Platform

Where Apple may have an advantage is where it typically excels: in its ecosystem. If games are released for the Mac, but then you can play them on your iPad or iPhone, it could open up gaming to tons of people who wouldn't have done so previously — and make it easier for enthusiast Mac gamers to play anywhere.

Playing anywhere has been a bit of a white whale for gaming companies lately. Think of cloud services like Game Pass from Microsoft or GeForce Now from Nvidia. The idea was you'd stream games to play them anywhere.

Apple's vision strikes me as a slightly more traditional version of the idea. Never mind streaming, but how about running the game locally on each device? Apple showed Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, which launched on Apple's products in July, running across the latest iPhone 15 Pro, iPad Pro with M4, and Macs . This particular game supports Apple's Universal Purchase functionality, so if you buy once, you get it across your Apple ecosystem. And the game uses iCloud to sync save data, so you can pick up where you left off on other devices.

Assassin's Creed Mirage has similar tricks, but only across the iPhone and iPad (and it looks excellent on the M4 iPad Pro's tandem OLED display, by the way). Rather than using iCloud, it uses Ubisoft Connect for syncing.

Apple needs to beef up its gaming library

As much as I liked seeing more games run well, particularly on the Mac, it still needs a lot more games to make it the main place for anyone to play. Ubisoft and Capcom are great partners — big studios with games people want to play. But the gaming PC is popular because it supports just about every major game outside of some console exclusives, and has a backlog going back decades. 

Apple needs to start somewhere. In my view, that's primarily with future games. I don't know how many people didn't play Death Stranding or Control a few years ago that will only play them because they're on the Mac. I think recent games like Palworld and upcoming games like Frostpunk 2 are better bets — get people when the games are new.

That also means it will take a significant amount of time for Apple to get its gaming efforts anywhere near mainstream. I hope the company is ready to continue this investment in chips, developer relations, and technologies. To get gamers and studios entirely on board will take a lot work. It will take years to see if this can be a true success. (Apple also needs to ensure it doesn't alienate game developers and publishers, like Epic Games, which means one of the biggest games in the world doesn't run natively on its flagship platform).

But sitting in that room, playing some Resident Evil on a MacBook Pro, Assassin's Creed on an iPad, Palworld on a Mac, and Control through x86 emulation tech makes me believe Apple is taking gaming seriously this time. It may never release a gaming laptop — instead, the idea is any Mac (with Apple Silicon, of course) can be a gaming machine. So can any iPad, any iPhone. It's a bold claim that will take continued successes to convince the often-skeptical PC gaming community. 

Quality of life improvements, as long as you're in the ecosystem

Apple's other gaming-focused projects are less shiny. Game Mode, which launched on the Mac last year, is coming to the iPhone and iPad this year with iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, minimizing background activity and reducing latency for audio and controllers. MacOS Sequoia will have a new version that reduces background processes even further. 

The Mac App Store will  require far less storage space to begin an installation update when macOS Sequoia launches later this year. Future updates will also let Mac owners install games to separate disks from the Mac App Store, which is helpful given the ballooning size of games.

And spatial audio is making its way to games in the new Mac and mobile operating systems, reducing latency and ensuring better audio while you're in game chat. Of course, that requires the second-generation AirPods Pro.

Stereotypically, the PC gaming community doesn't like lock-in. But the Apple community is known for loving when things work in an integrated fashion. 

The work has started, and it's impressive. Apple still has a long way to go. But hopefully, one day, there's a future where PC gamers, Mac gamers, and console gamers are all cross-playing with each other. Wouldn't it be beautiful?

Microsoft recently set the standard for modern laptops when it launched its Microsoft Copilot+ PCs. Aside from the 40 TOPS minimum of AI compute performance, the company said that these machines also need a minimum default 16GB RAM. Thus, manufacturers that want to get on the AI bandwagon are now putting 16GB as the minimum RAM for their laptops.

This drive is pushing up the average RAM capacity in laptops in the market. According to market research firm TrendForce, laptops will have an average of 11.8GB RAM in 2024, compared to 10.5GB last year. Although the growth may seem small at just 1.3GB, this is a 12% increase in memory capacity. Furthermore, the firm estimates that AI PCs, with its 16GB minimum requirement, will grow to 20.4% this year, further pushing the average laptop RAM capacity to 12.6GB next year.

However, this growth is held back to some degree by Apple’s stubbornness. Most of its entry-level offerings, including the M3 MacBook Pro and Mac Mini still start with 8GB RAM, and upgrading models to 16GB will set you back by $200 — more than double the price of individual RAM sticks you can find on Amazon. Unfortunately, since RAM is baked in on Apple-silicon chips, you have no way of upgrading your laptop down the line or even buying from a third-party source to double your MacBook’s RAM at the onset.

Apple claims that the M3 MacBook Pro’s 8GB RAM is equal to 16GB on PCs. While it’s true that macOS is much more optimized for its hardware than Windows will ever be, benchmarks have shown that 8GB of RAM seriously limits the MacBook Pro’s performance. Furthermore, we must remember that Apple uses unified memory, meaning the CPU, GPU, and NPU all share from the same pool of RAM, unlike Windows laptops with discrete GPUs that have separate RAM and VRAM.

We’ve been saying since 2022 that you shouldn’t buy a PC with just 8GB of RAM, unless you plan to upgrade it immediately. Even May’s Steam Survey results show that the majority of gamers have 16GB of RAM, but many are already inching toward 32GB. So, if you still have 8GB RAM on your desktop computer, consider upgrading to 16 or 32GB by checking out our best gaming RAM list for 2024.

Aside from greater RAM capacity, demand for higher-efficiency computing is also rising. In line with this, the firm expected LPCAMM2 modules to have greater demand in the coming years. Samsung already released a 128GB DDR5 laptop module last year, and Crucial also made 64GB LPCAMM2 in May 2024. These memory modules are still expensive, though, with the latter price at $330 per piece. However, as adoption rates for these RAM kits increase, we expect their prices to also fall.

These higher RAM trends show that 8GB is no longer enough for modern-day computing, and manufacturers should start using 16GB as the baseline minimum for laptops. Even flagship smartphones like the Samsung S24 Ultra and Google Pixel 8 Pro start with 12GB RAM, so if you don’t want to get frustrated with your laptop for your day-to-day tasks, check how much RAM it’s offering before buying it.

In the mid-90s, the seminal Apple Macintosh PowerBook 500 series arrived, changing the laptop market forever— albeit with fairly cheap plastic and internals that were quickly aged out of modernity by progress. Fortunately for fans of the PowerBook 500 series, and specifically the PowerBook 520C, YouTuber BillyTheKidCENTURION has successfully taken a classic PowerBook 520C shell and completely overhauled the internals with a new iPad display and components from a 2015 MacBook Pro.

As Billy The Kid warns at the beginning of his video detailing the process (embedded below), this was a potentially dangerous project to undertake and could have resulted in death or injury for a less-savvy tech enthusiast. Remember, before taking on any project like this, regardless of threat level, to do your due diligence to protect yourself and your hardware!

Apple PowerBook 520C Original Specs vs Apple Macbook Pro 2015 Specs

As you can see from our comparison table up above (520C specs courtesy of EveryMac), this is an exponential upgrade for the ancient Apple PowerBook 502C. In its time, though, these laptops were truly cutting-edge, debuting the modern trackpad to the PC market and boasting features like optional dual battery support for extra longevity. And in terms of pure usability and ergonomics...that shell and keyboard still look pretty nice, even if they did use cheap plastic.

We recommend watching the full video from Billy The Kid if you want a deeper look at how this project was done. There isn't very much in the way of establishing historical context, but you do get to see it come together and power on— inside and outside of the shell.

An Apple Mac expert has written at Six Colors about an unfathomable issue one of his children faced after trying to download a Steam game to an M2 MacBook Pro with an almost full SSD. You might think the problem would be like water off a duck’s back for Seattle-based technology journalist Glenn Fleishman, but increasingly technical and sophisticated attempts to free up space on the SSD failed. Poking around the Finder, issuing commands in the Terminal, and delving into the Disk Utility all drew blanks. Ultimately, Fleishman resorted to drastic measures – completely wiping the SSD for a fresh start.

The MacBook Pro in the headline was equipped with a 1TB SSD, and was part of a home network with regular Time Machine backups scheduled. Before asking dad to banish the Mac’s disk full alert, their offspring had tried the most obvious thing – emptying the trash to make room on the disk. Fleishman tried that again, and was greeted with the unhelpful message “The operation can’t be completed because the disk is full.”

Expert Mac user unsheathes his sharpest tools

Attempts to use Terminal, the Mac’s powerful command line interface, also fell flat, with the system grumbling about lack of space. Moving to the disk utility hit a brick wall, with the same “No space left on device” error.

Fleishman still had some tricks up his sleeve but, you guessed it, restarting and clearing caches was fruitless, as were subsequent recovery disk shenanigans.

Drastic measures were obviously called for. Erasing the drive and installing various versions of the MacOS was the next step – ‘safe’ in the knowledge that there were a series of Time Machine backups to restore or part restore once everything was back to normal.

However, the version of MacOS on the restored machine was found to have an issue with “the SMB/Samba-based networking mount procedure for Time Machine restores,” wrote Fleishman, and most exasperatingly “no one had found a solution.”

Luckily his offspring didn’t seem to care about many of the old files created, saved, or downloaded. So, they seemed quite happy to start afresh after grabbing a few files salvaged from a Time Machine backup saved on an external 1TB SSD.

“Systemic, cascading failures”

Fleishman’s conclusion is that perhaps he would have tried further recovery techniques, but after already sinking a day of effort into resolving this disk full issue, enough was enough. He hates to think about how less experienced Mac aficionados would cope with “systemic, cascading failures like this,” as do we.

It's no secret that Apple's speedy M3 Macbook Air runs hot, even hitting 114 degrees Celcius, which results in heavy performance throttling. However, YouTuber MaxTech discovered that the Macbook Air's performance problems can be easily remedied with just a couple of modifications (albeit expensive ones). By utilizing a DHCR cooling dock from SVALT in conjunction with thermal pads, MaxTech improved the M3 Macbook Air's performance by nearly 50% in select circumstances and outperformed the more premium (and much cooler) M3 Macbook Pro.

The DHCR cooling dock is a multi-purpose device explicitly designed to hold and cool a Macbook simultaneously. It features a "direct heatsink coupling" that has the laptop vertically. At the same time, the lid is closed and maintains surface contact around the bottom area of the computer where the M3 chip is located. The dock's cooling system functions by cooling the outer chassis, which keeps the M3 chip cool inside.

Max Tech found that the SVALT cooling dock can substantially increase sustained performance. In 3DMark Wildlife, the dock almost doubled the Macbook Air's performance, from 4,198 points in clamshell mode (lid closed) to 7,309 points, just 800 points shy of what the M3 MacBook Air can do in the same benchmark when not heat soaked. It is also roughly 600 points shy of the M3 MacBook Pro.

To get the M3 Macbook Air to Macbook Pro performance, Max Techsed a pair of thermal pads placed in between the M3's internal cooling solution and outer shell to boost performance. With these two modifications working together, Max Tech achieved 8,062 points of sustained performance, beating the MacBook Pro in the same test conditions by roughly 100 points.

Max Tech's discovery demonstrates how different the MacBook Air's cooling solution is from that of the MacBook Pro. Although both laptops share identical specifications, including the same M3 chip, the MacBook Air's fanless-cooling solution results in substantially lower sustained performance.

The good news is that users can modify their M3 Macbook Airs to get around this problem, as Max Tech has demonstrated. Even if you went with just the thermal pads, the M3 MacBook Air gains back most of its sustained performance loss. But SVALT's DHCR cooling dock is convenient if you use your Macbook Air as a desktop replacement — hooked up to one or two monitors. Another plus is that you don't need to modify the Macbook to use it. The only potential problem most people will have is its price, which totals $279.

UPDATE 3/9/2024, 10am PT: VancouverMac.ca has provided us with additional information about its services and Apple PCs storage upgrade capabilities. While the company officially advertises storage upgrades for M1-based Macs only, it says that upgrades for other Apple Silicon-based Macs are identical, but some parts may differ.

Once upon a time, Apple's MacBook used M.2-like SSD modules that could be easily replaced or upgraded. Still, starting from the 2015 MacBook 12 systems, the company began soldering SSD components down to motherboards to make laptops thinner, thus making upgrades virtually impossible. But is it so? A repair shop from Canada offers to upgrade storage on Apple Silicon-based Macs to up to 2TB at a price lower than Apple's.

"Thankfully, due to advanced soldering techniques, it is now possible to upgrade the storage space of the newest MacBooks to their highest configuration, for prices lower than what is originally quoted by Apple at purchase," a statement by VancouverMac.ca reads.

Upgrade complexities

Indeed, a story from April 2021 about a team of engineers who managed to resolder DRAM and NAND flash chips on an M1-based Mac Mini made quite a splash. The engineers from China upgraded the cheapest Mac Mini M1 machine with 8GB of LPDDR4X memory and 256 GB of solid-state storage to a much more decent machine with 16 GB of DRAM and 1 TB of NAND storage. While resoldering may not be a problem for experienced people, Mac upgrades are not simple.

In MacBooks with the T2 chip (2018-2020) and Apple Silicon system-on-chips (M1, M2, M3), the custom firmware of the soldered-down SSD is specific to the configuration of actual NAND chips (or alternative packages). Therefore, these chips cannot be replaced, as firmware modification is required.

Fortunately, according to VancouverMac, the Apple Configurator utility can reprogram the SSD automatically through its restore function on Apple Silicon-based Macs, which makes storage upgrades of these machines a complex but doable task.

The process involves replacing NAND packages with higher-capacity packages supported by Apple (i.e., you need to know which packages Apple supports) and then running Apple Configurator on the machine through another Mac via a USB-C port to reprogram the SSD configuration. The company has even uploaded a video describing the key steps of the upgrade. By contrast, with T2-equipped machines, everything is much more complicated.

SSD upgrade opportunities

Although the official page at VancouverMac says it offers storage upgrades for M1-based MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops, the company can upgrade Apple Silicon-based systems, including those based on M2 and M3-series processors, according to its founder.

The upgrade service can be performed for all of the below listed," said Sam Freeman, the owner of VancouverMac.ca. "The overall process is identical, but the parts used are different. The M1 Pro, M2, and M3 series use smaller chips with more dense connections, making it a bit harder, but it is very doable. I cannot confirm if parts are currently available for the M3 Macs since they are so new, but they will surely be released soon."

Pricing varies. For 2TB of presumably high-performance storage, the company wants $550 CAD/$407USD, which may be a little bit overwhelming considering the external storage options available, but it may be just right when you need high-performance internal storage.

Further upgrades

Given VancouverMac.ca's claimed capabilities, we asked whether the company can upgade storage devices of other Apple devices, such as M1/M2-based iPads, which share hardware with MacBooks. The company does not seem to offer such services for now though.

 "I do not have much experience with iPads/iPhones but based on my knowledge the DFU restore process should do the same thing for iPad which would mean this is possible on the iPads too," Freeman said.

Apple launched its first M3 Macs on Monday. A week has yet to pass, but we see that many of these machines are already on sale at Adorama. Are these truly Black Friday bargains for Adorama VIPs*, as they are billed, or is this a sign of a tepid reaction to Apple’s high MSRPs?

On Monday, Apple held its Scary Fast event, during which it took the wraps of its latest M3 processors and a handful of laptops and desktops featuring these slices of 3nm silicon. Despite this being a Halloween event for Apple, the most frightening thing was the pricing, particularly for those who don’t want to settle for base specs (8 GB RAM in 2023, anyone?).

The following offers are live today for people who have signed up for Adorama’s free VIP loyalty membership:

• 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro M3 512 GB was $1599, VIPs get it for $1399
• 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro M3 Pro 512 GB was $1999, VIPs get it for $1799
• 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro M3 Max 1 TB was $3199, VIPs get it for $2999
• 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro M3 Pro 512 GB was $2499, VIPs get it for $2299
• 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro M3 Max 512 GB was $3499, VIPs get it for $3299
• 24-inch Apple iMac M3 (8 core GPU) 256 GB was $1299, VIPs get it for $1199
• 24-inch Apple iMac M3 (10 core GPU) 512 GB was $1699, VIPs get it for $1599

*Adorama’s special prices, delivering up to $200 off the new M3 Macs, are only unlocked and viewable by VIP-tier customers. Becoming a VIP doesn’t cost anything, though; it is just a simple registration for discount prices like these, plus a way to earn and spend points – a very ordinary loyalty scheme. Sign in to get the VIP prices listed above.

It will be interesting to see if any other large US retailers follow in Adorama’s footsteps by discounting their factory-fresh new M3 Macs. Earlier today, we reported that Mac sales had been hit hard. Sales of Apple’s Mac computers were down a hefty 34% YoY, according to the FY23 earnings call.

One good way to shift more numbers is through keener pricing. However, Apple also has to step back from trotting out entry-level models with low RAM and storage configurations and prohibitive higher-spec prices. Even the most myopic Apple-focused fans will grow aware that similarly priced Windows laptops and desktops now come with at least double the RAM and SSD storage as the shiny new M3 Macs.

According to Apple's FY23 earnings call, sales of Apple's desktop and laptop computers were down 34% year-over-year in Q4 FY2023. Q4 of FY2022 was the most successful quarter for Macs ever, but this represents the fourth consecutive quarter of YoY declines for Macs. Apple remains optimistic about the future of its PCs as its M3-based lineup looks more competitive (and generally more expensive) than the previous-generation M2-powered family.

Sales of Macs and iPhones Disappoint

Sales of Macs totaled $7.614 billion in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023 and $29.357 billion for the whole, year, down nearly 34% and 27% year-over-year, respectively. While the declines look dramatic, fiscal 2022 was a record year for Macs in general as the company sold huge amounts of its high-performance M1 Pro and M1 Max-based MacBook Pro notebooks and Mac Studio desktops. Meanwhile, the company faced major shipments constraints in Q3 FY2022, which is why Q4 FY2022 was the record quarter for Macs ever.  

"In Mac, revenue came in at $7.6 billion, down 34% year-over-year from the prior year's record quarter," said Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, at the earnings call with financial analysts and investors (via SeekingAlpha). "This was due to challenging market conditions, as well as difficult compares against the supply disruptions and subsequent demand recapture we experienced a year ago." 

While comparison with Q4 FY2022 may be a bit off, there is another reason why sales of Macs decline: owners of Apple's PCs who wanted to get an Apple Silicon-based machine have already got one. Given that their M1-based desktops and notebooks are three years old at most, Q3 of calendar 2023 was not their time for an upgrade given mediocre performance difference between M1 and M2-series processors. Apple admits that only half of the Macs last quarter were bought by Mac owners, the rest of sales came from people who were new Apple customers.

"We have great confidence in our Mac line-up and are excited about the recently announced iMac and MacBook Pro powered by our M3 chips," said Cook. "Our installed base is at an all-time high and half of Mac buyers during the quarter were new to the product, driven by MacBook Air." 

Apple's iPad brought in $6.4 billion in revenue in Q4 FY2023, marking a 10% decrease compared to the same period last year. This downturn mirrors the situation seen with Mac sales in Q4 FY2022. Just like Macs, iPads were significantly impacted by supply chain disruptions in the June quarter, which led to an unusual spike in demand in the following September quarter as the pent-up demand was met.

But iPhones and Services Prosper

Apple's iPhone revenue saw an increase in Q4 FY2023, reaching $43.8 billion, a rise from the previous year's $42.6 billion. However, looking at the annual figures, iPhone revenue experienced a decline, falling to $200.6 billion from $205.5 billion the year before. 

While Apple's hardware business was a mixed bag both for Q4 FY2023 and for the whole year, the company's Services business thrived as the company's install base increased to two billion active devices. Revenue from services hit an record high, reaching $22.3 billion in Q4 FY2023 (up a 16% from Q2 FY2022) and 85.2 billion in FY2023 (up 9% from FY2022).

As Apple Increases R&D Spending to $30 Billion

Being the world's largest supplier of consumer electronics by revenue and the world's most valuable public company is a hard job. You not only need to meet customer's expectations, but also exceed those of investors. While Apple generally produces competitive and user-friendly products, it cannot force its customers to upgrade if subsequent models are moderately better than those on the market, especially amid economic downturn. Which is why some may consider Apple's results disappointing.  

But Apple still makes tons of money. The company earned $89.5 billion in Q4 FY2023 and $383.285 billion for the whole year. Despite lower sales, the company upped its research and development spending form $26.251 billion in FY2022 to $29.915 billion in FY2023, which makes the company one of the largest R&D spenders in the world.

Apple's A17 processor was the first chip to use TSMC's N3 (3nm-class) process technology, and this week, the company expanded its N3 lineup with a family of PC-oriented M3 chips for desktop and laptop computers. Analyst Jay Goldberg from Digits to Dollars believes the company spent as much as $1 billion on M3's design and tape-outs alone.

"We have to assume that [M3-series] tape out costs alone for the three [SoCs] has to be close to $1 billion," Goldberg wrote. "Very few companies can afford this large an undertaking."

Apple's M3 family consists of three fairly complex CPUs for now: the 25-billion-transistor M3 that's aimed at entry-level and mainstream desktops, laptops, and high-end tablets; the 37-billion-transistor M3 Pro for performance-mainstream machines; and the M3 Max that packs 92 billion transistors for high-end laptops and entry-level workstations. Each chip is designed to address different computing needs, from everyday tasks to professional coding, heavy engineering simulations, and video production.

Apple's vanilla M3, which comes with eight general-purpose cores and a new built-in GPU, is as complex as AMD's highly praised Phoenix processor (25 billion vs. 25.4 billion), whereas the M3 Pro and M3 Max are considerably more complex.

In fact, with 92 billion MOSFETs inside, the M3 Max is the most complex single-die processor released to date (though, based on what we know about some of the upcoming AI processors, not for long).

Apple used TSMC's N3 fabrication process to increase the economic efficiency of its M3 family, a risky move because the technology is relatively new -- but it looks like it has paid off. As chip detective @Frederic_Orange pointed out, Apple could presumably fit as many as 415 M3 dies on a single 300-mm wafer, which indicates a die size of around 146 mm^2.

By contrast, AMD's Phoenix (which has a similar complexity) has a die size of 178 mm^2. We can only guess whether Apple's M3 is cheaper to make than AMD's Phoenix based on rumors about TSMC's quotes, but smaller chips are typically easier to yield and produce. 

Apple spent $26.251 billion on R&D in 2022, and a significant part of this spending was assigned to chip design. The scale of investment in silicon, in general, and the M3-series SoCs, in particular, indicates that Apple is one of the few companies with the economic capability to undertake such development endeavors. 

Developing complex PC-oriented processors requires extended development cycles, often on the order of years, and intense capital investment. When it comes to an all-new platform — such as the Apple M3 family — the cost of development is staggering, particularly in Apple's case since the company tends to develop as much IP internally as possible. With M3, Apple not only uses its own custom general-purpose cores based on an Arm instruction set architecture but also packs an all-new GPU architecture supporting hardware-accelerated ray tracing and mesh shaders, a new AI NPU, and a new multimedia engine.

When Apple introduced its M3 family of processors this week, it mentioned its GPU Dynamic Caching technology as one of the key advantages of its GPU architecture that allowed it to bring hardware-accelerated ray tracing to its M-series SoCs. Indeed, it looks like Apple has spent years developing this technology and filed the first patent that covers it in early 2020. 

Traditional GPUs operate on static caching mechanisms and fixed memory spaces which sometimes results in inefficient management and retrieval of page table information, underutilization of certain physical memory regions, and limitations of allocated memory for certain workloads. Apple's GPU Dynamic Caching ensures that cache and memory spaces are dynamically assigned based on the actual needs of different tasks and workloads. This adaptability ensures optimized memory usage, preventing wastage of memory resources and allowing tasks to access the memory they need (assuming that there is enough memory for a given task).

Dynamic caching and on-demand memory allocation can significantly benefit things like hardware ray tracing. Ray tracing is a computationally intensive rendering technique that simulates physical behavior of light to generate images. Given the complexity and variability of ray tracing computations, having the flexibility to allocate memory as needed and speed up access to frequently used data can significantly improve performance. What is also crucial for Apple is that its technology also allows to improve performance efficiency and in some cases reduce memory consumption, both of which are important considerations.

In addition to ray tracing, dynamic caching and on-demand memory allocation can benefit memory bandwidth-hungry graphics applications in general, so the technology possibly plays a role in improved performance of Apple M3's GPUs too. Meanwhile, mesh shading also plays a significant role in improving overall performance of Apple's new GPUs.

Apple just held its "Scary Fast" October event, which was meant to invoke Halloween and introduce new products. The timing of the event, however, is uncharacteristic for Apple, with an 8pm start time instead of the usual 1pm for its keynotes. So, without further ado, let's see what spooky hardware Apple has in store as we come approach the closing months of 2023.

14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro with M3-based SoCs

The big news is the 3-nanometer M3 family of chips for the MacBook Pro: M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. They feature an all-new GPU architecture with hardware-accelerated mesh shading, hardware-accelerated ray tracing (as seen on the A17 Pro), and Dynamic Caching. Dynamic Memory, as its name implies, allows local memory to be dynamically allocated by hardware in real time depending on what an application needs. Apple claims up to a 2.5x uplift in performance compared to the GPU in the M2 family.

The performance cores are up to 30 percent faster, while the efficiency cores are up to 50 percent faster than the M2 Pro and M2 Pro Max. The neural engine is up to 60 percent faster than the one found in the M1 family. Here's the new CPU lineup for the MacBook Pros:

• M3 8-core CPU (4 performance, 3 efficiency), 10-core GPU, up to 24GB unified memory
• M3 Pro 12-core CPU (6 performance, 6 efficiency), 18-core GPU, up to 36 GB unified memory
• M3 Max 16-core CPU (12 performance, 4 efficiency), 40-core GPU, up to 128GB unified memory

Base 14-inch MacBook Pros come with the M3 processor, whereas previous entry-level 14-inch models started with the M1 Pro or M2 Pro. It will also be available with the M3 Pro and M3 Max. The 16-inch MacBook Pro will only be available in M3 Pro and M3 Max configurations.

Apple claims up to 22 hours of battery life with the new MacBook Pros. There’s also an upgraded Liquid Retina XDR Display with a maximum HDR brightness of 1600 nits. 

In addition, Apple introduced a new color for the M3 Pro and M3 Max: Space Black. The dark aluminum finish is a nice break from the usual Silver and Space Grey that have been the standard two options for years on MacBook Pros. Apple claims it features a “breakthrough” anodization method that resists fingerprints.

The 14-inch MacBook Pro now starts at $1,599 with the M3 processor (it previously started at $1,999 with the M2 Pro), while the 16-inch MacBook Pro starts at $2,499. All the systems are available to order today, but MacBook Pros with the M3 Max won't ship until November.

On a side note, the new lower price of the M3-based MacBook Pro will seemingly replace the "old" 13-inch MacBook Pro.

New 24-inch iMac with M3

It's been over two years since Apple last updated the iMac. At the time, the all-in-one computer launched with the M1 processor. When Apple debuted the M2 processor for the Mac mini and MacBook Air, the iMac was left out of the loop. 

Now, finally, a new iMac is boasting increased performance with the M3 processor. The new 24-inch iMac Pro is now up to 2x faster than its predecessor with an M1 processor (Apple also says that the machine is 2.5x faster when compared to 27-inch Intel-based all-in-one machines). It will be available in seven colors and will still start at $1,299.

Apple says that the new 24-inch iMac is available to order today and will ship next week.

Apple is poised to refresh its Mac lineup in an upcoming online-only event called 'Scary Fast,' with a focus on introducing new MacBook Pros and iMacs equipped with the latest M3-series processors, reports Bloomberg. The 'Scary Fast' description of the event might indicate that we will be dealing with high-performance M3 Pro and M3 Max processors produced on one of TSMC's N3 process technologies.

In the spotlight are the anticipated MacBook Pros, which are set to undergo significant internal enhancements. These new models are projected to house the advanced M3 Pro and M3 Max processors, marking a rather substantial leap from the previous M2-series. The processors have undergone a rigorous upgrade and gained both general-purpose cores and graphics clusters, as shown in the table.

The iMac is also reportedly slated for an update, marking its first in over 900 days. While the external design is expected to retain its current aesthetics, the internals will see a revamp. The new models are predicted to feature Apple's M3 chip, coupled with improved GPU configurations and a transition to USB-C connectors, signifying a modernization of the iMac’s architecture.

Notably, according to the Bloomberg report, the event holds additional significance as it aligns with the recovery of the personal computing market from the post-pandemic-induced slump. 

Apple's unveiling is also timed to capitalize on the holiday season, a critical period for boosting sales. The company aims to leverage its new offerings to boost sales after declining sales in previous quarters. The refreshed Mac lineup could play a crucial role in driving a resurgence in Apple's Mac revenue streams, supporting its generally high financial performance driven by iPhones.

In addition to the seemingly imminent unveilings, Apple is reported to have a pipeline of future releases, including new MacBook Airs and updated iPads. However, these products are earmarked for launch in subsequent events, extending into 2024 and beyond, indicating a sustained strategy of innovation and product enhancement in Apple's roadmap, according to Bloomberg.

According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple's Mac shipments hit a speed bump during 2023, despite the launch of a larger MacBook Air earlier this year. The 15-inch MacBook Air was seen as a much-needed entry into the popular 15-inch class of notebooks. However, shipments reportedly sputtered after a sales burst during the back-to-school period (shipment estimates have been revised downward by 20 percent for the year).

According to Kuo in a post on Medium, total MacBook sales for 2023 are expected to drop by 30 percent compared to 2022 to 17 million units. Even though we are fast approaching the holiday shopping season, Kuo doesn't expect a significant uptick in shipments for the remainder of 2023 since Apple won't deliver any MacBook hardware refreshes until early 2024, in a best-case scenario.

So, what's causing the shipment decline for MacBooks? Kuo says several factors are coming into play, including a steady decline in work-from-home (WFH) demand. PC demand was artificially inflated due to WFH during the COVID-19 crisis, and now shipments are settling back into a more normalized pattern. It's also surmised that Mini-LED, as seen in the MacBook Pro family, is no longer a big draw for customers. In addition, the luster of Apple Silicon has worn off for customers who've already upgraded from Intel-based MacBooks, as we've seen minor speed bumps going from the initial M1 to M2 generation of CPUs.

Apple could see upward momentum in 2024 when its next MacBook refresh is expected. Apple will launch new 13- and 15-inch MacBook Airs with next-generation M3 CPUs built on TSMC's 3nm N3 process. New 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops with M3 Pro and M3 Max CPUs are also on deck.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says that the new MacBook Pros will launch "early next year" but hasn't described what new features Apple plans to add other than faster RAM. We could also imagine brighter Mini-LED displays and perhaps we could see faster SSDs, though Gen5 models aren't like to appear in laptops any time soon given their current power requirements.

Being one of the founders of Arm, Apple has always had a longstanding relationship with the CPU design company, and its own custom Arm-based SoCs power its smartphones, tablets, PCs, and other electronics. Recently, the two companies extended their license agreement by almost 20 years, till 2040, which is an extremely long period for the high-tech industry. 

"We have entered into a new long-term agreement with Apple that extends beyond 2040, continuing our longstanding relationship of collaboration with Apple and Apple's access to the Arm architecture," a statement by Arm reads.

Apple offers a wide range of products spanning various categories, including high-end devices such as Mac desktops and MacBook laptops, iPhones, iPads, and Apple TV set-top boxes, all of which rely on custom system-on-chips (SoCs) built around specially tailored Arm cores. Furthermore, gadgets like the Apple Watch, AirPods, and Homepod Mini are equipped with system-in-packages (SiPs) that harness Arm technologies too. Apple also incorporates Arm cores in its controllers, such as the T2, W3, U1, and others. In short, all of the products carrying an Apple logo also happen to carry multiple Arm cores. 

Signing a long-term license that spans over 15 years before Arm goes public later this year is certainly Apple's vote of confidence in Arm's technologies. While Arm has hundreds of clients, many of them are industry behemoths like Apple, AMD, Nvidia, and Samsung, it doesn't look like the company has disclosed similar long-term licensing deals with any of them.

Although virtually all of Apple's products rely on the Arm instruction set architecture today, the company has been exploring the RISC-V ISA since at least mid-2021, so the consumer electronics giant is certainly not putting its eggs into one basket. There are many reasons why Apple is interested in RISC-V beyond risk management. Since RISC-V is an open-source ISA, it can be innovated quickly and without informing its original inventors. As a result, if Apple wants to introduce something brand-new and cannot wait for Arm to innovate its ISA, it will have to turn to RISC-V instead.

In addition to licensing Arm's ISA, Apple will also be one of the anchor investors in the upcoming Arm IPO.

Apple's M3-series system-on-chips is expected to get a major performance upgrade compared to predecessors since they are projected to be made on TSMC's N3 (3 nm-class) fabrication processor and use all-new CPU and GPU microarchitectures. Indeed, the highest-end M3 Ultra will feature 32 CPU cores and an 80-cluster GPU, but the entry-level M3 will retain eight cores, a Bloomberg report suggests.

M3: Up to Eight Cores

Apple's vanilla M1 and M2 SoCs are used for Mac Mini, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and iMac systems, which are quite popular. The company's upcoming M3 ix expected to retain eight general-purpose cores (four high-performance and four energy-efficient cores) and an integrated GPU with up to 10 clusters. The first systems on their base are expected to hit the market earlier this year. 

Apple's M3 will reportedly be the first SoCs from the company's third-generation PC processors and will also be the developers N3 chip designed for desktops and laptops. Apparently, the company decided not to increase core count in this SoC compared to M2, perhaps because it wanted to ensure the lowest possible power consumption or was sure that architectural advantages coupled with higher clocks will ensure a noticeable performance boost, or just wanted to maximize yields and keep costs down.

M3 Pro: Up to 14 Cores

The situation will get substantially better with M3 Pro that is projected to get 14 general-purpose cores (eight performance cores, six efficiency cores) in its top-end configuration, but its range-topping GPU will get 20 clusters, up from 19 clusters in M2 Pro. The M3 Pro in its maximum configuration will be more powerful than M2 Max in general-purpose workloads, but the latter will still have an edge in graphics applications.

Apple's M3 Pro and M3 Max-based machine will likely hit the market sometimes in 2024.

M3 Max: Up to 16 cores

When it comes to M3 Max SoC, it is rumored to get 16 general purpose cores (12 performance cores and four energy-efficient cores) as well as up to 40 GPU clusters. Getting four additional high-performance cores is a big deal and will certainly bring substantial benefits to demanding software that M3 Max is architected to run. These will likely end up in high end MacBook Pros, the Mac Studio and Mac Pro.

M3 Ultra Up to 32 Cores

Meanwhile, the M3 Ultra system-in-package consisting of two M3 Max chips will therefore get 32 CPU cores and up to 80 GPU clusters. While 32 cores sounds quite massive when we talk about desktops, workstation-grade processors from AMD and Intel already have 56 – 64 cores and it remains to be seen what they are going to offer when Apple's M3 Ultra-based Mac Studio or Mac Pro systems are available in the second half of 2024. 

While Bloomberg's Mark Gurman tends to be accurate with his reports about future Apple's products, he is still an unofficial source and information from him should be taken with a grain of salt.

The launch of Apple's Mac Pro based on its M2 Ultra processor formally marked the completion of the company's transition from Intel's CPUs to its own system-on-chips, which took about three years. The transition spurred users of Macs to upgrade and encouraged users of Windows to switch to Macs. Roughly half of Apple's PCs bought in Q2 were purchased by new users.

"This past quarter, we were pleased to complete the transition to Apple Silicon for the entire lineup," said Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, at the company's conference call with analysts and investors (via SeekingAlpha). "This transition has driven both strong upgrade activity and a high number of new customers. In fact, almost half of Mac buyers during the quarter were new to the product. We also saw reported customer satisfaction of 96% for Mac in the U.S."

Indeed, the transition to Apple Silicon helped Apple to boost sales of its Mac computers and gain market share. The company controlled 6.3% of the PC market, with 4.077 million Macs sold in Q2 2019. During Q2 2023, the company commanded 8.6% of the PC market, with 5.3 million units sold. Meanwhile, in Q1 2022, the firm owned 9.3% of the desktop and laptop market as it supplied 7.342 million PCs during the quarter, many of which were sold to first-time users, and many were upgrades.

Controlling the hardware and software enables Apple to integrate various special-purpose accelerators into its SoCs and maximize performance in select applications. In addition, it allows it to precisely tailor its software for these SoCs, which promises to reduce the number of glitches and offer decent performance. Finally, it allows the company to maximize its profit margins now that it does not have to pay for CPUs to Intel. Unfortunately, with the transition to its Apple Silicon, Apple no longer supports third-party GPUs with its Mac Pro PCs, which will frustrate users who need high-performance GPUs.

Since the PC market in Q2 2023 was down 13.4% year-over-year in terms of unit shipments, it is not surprising that Macs generated $6.8 billion in revenue for Apple during the quarter, down 7% year-over-year. It is also noteworthy that Apple sold more PC units than it did in Q2 2022, according to IDC. A reason why Apple's Mac revenue was down amid unit sales growth was probably because many first-time users bought inexpensive PCs. In contrast, in Q2 2022, the company finally ramped up sales of its premium M2 Pro and M2 Max-based MacBook Pros.

Also, it is evident that in Q2 2023, Apple's PC business performed better than the PC businesses of Lenovo, Dell, and Acer, at least regarding unit sales growth. Meanwhile, the company expects Mac and iPad revenue to decline in the ongoing quarter.

"We expect the revenue for both Mac and iPad to decline by double digits year-over-year due to difficult compares, particularly on the Mac," said Cook. "For both products, we experienced supply disruptions from factory shutdowns in the June quarter a year ago and were able to fulfill significant pent-up demand in the year-ago September quarter."

Apple's first personal computers based on its next-generation M3 system-on-chip may be unveiled as early as this October, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who tends to have accurate information from Apple's supply chain. If Apple follows its traditional launch patterns, it makes sense to expect the company to reveal inexpensive M3-based laptops and desktops first. Yet, this is speculation at this point. 

Apple has scheduled a launch event in October, and based on past history, the company is set to introduce new Macs there, Bloomberg asserts. Given that Apple has just released numerous new Macs based on M2 Ultra and M2 Max system-on-chips, it is unlikely that the company will refresh its Mac Studio or even MacBook Pro with any new SoCs. Therefore, the company may well introduce new MacBook Air 13, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro 13, or even iMac (which has not yet gotten an M2 treatment) powered by shiny new M3 SoCs. 

Of course, the assumption about the M3 arrival this October could be entirely wrong. Instead, Apple could release an all-new iMac lineup based on M2, M2 Pro, and M2 Ultra SoCs. Yet, being a notebook-centric company, Apple could be more inclined to update its 13-inch laptops with a new SoC. 

An avid reader would probably ask what to expect from Apple's M3, which is rumored to be made on TSMC's N3 (3nm-class) fabrication technology that promises higher performance efficiency and higher transistor density compared to TSMC's N5P production node used for M2. At this point, it is hard to guess the exact improvements, but the company has a number of options, including increased general-purpose core count, enhanced GPU, and additional accelerators, just to name a few.

Keep in mind that the information comes from an unofficial source, and plans tend to change, so while it is logical to expect the arrival of Apple's first M3 machines about 1.5 years after the first M2-based products, it remains to be seen what Apple has to show in October.

In 2020, as Apple introduced the M1 system on a chip, the company said it would switch away from Intel over two years. Here in 2023, it took a bit longer than Apple forecasted, but with the new Mac Pro with M2 Ultra, Apple has every single one of its computers on its own SoCs. I'm not sure I've ever seen the company this confident about the Mac.

The Mac Pro is an odd duck. Of Apple's computers, it's far from the most popular among consumers, but it's extremely important to creatives who need lots of power and are willing to spend the money for it. As the most powerful, flexible system in Apple's stack, it sets a tone for the rest of the line. Without Intel, it feels as if Apple can now act without restraint.

At WWDC in Cupertino, Apple has the Mac Pro out in its hands-on area with no cooler. That's right — Apple had a chip shot ready for anyone with a camera. M2 Ultra, its most powerful chip ever, was getting a bit of a flex. (Let us not forget, the more attainable Mac Studio also has M2 Ultra. There are two shapes in which to get Apple's most powerful processor).

The lineup is now as follows:

M1 Macs

• 13-inch MacBook Air (entry level)
• iMac (24-inch)

M2 Macs

• Mac Mini (M2, M2 Pro)
• 13-inch MacBook Air
• 15-inch MacBook Air
• 13-inch MacBook Pro
• 14-inch MacBook Pro (M2 Pro, M2 Max)
• 16-inch MacBook Pro (M2 Max)
• Mac Pro (M2 Max, M2 Ultra)

Intel Macs

• Nothing to see here!

When will Apple upgrade the M1 models? Whenever it damn well pleases. That's kind of the point. Apple now controls not just the system, but the chip. Apple may sell systems, but it builds chips to power them. The two are intertwined, whether it's a laptop or a desktop.

And that's before considering the other places the M-series chips have popped up, including the iPad Air with M1 and iPad Pro with M2. Apple's Vision Pro will be powered by an M2 chip in combination with its new R1.

But we're on the Mac. Apple could update any of these systems whenever it wants. It can also hold one on an older process node as long as it needs, whether because that's what it thinks its customers want, or because that's what the supply chain allows. It makes that decision for itself.

Everyone I spoke to at Apple seemed thrilled to be over the hump. But now, it has to truly beat Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and others at the game. And if those companies outdo Apple, it has no one else to point the finger at.

Apple is trying its best here. The company can claim that you can game on its machines. I've tried it. Resident Evil Village runs great. Stray and No Man's Sky are here. Hideo Kojima showed up in the WWDC livestream to announce that Death Stranding: Director's Cut is coming to Mac. Apple is doing some heavy lifting to get games on its platform.

And Apple is also interweaving the Mac with the iPhone and iPad more than ever before with macOS Sonoma. Sure, I had widgets when I had a Mac running Mac OS X Leopard, but sharing between these devices is an acknowledgment that the Mac is an integral part of workflows that also include iPhones. And that's a level of interoperability other ecosystems can't match, though I appreciate Intel and Microsoft trying to get iPhone support in, they can't match Apple on making your phone and PC workspaces that are tied together.

Heck, using the Mac is a showcase feature of the Vision Pro. Want the most power? Use your Mac on an AR/VR headset. Who said the traditional computer is going away?

And with the Mac Pro, we see Apple can still be flexible, allowing for PCIe Gen 4 cards for I/O, storage, audio and more, even if graphics are no longer supported.

WWDC, as a developer conference, pushed hard on the Macs for Pros, like the Studio and the Pro, the company's two most expensive and most powerful machines. But the 15-inch MacBook Air is a version of Apple's best-selling notebooks. In fact, it's an addition to the MacBook line, which has way more sizes and models than Apple has offered in recent memory.

Some Apple fans may be upset to see that the 24-inch iMac is still on M1, or that a 27-inch model never came back. I feel that. But that's also the type of decision that Apple has more power to make now, more than ever. Short of fabbing its own chips, Apple has all of the power of what goes into a system, and when. And that means it can design a system around any chip in its arsenal.

For many years, I wondered if the Mac was a second thought, sitting in line behind the iPhone and the iPad. From WWDC, it's extensively clear that's not the case. With Apple using its own silicon across platforms, with interoperability on the hardware and software level, the Mac feels like a key player at Apple again.

GPD has started a crowdfunding campaign to design and build the world's first external graphics processing system with AMD's Radeon RX 7600M XT GPU inside with OCuLink and USB4 interfaces to connect to its host, reports Notebookcheck. The unit promises to be one of the industry's smallest eGFX solutions if it gets developed and hits the market.

Standing at dimensions of 225 x 111 x 29.8 mm, the GPD G1 claims to be the world's smallest external GPU with laptop dock features. The unit packs AMD's Radeon RX 7600M XT notebook GPU with 2048 stream processors, 32MB Infinity Cache, 8GB of GDDR6 memory, and promises to offer up to 21.4 FP32 TFLOPS, which is in line with performance of desktop Radeon RX 6650 XT or Radeon RX 6700, according to Droix.co.uk, though only independent tests will reveal its actual capabilities. 

The unit offers a range of ports, including two DisplayPort 1.4a, one HDMI 2.1, an SD 4.0 card reader, three USB 3.2 Type-A, one OCuLink (SFF-8612) connector, and one USB 4 (Type-C) port. The box packs a tiny 240W GaN power supply, so it is as small as it is with no extra power bricks and weighs only 0.92 kilograms.

Perhaps the most mysterious part about the GPD G1 are its interfaces. On the one hand, it has a USB4 interface that is ubiquitous since it is compatible with loads of PCs that are already in use and have Thunderbolt or USB4 ports. Meanwhile, it also has an OCuLink connector, which offers similar capabilities, but is barely found on any laptops. In fact, when connected using an OCuLink cable, the GPD G1 even disables USB Type-A ports and the SD slot since OCuLink is only meant to support the PCIe protocol. Meanwhile, USB4 both provides higher bandwidth and better features, so most of GPD G1 users will likely take advantage of this connection.

The OCuLink is a cable interface for four PCIe 3.0 lanes and has a maximum bandwidth of 32 GT/s, which is in line with Thunderbolt 3/4 and USB 4. Meanwhile, unlike the said interfaces, OCuLink uses SFF-8612 and SFF-8611 connectors that are not widely adopted in the PC space in general and mobile PC space in particular.

GPD may not be exactly a household brand, but Shenzhen GPD Technology Co. is a company that is widely known for ultraportable gaming notebooks. Such machines can rarely pack truly high graphics oomph and in most cases need the help of external graphics processors to run the latest games. To address its upcoming miniature Win Max 2023 PC (which itself requires funds to be developed), the company is now running an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign to develop and build the world's first external graphics processing box with an OCuLink and a USB4 interface.

Droix.co.uk plans to sell the GPD G1 eGPU dock for around $700/£645 not including any taxes, so the part is not going to be cheap. Meanwhile, it seems that the only way to get a discount is by funding the development of the handheld gaming PC. 

Remember that crowdfunding a project is not a guarantee of receiving a finished product. Backing a crowdfunded project is akin to an investment; you believe in the project and want it to succeed. You are not purchasing a retail product.

Apple’s bean counters surely form one of the most powerful forces within the organization, despite much of the company's high-profile success being tied to design. A case in point is provided by one of Apple’s leading new consumer products, the 2023 14-inch MacBook Pro, which has had its design significantly steered by pricing fluctuations in the materials and components markets. 

iFixIt recently tore down one of the laptops, and was surprised at the change in SoC size, cooler size, and NAND performance. Chief Analyst at SemiAnalysis, Dylan Patel, was conscripted to shine a light on these changes and provide an explanation.

Why Is the Heatsink Smaller?

Opening up the new 2023 14-inch MacBook Pro M2 for the first time, the iFixIt team had expected the cooling solution to be beefed-up and bolstered compared to the previous M1 Pro version. After all, the M2 Pro inside this laptop was trumpeted as packing 40 billion transistors — nearly 20 percent more than M1 Pro, and double the amount in M2. It was also claimed to provide 200GB/s of unified memory bandwidth — twice that of M2. More usefully, compared to the direct previous-gen predecessor, the M2 Pro was claimed by Apple to have a CPU that's about 20% faster and a GPU up to 30% faster.

So, the heatsink / cooling assembly being immediately noticeably smaller was quite a surprise for the tech disassembly experts. Then, when iFixIt deshielded the M2 Pro, they immediately saw the new SoC was much smaller, with the main reason being the new onboard RAM configuration.

In the picture above, you can see the new SoC to the right. Patel explained that Apple instigated this change when the ABF substrates were in very short supply, so optimizing to this design constraint was highly pragmatic. The way Apple chose to do this is by changing from the dual-8GB LPDDR5 RAM configuration to quad-4GB LPDDR5 RAM chips.

NAND Supply Pinches Performance

We reported on the unfortunate impact of Apple’s NAND configuration choices for the entry-level 2023 14-inch MacBook Pro (M2 Pro, 512GB) last week. The reason for the tangible speed downgrade, in brief, is that the 512GB is split over two 256GB modules, rather than four 128GB modules, cutting the bandwidth to the controller. Patel asserts that 128GB modules are increasingly in short supply as NAND makers shift production to higher capacities, so using the larger capacity modules is much more economical. It's a shame that Apple didn’t just give entry-level users more storage, but the company has always been conservative with storage, offering high-priced upgrades.

When Apple announced its latest M2 Pro- and M2 Max-based MacBook Pros last week, the company boasted about performance gains (up to a 20 percent uplift for the CPU, up to 30 percent for the GPU) and improved battery life. Unfortunately, it appears that one area of performance has taken a step backward for M2 Pro-based MacBook Pros, at least for the $1,999 base model with a 512GB SSD. 

Multiple reports confirm that the SSD on the 2023 14-inch MacBook Pro (M2 Pro, 512GB) is significantly slower than the one found in the 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro (M1 Pro, 512GB). The first word about the performance downgrade came from @ZONEofTECH, who compared the two systems. The M2 Pro system scored 2929 MBps write and 2703 MBps read using the AJA System Test Lite benchmark. Its M1 Pro-based predecessor scored 3450 Mbps on the write test and 4081 MBps on the read test.

In his tweet, @ZONEofTECH opined, "Apple is likely using single SSD modules again (like the base 256GB M2 Air and M2 MacBook Pro)."

Further confirmation came this afternoon from Mac-centric website 9to5Mac, which also noticed slower performance with the new base model MacBook Pro. The publication used the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test on the 2023 MacBook Pro (M2 Pro, 512GB) and recorded writes of 3154.4 MBps and reads of 2973.4 MBps. For comparison, the 2021 MacBook Pro (M1 Pro, 512GB) on hand put up higher numbers at 3950.8 MBps and 4900.3 MBps, respectively.

Given the performance degradation, 9to5Mac decided to open the case on the new MacBook Pro to see if the chip configuration had changed compared to the previous generation. "Sure enough, where the 512GB M1 Pro MacBook Pro had two NAND chips visible on the front of the motherboard and another two on the back, the M2 Pro MacBook Pro had only one visible on the front of the board," the publication wrote. "There is likely a second NAND chip directly opposing this, as the M1 had."

According to iFixit, the 2021 MacBook Pro's 512GB SSD is split among four 128GB NAND chips. Its 2023 MacBook Pro counterpart instead uses two 256GB NAND chips in parallel. That could account for the performance decrease for the new MacBook Pro.

Interestingly, this performance downgrade extends to the 256GB variant of the 2023 Mac mini with the M2 SoC. When Apple announced the M2- and M2 Pro-based Mac minis last week, the company also reduced prices for the base model. The M1 Mac mini had a starting price of $699, while the new M2 Mac mini dropped that price to just $599.

Now, we know how Apple was able to achieve at least some of those cost savings: it skimped out on storage performance. The 2020 Mac mini (M1, 256GB) uses two 128GB NAND chips in parallel and achieves 2733 MBps write and 2854 MBps read with the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, according to Twitter user @t4bl3r0n3. Conversely, the 2023 Mac mini (M2, 256GB) sees its results roughly halve to 1431 MBps and 1482 MBps, respectively. Brandon Geekabit also confirmed these storage performance drops in a YouTube video.

If all of this sounds familiar, Apple performed the same SSD switcheroo with the base version of the MacBook Air (M2, 256GB). Using slower SSDs on the 2023 MacBook Pro and 2023 Mac mini could impact file transfer performance and overall system performance. In addition, any applications that exhaust the available physical memory would need to fall back to the SSD for virtual memory. The Mac mini would likely be impacted more by paging out to the SSD, given that the base 256GB storage configuration only comes with 8GB of RAM.

Apple's decision to lower storage performance in exchange for a $100 price cut on the entry-level Mac mini is somewhat understandable. However, the step backward in storage performance on the $1,999 MacBook Pro is less defensible. For customers paying top dollar for a "pro level" machine, you wouldn't expect storage performance to take such a dramatic hit.

The first reviews of Apple's refreshed MacBook Pro and Mac Mini are here, and, with them, we're getting to see impressions of Apple's new M2 Pro and M2 Max processors. The design of the machines are effectively the same (minus some port changes on the Mac Mini), so the big changes are all in the silicon.

While we still hope to get our hands on the new processors to run them through their paces, we're pouring over the existing results to see what reviewers think of the new chips. We're particularly interested in two things: performance and battery life. That's not to say the new system's designs aren't important — I own an M1 Pro MacBook Pro and like it very much, minus the notch — but we're focusing on what's been changed and improved.

The general consensus seems to be that the new chips bring some solid performance upgrades, especially for those looking to upgrade from older Intel-based systems.

The M2 Pro can be found in all three of Apple's new computers: the Mac Mini, 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros. The base model has a 10-core CPU and 16-core GPU, but most of the reviews out there have a step up: the full 12-core CPU and 19-core GPU. The 16-core neural engine is the same across both chips. Some reviewers saw the M2 Pro in the laptop, while others saw it in the Mac Mini.

The M2 Max is only in the laptops: the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros. It starts with a 12-core CPU and 30-core GPU, and the upgrade nets you a 38-core GPU. Both have a 16-core neural engine.

We've collated some scores from our sister sites Laptop Mag and Tom's Guide, as well as some of our prior review data on the 2021 models.

The performance scores those sites have published are fascinating. The two CPUs both have 12 cores, but the M2 Pro has 32GB of RAM and the M2 Max has 64GB. The other big difference is the GPU: The M2 Pro has a 19-core GPU, while the M2 Max has a 38-core GPU.

I was initially surprised to see that these chips produced the scores they did in Geekbench 5, with the M2 Pro slightly ahead of the M2 Max. My thoughts are that these scores are pretty close, and Apple should be using the same CPU cores here. While the M2 Max's 64GB of RAM should be helping a bit, these may be within standard error. It's also possible that, because the M2 Max has so much going on on the chip, it may have been hampered slightly in multi-core when those GPU cores weren't being used. We're hoping to get our hands on the hardware soon to see what we can learn about it.

On battery life, it appears the M2 Pro-based machine is on par with the 2021 model, while the M2 Max machine took a surprising dive. Of course, battery life is going to depend on what you're doing with the device. 

In Rise of the Tomb Raider, the Max shows its might with the highest frame rate at 1920 x 1200. Keep in mind that this is an older game, and not one designed for Apple Silicon or Metal. The M2 Max is also playable at 2024 x 1964 at 34 fps.

Other New Features

As an M1 Pro owner, the most appealing features are the upgraded Wi-Fi and HDMI standards. The M2 chips bump up these laptops to Wi-Fi 6E, HDMI 2.1, and Bluetooth 5.3. Will I use these all? Probably not, but I love to future-proof (and I do have a Wi-Fi 6E router).

HDMI 2.1 means you can even push 8K monitors at 60 Hz, which is overkill for most but may fit some creative workflows. For most people, the benefit is that you can get 4K at more than 60 fps. Apple claims you can reach 240 Hz, but you may have a hard time finding a monitor that actually supports that. 

We hope to get our hands on these laptops soon to see for ourselves, but initial impressions are good. It sounds like Apple's second round of pro-grade Apple Silicon can hang with other high-end chips. If the new MacBooks have the same great displays, keyboards, and speakers, these will be great for Mac users willing to cough up the cash (and deal with the notch).

Apple announced a new generation of MacBook Pro laptops earlier this week, and they'll begin shipping to customers on January 24th. New reporting from DigiTimes suggests that Quanta Computer started cranking out the new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros in December 2022 in preparation for Apple's official launch, and that MacBook Airs are next on the docket.

According to DigiTimes, Apple's manufacturing partners and supply chain are gearing up for a MacBook Air refresh during the second half of 2023. These laptops will likely feature a new M3 SoC based on TSMC's next-generation 3nm node. However, given that Apple's MacBook Pros just received a 5nm M2 Pro/M2 Max upgrade, it's possible that Apple won't shift to the expected 3nm M3 Pro/M3 Max SoCs until 2024.

While the new MacBook Pros look the same on the outside (the design is still relatively fresh, as they launched in late 2021), there are quite a few internal changes. For starters, they ditch the M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs in favor of faster M2 Pro and M2 Max silicon. In addition, while the chips still use a 5nm node, Apple boosted CPU performance by up to 20 percent, while GPU performance saw a maximum 30 percent uplift. The new MacBook Pros also feature Wi-Fi 6E support (up from Wi-Fi 6) and ditch the HDMI 2.0 port in favor of HDMI 2.1. 

The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,999, while the 16-inch variant opens bidding at $2,499. However, if you want a 16-inch MacBook Pro with all the trimmings (M2 Max with 38 GPU cores, 96GB LPDDR5, 8TB storage), it will cost you $6,299.

While MacBook Pro shipments are important for Apple, the MacBook Air is the key sales driver for the company. Even though overall PC shipments were down for 2022, Quanta's 3 percent decline to 28.4 million units during the second half was less than its competitors. Strong demand for the refreshed MacBook Air (M2) prevented Quanta's shipments from sinking further.

Apple saw its overall notebook shipments decline by 15.3 percent during Q4 2022. However, its chief competitors were down 30 to 40 percent during the same period. Given the economic downturn and consumers being more cautious about high-dollar purchases, Apple will reportedly adjust its shipments to favor more affordably-priced M1-based MacBooks and MacBook Pros. 

Apple's MacBook Air (M1) starts at $999, while the MacBook Air (M2) rings in at $1,199. The MacBook Air (M2) features an all-new chassis design with a larger display, more maximum memory (24GB versus 16GB) and a slightly lower weight (2.7 pounds versus 2.8 pounds).

Despite reports that M2 Pro and M2 Max-based products were delayed yet again, Apple today announced the launch of new MacBook Pros and Mac Minis using the new SoCs. The M2 Pro and M2 Max are more powerful versions of the M2 launched last year in the MacBook Air.

As Apple explains, the M2 Pro “scales up” the M2, giving customers 10 or 12 CPU cores and up to 19 GPU cores. The 12-core configuration has eight high-performance cores and four efficiency cores. For comparison, the M2 in the MacBook Air comes with an 8-core CPU and either an 8- or 10-core GPU. The M2 Pro can also be paired with up to 32GB of unified memory.

Apple claims that the 12-core M2 Pro is up to 20 percent faster than the 10-core version of the M1 Pro in multi-threaded apps. With the new 19-core GPU (three more than the M1 Pro’s GPU), performance is up to 20 percent faster. 

For a real-world example, Apple says that the 16-inch MacBook with the M2 Pro is 25 percent faster than its M1 Pro counterpart while compiling in Xcode. It’s also allegedly 2.5x faster than the legacy 16-inch MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i9 processor. In addition, image processing in Photoshop is reportedly 40 percent faster than the M1 Pro and 80 percent faster than the Core i9. 

The M2 Max is the flagship SoC and has the same 12-core CPU as the M2 Pro but doubles the maximum number of GPU cores to 38. Performance is further enhanced by doubling unified memory bandwidth to 400 GB/s compared to 200 GB/s for the M2 Pro. As a result, graphics performance is up to 30 percent faster than the preceding M1 Max. While the M2 Pro can be paired with a maximum of 32GB of memory, the M2 Max triples that figure to 96GB. 

The M2 Pro and M2 Max are built on a 5nm process node, packing 40 billion transistors and 67 billion transistors, respectively. The two chips also share a 16-core Neural Engine capable of executing nearly 16 trillion operations per second (a 40 percent uplift compared to the previous generation). Other features include an enhanced version of the Secure Enclave security platform and a beefed-up media engine.

The M2 Pro is available in refreshed versions of the Mac mini, 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro. The M2 Max is only available on the new MacBook Pros. All of the M2 Pro- and M2 Max-equipped Macs ship on January 24th.

Apple launched the current-generation MacBook Air in June 2022 with a new M2 SoC. It was expected that Apple would launch M2 Pro and M2 Max equipped 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros during Fall 2022. Unfortunately, the refresh never came, and MacBook Pros continue to be sold with M1 Pro and M1 Max SoCs

DigiTimes is now reporting that the M2 Pro/M2 Max MacBook Pro refresh has been "delayed once again" and will no longer "hit the market in early 2023." The publication didn't provide guidance on when the launch will occur, but Bloomberg's Mark Gurman stated over the weekend that the new laptops could arrive during the first half of 2023. 

With this in mind, it's possible that Apple could announce the new MacBook Pros at WWDC 2023, which will likely occur in early June. Apple announced the M2-based MacBook Air at the same event last year.

Performance junkies will want to temper their expectations with the MacBook Pro refresh, as Gurman suggests that the M2 and M2 Max will only offer "marginal leaps" over their predecessors. In addition, Apple won't make any design changes to the new MacBook Pros, given that the current chassis has only been around since late 2021.

There is also speculation that overall MacBook sales could drop as much as 50 percent sequentially during Q1 2023. The first quarter is traditionally a slower period for PC OEMs, but DigiTimes alleges that Apple is "adjusting its shipment ratios" due to weaker Q4 demand. In addition, MacBook inventory levels are higher than Apple would like, hence its calls to Quanta and Foxconn to reduce shipments. Also compounding matters is that many Apple customers are waiting for the MacBook Pro refresh, which further erodes demand for existing inventory.

As we reported yesterday, global PC shipments plummeted by 28 percent during Q4 2022 compared to Q4 2021. IDC noted that "the pandemic boom is over for the PC market," while Canalys added, "rising costs for energy and basic goods in key markets like the US and Europe, expenditure on big-ticket items like PCs has taken a back seat as consumers are prepared to delay refreshes."

Despite the doom and gloom over declining PC sales during Q4 2022, Apple fared better than most in the industry. Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard and Dell experienced worldwide PC shipment declines of 28.5 percent, 29 percent and 37.2 percent year-over-year, according to IDC. Apple, on the other hand, experienced just a 2.1 percent drop. The company also gained global PC market share, rising from 8.2 percent in Q4 2021 to 11.2 percent in Q4 2022.

According to a new report, Apple is looking to diversify production of its popular MacBook family of laptops. Apple has long produced MacBooks in China and has been reluctant to move production out of the country, until now. However, Nikkei Asia claims that longtime supplier Foxconn has been contracted to produce MacBooks in Vietnam. Interestingly, all of Apple's other major product lines already have alternate production sites outside of China, leaving its MacBooks as the final piece in its diversification puzzle. 

Several reasons are motivating Apple to look outside of China for MacBook production. Perhaps one of the more pressing issues is China's intense crackdown on the spread of COVID-19 within the country. China, until recently, has employed a zero-COVID policy, requiring people with COVID-19 to isolate in state facilities to prevent further spread among the population. The facilities were reportedly understaffed with poor living conditions, and their use separated people from their families (often against their will).

In recent days, China has begun to loosen some of its COVID-19 policies, allowing infected people to isolate at home instead of in a government facility (among other concessions). However, there is a lot of uncertainty about how China National Health Commission policies will shift in the future. And any changes in those policies can potentially affect workers assembling Apple devices in China.

However, the biggest issue involves escalating sanctions from the U.S. on Chinese companies. The sanctions prevent Chinese companies from acquiring semiconductors using advanced American technologies. The U.S. cites national security reasons for its crackdown, but the Chinese government fired back, filing an official protest with the World Trade Organization.

"China takes legal actions within the WTO framework as a necessary way to address our concerns and to defend our legitimate interests," China's commerce ministry said in a statement earlier this month. "[U.S. restrictions threaten] the stability of the global industrial supply chains." 

By shifting some of its MacBook production from China to Vietnam, Apple could at least partially isolate itself from any impending fallout geopolitical firestorm brewing from the sanctions. The Nikkei Asia report indicates that Apple has already set up test lines in Vietnam for its MacBooks and could start full-scale production as early as May 2023.

"After the MacBook production shifts, all of Apple's flagship products basically will have one more production location beyond China ... iPhones in India and MacBooks, the Apple Watch and iPads in Vietnam," said a person familiar with Apple's plans to Nikkei Asia. "What Apple wants now is an 'out of China' option for at least part of production for all of its products." 

Apple's next big MacBook release is expected to occur in early 2023. At that time, the company will reportedly launch new 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros using M2 Pro and M2 Max SoCs using a 5-nanometer process node.

Benchmarks for Apple’s unannounced but almost certainly real M2 Max have appeared in Geekbench results, which shows a 12-core processor running at 3.54GHz and backed by 96GB of RAM. The rumored chip, which would be used in forthcoming MacBook Pro and Mac Studio models, offers a slight increase in performance over the existing M1 Max if the Geekbench run is accurate.

The Geekbench 5 results are for a 'Mac14,6' computer running on unreleased macOS 13.2 software. It manages a single-core score of 1,853 and a multi-core score of 13,855. If accurate, this is a little disappointing, as an eight-core M2 MacBook Pro hits 1,899 in the same single-core benchmark. However, the greater number of cores in the M2 Max machine sees it pull ahead in the multi-core ranking, with the M1 scoring 8,737 (5,000 points behind). However, all the M-class Macs trounce an Intel iMac from 2020, with that machine's Core i7-10700K at 3.8GHz scoring 1,250 in the single-core test and 8,157 in the multi-core.

A report from Taiwan's DigiTimes claims Apple will move from the M2's current 5nm TMSC process to a 3nm node for the M2 Pro. Of course, Apple hasn't announced this development, but manufacturing capacity at TSMC was reportedly booked by Apple back in the summer. 

The previous generation M1 chips were eventually available in four guises: vanilla, Pro, Max and Ultra, with the upper-level chips having more cores and beefier GPUs. While the Mac mini, iMac, MacBook Air, a few MacBook Pros and the iPad Pro got basic chips, most MacBook Pros come with a choice of M1 Pro or M1 Max, with the new Mac Studio able to be specced with an M1 Ultra, which is two M1 Pro chips stuck together. While the M1 has eight or 10 CPU cores, the differences between the chips are mainly expressed in the number of GPU cores and the amount of RAM in the package.

It's not unreasonable to expect M2 to go the same route, and while so far we've only seen M2 in the 2022 MacBook Air and a single MacBook Pro model (as well as an iPad Pro), we expect the processor to make its way through the entire Mac computer range, even perhaps infiltrating the Mac Pro, which is still an Intel-only zone.

Apple has agreed to pay off disenchanted customers who were irked by its problematic butterfly keyboard key-switch design, reports Reuters. Late on Monday, a preliminary settlement for $50 million was filed, still awaiting the judge’s approval, that will compensate class-action customers in California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Washington.

Apple introduced the butterfly keyboard design back in 2015. At its unveiling, it was heralded for facilitating slimmer laptop designs (it debuted in the MacBook Air), as well as greater precision, quietness and stability. Unfortunately, these keyboards quickly gained a reputation for being unreliable, with keys failing to register actuations or becoming sticky, and so on. An inherent problem in the design was that it was susceptible to dust and particulate matter ingress. Though Apple went through several generations of butterfly switches, with additions such as dust membranes, Apple laptop enthusiasts were relieved when simpler and more reliable scissor switches returned in 2019.

From our potted history of butterfly mechanism keyboards, above, you won’t be surprised that the class action lawsuit covers the full period that these switches were equipped in new Mac portables; from 2015 to 2019.

So, if you bought one of the Mac laptops with a butterfly keyboard during the period stated in the US states this class action covers, what can you hope to gain by way of compensation? The answer is that most will get very little. Lawyers expect the highest compensation amount will be $395 for those who replaced multiple MacBook keyboards. More common will be those affected by a single laptop needing a keyboard replacement, and these people will get up to $125 in compensation. Lastly, Mac users who replaced keys rather than the whole keyboard are in line for $50. Obviously, the $50 million cake is being cut into very thin slices. Conversely, lawyers working on this class action suit may seek fees of up to $15 million, says Reuters.

If you still suffer from butterfly keyboard blues, you have our sympathies, and you'll remain eligible for four years of free keyboard repairs.

Has justice been done? If they are lucky enough to be covered by this class action suit, those affected by unreliable keyboard issues multiple times over multiple replacements probably won’t be impressed by the compensation. Lastly, according to the source report, Apple denies any wrongdoing as part of its settlement agreement. It must be hoping to sweep this design flaw under the carpet, with a few people in a few US states receiving a paltry sum.

Apple’s latest M2 13-inch MacBook Pro laptops contain a significantly slower SSD - or at least one putting out slower transfer rates - than the equivalent M1 models. The discovery was reported by MacRumors and builds on the work of YouTube channels such as Max Tech and Created Tech.

Tests using Black Magic’s Disk speed Test app showed the M2 MBP’s 256GB SSD achieving read and write rates of around 1,450MB/s, which knocks 50% off the read speeds of the M1 MBP’s 256GB SSD. The write rate also decreased by 30%.

Of course, someone had to take an M2 MacBook Pro apart and see what was going on. This person was Vadim Yuryev of Max Tech, who discovered the M2’s SSD uses a single 256GB NAND chip, compared to the pair of 128GB chips in the M1. The older unit would have been accessing both chips in parallel, allowing for the higher transfer speeds of 2,900MB/s.

Tests on the 512GB model from a MacRumours forum member achieved a transfer rate similar to that of the M1 models, suggesting that this SSD is made up of a pair of chips, and only the entry-level 256GB SSD is affected. 

The use of a single chip in place of the usual two is probably a cost-saving measure, or it may be connected to the global shortage of electronics. Either way, it will affect the performance of your Mac in several ways, both slowing down file transfers and constraining performance generally as the Mac swaps data in and out of RAM to the SSD as part of its virtual memory system. Upgrading your MPB to a 512GB SSD can only be achieved at the ordering stage, and adds $200 to the price of the laptop.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro is the first of Apple’s Pro laptops to move up to the M2 chip, with the 14- and 16-inch models still using M1 Pro and Max CPUs. The 13-incher is, however, limited in the number of ports it exposes to the world, with only a pair of USB-C ports and a headphone socket, compared to the larger Macs’ three USB-Cs, a Mag-Safe charging port, full-size HDMI and SD card slots. The 13-inch model also retains Apple’s controversial Touch Bar. A new M2 version of the MacBook Air is expected in July.

A U.S. district judge dismissed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Apple that accused it of concealing Meltdown and Spectre security flaws and reducing performance of its devices by mitigating the vulnerabilities, which reduced value of their devices. The plaintiffs demanded a compensation to themselves as well as other owners of Apple devices affected by Apple's actions. 

Accusers stated that Apple misrepresented the privacy and security of iPhones and iPads as well as performance of its custom SoCs on which Apple argued that plaintiffs' alleged misrepresentations are too general to be actionable and they have failed to allege that any specific representation was false. 

"Plaintiffs have failed to allege an affirmative misrepresentation, an actionable omission, and actual reliance on misstatements by Apple," U.S. District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California, wrote in his ruling, reports Reuters. 

Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities were discovered in mid-2017 and then made public in early 2018. While Meltdown affected chips from Intel, Spectre hit virtually all modern high-performance processors with speculative and out-of-order execution. Affected chips included those from AMD and Intel as well as custom system-on-chips based on various Arm architectures, including those from Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek and Samsung. 

Mitigation of Meltdown and Spectre leads to degraded performance. Since Apple knew about vulnerabilities before they were made public and mitigated them before they were revealed, plaintiffs alleged that it deceived its customers by advertising security advantages of its iOS platform as well as performance advantages of its then latest system-on-chips compared to its previous generation SoCs. The accusers called Apple's actions fraudulent.  

"Plaintiffs allege that Apple was notified of the defects in June 2017 but did not publicly disclose them until January 4, 2018, after a New York Times article leaked the vulnerabilities," the complaint reads. "Apple addressed speculative execution and Meltdown, disclosing that its December 2, 2017, iOS 11.2 update included a software update to address the vulnerability. On January 8, 2018, Apple separately released iOS 11.2.2, a software update to address Spectre." 

The plaintiffs stated that if they had known about potential security vulnerabilities of Apple's hardware and software, they would not buy the company's products or would not pay the prices they did. Furthermore, after Apple made appropriate announcements, their devices declined in value. 

"Plaintiffs assert that these vulnerabilities are material because, 'had they known data stored on their systems would be compromised and made available to unauthorized third parties,' they would not have purchased their iDevices or paid the price they did," the lawsuit reads. "After Apple made the announcements, the iDevices allegedly declined in value." 

The court sided with Apple as all security and performance-related claims were correct at the time they were made.  

"Because plaintiffs are unable to identify any statement from Apple that is both sufficiently specific to be actionable and was false when made, plaintiffs have failed to state a claim for fraud under an affirmative misrepresentation theory," the ruling reads. 

Furthermore, since Apple's mitigations affected all its SoCs, performance comparisons between subsequent generations continued to be accurate even after mitigations were implemented as generation-to-generation performance advantages are not only conditioned by improved speculative or out-of-order execution advantages.

While the class-action lawsuit looks to be blown out of proportion, the ruling is an example of a case that exonerates companies from liability when they make certain claims about performance before other information comes to light that may change it.

Quanta Computer is thought to be the sole manufacturer of MacBook Pro 14 and 16 laptops for Apple. With these machines primarily coming out of this solitary ODM's Shanghai facilities, supplies have been hit very hard by China's lockdowns and related efforts to stop the spread of Covid-19. According to Taiwan's United News Network, Quanta's pandemic-affected production lines have led to delays of up to two months from customer order to delivery of the laptops mentioned.

We reported on laptop supplies being battered by China's latest implementation of anti-pandemic measures about a month ago. That report made specific mention of Shanghai-based contract laptop manufacturers being affected. In a follow-up report a fortnight ago, we noted that Quanta Computer had been experiencing assembly line disruptions since the city lockdown began on March 28.

Another of today's story sources, DigiTimes, says that Quanta Shanghai has suffered from production levels as low as 5% of its potential due to anti-pandemic measures. However, Quanta's vice chairman CC Leung reportedly said that production was operating at up to 30% capacity as we traversed from April into May. It is currently looking to scale production lines back up to 50% capacity.

Factory employee riots are also mentioned in the United News Network report; however, we don't get much detail about these events. Riots were presumably about the working conditions, with employees doing extended shifts, living, sleeping and eating on the premises. It sounds like some were pushed too far from an acceptable work-life balance and missed home life.

As per our headline, the Quanta Computer production problems are having a bad effect on Apple MacBook Pro availability. Both the 14- and 16-inch models, sporting Apple's M1 processors, can't readily be bought by Apple fans in some regions. Many reports are pointing towards delays from order to fulfillment of about two full months or longer for custom configurations.

China Lockdowns Continue

The newest variant of Covid-19, often referred to as Omicron, is proving much more difficult to eradicate than previous strains. China's strict lockdowns had been effective enough to stop the spread of pre-Omicron Covid, but with the new variant being so readily transmissible, it looks like its zero-covid policy is a detriment to many industries. In contrast, Taiwan decided to give up its zero-covid policy after Omicron started to get a foothold a few weeks ago. The democratically governed island has over 80% of the population double vaccinated using vaccines from the likes of Pfizer, Moderna and Astra Zenica.

Apple has sued startup Rivos for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to its latest A15 and M1 system-on-chips. The startup is in stealth mode, but in a year it hired over 40 engineers from Apple and allegedly asked some to take gigabytes of confidential information with them.

Rivos was founded in June 2021 to develop system-on-chips that could rival those used by Apple and other companies. The company allegedly wanted to poach as many Apple employees as possible and so far has hired over 40 engineers from the Cupertino, California-based tech giant, reports Reuters.

Rivos is a startup that operates in stealth mode, so it is unclear what kind of SoCs it intends to develop. Given the nature of A15 and M1, we can speculate that the firm could be looking to the smartphones and PC markets.

According to Apple, at least two of former Apple employees allegedly took thousands of files related to A15 and M1 SoC design and other trade secrets. Rivos allegedly specifically targeted Apple engineers with access to gigabytes of confidential data and asked them to download it to flash drives, reports Bloomberg.

Apple claims that usage of its trade secrets and design of A15 and M1 could significantly accelerate development of Rivos SoCs and provide the company unfair advantages over other processor designers, such as Apple itself. To that end, Apple wants the court to block usage of its highly sensitive proprietary data by Rivos, return its property and award an undisclosed sum in damages.

“Apple has reason to believe that Rivos instructed at least some Apple employees to download and install apps for encrypted communications (e.g., the Signal app) before communicating with them further,” the complaint by Apple reads.

This is not the first time that Apple has sued its former employees. Last year it sued Gerrard Williams III and his colleagues, who founded Nuvia to develop datacenter SoCs with leading performance-per-watt characteristics. The dispute is set to go to trial in October, 2023. Nuvia was eventually sold to Qualcomm, the latter plans to use Nuvia’s CPU designs for it notebook SoCs and officially has no plans to develop datacenter processors.

Apple has begun testing new notebooks and desktops running its next-generation M2 system-on-chips (SoCs), according to developer logs. The company began testing some of these systems quite some time ago, but it is still unclear whether Apple plans to announce them at its upcoming WWDC conference in June and when exactly they are set to be launched. 

Apple is testing at least nine new Macs based on M2, M2 Pro, M2 Max, and M2 Ultra SoCs, according to a Bloomberg report. Previous leaks indicated that the M2 family is largely based on Apple's A15 Bionic architectures, so the new report largely confirms this information and sheds some additional light on the specifications of the new processors. 

As it turns out, the new M2 will not get any increase in terms of core count, but will get a GPU with more clusters. The M2 Pro will gain two more energy-efficient cores, whereas the M2 Max will get more energy-efficient cores and a better GPU (see the table below for details). 

Comparison of Apple's SoCs (official and unofficial information)

Since the new SoCs will be made using TSMC's N5P fabrication technology, Apple could not tangibly increase CPU core and GPU cluster counts, so expect moderate performance uplifts from architectural improvements, some performance surges from the increased core/cluster counts, and some additional oomph from higher clocks. 

The list of M2-based systems that Apple is testing includes its new MacBook Air, entry-level MacBook Pro, 14-inch MacBook Pro, 16-inch MacBook Pro, and an all-new Mac Pro. Surprisingly, the list does not include any iMacs. Meanwhile, all these systems have their own launch schedules and windows and therefore will not likely be introduced at the same time.

Apple's rumored M2-based systems

For example, a revamped MacBook Air and probably Mac Mini are expected at WWDC in early June. The MacBook Air is expected to feature an all-new design, so showing it off at the upcoming conference will certainly attract a lot of attention to the event given how popular that model is. Meanwhile, the next-generation Mac Mini has already been listed in Apple Studio Display's firmware as MacMini 10.1 (the current is 9.1), which is a clear indicator that a new model is incoming, reports 9to5Mac. 

Since it takes some time for Apple to adopt its latest microarchitectures to Pro and Max SoCs, do not expect an M2 Pro or M2 Max-based MacBook Pro or Mac Mini to emerge for a while. A reasonable guess would be by the end of the year, but that's pure speculation. Assuming that M2 Max SoC is months off, the M2 Ultra will probably arrive at even later date, so do not expect the new Mac Pro to arrive any time soon.

Like most other companies, Apple does not comment on unreleased products, so we cannot verify whether the unofficial information is correct. But, WWDC is looming and this might be the conference where the company will share the first details about its M2-based PCs.

Apple is reportedly working on two new system-on-chips for inexpensive and mainstream Macs. The new M2 and M2 Pro SoCs are said to be based on the A15 Bionic architecture and will therefore feature "Avalanche" and "Blizzard" cores as well as enhanced integrated GPU, according to a report.  As ever, rumors and leaks should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Apple's new M2 SoC is said to be codenamed Staten and will feature four high-performance Avalanche cores, four energy-efficient Blizzard cores, and a 10-cluster integrated GPU, reports 9to5Mac citing its own sources. Meanwhile, the rumored M2 Pro chip is said to feature eight Avalanche cores, four Blizzard cores, and an up to 16-cluster GPU. Given the fact that Apple's A15 Bionic is made using TSMC's N5P fabrication process, it is likely that M2-series SoCs will be made using the same node.  

It is noteworthy that at this point Apple reportedly has no plans for M2 Max and M2 Ultra processors for higher-end PCs. This does not look improbable as Avalanche and Blizzard hardly bring significant general-purpose performance improvements compared to Firestorm and Icestorm cores used in M1 processors. 

Comparison of Apple's SoCs based on official and unofficial information

The new M2 SoC is believed to power Apple's new generation Mac Mini desktop PC (J473), whereas the M2 Pro will be the brain of a more powerful Mac Mini desktop (J474) that will sit between the entry-level Mac Mini and the entry-level Mac Studio desktop, so it will be priced accordingly. 

Keeping in mind that current M1 SoCs also power Apple's MacBook Air and MacBook Pro 13, it is logical to expect M2 and M2 Pro SoCs to eventually find a home inside laptops, yet the report does not state this directly. 

Apple will host its annual WWDC 2022 conference in May or June, where Bloomberg expects it to introduce new Macs based on Apple Silicon. That said, it is reasonable to expect Apple to introduce its M2 and M2 Pro SoCs as well as computers based on these chips at the event. 

In previous M2 rumors about M2 indicated that the SoCs will leverage architectures used by Apple's next-generation A16 Bionic application processor for smartphones and tablets, which means that the SoCs will be made using TSMC's N4 node. Other rumors seem to confirm that Apple's 2nd Generation M-series SoCs could arrive in 2022 and would be made using an enhanced version of TSMC's N5 node, which means N5P, N4, N4P.  

It is noteworthy that Apple is also said to be working on its M3 family of system-on-chips based on its all-new architectures and made using TSMC's next-generation N3 node. The line-up will include processors codenamed Ibiza, Lobos, and Palma, which probably means M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max SoCs for entry-level, performance, and high-performance systems.

The ongoing full-scale war against Ukraine led Western countries to impose dozens of hurting sanctions against Russia and Russian companies. As a result, the national currency — ruble — has plunged over 30% since mid-February, which naturally has resulted in increased costs for imported goods in the country. 

New restrictions on CPU exports to Russia are taking their toll, too, and Apple also said it would stop shipments of its products to Russia. We did a few spot checks to see what pricing looks like for some of the impacted products in Russia. 

Prices Are Getting Higher

Reports indicate that AMD and Intel have ceased shipping processors into Russia. Though the companies have yet to announce the details, prices are already on the rise.

AMD's processors are rare in many parts of the world these days, so it isn't particularly surprising that some Russian retailers are selling AMD's Ryzen 5700G for $432 to $1,040 without VAT (₽59,200 – ₽118,000) according to the Yandex.Market price search engine. This chip retails for ~$300 in the U.S.

AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 5950X isn't immune, either; some shops charge around $734 (₽96,000), which is higher than the actual price in the U.S. of $608. 

Intel's 12th-Gen Core Alder Lake processors are popular for obvious reasons. They cost from $261 without VAT (₽34,344) for a Core i5-12400 to a whopping $1,570 (₽219,409) for a Core i9-12900K. A different retailer sells Intel's flagship for $648 (₽85,000), which is not too expensive, but other retailers show where things are headed.  

Apple was one of the first high-tech companies to officially cease sales in its online store in Russia, halt its Apple Pay service in the country, and stop shipping new products to Russia. Generally, Apple's products are not exactly cheap in Russia, but pricing appears to already be on the uptick. Apple is obviously one of the most popular brands today, iPhone and MacBook pricing shows a more severe impact than we've seen with prices of AMD and Intel chips. 

Early Wednesday, Apple's M1 Pro-based MacBook Pro 14 was available for anywhere from $2687 to $4300 (₽351,000 – ₽561,000), whereas some retailers offered the M1 Max-powered MacBook Pro 16 for as much as $8,720 (₽1,138,070). 

By contrast, graphics cards have been overpriced for several quarters now, so it isn't surprising that GeForce and Radeon pricing in Russia is high even today. We expect graphics boards prices to get higher in the country if/when GPU shipments to Russia will be banned, but for now, a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti for $1,060 (₽140,000) seems to carry about the same price tag as in the U.S. 

But Chips Will Not Stop Coming

It should be noted that AMD, Intel, and Nvidia have been ordered to cease shipments of some products to Russia given their dual-use nature (meaning they can be used for either military or civilian purposes), so these companies will have to comply. However, chip designers and their large distributors aren't the only sources for CPUs and GPUs. 

There are plenty of companies in Russia that sell leftovers that aren't consumed by large OEMs, distributors, or retailers. As it turns out, even today there are enough excess chips that these suppliers are willing to sell them to focus on newer products that are in higher demand and sold at a premium. 

Formally, AMD and Intel cannot supply CPUs to Huawei without an export license from the U.S. government, yet Huawei regularly introduces new PCs based on fairly recent processors from the two leading developers. We have no idea whether some of the export licenses for Huawei-bound hardware are still granted or the company obtains CPUs from third parties, but it is evident that not all restrictions work in 100% of cases. That means Russian companies could still somehow manage to either sell or use newer processors from AMD and Intel despite the restrictions.