Forget The New MacBook Pro, Apple Has Something Better

Consumer Tech Forget The New MacBook Pro, Apple Has Something Better Ewan Spence Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Storyteller exploring digital worlds, mobile, music and podcasting Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories. Got it! Sep 24, 2022, 12:36pm EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin It used to be that Apple customers saw the MacBook Air as a lesser laptop and the MacBook Pro as the laptop for power users .

With the move to Apple Silicon, the MacBook Air gained enough performance to topple that rule of thumb . With the summer update to the new M2 processor , the MacBook Air remains great value for money. The same cannot be said of the M2 MacBook Pro .

Why consider the MacBook Air and not the MacBook Pro? And why will Apple’s professional MacBook Pro laptops set for an October announcement kill the M2 MacBook Pro? Minsk, Belarus, October 11, 2021: Woman uses an Apple Macbook Air. Laptop for work concept getty There is a certain attractiveness to the M2 MacBook Pro on first glance, and a lot of that is down to the branding of “2”. The number is doing a lot of lifting, but surely two is larger and better than 1, even if the M1 has an M1 Pro or M1 Max, M2 is surely a better chip? While the M2 is certainly an improvement over the M1 (between eighteen and twenty per cent is widely accepted) it still doesn’t match the power of any other chipset beyond the initial M1.

The perception may be of the best MacBook Pro so far, but that’s not the reality. If not the power then what about the price? This is after all a MacBook Pro, and even as the entry-level professional machine this is surely the laptop to go for if you need to have something that delivers? This is where you have to ask what you get for the extra price over the MacBook Air. MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event Perhaps that was true in the Intel architecture days when the performance windows went from low to high depending on the chipset and running temperatures, That’s not the case with the ARM-based Apple Silicon.

The baseline set by the M1 lifted the MacBook Air so much higher meaning that the Air can do far more than before; which renders the slight performance gain moving to the entry-level MacBook Pro far less than the few hundred dollars extra, If you need to step up the power over and above the MacBook Air, you should take the full step up to the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro laptops. These are the try professional laptops. The extra investment guarantees an excess of power worth far more than the saving of moving back to the 13-inch consumer-focused MacBook Pro; a Pro that is stuck between not having enough power to be significantly better than the Air, and not enough saving to be considered in place of the next MacBook Pro in the portfolio.

In all this, you also need to be conscious of what’s coming in October. The 13-inch MacBook Pro has had its update to the M2 family. The 14-inch and 16-inch models are still running the M1 Pro and M1 Ultra chips and still outperform the M2 MacBook Pro.

With October expected to see the launch of the M2 Pro and M2 Max based Macs, the gap between the smaller and larger MacBooks will increase significantly. At the very least, wait and see the performance difference between the models. But if the gap is similar to the M1 family, the new M2 MacBook Pros are going to smoke the current M2 MacBook Pro in terms of performance, and the MacBook Air is already delivering better value for money on an all-around laptop.

Does Apple have something better than the M2 MacBook Pro? Yes. And not just one thing that’s better. Everything on the books now and to come out before the end of the year is better.

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