The new MacBook Pro is a boon for creatives

With its latest batch of MacBook Pros, Apple gave its most demanding fans everything they wanted: Tons of ports, plenty of power, and really great displays. As usual, the company is following up that major redesign with a simple chip upgrade, including the new M2 Pro and M2 Max. They’re faster, as you’d expect, but they also offer some features power users might appreciate, like 8K video output and WiFi 6E support.

Once Apple locks down a redesign, it usually doesn’t mess with a good thing (save for complete disasters like the Mac Pro trash can). So it’s no surprise to see that this year MacBook Pro 14 it looks no different than the 2021 model. It still packs a gorgeous 14.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR display with ProMotion support and a prominent notch that houses a 1080p webcam. It has all the ports you really want, including a MagSafe power connection, three Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, HDMI, a headphone jack, and a full-size SD card slot. And the overall shape of the computer remains relatively flat, an evolution of the long-running MacBook Pro unibody design.

Under the hood, though, the MacBook Pro 14 has been drastically upgraded. It can be equipped with Apple’s new M2 Pro chip, offering up to a 12-core CPU and 19-core GPU, or the M2 Max, featuring a 12-core CPU and 38-core GPU. Like Intel’s new hybrid processors, as well as Qualcomm’s mobile chips, Apple relies on a combination of core speeds for its CPUs (12-core chips, for example, have eight performance cores and four performance cores). efficiency). The previous M1 Pro and M1 Max had 10 CPU cores and 16 or 32 GPU cores, respectively.

Apple claims that the M2 Pro is around 20 percent faster than its predecessor in CPU speeds and up to 30 percent faster when it comes to graphics. Meanwhile, the M2 Max is up to 30 percent faster than the M1 Max in terms of graphics. We tested the completely updated $3,299 MacBook Pro, which was equipped with the M2 Max chip with 38 GPU cores and 64GB of RAM. It scored around 2,600 points (19 percent) faster in the GeekBench 5 multitasking CPU benchmark, compared to the M1 Max-equipped MacBook Pro 16. It was also 18 percent faster on the GeekBench 5 Compute with GPU test and 60 percent faster than the M1 Max Mac Studio on the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme benchmark.

These are phenomenal results if you plan to use the MacBook Pro to its full potential. But I’ll admit, during everyday use, I didn’t notice any major performance gains over previous models. That’s not really a knock against the new computer, it’s more of a testament to how much Apple got it right last time. Unlike PCs, you probably don’t play much with your Mac either, so there’s less reason to check for frequent updates. In that sense, it’s nice to see some modern games with native Mac support. Resident Evil Village It easily hits 60fps on the MacBook Pro at full resolution, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the same was true for the M1 models.